🎧 Press play above to listen as I read Chapter 8 to you!
MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA is a dystopian sci-fi about a girl on the flooded world’s only surviving island, sent out past the atoll into the forbidden ocean to find the sea gods to save her starving village. What she finds instead is an underwater research station full of other humans — and they have their own plans for survival.
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🛑 First time here? Start at the beginning: Chapter One
🌊 Previously in MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: Easla swam through the unholy waters to a second atoll and found the gods’ home beneath its lagoon. Hiding in a bubble-tree of trapped air, she watched the gods ignore her prayers and command a seaweed-net that moved on its own with a small box. Rather than kill them for their silver jaws as the Holy Crone ordered, she stuffed her dress with the gods’ plants to bring home as food and proof. Then a god spotted her through the leaves, and Easla burst out to steal his jaw…
Chapter 8
The Chosen People held strong in their faith, and so the Sea spared them.
But the Sinners were weak, and so the Sea took them.
As it was in the Great Flood, so it will always be.
— Ocean Law
I shoot out of the bubble-tree on my one held breath and kick hard for the god. He’s already turning toward the dome. I have to reach him before he calls the others.
The rush of my wake hits him, and he whips back, his gaze sweeping over me. His eyebrows shoot up like he’s never seen a human before.
But why would he be shocked by me?
He flings the bundled seaweed-net at me.
It unfurls through the water, reaching, but I knock it aside. My body thrums with the hunt, my focus narrowing to one target: the silver jaw on his face. Without it, he’ll have to duck into the bubble-tree for air, and every breath he spends there puts more water between us. Enough for me to get away with the stolen plants in my dress—food for Elly, proof for the village.
Two kicks, and I’m on him. I hook my fingers under the jaw, plant my feet on his chest, and push.
The jaw comes free in a roar of bubbles, easier than I expected, like twisting an oyster off a mangrove root. I flip and swim for the surface.
Something clamps around my ankle. It yanks me backward, down toward him.
Air bursts from my lips, and water rushes up my nose. I slap my free hand over my mouth and nostrils. Don’t gasp.
He rips the jaw from my other hand.
I spin in a half-circle to break his grip on my leg. The silver jaw is back on his lower face, his unscaled hands holding it there. Wait, both hands are there. Then what has my ankle?
I look down.
