An Agent's Inbox #15

Dear Secret Agent:

Born in a city buried underground, twelve-year-old Ethan Williams can sum up his life in one word: trapped. He dreams of the surface, where light comes from the sun, adventures are more daring than sneaking into a rated R movie at the SubEx, and his dad isn’t just a faded picture in his mom’s wallet.

Escape seems impossible, since boulders barricade the original entrance to the city and unending darkness blocks the other. Then Ethan discovers that the billionaire who founded the city staged the “earthquake” that trapped everyone. He did it to test the city’s sustainability but died before he could end the experiment. It’s all there in the journals Ethan found, along with a map and instructions to the surface through the Deep Caves.

Ethan, his older sister, and their best friend venture into the tunnels, sure anything is better than staying trapped. That’s before they meet a colony of vicious bats or realize they may not be following the right path. Instead of the surface, they stumble into a city whose people want to stay hidden, a city where flogging and dark pits await those who could expose its secrets. One wrong move and they’ll be trapped in a place much worse than the Underground City.

THE MODERN CAVEBOY’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING BATS, BULLIES AND BILLIONAIRES, a middle grade adventure, is complete at 43,000 words. While the story’s initial setting will appeal to fans of THE CITY OF EMBER, the majority of the action takes place in the caves and beyond.

Thank you for considering!

Sincerely,

M.M.

THE MODERN CAVEBOY’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING BATS, BULLIES AND BILLIONAIRES

Ethan wanted to kill someone. Not just anyone--Winston Stanford III. Lynching sounded like a good way to do it. According to Ally, that’s how the town wanted to do away with Winston before people talked them out of it. Instead a heart attack got Winston before Ethan could even walk, much less tie a noose. But Ethan wouldn’t have let anyone talk him out of bringing Winston to justice. Because that’s what it would be--justice, not murder.

Ethan couldn’t sit still another second. He pushed off the bare mattress in Winston’s abandoned bedroom, ignoring Ally and Gwen’s grumbles when they tumbled together. He paced the floor, kicking up dust that had been untouched for years. The specks remained suspended in mid-air, almost glowing as they reflected light filtering through the window from the energy rocks. Like the dust, Ethan’s whole world had been stirred up, and he didn’t know where he would settle.

Trapped. A rock-hard truth Ethan accepted as an inevitable fact of life in the Underground City. Nature made escape impossible--first by the boulders that blocked the entrance tunnel and then by the impenetrable darkness of the Deep Caves.

Until today, Ethan thought Winston’s role in their hopeless situation was limited to a lack of foresight in monitoring seismic activity and the single-minded paranoia that ensured no one on the surface knew his subterranean town existed. Now he knew the real truth.

An earthquake didn’t trap them. Winston Stanford did. On purpose.