The Clockwork Pen

He’s a typical teen guy who craves an adventure to escape reality. She’s a steampunk cowboy with a body that won’t quit—stuck inside a gilded cage—whose only dream is to escape the fantasy and find the real world.

Wyll's an everyday teenage guy fixing his car over the summer break. But when his parents tell him they are getting a divorce, unable to deal with his family issues, he storms out of the house and calls his best friend. Together, they answer the call to adventure by exploring a deserted mansion in their last flight of freedom before senior year.

When Wyll finds a door to another world and gets stuck on the other side, to escape his feelings, he sets off to discover the strange new city, but the few people he speaks to don’t understand him and angrily wave him away. The flying airship is a big clue that he is far from home, as are the Victorian-era-clad citizens, the cool steam-powered inventions, and the pointy-turreted castle, but soon, a kind man takes him in and then secretly spirits him away in the night. When Wyll meets Sira, he has no idea who she is or why she's the only one who understands him, but he decides he can stay a while and have a few new experiences… besides, he's stuck.

Sira’s burning goal to escape the mechanical city and her tyrant father—who created the world and all the people with a clockwork pen—drives her actions. But Wyll’s lack of emotional maturity does not impress her as the first human she’s seen since she can remember. Still, she keeps him hidden and safe from her dystopian world, and Wyll is roped, unwillingly at first, into a rebellion. A friends-to-lovers journey is still just a dream when Wyll is caught by the authorities and taken to a cave of horrors where the king draws on him with the clockwork pen, turning him into a double agent. He rejects his earlier desire to stay.

When he returns to the rebels, Wyll is torn. If he tells the rebels about the deception and chooses their side, he has no guarantee they will win their courageous fight for liberty against their creator. Besides, who would want to leave a cool place with a flying ship, rocket packs, robots, goggles, gears, and handle-bar mustaches? But if he says nothing, the king has promised to send him home—away from the nightmare he guarantees, but Wyll would lose Sira and may end up helping the king kill them all. Pulled between both groups like a tug-of-war, he must weigh his desire to go home with brand-new feelings of bravery, selflessness, and loyalty to the resistance, but which party will win, and who is lying to him?