[QCRIT] QUERY LETTER Glow Girls second attempt

In a post-apocalyptic world, a young woman with the power to transmute radiation crosses a hellish landscape filled with monsters. Sixteen-year-old Mayfly is searching for an artificial intelligence that holds the secret of her true identity.  She is a glow girl, a scrappy scavenger who scours the radioactive wastelands for gadgets to sell on the open market.  She can decontaminate ancient artifacts with the touch of a hand.  Haunted by visions of her mysterious origins, Mayfly sets her sights on the Citadel, a legendary sanctuary guarded by an advanced computer that holds the world’s lost knowledge and possibly the truth about the young girl’s powers. Glow girls like Mayfly are seen as dangerous abominations, hunted as heretics by a church-state ruled by a madman who calls himself the Red Pope. Each encounter with this world’s fanatical enforcers strengthens Mayfly’s resolve to break free from a world built on oppression.  

She enlists help from The  Astronaut, an enigmatic relic who travels the wastelands in his silver NASA spacesuit. Joining this rag-tag duo is her adoptive father, a bumbling assassin, and  Jab, a dog-sized mutant centipede. They travel across a countryside populated with murderers, bioengineered monsters, and blood-thirsty cannibals. Together, they are stalked by religious zealots who want to subjugate all glow girls and gain access to the weapons hidden behind the walls of the Citadel.  

Mayfly and her team set out on a dangerous quest that leads them to a teeming metropolis trapped within a 72-hour time loop of destruction and rebirth. They cross an irradiated desert named the ‘Black Glass,’ where the key to the Citadel lies buried in a centuries-old bomb shelter. Finally, they reach the gates of a hidden conclave, where a long-dead machine god waits. Mayfly's story is one of rebellion and resilience, as she risks everything to challenge a brutal world that would sooner see her burned than free. 

Glow Girl is an 80,000-word epic science fiction adventure similar to Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, Station Eleven, A Canticle For Leibowitz, and Jack McDevitt’s Eternity Road.