Daughter of the Deep

Daughter of the Deep

Rick Riordan




Nature’s creative power is far beyond man’s instinct of destruction.

– Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea





Foreword


Don’t Pick Up a Starfish by Its Arm


Did you know more than eighty percent of the ocean remains unexplored? EIGHTY, PEOPLE! It is very possible that at this moment a mermaid and a giant squid are munching on macroalgae macaroni and wondering when we’re going to catch up and discover that Atlantis was just a theme park that went terribly wrong. Who knows?

No one can say for certain, because so much of the ocean is unknown. And I am terrified of the unknown, so it goes without saying that I am absolutely terrified of the ocean. Perhaps it started when, at the age of ten, I picked up a starfish by one of its arms … and soon found myself holding a single wiggling appendage. At the time, I didn’t know that starfish arms could regenerate. I believed I was a murderer. I fell to my knees and bellowed with horror. (CURSE YE, FORMIDABLE MIGHT! SUCH INNOCENCE … DESTROYED! DOES THIS MEAN I CAN PERMANENTLY SKIP GYM?)

But the more that something terrifies me, the more I tend to obsess over it. And, ever since that fateful starfish encounter, the ocean, with its strange inhabitants – that’s right, I’m looking at you, various echinoderms and ophiuroids – has loomed large in my mind as a place of unknowable power, unimaginable beauty and untapped potential.

Rick Riordan’s Daughter of the Deep captures every single facet of that awe and terror.

If you have ever craved a story that will leave your heart racing, your lungs gasping from numerous twists and turns, your soul heaving from the effort of carrying around an ensemble cast that includes smol, ingenious and possibly bloodthirsty cinnamon rolls (oh, and a humongous creature of the deep who, truly, just wants love), you will find all that and more in the pages ahead. Our story begins with two warring schools and a cataclysmic event that sends the freshman class of the elite Harding-Pencroft Academy on a deadly mission to unearth a secret about the kind of technological power that can remake the world. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time as the crew navigated high-tech high jinks, deep-sea riddles and the sort of military tactics that somehow make me feel smarter despite the fact that I have been ensconced in a soft blankie for the better part of the day.

I cannot think of a better captain to helm this watery adventure than the formidable Ana Dakkar. Ana is everything I wished I could be at fifteen. Fearless, brilliant, a linguistic whiz, friends with a dolphin named Socrates and – most importantly to a daydreaming adolescent Rosh – burdened with an ancestral legacy that is the stuff of legends.

You see, Ana is one of the last descendants of Captain Nemo, and that’s where things get complicated. As the last of the Dakkars, Ana not only finds herself grappling with an inheritance that could change the entire world’s understanding of technology, but she’s also struggling with larger questions, like What are we owed? and What do we owe others? It’s easy to make the right decisions when all the world is watching, but when you’re deep underwater, where the sun can’t see you, you might just end up doing something you never expected …

To me, this story is a lot like the ocean. Equal parts thrilling and terrifying, and, no matter which way you look at it, downright cool. Enjoy! And don’t eat too many cinnamon rolls.





Introduction





My journey under the sea started in landlocked Bologna, Italy, in 2008. I was there for a children’s book fair, right before The Battle of the Labyrinth and The 39 Clues: The Maze of Bones were scheduled for release. I was having dinner in the basement of a restaurant with about fourteen of the top brass from Disney Publishing when the president of the division turned to me and said, ‘Rick, is there any existing Disney intellectual property you’d love to write about?’ I didn’t hesitate in saying, ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.’ It took me another twelve years before I was ready to write it, but my version of that story is now in your hands.



Who is Captain Nemo? (No, not the cartoon fish.)

If you’re not familiar with the original Captain Nemo, he’s a character created by the French author Jules Verne in the nineteenth century. Verne wrote about him in two novels, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1875), in which Nemo commands the world’s most advanced submarine, the Nautilus.

Captain Nemo was smart, well educated, courteous and massively wealthy. He was also angry, bitter and dangerous. Imagine a combination of Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark and Lex Luthor. Formerly known as Prince Dakkar, Nemo had fought the British colonial government in India. In retaliation, the British killed his wife and children. This was Dakkar’s supervillain/superhero origin story. He renamed himself Nemo, which is Latin for no one. (Greek myth fans: this was an Easter egg about/shout-out to Odysseus, who told the Cyclops Polyphemus that his name was Nobody.) Nemo dedicated the rest of his life to terrorizing the colonial European powers on the high seas, sinking and plundering their ships and making them fear the unstoppable ‘sea monster’ that was the Nautilus.

Who wouldn’t want to have that kind of power? As a kid, every time I jumped in a lake or even a swimming pool, I liked to pretend I was Captain Nemo. I could sink enemy ships with impunity, go all over the world undetected, explore depths no one had ever visited, and uncover fabulous ruins and priceless treasures. I could submerge into my own secret realm and never return to the surface world (which was kind of horrible anyway). When I eventually wrote about Percy Jackson, the son of Poseidon, you can bet that my old daydreams about Captain Nemo and the Nautilus were a big reason I chose to make Percy a demigod of the sea.