QK Round 1: What's Luck Gotta Do With It vs. T-Blocked

Title: Big Town
Entry Nick Name: What's Luck Gotta Do With It?
Word Count: 77,000
Genre: Adult Fantasy

Query:

Lena Huertas grew up believing only the dead were welcome in Big Town…

Hidden within the frosted peaks of the Sierra Nevada, the prosperous city stands in isolation, protected by a marksman of considerable skill. However, those unfit for burial are shipped across the border for an unknown purpose. On the day her late father is set to make the journey, Lena aims to follow with blood pumping through her veins.

It doesn’t matter that the road for the living is drowned in mud, or that to secure passage across the harsh frontier she must first steal funds from a bandit cousin, and best a local gang leader in a game of poker. Lena, like another wayward soul in 1879, has nothing left to lose, and she’s desperate to free herself from the thousands of Forty-Niner’s who flooded California, claimed her family and her heritage and left her wandering the streets in search of scraps.

She boosts her chances with the help of a pair of mysterious golden dice, capable of granting favor to those who need it most – along with the charity of Big Town’s one-eyed sheriff.

But what she doesn’t know is that the sheriff’s false-eye allows him to enter minds. As he learns about the dice, Lena discovers the secret to the city’s fabled success may tie her magic luck to their desire for corpses. Probing deeper, new enemies unlike anyone she’s ever outsmarted emerge along with the truth, and she quickly realizes that to survive in her new home, she’ll have to wager her own unbroken spirit, because among a populace who take their wealth for granted, control over the future is worth more than gold, and only the dead are welcome to leave.

First 250:

Three coffins rested near the railroad beneath a sky as gray as a weathered barn. Sealed with rusty nails, the wooden boxes carried the stains of anyone from Skidmore who’d ever dropped dead, or was murdered, and had no kin to give them proper burial.

Or for those who, like Lena Huertas, had nary a penny in their pocket.

The young woman’s dry hair was bunched under her father’s Stetson. She sat in a ticket booth that was boarded up on one side and gutted open on the other, and watched a beetle scuttle between her boots across a cracked stone platform. The bandana covering her face helped shield her from the dirt and mud that swallowed everything else, including most of the sign welcoming would-be passengers of Skiddy’s Wagon to her quaint mining town.

She folded her arms on her knees and ignored the bumps on her skin from the mosquitoes. A wind cut through the ticket booth, making her shiver and hug her knees tighter. The pale afterglow of the sun peeking up over the walls of the Sierra Nevada was fading, but she’d yet to find the courage to step closer to the railroad, put her hand on her pa’s box, and bid a last farewell.

She was surprised and grateful no one ever tampered with the coffins. They were usually left on the platform for days awaiting their journey. She supposed superstitions got the better of folk. No chance it was out of respect.

VS

Title: A Girl in the Boys' School
Entry Nickname: T-Blocked
Word Count: 79,000
Genre: Adult Speculative Fiction

Query:

As humanity faces self-extinction in a male-dominated world at war, a fearless Sisterhood plans for survival. Their plan is complex and nonviolent. It is also deceptive. It relies on both hormonal control of males and a forged gospel chemically dated to A.D. 80. In an odyssey spanning centuries, the story begins with female scientists willing to sacrifice half the human population to save the rest, and evolves to a future world segregated by gender.

In 2072, biochemist Lorelei doesn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thinks of her. She only wants to protect humanity from obliteration. She develops techniques to control men by reducing their hormone levels to make them more tame, less violent, and more like women. No lab confines this researcher; Lorelei collects her male specimens in the wild. She doses them with testosterone blockers. With a needle. In the neck.

Hundreds of years later, archeologist Maya reveals the Aidan Documents, the gospel of an unknown female disciple, forged and buried by Lorelei’s colleagues as a seed to help humanity heal. But all has not gone as the Sisterhood planned. Males may be corralled, but they will not be controlled. And healing can only succeed with their help.

First 250:

They marched into the square in a ragged, slow line. Some women. Mostly men. Hands tied. Roped together like cattle. I watched these parades every day at sunset, looking for colleagues and sisters. Hoping.

A toddler clenched her mother’s legs, and she wailed to be lifted into the woman’s tied arms. The mother hissed, “Run, Emma. Run to the trees.” I watched from those trees, hidden but close enough to hear, ready to take the girl if her mother could convince Emma to get away. But the child wouldn’t leave the security a mother is supposed to provide. She was too young to know the danger was surest and sharpest at her mother’s side. They died with the other hundred souls in the daily roundup.

These are the remnants of our world under male control.

Somehow, I slept deeply, exhausted, under bushes or in graveyards, always hidden, through the roar of helicopters, gunfire, and screams. I’d wake to a voice, a child crying, a dog barking. Rainfall. Or a smell, like smoke or feces. Loud noises never woke me. They were the background of the anger and the hate.

He slithered in silently while I slept, but I smelled his unwashed body. He reached for my throat. I slashed his wrist, watched him howl, kicked his head, and knocked him out. I watched him bleed dry. And I felt nothing.

Numb and broken, I pocketed his gun. But what can I do with a gun but become one of them?