CAGI Finalist #25

Title: STAYING DEAD

Genre: YA Dark Fantasy

Word Count: 82,000

Query:

Persephone Mead wakes up in a house with no ceiling, a bed covered with flowers, and a giant shard of glass in her chest. Normal fifteen-year-old girls would start freaking out. Persephone is not a normal fifteen-year-old girl.

All she wants to know is: Did it work? Is she back? After everything she’s been through, has she finally made it?

But it doesn’t last. It never lasts.

And soon enough, she’s thrown back. Back down towards Earth. Back down towards a world full of smoke, debris, and wailing ambulances.

Persephone is not a normal fifteen-year-old girl.  Because she just can’t seem to stay dead. And she has no idea why.

First 250:

When your eardrum gets blown apart, something weird happens. Right before everything goes silent, there’s this freaky ringing in your ear.

Not a lot of people know this, but that ringing in your ears? It’s actually the sound of dying cells. What you’re hearing is actually the last time you’ll ever get to hear that particular note. When it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

It was as if there was an entire orchestra of notes, all ringing, all dying, and that sound just drowned out everything. It drowned out the sirens, it drowned out the screaming. It even drowned out the firefighter who was trying to drag me to safety. I think he was yelling something at me, but I couldn’t tell.

I blinked, staring up at the sky. Everything was coming in and out of focus for some reason. Blurry, sharp, blurry, sharp. Was there something wrong with my eyes too?

Ironically, it was actually a nice day.

The sky was blue, bluer than I had ever seen before. And in the distance, flocks of birds twittered, darting this way and that, chasing each other like playful children. Briefly, the sun winked at me before disappearing beneath a group of puffy white clouds and I sighed as a warm summer breeze washed over me.

Great. The first nice day we get in a long, long time and I was going to miss it.