🎧 Press play above to listen as I read Chapter 5 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.
Not following the novel? You can turn off Chapter emails in your subscription settings and still get everything else from The Deep Dive.
🛑 First time here? Start at the beginning: Chapter One
🌊 Previously in MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: The atoll sank, and the unholy waters flooded the lagoon, killing every fish, and a matron who fell in died, screaming that it burned. When her blue-coral-crazed father drowned Relfy’s baby, Easla chose to save Elly instead. Then, obeying the Holy Crone’s claim that only the gods could save them now, Easla broke her promise to her sister and paddled away toward the sunken atoll. There, her grandmother took her hand… and pushed her into the deadly waters...
Chapter 5
Our bountiful Lagoon is only for its Chosen People.
Those who poison it with Sin shall be returned to the Atoll,
where they will burn in the Unholy Waters or die slowly with their sins.
— Ocean Law
My scream disappears into the sea. I thrash, bracing for the burn the Ocean Law promises any sinner who touches these waters. My back slams into coral, and I sit up, waist-deep on the sunken atoll, gasping.
The red water floods my torn palms and the gash in my heel, and the pain flares sharper than the lagoon’s salt ever stung any of my open wounds.
I scramble to my feet. The unholy waters still swirl around my shins. I clutch my hands to my chest and wait for the pain to spread, for the rest of my skin to burn.
It doesn’t. The sting stays only in my wounds. My nose itches from the rotten stench, but my skin stays whole.
The current pushes gently at my legs.
A sob of relief bursts out of me, then catches.
The Holy Crone. She pushed me. I shouldn’t be surprised. She banished her own daughter. But I did everything she asked. I thought that would be enough. She took my hand, looked me in the eyes, then pushed me in, knowing these waters would—
Wait, I’m alive. How am I alive? I lift a cupped hand and watch the red water drain through my fingers. “They’re…not deadly?”
A rope soars toward me.
My hands grab it before I even decide to, the way every girl learns to grab a line thrown her way. Its other end knots onto my canoe.
The Holy Crone still stands in it, now drifting backward into the lagoon. She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it. She presses a fingertip deep into her ear, digs, and flicks something small into the red water. Whatever it is, the current takes it.
“The village can’t be saved,” she says. “But we can save ourselves, if you do exactly as I say.”
I want to heed her words, but as I dip my hand again into the waters I was always told would kill me, my mind whirls with this new discovery. An impossibility. I can’t stop staring at the water around me, touching me. “B-but a Great Flood cleansed the world of sinners. The Ocean Law says these waters kill.”
“Only those that breathe water,” she says. “Not us.”
Not us? She was there. “You heard that matron’s screams. She was clawing at her canoe, screaming that it burned.”
The Holy Crone shrugs. “It stings, yes.”
“That matron died!”
The Holy Crone’s gaze doesn’t waver. “From a paddle.”
She says it with such certainty that my grip slackens, and the current pulls the rope through my raw palms.
I catch it at the knot before I drop it, my blood smearing the rough fibers of coconut husk. Was the matron’s pain from fear and not reality? Was her death from humans and not gods?
What did I truly see? The matron scrabbling at the canoe, tipping it toward her, the Oyster Prime’s son sliding toward the water. The paddle, ripped from the girl’s hands. The Oyster Prime swinging it down.
The paddle.
The waters didn’t kill her. That matron could have climbed back in the canoe. She could be holding her son right now. My stomach turns. All it would have taken was… “You could have told them.”
“In all that screaming?” The Holy Crone has the audacity to look annoyed. “Who would have heard me?”
“B-but before. You always knew. And you never…You never…”
She stares past me, into the haze. “What would it change? Where would anyone go? There’s nothing out there.”
I turn to look at the waters I’ve been taught to fear. Red-gray waves chop in from the haze, endless. If we knew they weren’t deadly, would we have desired to explore? What would we have found beyond the haze—an endless flooded world as the Ocean Law says, or more lies? So many lies. I twist the rope in my fists. “The gods never said they would accept a girl, did they?”
Behind me, the Holy Crone sighs. “The other option was to give up. It was better to take action. That’s what you must now do. You must go.”
My stomach drops and my breath comes faster. “You’re b-banishing me?” She can’t banish me. Not after everything I’ve done to be good. Not now. I spin back to the lagoon, or what remains of it, and pull fist over fist, dragging her and my canoe toward me.
The Holy Crone sets her feet and lets me pull her in. Her eyes stay on me, narrowed. “No, I’m sending you. Find the gods’ home.”
My hands go still on the shortening length of rope. She knows where the gods live?
“Swim into sunrise. Dive to the seafloor.” Her words are spoken clearly, but they seem to come out faster than the freshwater spring. “The gods wear silver jaws that let them breathe water.”
The gods wear what? “That’s not mentioned in the Ocean—”
“Don’t question me.” Her voice snaps across the water, and my mouth shuts on reflex.
“I know of a place.” She lowers her volume, though there’s no one here but me and the waves. “With food. Fresh water. We can’t reach it without those jaws. It’ll be hard, but I know you can get them.”
I squint at her, trying to make sense of all this nonsensical. “Enough god jaws f-for the whole village?”
She shakes her head. “Only three. You, me, and Elly.”
Another face rises before I can stop it. Relfy, clapping across the water. Her baby’s bubbles, popping one by one. “What about Relfy?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
Her eyes don’t soften. “It will already be a great risk. And Relfy? She is not family.”
I can nearly grab the canoe’s side. Instead, my fingers dig into fists. “But the gods abandoned us. Why would they help me now?”
“They won’t. So you’ll take.” The Holy Crone’s so close, I can see the wrinkles bunched beneath her inked-out forehead tattoos. “Without the jaw, the god drowns, same as any of us.” Her thin upper lip curls. “I’m not telling you to ask for help. I’m telling you to kill the gods.”
She pulls a knife from her skirts and slices the rope.
It goes slack in my bloody hands.
“No!” My voice cracks. “Don’t leave me here!” I lunge, but she shoves off with my paddle. Leaving me like she left my mother.
Her eyes hold the same crazed look they did that sun. “You already know the truth, Easla,” she says, the current carrying her out of reach. “We can’t save us all.”
The coldness in her tone sends a shudder down my spine. “Please no!” I cry out, and I’m reminded of how my mother begged when we left her broken on the atoll. When I sat in my canoe in the lagoon’s calm blue last harvest, while the entire village floated in our half-circle, and we watched my mother’s banishment.
At first, she didn’t stay. She dove off the corals and swam for us. For Elly and me. She swam like she was racing, arms tearing through the water, her braid coming loose behind her, and for three strokes, four, I believed she would reach us.
Then the first Holy Crone rose in the canoe my grandmother paddled, raised a paddle high, and swung it down on my mother’s shoulder.
Something snapped, like a mangrove root breaking. That arm stopped moving, and my mother sank lower, but still she kicked toward me.
Then the first Holy Crone grabbed her by her braid and hauled her over the side of the canoe, and Grandma Almti paddled them back to the atoll, where they rolled her onto those same corals and left her like a gutted fish.
Now my grandmother paddles away, and I’m the one left behind.
Blood drips from my hands into the red-gray water. It chases her. I could too. I’ve swum every sun until my arms gave out, training for a race from atoll to village. This is that distance.
But my feet won’t leave the coral. If I swim after her, will she raise my paddle the way the first Holy Crone raised hers? She told me where to go, and it isn’t to the village. Even now, with the atoll sunk, the lagoon dying, and the gods abandoning us, I can’t make my body disobey her.
So I stand, the red waters tugging at my legs, until her shape thins into the haze and disappears.
Slowly, the sun sinks behind the village. The red waters darken to black.
At some point, my legs start to shake, and I drop to my knees. Bony fingers of coral dig into my shins. I sit back, and the water laps at my waist and soaks my barkcloth dress to the ribs. Everywhere the cloth clings, my skin prickles and itches like a thousand urchin spines. I curl in my knees and wrap my arms around them. Each wave that rolls over the wall slaps my chest and throws spray into my face. It catches in my throat, and each cough scrapes deeper than the last, until my eyes burn and stream.
My mother was killed by the gods for living impiously. And I am to be impious and kill the gods to live? How does that make sense? I drop my face into my hands and tear at my hair, pulling it loose from the braid that hurts my scalp. I’ve tried so hard to obey the gods. Now, the Holy Crone wants me to kill them?
Doubting the gods is a sin. Killing them would be worse than any sin I have a word for, and what could be worse than an afterlife of eternal flood and blood? I dig my thumbnail into the scars on my thumb and press until the sting drowns the thought.
The thought rises anyway. The gods sank our atoll. They let the fish die. They didn’t send the harvest.
Are they testing us? Testing me? Has the Holy Crone lost her way? She’s supposed to hear the gods. She’s supposed to speak for them. But now she wants them dead.
When that matron fell in, the Holy Crone lay curled in the bottom of my canoe, staring at nothing. I’ve seen that same lost look on matrons after their birthing goes wrong, rocking their arms with no baby in them. Loss turns people strange. The jaws, the gods’ home—some of what she said may be true. But to kill the gods?
I press harder into my skin, until blood beads under my fingernail.
In the lagoon, a smear of torchlight glows through the haze where the village should be. On any other Offering night, that glow would mean the feast.
Shouts drift over the water, too far off for words, but they don’t sound like celebration. And why would they?
There’s no harvest.
Has Elly eaten?
Gods. I’ll never leave you, that’s what I told her at the top of the palm tree. Then I gave her seat to the Holy Crone, and she sat in our father’s canoe instead. And then I paddled away while she screamed about my promise. I told myself the apprenticeship would keep her safe.
But the woman I gave it all up for cut the rope and left me here.
This next sun was meant to be my race. I would have won. I would have stood at the Holy Crone’s side. But there’s no race now, no village left to lead.
I tuck my chin to my knees and watch the village’s faint glow flicker through the haze.
Three jaws. For the Holy Crone, me, and Elly. Relfy is not family. And the rest of the village, the matrons who wouldn’t meet my eyes and the girls who refused to share my canoe? They will all be left to die, the same way we all left my mother. Why should I care? None of them ever cared for me.
But my mother, she knelt for Relfy. At the trial, she dropped before the mangrove chair and begged for both of us. “They’re just girls,” she said. Relfy wasn’t her family.
And the Ocean Law says it too: Only one swimmer endured. From Atoll, through Lagoon, until she found our new home. Others would have rested, but this woman returned. Bringing canoes, and saving us all.
Saving us all.
Not three.
The haze lightens to gray, then pink. With the light comes the morning wind, the way it always does, and it pushes at my back.
Upon this atoll, the gods gave the first Holy Crone our laws. As the first Holy Crone swam, her successor must too. The matrons were meant to race by those words at sunrise.
Which is now.
Maybe this is my race. Maybe our loss has twisted the Holy Crone’s words, and the gods speak through what remains of her grieving mind.
Perhaps it’s the gods who want me to find the gods.
So I will. But killing them won’t save anyone. I’ll find them the way the first Holy Crone did, and I’ll beg them. Only the gods can save us now.
The unholy waters lap at my skin, whispering their sinners’ song. Inviting me to sleep, to drown. The ocean doesn’t care who it claims. But I’m not ready to join my mother.
So I stand, my legs stiff, my skin stinging, and I wade to the atoll’s outer edge. The wall drops away into the depths and red-gray waves chop in from the endless haze.
I fill my lungs the way I do before every dive, then I jump, and like the Holy Crone told me to do, I swim into sunrise.
🎥 Next Up: The Chapter 5 Director’s Cut
The Chapter 5 Director’s Cut drops this Tuesday, Oct. 20!
📖 Ready for Chapter 6?
Chapter 6 drops next Saturday, Oct. 24!
🌊 Loving the Story?
Word of mouth is the entire marketing plan for this experiment! If you’re enjoying this story, share it with a friend who loves world-building, dystopian fiction, or the ocean.
🌊 Enjoying MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA?
Subscribe for free to get upcoming weekly chapter drops delivered straight to your inbox every Saturday morning:
Subscribe to get the next chapters and the upcoming Chapter 5 Video Director’s Cut sent straight to your inbox.