Pitch Wars ALT: LL-10 THE THINGS BETWEEN

MENTOR: Amy Reichert

ALTERNATE: Ellen Brock

TITLE: The Things Between

GENRE: Soft Science Fiction

WORD COUNT: 85,000

PITCH: A man who is legally dead, a street kid, and the guardian of a disturbed child must band together to stop a man who can manipulate dreams.

EXCERPT:

She was a child. An infant.

Wally stood with his fists shaking at his sides, staring down at the baby curled up on the ground. He had seen many people die, had even helped facilitate most of those deaths, but he had never harmed a child.

His brother Frank stood beside him, a broad grin on his face. They had been looking for someone like this, and she was better than they had expected. Her energy pulsed through the dream as if charged by electricity. It was a sensation neither Frank nor Wally had ever felt from another dreamer.

Wally stared down at the child. Her dream was nothing more than brown and red blurs accompanied by the sound of a beating heart. She had nothing to dream about yet, and it struck Wally how untainted she was, how innocent.

Frank put his hands on his hips and sighed. “We're going to have to go through her parents since she can't tell us where she lives.”

Wally nodded, as enthusiastic as ever, but looking down at the girl, a naked pink infant unmarred by the outside world, he wanted to tell Frank no. For the first time in twenty-five years, he thought about what he was doing, what his brother was doing, how they used people and then threw them away.

Frank pulled back towards consciousness. “Let's go,” he said, flickering for just a moment before disappearing from the infant's dream.

But Wally didn't follow. Without his brother there to tell him what to do, to get angry at him for sympathizing, he bent down and picked up the infant.