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

by Mira Grant

prey that could not be easily taken was rarely worth remembering.

The thieves knew what to steal, but they didn’t know how to put it together in a way that meant something. They acted without sense. That was the worst thing. At least the humans, when they tried, were trying sensibly. The thieves just acted.

Jillian’s voice was calm, virtually serene: she was Cassandra speaking from the walls of Troy, watching her prophecies coming true.

We sent three innocent creatures into a trap, and we did it because we could.”

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

Instinct told him to fear what he saw in front of him, and so he did, without hesitation.

The smarter you are, the more likely you are to want to eat the world.

They learned to call for us because we wouldn’t follow a shiny light or a wiggling worm.

Taking prisoners of war doesn’t fix the problem, had been Tory’s thought;

We’re trapped on a floating tin can in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by predators smart enough to communicate and plan, and no one’s doing anything to get us the hell away from here. We’re not going to get cut out. We’re going to die.”

They were here to disturb something deep and ancient and cold, something that was better left alone.

The human race had always created dreamers whose seemingly frivolous dreams forced the creation of infrastructures and innovations that benefited everyone around them.

“We know where the fish-women go. They go down to Davy Jones’s locker, and they take you along for the ride.”

Guns were always less reassuring once it was clear how easily they could be taken away.

“The lovely doctor does not look for her sirens, because she always knew they would come to find us. She made us the lure for her line, and she sat back to wait. How does it feel to be a wiggling worm, hmm?

“Did anyone ever tell you that you have the social skills of a hyena?” asked Luis.

“I love my husband; you insult the hyena...

The rise of steamships must have changed so much about their hunting techniques. For humanity, the industrial revolution had been the start of an era of booming prosperity and comfort. For the mermaids, it must have seemed like one of their most reliable sources of food had dried up effectively overnight. Add in the rise of the whaling industry, and it was a miracle they’d been able to find enough to survive.

“It’s matching the sounds made by a human throat while completely submerged,” said Jillian. “It shouldn’t be able to do that. Human speech underwater doesn’t sound like human speech. It sounds like something dead and drowned and distorted. Whether it’s thinking about the adjustments or doing them automatically, it’s matching something it shouldn’t be able to match. That’s incredible.”

That was what mattered: finding a place where their two worlds would meet, a form of commonality between their two species. Without that, they were going to remain predator and prey, separated by a thin glass wall.

Sign language is relatively easy.” “Spoken like a man who’s never tried to navigate the disconnect between two different types of sign language.” Daniel blinked at her. “There’s more than one kind of sign language?”

The whole world is set up to be easy on hearing people, but that wasn’t good enough for us. We had to find the one corner that wasn’t designed to cater to our needs and take it over, and fuck the people who already lived there, who had a perfectly reasonable way of talking to each other, who didn’t need us to ‘fix’ them.”

“Knowledge that can be imparted loudly and with passion always lasts longer than knowledge that has to be whispered.

we know they’re clever; they were smart enough not to sign on for this voyage of the damned—

“I’m curious, what’s your definition of an emergency? Two people were dead before we took one of the mermaids hostage,”

Sadly, way too many girls who liked girls (and boys who liked boys, although that wasn’t a dynamic she’d ever been a part of) had issues with girls who liked both.

She just was pickier about personalities than she was about genders.

They were still miles from home, adrift on an uncaring sea, and the worst was yet to come. The worst was always yet to come.

Mermaid behavior required live subjects. Mermaid language required live subjects. But some questions—how did they mimic human voices? How did they make the transition from water to air? Were they fish or amphibians, or some third option, something stranger still?—could only be answered with a dead one.

After all, what’s the point in preserving something for posterity if we don’t do it correctly?” Olivia, who suspected that the point was getting out of the line of fire, said nothing.

Some things you document to say "Stay the hell away from this. It will kill you."

now they’re real, and they’re killing people, and we don’t know anything about them. They were smart enough to sink that submersible thing. What else can they do?”

But they had sailed off the edge of the map, into the waters the cartographers had marked with “Here be monsters” and a picture of something terrible and toothy—a warning to unwary sailors that this was, perhaps, not the best route to carry them home.

There were few things in these waters that could kill an adult mermaid. They were too fast, too deadly, and too clever. The two-legged things in their artificial floating reefs were born killers, and they would do what they were made for if they were given half a chance.

They were going to die. She’d been sure of that since the moment she spread the mermaid’s ribs and saw the puzzle-piece organs nestled inside, waiting to share their mysteries. Some of those mysteries had been self-solving, so obvious that every incision and examination just confirmed what she already knew. The secondary lung, for example. The conclusions were clear. There had never been any other way for this to end.

evolution has never been about easy. Evolution takes risks. It puts things in new environments, and leaves most of them there to die when they don’t work out. But some, if they’re quick, or lucky, it allows to come back to where they started.

The trouble with nature is that nature doesn’t care about us. The world made us, and it was done. Sink or swim, we’re on our own. The thing people forget about survival of the fittest is that it doesn’t work. You really think the giraffe was the fittest? Or the kakapo? Even our friend the axolotl has no business existing. Nature has made and rejected and lost and remade more biological diversity than currently exists.

It’s hard to get less scrupulous than killing intelligent creatures and taking them apart just to understand how they work, thought Tory, and said nothing.

There was a long pause before Jason asked, sounding scandalized, “Are you telling us this thing is a male?”

What comes next … That’s what’s going to determine whether any of this was worth it.” “Do you think it was?” asked Olivia. Dr. Toth turned to look at the smaller woman. She raised her eyes to the camera, looking into the lens for a long moment before she said, calmly, “No,” and turned back to her necropsy.

“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.”

I don’t think we forgot them on purpose. I think we did it because we had to. These were monsters we could neither fight nor flee. Our only choice, if we wanted to claim the seas and hence the world, was to learn to pretend that they weren’t there.

Nature made what nature wanted to make. Sometimes it came together perfectly. Other times it all fell apart.

There must have been a time when you lived closer to shore. There’s no other reason for you to be so good at playing pretend. If you’d stayed in shallow water, we might never have set sail. We would have been too afraid of the voices in the deep. So what drove you away? What kept you from coming back?

She was missing something. She knew that she was missing something. And if she didn’t figure out what it was soon, they were all going to pay for it. One way or another, someone always, always paid.

Patience was never the watchword in science. Patience came later. Patience came when they were back on land, milking the results of this journey in an unending effort to make the funding last. Patience came after the first hot rush of discovery.

They were in the same place now. That wasn’t going to last. Tory was going to have the opportunity to watch her ex-boyfriend make the future while she wound up standing in the past. He hoped her little slut could make it up to her. He sincerely doubted it.

Die. Please, die a stupid, painful death before you get a chance to procreate. You're not even worried about if your science will help people, you just want to be famous.

Young people always think they’re hungrier than we are. You forget that you’re omnivores, while we’ve become specialists. It’s like a goat asking a koala why it doesn’t want to share the eucalyptus.”

“It was never about being right. It was never about gloating. It was about proving the existence of a deep-sea predator we kept forgetting about the second our backs were turned. It was about showing the world there was a threat.

“You didn’t think we’d find them?” “We didn’t find them. They found us. I always knew that would be the case.

“That, right there, is why I don’t trust you, and why I left. You wouldn’t give me the ocean, and you wouldn’t tell me the truth. I’ve been second in your life for years. I wasn’t going to stand by and let you make me second in our marital bed.”