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Team Brenda #1 – SUBHUMAN

Thursday, 17 May 2012  |  Posted by Brenda Drake
Title: SUBHUMAN
Genre: YA Science Fiction
Word Count: 96,000
Query:
17-year-old Kensington Randall has always felt invisible – until she becomes a moving target, and the prize in a devastating global war between mankind and their alien progenitors. When arctic drilling unearths an alien ship, the discovery sets off a chain of events that leaves the Earth scorched and twisted, and steals six years of Ken’s life in an instant. Six years in which her family, her friends, and her world move on without her.
Six years that leave her broken, wounded…and transformed into something that isn’t quite human. 
As the military hunts her, her family rejects her, and her friends betray her, Ken has nowhere left to go save into the arms of Roman McKinley, another altered human and a confusing enigma who may damage Ken more than the aliens ever could. Together they discover the darker purpose behind their transformation – a purpose that makes them enemies to their own species, and living weapons who will, one way or another, bring the war to a shattering end.
Excerpt:
Kensington Randall would always remember the first time she saw Earth from space—and the last time she saw Brian smile.
He leaned against the railing on the outer observation deck of Hancomb International Lunar Station, smiling that strange, inward-turning smile that always made him seem so far away. Far from the world around them. Far from her. Unreachable, even when he stood so close their hands touched.
“I don’t want to go back,” he said. “I can’t.”
“Then stay. Don’t leave me here alone.”
He looked at her sidelong, pale gray eyes glinting behind his glasses—the legacy of failed gene therapy. “I don’t just mean for one more day.”
“I know.”
He smiled again, but she looked away. She’d never let him see how much that smile hurt, how much she wished she could understand what lay behind it.
She’d never let him know how helpless it made her feel, that she couldn’t answer the silent question in that smile.
Instead, she looked out the protective glass. Below, the Earth was a disk of color and shadow rising past the ashen gray horizon of lunar craters. Darkness cupped the outer curve of the planet. Sunlight gilt the illuminated edge, until she could have plucked the red-gold ring from space and slid it onto her finger. A dense storm system unfurled its arms to grip the northern hemisphere, and she caught her breath as lightness filled her.
Brian took her hand, and his fingers curled cool and pale against her dusky skin.

Filed: Misc

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