Betrayed and killed by the ones supposed to love her she returns to seek retribution. I hate you, she thought, the last spark of her consciousness flickering in the cold. If there is a moon above or a devil below, let me go back. I will burn it all. I will burn every single one of them. Then, the darkness claimed her. Gasp. Nyx lunged upward, her lungs burning as if she had just swallowed a gallon of seawater. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. She expected the cold. She expected the crushing weight of the gorge. Instead, she felt... silk?

The World Ended at 4:22 PM. ​For eighteen-year-old Cassie, the apocalypse isn't a surprise—it’s a prophecy. Raised by a father who traded bedtime stories for survival drills and conspiracy theories, Cassie has spent her life being the "weirdo" with a bug-out bag. But when a government experiment shatters the peace of her high school detention, her father’s paranoid warnings become the only thing keeping her alive. ​Trapped in a room with nine other girls who never liked her, Cassie must transform from a social pariah into a ruthless leader. Her mission is simple but suicide: break out of a locked-down school, navigate a courtyard swarming with the infected, and reach the middle school wing to save her fourteen-year-old sister, Lily. ​But the "zombies" aren't the only threat. As the military moves in, Cassie realizes her father was right about the most terrifying truth of all: The government isn't coming to rescue them—they’re coming to collect samples.