Music:ON World:OFF Welcome to Syrus. Please pick up your complimentary pair of headphones at the gates. Plug them into your mandatory devices and skip to track four. Listen and enjoy. Cor's world is filled with notes and pitch and tone. Twenty three hours of the day she is hooked to the music mandated by the Serial Seven, Syrus' elite council. It is essentially every teenager's dream: Hit a button and drown the world out. But what happens when the music stops?

When Darren Statler awakes, he has no idea what's going on. He's restrained to the hospital bed he's in, and someone seems to have just been killed outside his door. He prays this is a nightmare and tries to wake up, but what awaits him when he opens his eyes is something too terrible to comprehend; people are sick, and its all his fault.

Nothing good happens after midnight; that’s what my dad always used to say. It was 12:01 when I found him, and 12:14 the day he left. My mother had always raised me around strays she’d taken in; dogs, cats, the occasional bird or monkey. I was used to lives apart from my own popping in and out randomly. Jake had never felt that way to me, though. Something in my gut from the moment I saw him told me his life was colliding with mine for a reason. But…I still haven’t figured out what that reason was.

What if we were all connected in some way? Across time? Across space?

I twisted my hair into a ponytail, tucking it under my cap and lowering the brim. Then I took a final look around the room full of strangers, wondering which of them would help me escape, and which would try to kill me.