Tidebound

The shells were arranged in a golden spiral. Naia ran the numbers. The numbers said impossible.

Marine biologist Naia Ohta moved to a tiny Hawaiian island to study octopuses and outrun a failed marriage. What she found at the bottom of an ocean trench was older than the island, larger than anything in her taxonomy, and leaving her gifts on the dock-split geodes, arranged shells, beauty placed with the precision of something that wanted her to know it was watching.

He has no name she can pronounce. He has tentacles that move stones the size of trees and a garden in the abyss that no human has ever seen. He has a hatred of her species built on centuries of evidence-dragged nets, poisoned water, drums of waste rotting on his ocean floor. His fury is old and earned and he has never once had a reason to reconsider it.

She is not a reason. He is aware of this. He can't stop watching her anyway.

When a drilling company targets the trench, Naia has to choose between the career she's built and the creature she can't explain, armed with nothing but her data, her stubbornness, and a fishing boat blockade.