The half-drowned takes place in a world after the end of our time. The people who remain from those that fled into orbit planet earth live in a comfortable dystopia. Everything in this world is fluid--time and connections wax and wane. LaVon is obsessed with swimming in the polluted Atlantic where he finds beauty and escapes from grief and connection to ancestral knowledge. Harbour wants the chain she gave to her crush back. Kaya doesn't know her past and can't see a future for herself in this town but there might not be anything outside of it. A mysterious shape-shifting alien being resides beneath the surface of the water.