Into the Drowning Deep (Rolling in the Deep, #1)

by Mira Grant

Skies were supposed to be wide and blue and welcoming, like a mirror of the wild and waiting sea.

According to her parents, her first smile had been directed not at her mother, but at the Pacific Ocean.

by the time she was three, reveling in the taste of salt water on her lips and the sting of the sea spray in her eyes.

The riptide had just been doing what it was made to do; she was the one who’d been in the wrong place. She had to learn to be in a better place when the next riptide came along.)

Tory was going to be a marine biologist,

Katherine Stewart put her arms around her surviving daughter and held fast, like she was an anchor, like she could somehow, through her sheer unwillingness to let go, keep this child from the sea.

They weren’t supposed to find anything. Mermaids aren’t real.

He had the waves. He had the sun.

This was the way things were meant to be: just him, and the sea,

She’d lived next to the ocean for her entire life, had learned to walk with salt on her lips and learned to swim before she could read.

The tourists were seeing everything for the first time. Through their eyes, she could do the same. She could be amazed by things that might otherwise become less amazing, and she’d never be jaded, and she’d never forget how much she loved the hammered silver shine of the horizon.

she’d been able to spend a lot more time at sea than she’d been anticipating at the start of the season. It hadn’t been enough. It was never going to be enough. She gripped the rail with both hands, watching the horizon grow bigger and broader as they left the land behind, and wished with all her might for the waters to open wide and give up all their secrets. They didn’t. But then, they never did.

She spoke, and the boat rocked, and the sea, deep and dark and endless, spread out all around them, and for a little while, she could pretend she was home.

all the lost and lonely ghosts of the sea.

Her answers were waiting in the Mariana Trench. She knew it.

‘You’re making the scary face again.’ ‘Which one?’ ‘The one that says you’re going to burn down the world if that’s what it takes to get what you want.’

‘The ocean is the last great mystery in the world.

They were her people, in love with the ocean, forgiving of its foibles, protective of its boundaries.

Each new wave of humanity found itself crashing onto a beach that was a little more cluttered from what had come before, a little more damaged from the carelessness of others.

Earth would survive whatever humanity did to it. Humanity might not.

Advances in nerve regeneration – ironically, partially due to compounds isolated from certain jellyfish, which did not age, did not die of natural causes, and seemed to hold the key to immortality – had allowed doctors to regrow and reconnect portions of his spinal cord, coaxing them through fused bones and shattered pathways.

A certain amount of lawlessness had been necessary to make them ready for wide distribution.

There’d be time to worry about the future soon enough. That was the thing about the future. It didn’t wait. No matter how hard you tried to run, it always caught up with you in the end.

sometimes she wished, desperately, that she could still live by the sea.

Jillian hated that people thought of her that way, as someone so shallow that she’d give up on the man she loved simply because he was no longer capable of running down the deck of a moving ship with a net in one hand and a live lobster in the other.

anything that would set sail, that would get their little family away from the land and out to sea where they belonged.

Mankind has a responsibility to the sea. We owe it our lives.

Where there’s water, we find mermaids. Maybe it’s time we started asking ourselves exactly why that is.

All the conservation efforts in the world, and for what? So the last wild male could die of old age, surrounded by armed guards he couldn’t understand, as much a captive of mankind as any zoo-bound specimen? At least the animals in the zoos didn’t know what they were missing.

We will hopefully answer a greater, older mystery at the same time: are we alone on this planet? Elephants, dolphins, even crows have exhibited signs of what we recognize as intelligence, but they are not our equals. They aren’t the elves or fairies or, yes, mermaids of legend. If we can find a mermaid, if we can prove these lovely ladies of the sea are more than just stories, we can answer a question humanity has been asking for millennia.

Why didn’t Imagine want us to know that we were pushing off? she wondered. What don’t they want us to see?

Imagine was hiding something. She wanted – no, she needed – to know what it was.

The bitterness that had accompanied her growth was a sad consequence of being a bright light in a dark world.

‘Why? Because if we find mermaids we’ll have something intelligent that has hands and looks vaguely like us, and maybe then we’ll respect it? We have that. Chimpanzees, great apes, orangutans – they have hands, they look vaguely like us, and they’re intelligent enough to be considered people in a court of law. Dolphins don’t get that courtesy solely because they look more like fish than like the girl next door. Mermaids split the difference. Finding them won’t make us treat the oceans any better, and it won’t magically turn them into a protected species. If anything, it’s going to make them the competition.’

The Melusine floated at the very top of the photic zone, in the pelagic, or open sea. The farther she got from shore, the more packed with life the water became.

You know what gets oceanographers horny? Being in the middle of the ocean. It’s amazing.’

‘I’m so used to humans being responsible for everything that it’s a pleasant change when we didn’t do it.’ ‘Humans are the worst,’

The coral reefs are the Times Square of the ocean. So many species, so many sounds, so many things to untangle and learn.’

Science was all about curiosity. It was a world where the kids who touched hot stoves and poked sticks down mysterious holes in their backyards could get better tools, protective gear, and bigger holes to poke at. Asking scientists not to look into an open box was like asking cats not to saunter through an open door. It simply wasn’t practical.

This was not where she belonged. This had never been where she belonged. Humanity had chosen the land over the sea millennia ago, and sometimes – when she was letting her mind wander, when she was romanticizing what she did and how she did it – she thought the sea still held a grudge. Breakups were never easy, and while humanity was hot and fast and had had plenty of time to get over it, the oceans were deep and slow, and for them all change had happened only yesterday. The seas did not forgive, and they did not welcome their wayward children home.

There was nothing in the world like the deep ocean, where life was rare and its hold was tenuous but tenacious, refusing to let go.

Curiosity was the reason humanity had come down from the trees and spread across the world.

Every person on this vessel was a story in the process of telling itself, and all of them were fascinating, and all of them deserved to be heard.

They would die together, gored by a bull elephant or torn to pieces by a pod of hippos, and he would go out with a smile, content that he’d spent his time on Earth in the company of his opposite and equal, something he would never have thought possible.

Humanity was cruel, and if you were prepared to try to find a bottom to that cruelty, you had best be prepared for a long, long fall.

the problem with trying to define nature is that nature is bigger than we are, and nature doesn’t care whether we know how to define it. Nature does what nature wants.’

‘When a man undertakes a journey of revenge, he needs to dig two graves,’

It was a small price to pay, trading a temporary mortal life for something like that, living forever in the pages of every book on marine biology that was ever going to be written.)

Dolphins were good. Humans had the potential for good, although they did not always make the effort. But the creatures born from blending the two, the claw-and-tooth children of the deepest depths… they were not good. They had never been good, would not know how to be if the opportunity was offered to them. They existed only to catch and snatch and devour. They sang no songs of their own, only songs stolen from the victims of their hunger. They were voiceless and cruel and terrible, and if not for them, the dolphins would never have needed to seek the shallows, or put themselves into the path of men, or choose the safety of cages over the freedom of the sea. Mankind could go hunting for mermaids as much as they liked. The dolphins had known where to find them all along.

It was so far away. It couldn’t hurt her. It was so far away. The mermaids that dropped on her from above made no sound. That, too, was how they hunted: sound to enthrall and confuse, claws to catch and close and end the fight. Twitter had time to scream. She didn’t have time for much else.