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

by Mira Grant

This is a creature constructed along brutally efficient lines, designed to survive, whatever the cost. Nature abhors a form that cannot be repeated.

‘You know she’s wasting her potential.’ ‘I do.’ ‘Then why —’ ‘Because it’s her potential to waste.’ Brian walked over to his wife, putting his hands on her waist and tugging her toward him. She came willingly. ‘We made her – and God, didn’t we do a remarkable job of that? – but that doesn’t mean we get to dictate what she does.

‘Seafood has less of an ecological impact, and pigs are smart,’ said Tory. ‘You shouldn’t eat anything that knows how to play fetch. It’s rude.’

‘The ocean is the last great mystery in the world. We may as well pursue every clue it contains. We’ll have all the questions answered soon enough, and things are going to get very boring after that happens.’

The best predators always learned how to masquerade as things that wouldn’t seem threatening. That was how they got close enough to strike.

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.

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.

‘Something being mean doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You know your father and I love each other. We always will. Sometimes loving each other isn’t enough to make up for all the things you know about another person.’

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

The first active shutter drill began at midnight. It ended two minutes later, in failure. The Melusine sailed on.

The water around it cooled, slowly enough that the unwary parrotfish didn’t notice. It was following the light. Every instinct it had told it that this was safe, this was the way home. It was not a deepwater fish, to understand the risks of bioluminescence, the things that could hide behind a glittering glow.

An adult bumphead parrotfish can weigh more than a hundred pounds. This one tipped the scales at slightly over seventy, larger than a human child. But when the thin, strong hands reached up from below and dragged it down, it didn’t break away. It couldn’t.

Two more shutter tests were performed, both at midnight, when fewer passengers would be awake to notice. Both failed.

This would change the world. Maybe not in the big, flashy way Imagine wanted, but it would be enough for her, and for every deaf girl with a dream who came after her. Heather pushed down on the sticks and dropped into the dark.

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.

She had her job because she was good at her job. Not because she was a woman, or a twin, or a redhead, and certainly not because she was deaf. But try telling that to some of those assholes. As far as they were concerned, she’d either been hired because her ears didn’t work, or because her tits did.

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

She was a surface creature where surface creatures had no business being, and it delighted her.

A jellyfish drifted past, diaphanous tendrils dangling, and for a moment she could see the outline of a human form in the way its membranes pulsed, the ghost of a drowned girl forever doomed to haunt the restless sea.

She was one of the best in her field, and a lot of that was because after giving up on one dream, she’d be damned before she gave up another.

Hallie sometimes thought things would have been easier if she, and not Heather, had been a twin. Let everything stay the same except for birth order. She could still have been the translator for her sisters, but she would have been the one with a constant friend, companion, and busybody glued to her side, while Heather could have gone off and lived life her own way, not worrying about upsetting Holly.

The pressure outside her submersible was such that if she’d opened the hatch – if the machinery keeping it locked had allowed her to open the hatch – she would have been crushed before she had the opportunity to drown.

She was approaching the depth that had, for decades, been the deepest mankind could safely go – not that there was anything safe about what she was doing. Safety had been left far behind her, and she was flying.

‘Heather, please remain calm and return to the surface,’ said the full message.

She hesitated with her fingers above the keys, trying to decide on her reply. If she said ‘no,’ they would argue. If she asked ‘why,’ she’d be as good as agreeing to return. And she didn’t want to return.

She could descend again, but there was only one first dive in any one location. One chance to make a first impression. Without a clear and obvious danger, she didn’t want her first impression of the Challenger Deep to be undefined motion on a monitor and fleeing like a scared puppy with her tail between her legs. She wanted to know.

She could cover a lot of ground in a minute. Heather hauled on the controls, and her Minnow continued its descent.

The only real difference between the Challenger Deep and the Mariana Trench was the light. Heather had thought she knew what darkness looked like; had believed the waters of the trench were as dark as it was possible for a place to be.

As her submersible slipped below the surface of the Deep, dropping downward at a pace that skirted the line between conservative and ambitious, she realized with slow and dawning wonder that she had never known da...

Humanity had feared the dark since time immemorial, and yet humanity had never experienced the dark, because it wasn’t until recently – the age of cunning hands and clever machines – that the dark had been anythi...

Biologists and the laws of evolution on Earth said humanity had started, like everything else, in the sea. Maybe that explained fearing the dark. An ancestral memory of this sort of all-consuming ...

She could have turned on every light she had, lit every emergency signal, and still not done anything to brighten the Challenger Deep. This was where darkness went to live forever, growing deeper and more powerful as the eons passed it by.

Heather was not claustrophobic – couldn’t be, with her job – but as she looked into the blackness around her, as she felt it pushing down against her skin, her heart stuttered in her chest, becoming heavy and awkward as it tried to get back into rhythm with itself.

Then, with a single sharp, decisive motion, she turned the submersible’s lights off. The dark surged in like a living thing, extinguishing the world. It had her surrounded in an instant.

This wasn’t the tame dark of a city street or a suburban home. It wasn’t even the slightly wild dark of a forest or a secluded beach. Moonlight, starlight, lightning, they were always there, always lighting up some fragment of the world. They were beyond her here.

Slowly the fear subsided, and her heartbeat resumed its normal rhythm, so familiar that she could ignore it. Heather smiled before powering the console lights back on. There were no new messages. Either the Melusine was still waiting for her reply or she had traveled outside of communication range. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t demand that she come back.

Down this deep, it seemed like whatever didn’t glow in the dark didn’t have eyes either, like evolution had written off sight as a useless skill. (Which begged the question, she sometimes felt, of whether there were senses humanity, blessed as it was with light and air and a relatively pressure-free environment, had given up on as useless.

What else might people have given up, and never noticed was missing, since it was virtually impossible to define an absence?)

Heather took her hands off the controls, eyes going wide and chest going tight. When she signed up for this mission, it had been with her eyes on the Challenger Deep, not because she’d believed, for even an instant, that she was going to find anything.

Unable to think of what else to do, Heather hit the button that would activate the submersible’s external lights – all of them. They flashed on, and the water around her lit up like midday in comparison to the absolute blackness of only a moment before. The mermaids recoiled as Heather gawked, unable to move her hands in her shock. Mermaids surrounded her on all sides.

Forty-five seconds was nothing on land. In the air and sunlight, where the pressure was negligible, it was nothing. Here, hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea, forty-five seconds was an eternity.

If her engines weren’t physically damaged – if they’d just been overwhelmed by conflicting signals and the surrounding pressure – they could be rebooted. She could get out of this.

The first flickers of bioluminescence moved past the window. Heather ignored them as best she could, feeling for the controls that would return her to the world where there was light, and air, and her sister, waiting patiently for her to come back and start apologizing.

She was still trying to restart the engines when there was another impact from above. This time it was accompanied by a trickle of water falling down to strike her shoulder, shockingly cold and impossible to ignore.

Heather closed her eyes. When the final impact came, when the water flooded into the pod and took the rest of the world away, she didn’t fight it. It would go faster if she didn’...

Curiosity was the reason humanity had come down from the trees and spread across the world. Sadness was tempting. Sorrow held more charms than most people liked to think, and it would swallow her whole if she let it. She had been dancing with sorrow since the Atargatis. But that was what made it so important that other things happen even when the sad things were already going on.

Sometimes science was the closest thing to the sword of an avenging angel humanity was ever going to get.

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.

The world was bigger and stranger than people thought, and things that were big and strange could also be fatal.

The mermaids liked it down in the deeps, of that there was no question. The deeps were their home. But when they needed to come up… ‘They can,’ whispered Olivia, and watched the shapes forming and breaking up on Luis’s screen, and wondered what was going to happen when the sun went down.