Beginning (sort of)

Premise: The world has changed. Global population has expanded and, as such, most of the remaining surface area of the planet is cities, except for a few zoos and parks that have been protected. We have adapted, as well as the remaining animals, and changed. Natural red-heads are mostly extinct, the mutated gene having been bred out. Only a few remain in the wild. The rest are dyed fashion-followers. Technology is so advanced, now, that people being saved from life-threatening disease is every day. They get special nanobots inserted into their blood stream to destroy the mutated cells that are causing the sickness. Everything is peaceful and there hasn’t been a serious war in over a hundred years. A young journalist comes home one day to find her house trashed and her younger brother missing. She finds a box with photos of her missing parents and her criminal of an uncle. Desperate and confused, she turns to one of the subjects of the photos, an assassin called Jaret, for help. Can he be trusted? Will Lu get her brother back? Or will she discover something about her parents and the world she wished she never knew?



Outline 1st Draft: Lu’s parents disappear, leaving her to raise her younger brother Matty. One day, after a fight they had over breakfast, she comes home to find that he has disappeared. She searches the house and finds a box hidden in her parent’s old bedroom. Lu opens it to find pictures of her father and uncle, whom she knows is a criminal, and a young boy that she doesn’t recognise.

She sets out to find the unnamed youth, and answers, asking her uncle for help which he refuses to give. Her search leads her deep into the seedy underground business of assassination. She eventually finds the boy, who is a grown man and a freelance assassin, and asks his help to find her brother. He refuses so she seeks out others. Unbeknownst to her, Matty had been selected to become one of the next generation of assassins that have become genetically mutated thanks to special nanobots that changed their coding, inserted when they were “sick” shortly after birth. Funnily enough, they’re all wrangas.

Lu is hunted by a sinister group that doesn’t appreciate her sticking her nose in where it doesn’t belong. The man, Jaret, saves her from one such trap and grudgingly agrees to help her because he feels he owes her a debt (why?).

They discover the secret, and a number of other children that have been “infected” but are unable to save them because it’s almost impossible to change them back without serious risk (and they’re not exactly rocket scientists either, lol). Lu discovers that her parents are behind the whole thing. Matty is sent to kill her and Jaret, but fails at the last minute, (moral/conscience/ethics issue?). Lu is left wounded and Jaret takes her back to his base of operations to recover and plan their next move.

****Lu is one of the last natural red-heads. She stands out in public. Why wasn’t she given the nanobots? Or was she? Is she just different to the others? Something that went wrong, causing her to be the opposite of a cold-hearted killer? Could work.

****All the while, Jaret is slowly falling in love with Lu and learning to trust her. This is very important! Jaret didn’t trust ANYONE before, but now Lu is sliding under his guard. Leads to sweet moments, and a bit of heartache because Jaret is awkward and shy and he sometimes does things that hurt her without intending to. He is scared he will hurt her.