Team Krista #2: CHRONICITY

Title: CHRONICITY
Genre: MG fantasy
Word count: 54,000

Query:

Thirteen-year-old Grim Grinnert has no idea how he got stuck as an Apprentice in Chronicity, the Town of Time. All he knows is that he wants to go home, because there’s something wonky about this place where HoroHounds search the centuries for era-hopping prowlers and a class assignment can send you to the Peloponnesian War. He’d take his mother’s stale-pizza-and-flat-soda suppers any day over the Count’s relentless lecture fests and his TimeWheel teacher’s attempts to off him.

But the Watch, the robotic police force of Chronicity, has other plans for Grim. He’s missing the hourglass birthmark that’s supposed to brand everyone who enters Chronicity, and they’ve given Grim one month to convince them he’s not a Timbukker--an illegal. With the help of his two best friends and a 400-year-old girl he may or may not have a crush on, he sets out to determine how and why he stumbled into Chronicity. If he fails to find the answers before the Watch watch strapped to his arm hits zero, they’ll send him someplace horrible…like 1932. Forever.

Tick tock, says the clock. And in Chronicity, time is the one thing Grim doesn’t have.

First page:

Grim hated his name. It wasn’t short for Griffin, or Grissom, it was just Grim, and he’d never understood why his parents called him something that meant “extremely unpleasant.” Some kids at school, mostly girls, thought it sounded mature, but to him it just sounded depressing. Why couldn’t he have had some nice, normal, average name, one that didn’t make him stick out like a sore thumb?

But then, his parents never had been exactly average. And although the Grinnerts lived in an average town, on an average street, in an average house, it took approximately five seconds to see that they were anything but.

“HEY, KID! YOU BETTER WATCH IT!”

Grim poked his head out his bedroom window and snickered. His eight-year-old brother, Tyrus, was throwing jumbo marshmallows into the windows of passing cars and calling out, “Want s’more?”

Tyrus was a Grinnert through and through, and this afternoon he was wearing an aluminum foil hat with ears that pointed straight up, like a horse’s. Grim threw his algebra textbook onto the bed. He had quit being embarrassed by his family’s oddities long ago--at least most of the time--and this particular scene looked like it was going to be too good to miss. A few seconds later, his mother barreled out the front door.

“Tyrus Grinnert!” she yelled as she ran. “How many times have I told you not to waste your father’s aluminum foil? If you’re going to use it, make something useful, like an alien antennae!”