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Sixteen-year-old Wick Vale was dead. Then he wasn’t.

Wick grew up on Genesis, a military space station where children are trained as soldiers and the truth is controlled like oxygen. He was told that Earth died in a nuclear disaster 150 years ago. Then his emergency transport crashes into what’s left of Boston, and everything Genesis told him turns out to be a lie. Earth isn’t dead. It’s still rotting.

Zombies roam the streets. Fenway Park is a graveyard. Human survivors hide in underground factions where blood is currency, and trust is a death sentence. A fragmented digital file called 24 Hours Before, part recovered on Genesis and part unearthed in Boston alongside a journal, confirms the truth. His ancestor helped engineer the virus that killed the world. His blood carries the cure. He wasn’t raised. He was manufactured. A contingency plan in a soldier’s body, born just in case humanity ever needed saving.

Now, every faction wants him. Some want to study him. Others want to harvest him. All of them are willing to bleed him dry. The only person who doesn’t want to bleed him dry is Rowan Clarke, carefree and sharp, the descendant of the other scientist who helped create the virus. She represents everything Wick was never allowed to be. He doesn’t trust her. He can’t stop watching her.

Then there’s Nova, a sentient AI inhabiting a 150-year-old corpse who understands Wick on a molecular level. She wants to protect him. She wants to guide him. She wants to become him. 

Wick Vale was born to save humanity. He’s just not sure they’re worth his life. He’s learning that heroes don’t always get to choose how they die.

The first children disappear. The second children forget. The third children fight back.

Eleven-year-old Flynn Winston and his friends, the self-proclaimed Monster Club, have spent a lot of time chasing local ghost stories in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. But over Labor Day weekend in 1980, something real woke up. When Ricky Brenton, a gifted student at the elite Fort Tabor Academy, vanished without a trace, their games turned deadly serious.

Their search leads them to Charlie Bennett, a quiet, withdrawn boy with a cryptic “C-4” brand burned into his neck, and to a growing distortion beneath their town called the thin place, where reality bends and time slips. Shadows stretch where they shouldn’t. Sounds echo without a source. A low, unnatural vibration hums beneath Fairhaven’s streets.

As Flynn and the Monster Club follow the trail Ricky left, they uncover long-buried secrets tied to Fort Tabor Academy and a dangerous link between Charlie and the thin place itself. To save Ricky and possibly themselves, Flynn must confront forces far older than Fairhaven, learning that every choice has consequences and that some truths should never be told.