Maggie is 16? Somehow her "voice" suggested a younger heroine to me. And in Part One, Everything was as it should [[be]], but Maggie knew they were all in great danger if she couldn’t find the source....
As she circled the main square, [[the young girl]] noticed a boy throwing pebbles...
If you employ Deep POV, you don't use "tags" like she noticed, saw, felt, etc; and even though this is third person, you don't slip out of the heroine's Point of View and tag her as "the girl."
Is a 16-yr-old a "young girl"--?
Ok, this is a 5-minute freewrite, and normally I don't publicly call attention to things I would revise but your writing is so strong, your prose so good, I trust you can take my comments as a tribute vs a criticism. Again, I'm well aware this is a first draft. And I'm impressed at what you spin out in response to a 5-minute freewrite!
This sort of criticism is definitely welcome and I must admit not paying much attention to POV. I try, I mean, but most times I'm simply too focused on the direction the story is going. I will try harder, I promise.
Thanks for taking the time to read so carefully!
You're welcome, and no need to "promise" to "try harder" - you're doing fine! This is a rough draft, not a submission to a publisher here, and I commend you for it. I'm a chicken about posting my freewriting.
Your strength is my weakness - plot, pace, the direction the story is going. In fiction workshops it's all too easy to get hung up on "POV violations," the passive-voice police (who tend to mistake "she was standing there" for passive voice), and those who use Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Fiction as a battering ram to attack the prose of others. After almost four years of an online workshop, I left, even though you can also gain a lot of really good, really helpful feedback there. I was editing and offering feedback (for free, as always) at #thewritersblock and #isleofwrite for more than a year, but I finally quit working a full-time job unpaid and started doing more 5-minute freewrites and I even wrote a 50,000 word novel in one month (NaNoWriMo), but it needs editing, beta-reading, feedback, and maybe a co-author to torture those protagonists when I can't bring myself to do it.