NoQS Agent Round: ALL THOSE WHO WANDER - YA Sci-fi

Name: Yu(Angela) Wang

Twitter Handle: @AngieWang99
Title: ALL THOSE WHO WANDER
Genre: YA Sci-fi
Word Count: 87,000

My Main Character's Most Stressful Relationship is:

Bree’s most stressful relationship is with herself—or, rather, her past self. Ever since she discovers that her memories and identity are fake, she finds it impossible to reconcile the person she used to be with the person she’s become. The old Bree was confident, fearless, and spontaneous—everything the new Bree isn’t. And when she meets up with former friends who barely recognize her new self, the divide between her past and present only gets worse. Bree wants nothing more than to return to who she used to be, but that girl’s long gone—wiped away forever.

Query:

The timestream is broken, and eighteen-year-old Bree Cross is pretty sure that's a mess even duct tape can't fix. She never thought she’d be the one to fix it, though—not until her best friend Kasey recruits her to the Chronological Maintenance Department.

It turns out Bree can spot time travelers—a gift the Department desperately needs in order to capture the techies: genetically-enhanced criminals they’ve chased all the way from the future. It’s the adventure Bree’s spent a lifetime dreaming of, and there’s no way she’s going to pass up her chance to save the world.

But all those dreams of heroism shatter once she actually lays eyes on the techies.

Visions plague her—memories of Bree herself growing up alongside the same criminals she’s supposed to hunt. The more she remembers, the more Bree doubts the Department's true motivations, and the role she’s so obediently played. And when Kasey’s captured and the Department refuses to help, Bree’s the only one who can free her best friend from the techies’ city outside of time.

But buried among the city’s gleaming towers is more than Bree bargained for—truths about her past, and what the Department’s truly doing.

Bree was hired to fix the world, but she might have broken it beyond repair.

First 250:

There’s something beautiful about order. The precise row of footsteps I leave behind in the snow makes me wonder if this is how other peoples’ memories are—one after another in a perfect sequence, a past they can walk through over and over again.

If only my life could be that certain.

I shiver, turning away and drawing up my coat’s collar. The gentle, drifting snowflakes of just a few moments ago now swirl in violent flurries, catching on my eyelashes and nesting in my hair. The corner store lies ahead, muffled under a white blanket, parking lot empty but for a single, dark car, driver’s door left open.

Strange, considering the imminent blizzard. And the closer I get, the stranger that car seems. It’s small and lithe and rounded in an unfamiliar way, roof covered in transparent—transparent?—solar panels. The dashboard glows ominously blue, and an almost… faded quality clings to it, as if someone’s washed it far too many times.

I reach out, thinking to close the car’s door—and jerk back, stomach flipping, nausea rising in my throat. An ache pushes at my temples, filling my head with jagged, senseless whispers, a yearning I can’t quite explain.

It’s the car, I’m certain of it. The car and its thrumming.

But that’s crazy. It’s just some car.

I shake my head, backing away. It’s probably the shrimp I had for lunch. That’ll teach me to eat suspiciously gooey seafood.

It’s a plausible explanation, but I don’t quite believe it. Not even then.