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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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🌊 Previously in MAY WE PLEASE THE SEA: Easla chose the safety of the Ocean Law over her forbidden connection with Relfy—the same strict laws that cost Relfy her tongue and their mother her life.
Now, as the village prepares for the annual Offering to the sea gods, a matron’s scream echoes through the coconut grove, sending Easla’s sister, Elly, slipping from the top of the palm tree...
Chapter Two
The Chosen People awoke on an Atoll, split between waters red and blue.
A God appeared, her scaled body stained red from the waters she rose from.
She pointed to the red waters. “Die.” She pointed to the blue waters. “Live.”
This is how we learned of the Unholy Waters. This is how we learned of our bountiful Lagoon.
And though the distance was long, the Chosen People swam.
From Atoll, through Lagoon, but they floundered and failed.
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.
This is why the Holy Crone leads. This is why we follow.
— Ocean Law
It happens in less than a breath. The matron’s shout from below, Elly’s hand sliding out beneath mine from the top of the palm tree. My hunting instincts take control, and I snatch at my little sister’s fingers like they’re a lobster in the rocks. But they’re not a lobster’s spiny shell. They’re sweaty, slick. They slip through my grip, and I scream.
So does she. But. . . she’s no longer falling. Her other hand clings to a frond near the coconut she was reaching for. She dangles in the open air.
Oh, thank the seas. “Don’t let go,” I gasp out. “I’m coming.” I hug the tree and shift around its girth, closing the distance between my sister and me. Get to her. Now. My feet fumble for each foothold as I move sideways, my climber taut between my ankles.
The tree’s ridges snag my dress.
I untangle and sneak a glance down. The walkway is a thin brown thread below. A fall from here would be deadly.
The frond in Elly’s fist groans.
She shrieks and kicks against the tree, swinging from her one arm and making the frond bend lower.
“Stop moving!” I shout, though I know Elly is past rational thought. She won’t be climbing down on her own. No, I’ll have to carry both of us. Somehow.
Elly’s climber spins in a circle around her ankle.
I watch it, mind racing. The climber I borrowed from Dams can hold me. But Elly’s weight too? It’ll pull us both backward off this tree. Unless…
On the next kick, Elly’s climber flies off her foot.
It arcs through the air and I catch it, then I shimmy lower until I’m pinned between Elly’s dangling body and the tree. This will work. It has to. I bite the knot of her climber between my teeth and worry it loose. “Keep holding,” I puff out in small bursts.
“I want Mama,” Elly cries. Her feet kick my back. “Where’s Mama!”
I whip Elly’s untied climber around the tree and grab its opposite end with my other hand. Fumbling with motions I can’t see, I wrap it around that wrist and hold tight. My hands are full, but now I’m cinched to the tree. “When I say so, drop onto me.” I wedge my toes into the palm tree’s cracks and squeeze with my knees, bracing for her weight, praying this will work. “Let go, Elly!”
Her knees knock my shoulder blades. She doesn’t let go. “I’m not Elly! I don’t want to be Elly!”
My palms slide on the climber, slick with sweat. I readjust my grip. “I said let—“
The frond snaps.
Her sudden weight slams onto my back. My bare feet slide down the trunk, and something sharp drives into my heel. I bite back a cry and yank on the climber in my hands, curling my fingers tighter than they ever gripped the blue coral’s pestle. We jerk to a stop.
Elly goes still for a breath, then she sags against my back and sobs, big heaves that shake my body as much as hers. Her fingers latch onto my neck like a starfish gripping coral. “I’m the moon jelly. I’m Oonj. Like Mama called me.”
My heart thumps in my fingertips. They cramp from being bent so tight. I loosen the climber and we drop a hand-span, my stomach jumping into my throat. My heel throbs around whatever’s buried in it. I brake the climber. Hands, focus only on my hands.
Elly whimpers in my ear. “Sing to me, Lug.” She squirms on my back, throwing our balance to the side.
My foot slips, and I shove into a notch to stop our fall. Pain lances up from my injured heel.
I gasp. My vision blurs. Gods, I need her calm. Sing? I know which song of our mother’s she wants. How could I forget it? Elly the Jelly. Oonj is my moon. I close my eyes and pretend I’m back on the overgrown dock, letting the words rise in my throat. I’ll sing, just in the tiniest whisper.
Shouts rise up from the walkway below. Not the rhythmic waves of birthing cries that I’d heard at the Cowrie Hut. These are sharp, frightened. A single word carries with the wind—boy. Something’s wrong.
I swallow the song whole and hush Elly with what little breath I still have. Maybe the matrons won’t hear, over the shouts and the distance. But maybe they will. Always listening, always waiting. To prove their own piety by catching others in sin. One misstep will send us tumbling. That thought shakes me worse than Elly’s quivering sobs, making my decision for me.
“We may only raise our voices in praise of the gods, Elly.” I emphasize her name as I stare at the palm tree’s splintering cracks. Rigid. Unbending.
She hiccups another cry. It turns into a cough, hacking out the poisoned air. “No, call me Oon—”
“The gods did not give us names so we may change them.” My hands are lobster claws. All they do is open and close. Release and brake. The air thickens as we descend, grit scraping the back of my throat with every gasp. I won’t let them hear her sins. Gods or matrons.
“Stop that, Lug. You’re being—”
“The braid is the seaweed. By wearing the braid, we welcome the harvest.” With each controlled fall, I recite more of the Ocean Law, drowning out her requests.
Elly’s nails dig into my neck. “I hate you,” she whispers.
Her words sting worse than salt in the eyes, but I make them wash over me like water. When she’s older, she’ll understand. This is how I keep her safe. This is how I show my love.
On the next drop, Dams’s blue eyes rush into view. We made it. I release the climber and collapse onto solid wood. My fingers throb as they uncurl. I finally take a look at my heel—a shard of bark as long as my finger buries deep there, already dark with blood.
I grit my teeth and pull it free in one motion, then press my sweaty palm hard against it until the bleeding slows.
Dams helps Elly off my back without meeting my eyes. She must’ve heard. All of it. Enough sins for both of us to answer for, if anyone else heard too.
My heart still pounds in my ears. I look up and down the walkway twice, searching for a flash of red-dyed barkcloth, listening for a matron’s light tread, the clacking of shells, Elly’s name hissed in accusation. Nothing. Only shouts further down the walkway, not here in the coconut grove. Whatever it is, it can’t be good, but it’s not about us.
I let my shoulders drop. “Thank you, Dams.” Then I touch my sister’s arm. “Enough.”
Elly jerks away. “I’d rather be dead with Mama.”
The fraying rope of my nerves unravels to a single thread. I want to be the kind and patient person our mother was. But our mother’s careless actions led to her death. I will not lose my sister, even if my choices make her hate me. “Elly Born-to Cowrie, you need to—”
Dams clears her throat. She picks up the green coconut I harvested. “We should go—”
A conch shell bellows through the trees, its deep pitch announcing the Offering.
I don’t wait for Dams to finish. I grab my sister by the elbow and pull her down the walkway, responding to the conch’s call for both of us.
* * *
Elly and I are swept into the rushing tide of matrons and girls, across walkways stretching over water, past bamboo forests rising from the sea—each step bringing us closer to the Gathering Place and the Holy Crone’s call. The baby boy must’ve been born. But why were there screams? I shush Elly’s protests and lean closer to the nearest matrons.
Their whispers prickle the air, hanging thicker than the humidity. “Never has this happened,” an Oyster matron says, stroking the same spot on her skirts again and again.
The matron beside her clasps her hands in prayer. “May the gods forgive our failing.”
Their panicked looks answer my question. The boy must’ve come out dead, just like all the other ones.
That realization makes my heart pump faster. The gods demand a baby boy for their annual Offering. It’s what the Ocean Law requires for our gods-blessed harvest, what we’ve done since my grandmother’s mother first came to the village. And the harvest has always followed. But we have no newborn boys to offer.
Were the birthing matrons not pious enough? Will the harvest of seaweed still rise? I stumble after the matrons, my fingers digging into Elly’s arm.
“Ow!” She yanks out of my grip and runs ahead.
I’m about to chase after her, but she’s already swallowed in the crowd. We’ve arrived.
At the large deck’s center, the Holy Crone sits in a high-backed chair of gnarled mangrove roots. Behind her, our gods-gifted freshwater spring flows, rising up from the sea.
The crowd thins as the villagers spread into a wide arc around the Holy Crone’s chair. The primes and the few rare sons take the ends, close enough to touch the Holy Crone’s skirt. Matrons fill in beside them, leaving us girls at the arc’s open center, in the clearest path of the Holy Crone’s watchful eyes.
Stay calm. Show your faith. Trust in the Holy Crone to guide us. I align myself with the other girls of sixteen harvests, spacing myself so I’m farthest from last harvest’s youngest matrons. From Relfy, her daughter asleep at her chest. I know exactly how many bodies stand between Relfy and me. I always know.
The Holy Crone holds the pink-and-white conch in her lap, where it disappears into her skirt’s folds. Her eyes, buried similarly within the folds of forty-eight harvests of pale and sagging sun-mottled skin, skim the gathering crowd. Watching. Waiting. “Bring forth the newborn.”
As we wait in heavy silence, my eyes wander to the primes gathered at the Holy Crone’s sides. The Whelk Prime stands nearest to her—soft-bellied with smooth, unscarred skin the warm red-brown of mangrove bark. A string of whelk shells hangs heavy at his throat, one for every girl he’s been given.
He’s said to be the kindest of the primes. That would be nice. And if he picks me, I would sleep in the same hut as Relfy. I could—no. It’s not worth imagining. And it’s not my choice, anyways.
The arc shifts, and the new mother steps through the line of girls, half-carried between two Cowrie matrons. Her steps are unsteady, the hem of her skirt still dark and wet. She won’t lift her eyes from the deck’s warped boards as she presents the swaddle of barkcloth. The baby that was supposed to save us.
Why is this happening? Why are all the boys—
The bundle squirms and coos. Alive.
A collective intake of air sweeps the Gathering Place. I lean forward, along with every other villager, seeking a better look. But no, upon the baby’s tiny forehead, an even tinier born-to Cowrie mark has been inked.
Across from me, my father the Cowrie Prime huffs. “A girl?!”
The words are a condemnation. With them, I’m whisked back to last Offering. The same words, the same tone, whispered by everyone around me. “A girl?” But they weren’t speaking of a baby then. They were speaking of me.
It was darker then, the sun already set. In the glow of the torches, the remains of the Offering feast lay scattered, half-eaten and forgotten. Instead, the villagers curved in their arc around Relfy and me.
My body still hummed with giddiness from the fermented bamboo sap Relfy and I had drunk. It was risky what we’d done. Foolish. But the bubbly joot had numbed our common sense, and when I’d been sent to the Joot Hut to fetch more of it for the celebrating matrons, Relfy had followed.
A dark hut, alone, just the two of us. It was only for a moment.
The first Holy Crone—the one who had discovered our village forty-eight harvests ago— sat in the mangrove chair then, my Grandma Almti still hovering at her side as her apprentice. “A girl?! And they were kissing?” The Holy Crone looked like she’d swallowed a fish bone.
“A girl!” the matron who’d discovered us spat out the words. “A girl and a matron.” She shook her cup of joot like a spear. “I saw with my own eyes. Sinful touches in the darkness.”
The joot still tickled my nose, but I no longer wanted to giggle. I wanted to run. Every muscle in me tensed, but I was a fish in a net.
The Holy Crone leaned back in her chair and tapped her ear, listening for the gods’ counsel. She waved a hand for silence then nodded. “We shall drown them in the freshwater spring. Both of them.”
Some matrons hissed. Others gasped, but those turned to hisses, too.
My head was too joot-muddled to do anything but gape. This was it. My life’s end.
Someone pushed past me. My mother. She fell to her knees before the mangrove chair, her hair in a well-oiled braid, her body in well-practiced prayer position. “Please, Holy Crone, they’re just girls.” She seemed perfectly pious, but like wood catching fire, a new energy blazed through the crowd.
“Bah! Par Given-to Cowrie is a sinner too,” a matron called out. “I’ve seen how loose her braid becomes.”
“She whispers then smiles, nothing good behind that,” another matron shouted. “She’s a heathen protecting heathens.”
The crowd became a frenzy, sharks smelling blood. Accusations and judgments whirled louder, until the Holy Crone raised her hand. “At sunrise, we will have three drowning—”
Grandma Almti gripped the Holy Crone’s arm, stopping her before she could finish, and bent close to whisper in her ear. She spoke too low for me to hear, but her face held that same focused frustration it always did. Except, for one breath, it slipped—and I saw fear.
With my life’s last breaths now countable, I stared at my grandmother with the deepest intensity, praying she would somehow save me.
But for a woman named for the palm trees soaring above our village, Grandma Almti always kept herself low, cowering and bending. There was no way she could stop this.
The Holy Crone nodded, and Grandma Almti tiptoed forward, past my mother on the ground, looking between Relfy and me. “Who tempted whom?” she asked, her hands twisting in circles.
Sinful memories flooded my mind. The answer was both of us. Again and again. The first hand-hold was Relfy. The first kiss was me. But those truths wouldn’t help us. Only one response would, and it evaporated off my tongue like joot left out in the sun.
“I did,” Relfy said. Her hand hovered at her throat, clutching my hidden shell beneath her new red-dyed barkcloth. She glanced at me, and in my mind, I heard the words she’d said to me earlier that sun, out on the lagoon in our canoe. I am Relfy Given-to Cowrie. “Easla was pushing me away when we were found.”
Matrons clicked their tongues. They swung their braids in disapproval.
Grandma Almti scuttled back and hunched by the Holy Crone’s ear, whispering more.
I said nothing. Did nothing.
The Holy Crone stood. “My apprentice has suggested new forms of punishment. Why deprive the village of a matron and a future matron? Easla Born-to Cowrie is innocent, so she has no sin to be punished for. The temptress, Relfy Given-to Whelk, however, brought shame upon her prime and tainted a blessed evening, so she shall lose her tongue.”
Relfy’s hand flew to her mouth, muffling her gasp. Her knees buckled, but she refused to fall.
I wanted to reach for her, but my body didn’t move. I was spared. Grandma Almti saved my life. And Relfy…she took the blame.
The Holy Crone flicked a hand toward my mother, still knelt below the mangrove chair. “And Par Given-to Cowrie will no longer be drowned at the Gathering Place’s spring.”
I found Elly’s face in the crowd, my mind spinning as I tried to keep up. I nodded to show her everything was fine. As fine as it could be. Elly’s own mouth was already shaping into a smile, revealing her gapped front teeth.
“No,” the Holy Crone continued, and with the weight of her pause, my attention snapped back to her. “Par Given-to Cowrie shall be banished to the atoll, where she can die slowly with her sins.”
Elly’s scream tore through the air.
A matron’s hand clamped down, cutting it short, and then all I could hear, apart from the ringing in my ears, were grunts of satisfaction from everyone around me.
B-banishment? I stared at Grandma Almti, waiting for her to stop my mother’s punishment, like she had stopped mine. But Grandma Almti cowered by the first Holy Crone’s side and said nothing more.
The conch blows again, and it’s no longer the first Holy Crone seated upon the mangrove chair. It’s Grandma Almti, back straight and shoulders flat, a shark’s teeth necklace gleaming at her throat. Not the hunched apprentice she was only one harvest ago. Not my grandmother anymore. She’s the Holy Crone now, and she holds the newborn girl. “Silence.”
The crowd goes quiet. Only the flowing of the freshwater spring can be heard.
The Holy Crone closes her eyes, her mouth pinched in thought, then she gasps, eyes flying open. “I have heard the gods.” She taps her ear. “This is not a failing. It is a celebration. This harvest will be”—the Holy Crone holds the newborn high—“the Offering of a girl!”
The matrons cheer. Some drop to their knees and weep.
The tiny newborn girl squirms in the air, her born-to mark still wet on her forehead, and I realize—this means any girl born since last Offering might be chosen. This one. Or Relfy’s daughter.
The Holy Crone rises. “Come. We must row to the atoll.”
Villagers push past, humming with excitement.
I should too, but I stand fixed. It’s not my place to question what the gods tell the Holy Crone—only she can hear their counsel. But for one breath, before the Holy Crone turns to follow the others, her face reveals a different expression. The same fleeting one I glimpsed last Offering, when she whispered in the first Holy Crone’s ear. Then, she was trying to fix a problem.
Now, is she trying to fix another? My grandmother says this will be a celebration, says she’s heard the gods, but the look I saw on her face?
It was fear.
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