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

by Mira Grant

Maybe the point of the theatrics was to distract from those eyes, which had more in common with what little she’d seen of the mermaids before they attacked than they did with anything human.

No. No, and no, and all the no in the world. Her sister was dead. That video might become Heather’s legacy, might be the thing she was remembered for, but Hallie wasn’t going to start studying it until she had to.

“Fine,” he said. “But I’ll remember this, and pray you do not find yourself in need of assistance before our time aboard this ship is done.”

Okay, I WANT him to die. Gruesomely.

She would help him understand them. She would help them understand her, and when she told them why they had to die, they would know it was their own fault.

“The mermaids—we need a better word for them as an aggregate; we don’t know their genders, we don’t even know if they have gender in the human sense of the word—

“If they have a language—not just one language, but two languages, one spoken and one not—and if the complexity of their spoken language is anything like the complexity of their signing, they must be sentient,”

“There’s a lot of difference between a song that basically says, ‘Hey, come fuck me’ over and over again and a distinct, signed language,” said Luis. “Especially one that didn’t get abandoned as useless after they migrated from shallow waters into the depths.”

she was thinking of her sister again, and how easy revenge had looked when she was standing on the shore, thousands of miles from here, with no real choices to make. Here and now, on this ocean, in these waters, she had decisions in front of her. No matter what she chose, it was going to hurt.

“If they attack, we can fight back, and maybe the Wilsons don’t have to live with what I’ve lived with. But we can’t go after them. We just can’t. They’re intelligent creatures, and we don’t … we don’t have the right. Even after everything they’ve done, until we know that they know they’ve been hurting people, we can’t go after them.”

“We tell them that we need to get the hell out of here before we all get eaten,” said Tory. “And when people say that decision is above our pay grade, we pray we’ll live to see the shore.”

The fault in the system had eluded them this far, but they were out of time. If they couldn’t fix the shutters, they were all going to die.

Humanity was cruel, and if you were prepared to try to find a bottom to that cruelty, you had best be prepared for a long, long fall.

Nature is bigger and weirder than anyone ever wants to think it is.

the problem with trying to define nature is that nature is bigger than we are, and nature doesn’t care whether we know how to define it. Nature does what nature wants.”

“Sounds like a lot of pretty self-justification for stealing what should have been her Nobel Prize for first contact with an alien race,

The trouble with having a bear sharing your bed was that one day, the bear was going to notice that you were there; one day, the maimings would begin in earnest.

If we can talk to them—” “They’ll still be the creatures who killed your sister, and Miss Stewart’s sister, and a lot of good men and women I was once proud to call colleagues.”

They’re going to look at your little friends as an offering of delicious treats. There’s not going to be a free and open exchange of ideas. There’s going to be a bloodbath.”

“When a man undertakes a journey of revenge, he needs to dig two graves,”

Either way, we’re going to continue on the course I’ve charted. If you don’t like it, feel free to leave.” “We’re on a ship in the middle of the ocean,” said Hallie. “I know,” said Theo. “Good luck finding somewhere to go.”

Some people pointed out that their lives were officially in danger. Things that were real could hurt them.

All over the ship, engineers worked as quickly and quietly as they could, chasing a mechanical fault that should have been enough to turn them around before they had ever reached this point.

Safety and comfort were deep things, dark things, but food? A full belly, a full mouth? Those were shallow things, found where the light sliced through the water like talons through the belly of a shark. They were swift enough, clever enough, to play the line between light and dark like a shield, using it to hunt without becoming hunted.

Group by group, they came together, forming hunting parties of sixes and eights, and began to rise toward the light.

Daryl was convinced that the word for a group of scientists ought to be a blackout, because that was what the fuckers seemed determined to cause.

Men might return, but the boys? Oh, they never did.

The mermaids were real and they were coming. Why they didn’t just turn and get the hell out of here was above Gregory’s pay grade, but he had some suspicions: a ship this size wasn’t made to accelerate on a dime, and if the damn shutters weren’t working, who was to say what else might have decided to break?

not for the first time, Gregory questioned the wisdom of letting an entertainment company call the shots. You didn’t let Disney plan a war or Sony run a government. Why the hell would anyone let Imagine supervise a scientific expedition?

By telling the captain—by telling the person in charge—the young man had rendered this someone else’s problem.

As an engineer, it was his job to speak for the safety of the ship. He was speaking for the safety of the ship now. He knew it all the way down to his bones, even if none of the people who heard him agreed. He was trying to protect them.

People were afraid of what the weather was becoming—what the weather had already become—and so they didn’t want it intruding on their entertainment.

“No offense, hon, but you flirt like it’s a form of espionage and you’ll be executed if you get caught. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Any hint of “pervert” literature would have earned her a smack from her father, followed by a lecture from her mother about how she was special, delicate, and shouldn’t worry about such things, since it wasn’t like she was ever going to have sex anyway. Little autistic girls should learn to masturbate, or better yet, to abstain, because anyone who was deviant enough to want her would be deviant enough to hurt her.

Her father had left bruises on her body. Her mother’s bruises, for all that they’d been harder to see, were proving much slower to heal.

“Go to hell.” “I have been there, and it is these data feeds.”

“They’re mimics, we knew they were mimics, we knew they remembered what the engines of the Atargatis sounded like, of course we can’t pick them out, because they don’t sound like them!”

“They have three languages! The one they sign, the one they sing, and the one they steal, and they use that third language when they’re hunting, so the prey never hears them coming!

“You said that they use mimicry when they’re hunting. They stop using their own kind of sounds when they’re hunting. What are they hunting now, Victoria? What are they looking for? They killed Heather. They’ve killed humans before. They know humans come from ships; what happened to the Atargatis is proof of that. Between the season and the climate changes, we represent the most food they’ve seen in one place in God only knows how long. They’re hunting. They’re hunting us.”

“Jokes remind us that we’re alive. And that your sense of humor is terrible.”

he knew something about the monsters now. He knew they were real, for one thing, and he’d been wasting his family’s money by looking for them. He should have been using it to build better barriers. Anything to keep them safe from the so-called lovely ladies of the sea.

Luis didn’t think there was much reason to worry about panic among the ship’s scientists. As long as their equipment kept working and they weren’t actively being eaten alive, they were going to keep doing their research, and keep enjoying the opportunity to do so.

It was hers now. If she gained comfort from its existence, and not its use, that was up to her. People had their own ways of experiencing trauma, and he wasn’t going to interfere.

“We don’t know how many are down there, how much they eat, or whether their smarts extend to having figured out a form of food storage.”

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.

That was how you found things, in the sea. Be delicious. That was all you ever had to do.

“The trouble with intelligent creatures is that we don’t recognize borders that seem completely natural to those who act on instinct.

So assume the mermaids have never forgotten about us. We wrote them off as legends as soon as they were no longer knocking on our front door.”

If we die like this, it’s our own damn fault. We don’t get to blame anyone but ourselves.”

“How can you call them animals and say you need consent in the same breath?” asked Daniel. “Dolphins are intelligent creatures.”

If my crime is refusing to be silent, then I’m happy to be a criminal, because believe me, the lovely ladies of the sea, they’re out there. They exist. And if we’re not careful where we sail, they’re going to prove it to us.