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

by Mira Grant

“He’ll devour you if you let him. Strip you down to your bones and sap every bit of nutrition he can from your flesh, because you’re what he used to be, and somewhere deep, he hates you for that. We all do.”

Of course she died for nothing. There’s no other way she could have died.

“There you go,” said Luis. “You put a quarter in her. Everything that happens now is on you. You understand that, right? This is your fault.”

Maybe we’ll get lucky, and alcohol will be fatal to the things. They’ll eat a couple lightweights and decide to leave us alone.” “Not likely,” said Dr. Toth. “Several recorded disappearances in these waters have involved private yachts of the sort that are either used for poaching or partying. I’m sure the sirens have encountered drunk humans before. They probably think we’re even more delicious when we self-marinate.”

“Whistling past the graveyard is a time-honored tradition. Keeps us from screaming.”

“So we leave,” said Tory. “We can … we can tell the navy, and they’ll come back with bigger guns.” “They’d come back to drop a nuke into the Challenger Deep, and you know it,” said Theo. He sounded tired more than anything else; this was not the first time he’d considered this. “They’d set the seas to boiling before they’d share them with a hostile sentient race, and when that made the weather even more unpredictable—when that killed the fish and destroyed the people living on the local islands—they’d say all of that had been unforeseen. Even though anyone with eyes could have seen it. No. We need to go back with as much data as possible. We need these creatures protected.” “Protected?” Tory stiffened. “Why would we want to protect them?” “Because waging war on things that normally live a mile below the surface of the sea does no one any good, and could do us quite a lot of harm,” said Dr. Toth, stepping in before Theo could open his mouth. “Because they represent something otherwise unknown to science, and studying them could tell us things about our planet that I never thought we’d have the opportunity to learn. But most of all, we protect them because it’s our job. We don’t just conserve the things we like, or the things we find adorable. We conserve everything. We take care of the planet. We’ve been doing a piss-poor job so far, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get better.”

It was a gamble. It was always a gamble. That was the beautiful thing about it.

Scientists were very good at finding things that could kill a man. It was, along with the creation of more and better guns, the greatest benefit of science.

Nobility was for those who never stepped into the line of fire. Given the circumstances, she would gladly accept survival over anything of the sort.

“I didn’t know you could talk,” said Tory. “Of course I can talk,” said Holly. “But you can’t understand me, so I had to learn to make sounds with my mouth. Why am I going with you?”

Thinking never changed the world. Research did, yes, and study, but that was action. Science was philosophy plus movement. Thought alone couldn’t make the grade.

Too late to save the people, maybe, but not too late to save the science.

I got to know what I looked like with skinned knees and black eyes—and since neither of us could hear, and most hearing adults couldn’t tell us apart, the only way I didn’t get in trouble right alongside her was by staying so spotless that there was no possible way I could have done anything wrong. She rendered me sterile, clinical, all because I was looking for contrast.

Was it suicide when death was inevitable? Or was it just refusing to let someone else—something else—decide the way she ended?

They looked at her like her bravery was sincere, like she knew what she was doing. Maybe that was the secret of bravery. Maybe it was always a matter of puffing out your chest and lifting up your chin and looking like everything was going to be okay. She was an actress, not a fighter. Here and now, the one was the same as the other.