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

by Mira Grant

The seas of the world were a vast and interconnected graveyard,

She snorted. “No mermaids, of course” would probably be the epitaph for this mission.

They aren’t our fault. We didn’t mutate some flatworm into a murderous new form, and we didn’t melt a glacier that freed a prehistoric predator. They exist because they exist. That’s nice.” Dr. Toth smirked. “I’m so used to humans being responsible for everything that it’s a pleasant change when we didn’t do it.”

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.

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.

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 anything more than a whispering legend, a rumor of a nightmare.

The Atargatis hadn’t found the mermaids through a free and open exchange of ideas. The Atargatis had found the mermaids because the people on the ship were made of meat, and the mermaids had empty stomachs that they wanted to fill.