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by
Mira Grant
Read between
October 15 - October 22, 2025
‘I don’t understand how you can say that,’ signed Holly. ‘She was your sister. She was my sister. She was the world. Of course she died for nothing. There’s no other way she could have died. If she’d been dying for something, the world would have realized it was a stupid thing, and given her back.’
He was dead before the elevator came to a stop, one deck down. All things considered, that may have been a mercy.
And he died because he's a moron who didn't have help and who wasn't careful enough and too overconfident
“What if their language is the borrowed sounds? I mean, what if they’re talking in mermaid metaphors?”
“It’s not the words, it’s what they represent,” she said, tone bordering on awe. “It’s not the sound, it’s where the sound was encountered. It’s what the sound does.”
“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.” “What’s my fault?” asked Olivia.
“We were ignoring the issue of cultural literacy. We didn’t think they had culture. That was on us. All these sounds they’ve been collecting, all these things they’ve been shouting at one another—they’re coordinating through shared experience.
“They talked about a successful hunt. They talked about prey. They talked about prey that hunts via ambush. They’re coordinating. Everything they steal, everything they share, it’s another piece of the continuity they have with the rest of the school. The spoken component of the siren language isn’t learned. It’s felt.”
“Jason’s a jackass, but there’s no way Tory killed him and got caught,” said Luis. “If she were going to kill him, she’d have done it at school, and there wouldn’t have been anything to link her to the murder. Whatever this is, it’s amateur hour enough that there’s no way she was involved.”
Olivia blinked. “You know she didn’t kill him because if she’d killed him, she wouldn’t have gotten caught?” “Pretty much.” “That’s … Okay, you’re right. That’s oddly reassuring.”
“That’s a good description,” said Luis. “I thought you didn’t know him.” “I’m a geeky woman whose job involves looking cute on camera for a major genre media producer,” she said. “I’ve seen his type before.”
Dr. Toth approached the body. She had looked more concerned—and more reverent—when dealing with the dead siren. It, at least, had been filled with mysteries. Jason was just one more dead human. If there was any novelty in him, it was that this time, they had a body. The sea hadn’t claimed him the way it had claimed the others.
I could kill you all, and while the American government might try to have me arrested, they’d have trouble convincing me to come back into their jurisdiction. Here, the word of Imagine is law, and I am the voice of the company. If you say you didn’t kill this young man, I have no reason to doubt you.”
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.”
He simply hadn’t expected her to be real enough to start wooing his own people away from him.
“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,”
“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.
“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
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“I think you’re overlooking something,” said Tory. “These are scientists. They’re not going to want to leave while there’s a chance that they could learn something. The problem isn’t going to be people rising up to overthrow you in order to get out of here. The problem is going to be someone sabotaging the engines so they can finish their chemical analysis of the surface water.”
“It’s time for us to finish and get out of here. This is their place, not ours, and the longer we linger, the worse things are going to become.”
She didn’t want to see the pity in their faces. It was a reminder of what she’d lost, what she was never going to have again, and it was like Heather died over and over when people looked at her like that.
But oh, how those normal people begged for what he and Michi could do when they felt their lives were in danger! How they screamed and pleaded. And bled, of course. Bleeding was par for the course when soft, pampered things like these scientists moved through the living world.
If these were the natural parasites of the sirens, the toxins they secreted couldn’t be fatal to the creatures. That meant there were answers in these protein strings, in these tiny, chitinous scraps of marine life. And she was going to find them, before they ran out of time to find anything.
Cats chitter, because they’re excited, because they’re about to start hunting. But when the hunt begins, they’re silent. They don’t make a sound. They come at their prey as quietly as they can, because a hunt only counts if there’s a kill at the end.”
This might be the last real hunt for both of them. They had traveled the world, taking their prey from every environment, every ecosystem. They had bribed, bartered, and trespassed to line up the perfect shot, creating their own Noah’s Ark of ghosts. Two by two, that was how they’d taken the animals; two by two, and all for the sport of it, the thrill of it, the God-given necessity of it. Mankind was designed for the hunt. People who forgot that might as well have been prey animals themselves. But all things came to an end. There was no thrill in a hunt repeated. Even Michi, with her whaler’s
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Uncomfortable as the guards patrolling with him were, they knew they would have been even less comfortable with her. He was a killer, brute force and bullets. She was something more subtle, more vicious, and hence much more terrifying.
It shrieked, loud and shrill and strangely honest: this was not a sound the creature had stolen from some other denizen of the deep. This was its voice, its true voice, for the first time.
as if scientists knew the first thing about safety, when they spent their professional careers courting disaster like they were hoping to take it to a school dance? Giving scientists control of safety was like giving apes control of the banana supply—
“We go this way.” “Why?” “Because mucus is an easing agent. It makes the path smoother. Things that slither—snakes, alligators, anything that likes to crawl—take the smoother path every time. It’s not laziness. It’s tactics. They stick to the path, they save energy for more important things.” “Important things like what?” asked one of the guards. Someone screamed.
They might not be slithering things, but they knew the wisdom of letting someone else blaze the trail. Those who came in first often died that way.
Unfortunately, orders have never changed human nature, and it was inevitable that some people would think the warnings were just hyperbole.
They had intended to let the night air in. The night air hadn’t come alone.
“Six so far,” said Jacques, turning his eyes back to the deck. Let them think him callous. Where there were six, there would be more. “It begins.”
He mattered. Michi mattered. Every other body on this ship was simply bait, something to push in front of the sirens while he took a moment to reload.
I'm torn between wanting him to die because he's a foul human, and wanting him to live because he's good with a gun and there are several characters I want to keep alive
The Melusine had been designed for the comfort of her passengers as much as for the functionality of her mission, and the doors were effective sound baffles. Add the shape of the ship, and the normal properties of screams, and half these people wouldn’t even have heard the slaughter. They were sitting ducks.
“Come up with a plan that does something beyond getting us all slaughtered, and I’ll think about it.” Luis folded his arms. “We’re not going out there without a plan.”
“Well, I want to live,” said Luis. “I don’t care if the captain thinks we’re safer in our labs. The captain also thinks a few security fire drills mean the same thing as being ready for a disaster, and look how far that’s gotten us. Make the call.”
her boys, as she kept pseudo-affectionately calling them, subtly shifting their ideas of loyalty from the corporation onto her, where all loyalty belonged—
if someone was paying attention, they’d never be taken by surprise. It was like fighting an invasion of giant slugs.
Losing her temper would do her no good, and might do her considerable harm. Jacques could rant and rave and people would view him as roguishly dangerous, possibly unbalanced, possibly just unpredictable. If she did the same things she’d be labeled as a crazy bitch and lose any respect she’d gained among these men.
Metal is no challenge for something with big enough claws if they’re only looking to pull themselves up. Be more concerned about what those claws can do to flesh, and look alive.”
They were killers. They were monsters. They were throwbacks to a less enlightened era, and if they were tolerated in places like this one, it was because even throwbacks can be necessary; without them, the monsters at the door would become the monsters inside the house, and the fairy tale of conservation and tolerance would end, swallowed alive by something older and redder and wetter.
If she could keep them in line long enough, continue to smile and flatter and exchange pleasantries for another few circuits around the ship, they would follow her into Hell itself. That was a good thing. With the way this night was unfolding, Hell itself wasn’t far away.
want to try something. Stand in front of the tank.” “Stand in front of the deep-sea horror that wants to eat me, you mean.” “Yes,” she said serenely. “I mean exactly that.” Daniel glared at her. “I have a PhD.” “That’s nice. So do I.” “I also have two master’s degrees, and I’ve addressed the United Nations.” “I can run in four-inch heels. Are we done playing ‘who has the bigger dick’? Because I have things to accomplish, and I need you to stand in front of the siren.”
The creature—mermaid, siren, whatever she wanted them to call it—was a predator from another world, and it would kill him if he gave it the chance. He knew that, and deep down, in the part of his soul that would never come out of the trees, he was afraid.
“Great,” said Daniel, blissfully unaware of what was going on above them. “Maybe we can get out of here without anyone else dying.”
Like the flamboyant cuttlefish, the siren was poisonous. Not venomous; poisonous. The flesh of the creature was relatively inert, but the mucus it secreted contained a complicated mix of anticoagulants and neurotoxins, designed to slow and sedate anything foolish enough to bite it. Whatever ate a siren would become prey to the rest of the school, unable to build up the speed to escape them.
The race between medical science and natural poison was a swift one, and one that had been run over and over again since the dawn of mankind.
“Of course I can talk,” said Holly. “But you can’t understand me, so I had to learn to make sounds with my mouth.
Holly turned and ran across the lab, gathering the precious parts of her research, the things a backup couldn’t replace. Maybe it was silly. Maybe it was frivolous. But she’d already lost one sister, and her second sister was somewhere on this ship, out of reach, out of range. She wasn’t going to lose them both and her work at the same time. If that happened, she might as well give herself to the sirens. She’d have nothing left.
