What if you could do a moment in your life over again? My sample submission for the #13ReasonsWhyContest

"Humanity's pride and greed will be the death of us" In 2025 B.E.F that saying couldn't have been more than true. After a devastating nuclear explosion had scorched one side of the world, people were forced to leave their home planet to Mars. A few millenniums after the global crisis, an ambitious girl, Nila, aspires to go to Earth like the rest of her colleagues. Though, when she arrives, it's not what she had expected and suspects something much sinister is going on. |HIGHEST RANK: #5 in Science Fiction| ~~~~'This magnificent cover is by @winterinheaven! Go check out her cover shop~~~~

ORIGINAL DRAFT. SEE UPDATED NOVEL FOR REWRITE VERSION RELEASED 9/2025. Wattpad Featured Author | 800K+ Reads | AMC TWD Partnered Story | Ranking #1 in Adventure | Wattpad Beta book for text-to-speech accessibility A Dystopian Society 4522. Both a name and a number that had labeled many. Within a society of the alive, yet not living, 4522 struggles to conform. She finds herself lost while surrounded by strict rules of direction. Deep inside, she knows there is another way to exist than following orders in a herd of humans who do not think for themselves. 4522 believes there is more to life than numbers and laws; she just has to find it. When her hall Officer is replaced, and she forms an unlikely friendship with the boy next to her, the opportunity for change arises. When the mysterious Officer selects her and her friend, 4313, for testing she knows something is wrong; 4522 can only think she was picked because they know about her secrets that she had been keeping. They know she is different and different only meant one thing. Death. Pronounced: Four-Five-Two-Two

**Wattys 2016 Winner!** Fifteen-year-old Emmeline Jefferson doesn't have time away from the Demons. Not a minute to say goodbye to her family, not a moment to wonder "Why me?" Every second she's not possessed is spent begging stranger after stranger for help. But no one believes a sporadic girl who claims Demons have spent more time in her body than she has. No one until she finds Dumaine. Dumaine Chartres's whole life fits in his accordion case, his friends are nonexistent, and this fascinating girl is telling him Demons exist. These things all make perfect sense. What he doesn't understand is why humans have such outrageous issues with murder. Death is natural. If he wasn't supposed to kill anyone, they wouldn't have died. Nobody even noticed the bodies anyway. In return for a break from his internal demons, Dumaine offers Emmeline help, and she's willing to receive it from anyone. Maybe this boy can finally be the keeper she needs. Maybe chasing these Demons can explain why he's so different from everyone else. Maybe this friendship can work. With a wise but demented old man, and enough determination to perturb the Demons, Emmeline and Dumaine concoct a plan to unriddle their lives. The first step is to confront the Demon's creator. But something else seems to have found the creator first. And it only looks like an Angel. Human Spines is part one of a YA dark Urban Fantasy written in a style similar to Tahereh Mafi's Shatter Me and Elana Johnson's Possession. It's the first of a series and told from the viewpoints of Emmeline, Dumaine, and their rambling but wise navigator, Hans. Through a diverse cast, it explores themes of learned distrust, fear of the unknown, and the battle against the evil inside us all, in a way similar to a Studio Ghibli film. Cover by ecclesia-

**CURRENTLY A FEATURED STORY** highest ranking: #11 in Science fiction ❝true happiness is only achieved without freedom. There is a girl who wakes to a world that she was supposed to protect. Instead, she fights it. There is a man who is cursed with the ability to dream. A glass city is their cage, a city filled to the brim with unanimity and order, a paradise on an earth laid to waste by an artificial snowstorm. Sunlight filters through the glass buildings and through glass walls, pierces glass floors. It illuminates the city square when it is strongest at noon, surrounded by a huddled mass of citizens, all as perfect as the city they inhabit. And they all think: everything is as it should be. And it is. Or, it was. -- long live perfection.❞ (c)sarahgaier2016 #diverselit | #LoveEqualsLove | #helpfightcliches | #freethelgbtq | #badassreads check out my Science Fiction novella, Sector-33, here! https://www.wattpad.com/story/62174094-sector-33