LOGIN: YA Spec-Fic/Adventure

Title: LOGIN
Genre: YA Spec-Fic/Adventure
Word Count: 82,500

My Main Character's Greatest Fear:

I wanted to live so badly, I let my parents die. I said I would never let anyone else be hurt because of me, but I’m being hunted now, and in my unending selfishness, I’ve allowed Kyran to run away with me. If he dies too, I don’t know if I can handle it. I already live with guilt. My greatest fear is having weight added to that guilt.

Query:

My novel LOGIN is a YA spec-fic/adventure, complete and standalone at 82,500 words (with series potential).

Technology is no longer just a part of life; it’s a part of the population.

Z-Tech produces everything from diapers, to the babies who wear them. Several generations have passed since Z-Tech first started selling Customized Children: humans genetically personalized, and physically integrated with technology. These cyborgs are now the majority, and natural-births are not only rare, they are illegal. Z-Tech owns exclusive rights to human life.

Sixteen-year-old Fayten Lena can’t stand the vacant stares of Customized Children. Fake eyes connect them to the web, the world, and each other, but sometimes Fayten wonders if cyborgs ever see what’s going on right in front of them. As a Natural-Born, Fayten is unable to use technology. Denied most basic privileges, she’s not protected by the government, and when her parents pay the ultimate price for infringing on Z-Tech’s copyright, Fayten is completely unprepared for life on her own. The world is full of black-market slavers, and vigilantes who prey on evolutionary throwbacks like Fayten. But the people hunting her now are far more dangerous. Fayten couldn’t possibly have inherited a code capable of halting Z-Tech’s global invasions, but that won’t stop Z-Tech from trying to take her down.

Along with Kyran, a tough young man with shady connections, a stubborn personality, and a complicated sense of loyalty; and Rian, a shy hacker who can literally get in the heads of his fellow Customized; Fayten must find a way to stay alive, protect a code she doesn’t even believe she has, and save a foreign country from Z-Tech’s corporate takeover.

First 250 words:

I’d woken with a jolt early this morning, peacekeepers beating on my door. I thought we still had one more day, but my parents’ Grace Period to raise me was over. They had prepared me for much, but not this—how could they? While a Customized would be thinking about blowing out candles on their sweet-sixteen, I was at the Judgment Building, trying to decide which of my parents to feed to the flame. Before I’d be allowed to leave the balcony room above the Pit, I’d have to choose which of my parents would die for me.

I dug my nails into the pale skin of my arm, not removing them until they left deep marks. I couldn’t really feel any pain. It was vague, a distant sting to a nervous system that no longer belonged to me. My consciousness seemed to float above my body, but it couldn’t escape, and neither could I. I remembered how I used to wake screaming when I was a little girl, plagued by guilt over a choice I hadn’t made yet. Now that that choice was before me, I was too numb to feel anything.

My counselor tapped her clipboard with long fingernails. She was sitting somewhere behind me, reminding me that she was still there—and that I was still wasting her time—every few minutes when she shifted the order of her crossed legs.

After a long silence she prodded me yet again, “Fayten? It’s been another hour.”