The Expended

TO SAVE THE WORLD, SHE HAS TO SAVE HERSELF.

He killed her parents. He imprisoned her little brother. And he turned her into an assassin. The only thing keeping her alive? The fact that if she stops hunting for the government, her brother is the payment.

Then she rebels anyway. Saves one eighteen-year-old insurgent simply because he has the same name as her brother. And when that is discovered...she learns that Rivus was never joking. Her brother is in the ICU. And she is given an ultimatum-she can lose him forever, or she can shoot the governor and throw the entire City into chaos.

At the same time, her brother was never so helpless after all. He's not in the ICU-he's trekking across Frilant looking for the runaway resistance man who shared his name. And Rivus is playing both siblings.

Will they meet before the world collapses around them? Or will Peter Ian cave under the weight of realizing that his new friend's City is about to be the site of a procedural massacre? Or will Eri kill Rivus out of spite before he can tell her where her brother is?

They think this is the beginning of a new world. But every beginning is an end.

As Gabrielle Zapata's "teenage novel" used by Mao Lin to invade the United States in COGNITO: Zapata's Memoirs, The Expended is a cascade of systemic destruction and human vulnerability that comes together in the plot Mao chooses-and the ending he rejects.