Seventeen-year-old Maisie Rojas has spent her entire life in the Q—a post-pandemic quarantine zone that was once Austin, Texas.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from dystopian young adult novel The Q by Amy Tintera, out from Crown Books for Young Readers on November 8.
Seventeen-year-old Maisie Rojas has spent her entire life in the Q—a post-pandemic quarantine zone that was once Austin, Texas. Born and raised behind the high security walls that sealed their fate, she’s now a trusted lieutenant for one of the territory’s controlling families.
Lennon Pierce, the charismatic son of a US presidential candidate, has just been kidnapped by his father’s enemies and dropped out of a plane into the Q with nothing but a parachute strapped to his back. Lennon is given a temporary antidote to the disease and crucial intel for his father, but Maisie must get him out of the zone within forty-eight hours–or he will be permanently infected and forced to remain.
With unrest brewing both inside and outside the Q, reaching the exit is a daunting and dangerous task. But if Maisie and Lennon fail, it could mean disaster for the entire quarantine zone and its inhabitants—and could cost Lennon his life.
Lennon
This was not the first time Lennon Pierce had been kidnapped.
The first time was fifteen years earlier. He had no memory of it, but when he was four years old, he apparently wandered away from his parents at the farmers market. A woman had given him a cookie, scooped him up, and made a beeline for the parking lot.
His mom saw the kidnapper just in time, started screaming, and chased the woman down. According to his parents, he’d been completely unfazed by the whole thing. He was happily eating his cookie when his mom snatched him back from the stranger.
Later, the would-be kidnapper claimed she didn’t know that the young boy was the son of a congressman. She’d just thought he was cute.
She never gave much more of an explanation than that, which had always baffled Lennon. Impulse-kidnapping a small child just because you liked his chubby cheeks didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
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The Q
This was not an impulse kidnapping. He’d glimpsed the bodies of his two secret service agents before the kidnappers had tied a blindfold over his eyes.
He was in some deep shit this time.
He’d lost track of how long he’d been in the van. For a while, he’d been able to see hints of sun from the bottom edge of his blindfold, if he tilted his head up. It had been a relief, because there’d been nothing but darkness since they grabbed him from a gas station.
But now it was dark again, and he could have sworn he’d been on this bumpy ride for at least two days. But that couldn’t be right.
His hands were cuffed behind his back. Everything ached. His wrists, where the cuffs dug in; his back; his ass, from sitting on the hard floor. They could have at least let him sit on a seat. Maybe this vehicle didn’t have them.
His stomach rumbled. They’d given him a few sips of water but no food, and he felt weak. He’d considered running, the first day. Or fighting back, when he got the chance. Now he was pretty sure that would not go so well.
The vehicle screeched to a stop so suddenly that he toppled over onto his side. He stayed there, listening to the sounds of two doors slamming shut.
Another door opened. Someone grabbed his ankle. He heard a snap as they cut off the plastic tie.
“Get out,” a male voice said. Southern accent. They’d taken him from Georgia, but Lennon had no way to know if the accent was local to the area. He was from Los Angeles. Everyone down here sounded the same to him.
Fucking Georgia. He’d told his dad that his time was better spent in one of the Rust Belt states, but the senator had insisted.
Georgia’s going to turn our way, I just know it, his dad had said, overly optimistic as usual.
Actually, maybe it would now. Nothing drummed up sympathy for a candidate like having their only son kidnapped.
Lennon briefly wondered—hopefully—if maybe his dad’s campaign had done this. A sympathy kidnapping! Not a bad idea, come to think of it.
No, his dad’s campaign manager would have come up with a much posher kidnapping. They would have locked him up in a nice apartment. There would have been food, at least. Cal Franklin would absolutely kidnap someone to win an election, but he’d do so with a smile and a bottle of champagne.
“Out! Now!” the Southern accent yelled.
Lennon struggled to sit up and then scooted forward until his legs hit air. He planted them on the ground and stood, slowly.
“Can I have some more water?” he asked. They hadn’t gagged him. There probably wasn’t anyone around to hear him scream.
“No. We’re almost there.”
Where? He wasn’t stupid enough to actually expect an answer, so he didn’t ask.
The blindfold was yanked off, and he blinked and squinted in the sudden light. It was morning, the sun rising directly in front of him.
They were at an airplane hangar. A small plane sat not far away.
Screw his hunger and weak limbs. He was not getting on a plane to be dropped off in some foreign country.
He took off running.
He made it three whole steps before one of the men dropped him flat on his ass.
He gasped as he hit the ground. The bearded face of a man appeared above him as he rolled over.
“Don’t be a pain in my ass and make me drag you to the plane,” he said. No Southern accent. This one could have been from anywhere in America.
It seemed like a bad sign that they weren’t wearing masks. Lennon tried to memorize their faces.
The other man roughly dragged Lennon to his feet. He screamed, and his voice cracked. If there were manliness awards for kidnap victims, he wasn’t getting one.
He made the men drag him. He was nothing if not a pain in the ass.
They wrestled him up the steps and into the small plane. There were only four seats, facing each other on either side. The bearded guy shoved him into one and strapped him in.
“I’m not flying this thing until you put his blindfold back on,” a new male voice said.
Well, at least someone had hope that he was going to get out of this situation one day.
They tied the fabric around his eyes. Everything was dark again.
They were up in the air. Lennon was trying to think how much fuel a plane like this could hold. How far could they make it? Did they have a way to get out of the country? The FAA didn’t just let people fly wherever they pleased.
“Now,” the Southern accent said. He sounded nervous, for the first time. “He needs to get out now.”
Get out? Of the plane? They were still in the air.
Someone grabbed him and yanked him out of the seat. His handcuffs snapped off. His wrists screamed in relief.
“You’ve skydived before, right?” another man asked. “I read in an article that you skydived. Real daredevil type.”
His mouth was too dry to speak. “Uh…” He had skydived, once. Strapped to an instructor.
They were attaching something to his back.
“You just pull to open the parachute,” the Southern accent said. “Before you get too close to the ground.”
There had been a lot more instructions than “before you get too close to the ground” when he had gone skydiving. He suddenly couldn’t remember a single one of them.
Several hands pushed him forward.
Wait. They hadn’t been in the air that long. At all.
Wind whipped through his hair.
Someone ripped off his blindfold again. He squinted against the wind. He was at the door of the plane, and he braced both hands on either side. He looked down at the world beneath him. They were flying pretty low to the ground.
He’d seen an aerial view of this place before. The buildings, the homes clustered together.
The quarantine zone in the middle of Texas.
“No, no, no, no.” He tried desperately to move back into the plane. The men held him in place.
“He needs to go now!” a voice shouted.
“No!” he yelled again, frantic. He’d rather go to a foreign country. Literally any country in the world. Throw a dart at a map and he’d go there.
Hands roughly shoved him forward. His grip on the plane began to slip.
“Don’t forget to pull the string!” a voice yelled.
They pushed him out.
Excerpted from The Q, copyright © 2022 by Amy Tintera.
