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

by Mira Grant

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.)

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. She loved the Pacific as she loved nothing else in the world, and sometimes she worried she would start taking it for granted, letting familiarity wear away the sharp, startling edges love needed in order to stay bright and strong. The tourists were seeing everything for the first time. Through their eyes, she could do the same.

Jay exhaled hard. “You can’t talk to your bosses like this in the real world.” “I’m not planning to go into the real world. I’m going to work in marine conservation. As long as I’m not dangling from the ceiling, people will take me seriously as a scientist.”

(That was a generalization, of course; he knew anxiety and uncertainty bred in this new generation just as prolifically as it had in his own. Perhaps even more so. 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. If these students seemed motivated and determined, it was because they’d seen the writing on the wall. Earth would survive whatever humanity did to it. Humanity might not. These children,

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

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.

He turned his head and found himself looking into Michi’s eyes. They were brown, cold, and surrounded by impeccably applied winged eyeliner. He had time to wonder who took the time to do their makeup before coming out to hunt mermaids before she was shoving him away,

She sounded like the pure distillation of Queensland, Australia, all sunny skies and brutal murder.

she and her husband had to shoot it. The mermaid, not the scientist.

“When someone kills an American citizen, we don’t say, ‘Oh well, we killed one of theirs last week; we’re calling it even,’” she said. “We declare war. We sweep civilizations off the face of the globe. They won’t care that they started it. They’re only going to care who finishes it, and to be honest, I’m not sure it’s going to be us.”

Good, she thought fiercely. Things like this, moments like this, were meant to be remembered. They were meant to be felt. Let these people feel what it was to truly sail to the ends of the earth. No one who went this far from shore came back unscathed. No one ever could.

Science is not a matter of belief. Science does not care whether you believe in it or not. Science will continue to do what science will do, free from morality, free from ethical concerns, and most of all, free from the petty worry that it will not be believed. Belief has shaped the history of human accomplishment—we believe we can, and so we do—but belief has never changed the natural world.

“Men are weak,” said Jacques dismissively. “Nothing which wants to survive should keep its genitals on the outside of its body.