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

by Mira Grant

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.

He didn’t need to mention the Atargatis. The ghost of that earlier voyage was all around them. The Melusine was a haunted house. She had been since the day she’d been commissioned.

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

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

The seas did not forgive, and they did not welcome their wayward children home.

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.

There was no way she was cutting this mission short for anything but a natural disaster. She turned her eyes back to the viewing window, easing herself farther downward. The natural disaster swam toward her with a sinuous rippling motion, cutting through the water like it possessed no resistance at all.

A lot of people are going to die. Maybe even us.” “Maybe,” Theo agreed noncommittally. “But we got to sail together one more time. Wasn’t that worth the risk?” “For you and me? Maybe. For everyone else on this godforsaken vessel?” Jillian shook her head. “It never was. It never could have been. And

Everything that threatens us in the sea has its counterpart on land, with less of the gravity-defying freedom the water offers. So what could have driven us away? Nothing more nor less than an equal. One whose mastery of the waters outpaced our own, and left us with the choice to flee as predators, or to live as prey … —

As long as there were bellies, they would need to be fed. As long as there was life in the sea, there would be teeth.

Deep beneath the waves, the hungry turned their eyes upward, toward the promise of plenty, and began to prepare.

She had been a demon of the sea, and she still was; he could sense that much. Let her wear all the sensible sweaters she wanted to, let her hide her fury under polite frowns and her compassion under sharp words; he saw through it. She was still, and would always be, his Helen of Troy.

Gone to sea, like all the bright-eyed boys, and like all the bright-eyed boys, he was never coming home. Men might return, but the boys? Oh, they never did.

Let deforestation do away with Bigfoot, let sonar destroy Nessie, but the sea would always be deep, always be dark, always be filled with wonders.

I am not the first to chase the mermaid from sea to sea, from the shallows to the depths. I am just the most recent in a long line of scientific Cassandras, looking at the waves and saying, “This is not for us. Be careful, be careful, for this is not ours to claim.”

It was beautiful, in its own terrible way. So many monsters are.

We left and then we came back. The water never forgave us. Why should it? We were the prodigal children, us and our kin, and even if we wanted to come home, home didn’t want us anymore.

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

From the sea humanity had come; to the sea humanity would always return.