Brooklyn, 2095. Seventeen-year-old Riley Taylor longs to escape the crushing poverty of the slums. Stuck with her best friend in a totalitarian police state, their only hope of freedom is joining the military. But when Riley gets ripped away from him in their first brutal combat, she’s shocked to discover why so many recruits come home in coffins.

It was just a random mutation - one of a billion that happen in viruses every day. But this one was different. It exploded out of Somalia and spread across the oceans before anybody thought to look up from their cell phones to see what was going on. The infected breathed the virus into the air around them, spreading it through the cities faster than anyone thought possible. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Police lines crumbled. Quarantine sites disintegrated. Cities started to collapse.

Cassie Forrest isn't surprised to learn that the day she’s decided to get her life together is also the day the world ends. After all, she’s been on a self-imposed losing streak since her survivalist parents died: she’s stopped painting, broken off her engagement to Adrian and dated a real jerk. Rectifying her mistakes has to wait, however, because Cassie and her friends have just enough time to escape Brooklyn for her parents’ cabin before Bornavirus LX turns them into zombies, too.

Sylvie Rossi has the loner thing down pat, with the exception of her best friend, Grace. But when the two are trapped in a hospital during the last gasp of a dying city, alone time is no longer an option. A nurse's offer of sanctuary promises Sylvie the supplies she needs to survive the zombies - it's the coexisting with people that might do her in. Eric Forrest will do whatever it takes to get into the dead city for his sister, including ending up dead himself. He's used to taking risks, but with every mile he travels death looks likelier.

You have two options. You die, or you Qualify. Sixteen-year-old Gwenevere Lark is determined not only to Qualify but to rescue her entire family. If you are good enough to Qualify, you are eligible to compete in the brutal games of the Atlantis Grail, which grants all winners the laurels, high-tech luxuries, and full privileges of Atlantis citizenship. And if you are in the Top 10, then all your wildest wishes are granted...such as curing your mother's cancer. There is only one problem. Gwen Lark is known as a klutz and a nerd.