What if you could hear them? The thoughts they deigned not reasonable enough to say out loud, the things not suitable for even a giggly teenage gossip conversation. Would it be a blessing or a curse? Troye, the unlucky teenager bestowed with this 'gift', thinks of it as a curse, with good reason. Do you know how hard it is to keep a relationship with someone when you know exactly what they think of you? Impossible. It's impossible. Or at least that's what Troye thinks, considering he's given up on even trying to make it work. He's different, people shun different. People hate different. And it's better to go under the radar, to be nothing, than to be hated. Right? Tyler, on the other hand, has taken a different approach to a similar problem. No, he can't 'read minds', but he does have a part of himself he doesn't want a soul to know about. He's quarterback, every girl's dream guy, an academic mastermind, and he's also gay. He's seen how different kids get treated, hell, he's been the one to treat them that way before. Why on Earth would he ever wish that on himself? No, it's easier to hide, to be someone you're not, than to be hated. Right?

When seventeen year-old Runner was sentenced to death for stealing a loaf of bread in MegaCity One, his dreams were literally at an end. But then he opts to sign up for the Remnants of Men, a government sanctioned search for a rumoured fresh water lake beyond a radiated wasteland. At first, it seemed like a second chance to a new life, the transformation from zero to hero. But after an encounter with a rabid gang of men suffering an acute insanity, he soon comes to understand that he is one of many discarded into the wasteland to study the cannibalistic effects of a new drug called the Sixth Sense. Olivia Patterson has had one too many doses of the Sixth Sense and owes a massive debt to a shadowy rebel and loan shark called Death-Throe. Being the daughter of the City's dictator, she knows too well that the gallows awaits any who associates with the rebel. In an attempt to free herself, she acquires an asset in the form of Runner and finds herself always at the edge, for if he survives it means freedom for both, but if he dies...