Alt M-9

NAME: Jani Grey

MENTOR: Lori M Lee

TITLE: Those Who Can't Speak

GENRE: YA Urban Fantasy

WORD COUNT: 81 000

PITCH: Cadence battles to keep her city safe from the Saints and Prophets imprisoned there. When one prisoner finds an escape, she must stop him before he kills her loved ones to make it happen.

Sebastian said he found me in a hole, and I imagined it quite similar to the one I now dangled in head-first. He didn’t want to tell me what kind of hole, but I suspected it was the kind that was dark and damp. The kind of place mothers threw unwanted babies and left them to die.

           

Just after one a.m. I found myself hanging upside down in such a hole. Sebastian had sent me there after he received an anonymous call that something had been dumped inside it. More like sent me to do his dirty work, the lazy slob. I wondered why he would send me out in the middle of the night when he nagged about safety and whatnot so often.

I’d decided to crawl into the hole instead of taking the rungs hammered into the cold concrete. I liked keeping life interesting, my current position testament to that. Right now, the only thing keeping me from falling into the black abyss was my mute best friend, Zadie.

“Can you hand me a flashlight? I think I see something,” I called to her.

“If I hand you the flashlight, I’ll have to let go of one of your legs and you’ll plummet to your death.”

After years of hearing Zadie speak when she was supposed to be mute I didn’t find it strange anymore. She was mute, to everybody except Sebastian and me. She had some kind of psychological block we didn’t talk about, one of our many unspoken Best Friend Rules.