1st 5 Pages October Workshop - McGuire Rev 2

Name: Amy McGuire

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy

Title: QUEEN'S ROOK

Pitch:

Chess is war, and for sixteen-year-old Rowan Darroch, it's about to become life or death.

Recruited into a lethal chess match between opposing factions of a soulless race, Rowan finds herself carried more than two hundred years into the past, where she's trapped in a time-bending war game that will decide the fate of humankind. Her only guide is Conor, a scarred soldier from an ancient, hidden order tasked with safeguarding human souls. And while she might be infatuated with him, she sure as hell doesn't trust him.

At home amongst the thieves and confidence women of London’s criminal underworld, Rowan and Conor concoct an elaborate plan to infiltrate the court of George IV, where Conor must complete his next move. But as Rowan becomes convinced she has more influence on the chessboard than Conor would have her believe, she faces a choice: play by his rules and make it home alive, or play by her own, and risk everything.

Pages:

Chicago. December, 2015.

It’s Friday, right after fifth period gym, and the crowd is thick outside the girls’ locker room. For reasons I can’t name I glance around, searching for something. But what?

I almost give up, prepared to ignore whatever is making me twitchy, when—there. A boy.

In that fleeting moment, I can’t help but wonder if fate is about to mess with me because (a) I usually skip gym, which, on any other day, would have placed me well outside the trajectory of his path, and (b) I’m boy blind.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see boys; I know they’re there. I just fail to perceive any great difference between them.

Not so with this boy. Though I didn’t catch a glimpse of him until he’d already passed me, his retreating back holds my undivided attention. Before I can quite work out what that means, something inexplicable happens. I follow him.

Just like that. One minute I’m heading to calculus, happy to be free of the odor and aggression of teenagers in uniform shorts, and the next I’m trailing an unknown figure down a packed hallway.

It’s a nice figure from behind. He’s got roughly six inches on me, putting him around six-one or six-two, and he carries himself with a gravity most guys my age don’t have. Watching him move, I almost feel…not nothing. And I want more of it.

Clocking his every step, I walk swiftly through the noisy mob. Jammed up by a pair of hand-holders, I wiggle my way around them, just in time to see the guy steal a piece of paper from some girl’s back pocket.

My jaw drops like a stone.

Eyes darting, I swivel my head, apparently alone in my outrage.

Do I call him out? What if he took something important?

With that thought, I dig into my own pocket, seeking the black rook I always keep on me. My hand closes over cheap plastic, and relief fills me. A chess piece from the first Illinois K-8 tournament I’d won as a kid, it helps me focus, reminds me to always look to the future.

My gaze finds the guy again. As if on cue, he stops, drops a rectangular object, letting it slip through his fingers and fall to the floor, and then promptly disappears.

Hold on. Cue the WTFs.

It couldn’t be. And yet I’d been looking right at it. The dude had just blinked out like a light.

Tension hums at the base of my skull, and my breath comes a little harder. Because I can’t think of a single reason not to, I jog ahead. When I reach the item the Boy Who Vanishes had left behind, I stare at it, hesitant to pick it up. It appears to be a small address book, the words IF FOUND RETURN TO JMM written on the leather binding.

“Rowan!”

I nearly groan. Not now.

“I know you can hear me, Rowan!” It’s a warning. One that won’t be ignored.

Already regretting it, I swipe up the address book, jam it into my pocket, and turn around, scouring the sea of faces for the one I know as well as my own. Harper Boyd, best friend and pocket-sized human, is seventy feet behind me and gaining fast.

Harper and I go way back. Way, way back. Free agents at birth, otherwise known as sad little orphan babies, we’ve been hustled in and out of foster care facilities our entire lives. We haven’t always remained together, but peculiar chance keeps returning us to one another. Right now we live in a group home in Norwood Park, where we were placed within weeks of each other during freshman year. I call it The Layover: another pit stop on the way to somewhere better.

I shoot an antsy look over my shoulder, not ready to give up on finding the BWV. But I know Harper won’t back off until I acknowledge her. Resigned, I give a sharp whistle.

It brings Harper up short. Her green eyes zero in on me, and she flashes me one of our secret signals—where are you going?

My life consists mainly of school, job, and chess, and you can set your watch to my schedule. If I deviate from it in any way, Harper always manages to appear out of nowhere to interrogate me. Every single time. Like, poof.

Most days I roll with it. Most days I got nothing to hide. But today I’m actually up to something, and no way am I telling her what it is.

Bathroom, I signal.

Rapid hand movement. I’ll join you.

Thanks, but I pee alone.

Her eyes narrow to slits. She knows I’m lying, and she knows I know she knows. It’s one of the more inconvenient side effects of our years together.

Fine, she tells me.

Her hands are still in motion, but I’m already walking away.

The decision to go out of one’s way between classes is never to be made lightly, because a Tyler High School hallway holds unspeakable power. It can take you to other parts of the building, anywhere you wish to go, or it can take you to your knees with a single well-placed idiot. With more than thirty-two hundred students jockeying for position in a building designed to accommodate less than twenty-one hundred, the idiots rule.

Coming around a corner, the scent of body spray almost knocks me over, the guy in front of me evidently having bathed in it that morning. He achieves true douchebag status when he knocks the books out of someone else’s hands and then holds his arms up in victory.

I angle my head to breathe better air—and then it happens all over again. Awareness pricks at me, right before the BWV reappears! I see him enter a room directly across the hall a split second before the door closes behind him. Beyond all reason, and without hesitation, I follow.

Once inside the room I freeze, surveying the scene before me in confused shock. Several guys are standing at irregular intervals facing one wall. Others are washing their hands and fussing with their hair in front of mirrors hanging on the opposite wall. And one guy pulls a small foil packet from a metal dispenser not far from where I stand.

I’m in a boys’ bathroom.

When the synapses start firing again, flight should have been the natural response. Instead I think, Blend!

I tug the bottom of my sweatshirt down over my hips and pull the hood up to cover my hair. I have an asymmetrical bob that falls just above my chin on the right and just below it on the left. With the hood up, only my side-swept bangs are visible.

My gender swap won’t bear up under any kind of scrutiny, but I’m getting a distinct no-look, no-talk vibe from the room’s occupants. Guy etiquette. Who knew?

Head down, I stride over to the wall of urinals, stopping in front of the one with the most graffiti around it (might as well have something to read).

The majority of messages and drawings on the wall are vulgar, but a few show real promise. Someone had sketched a perfect likeness of the school mascot, the fierce-looking Tyler Falcon. Someone less gifted had drawn an arrow pointing to the urinal bowl and scribbled Willie Wuz Here.