Taylor_Ellis
Months after a classified strike hits a Nevada government facility, relocation orders sweep across the country. Military camps rise overnight in empty fields. Communication splinters.
Officials call it precaution.
Odette is twenty when the evacuations begin. She and her younger sister, Teddy, are herded into a temporary military camp in Kansas alongside thousands of others.
Phones barely function. Social media is scrubbed clean. Every cryptid sighting is dismissed as hysteria, hoaxes, leftover memes from a dying internet.
But the rumors don't stop.
During a chaotic transfer, Odie and Teddy are separated. The military promises processing delays, paperwork errors, reunification.
They're lying.
The system isn't broken.
It's collapsing.
Refusing to wait for answers that never come, Odie gets stuck with Reid Wilder, the former classmate she's hated since high school. Intelligent and Insufferable, now infuriatingly right about everything.
Together, they slip past intake and into a fractured America-through abandoned towns, quarantined highways, and territories the government has already written off. Along the way, they encounter other survivors... and the creatures once locked inside hidden facilities built to contain them.
Some hunt.
Some mimic.
Some only watch.
As authority collapses and the secrets buried inside those facilities come to light, Odie understands this wasn't chaos.
It was a cover-up gone wrong.
And finding Teddy may mean walking straight into what was never meant to be seen.