DOOMED has a cover!
Beat the game. Save the world.
Pandora’s just your average teen, glued to her cell phone and laptop, surfing Facebook and e-mailing with her friends, until the day her long-lost father sends her a link to a mysterious site featuring twelve photos of her as a child. Unable to contain her curiosity, Pandora enters the site, where she is prompted to play her favorite virtual-reality game, Zero Day. This unleashes a global computer virus that plunges the whole world into panic: suddenly, there is no Internet. No cell phones. No utilities, traffic lights, hospitals, law enforcement. Pandora teams up with handsome stepbrothers Eli and Theo to enter the virtual world of Zero Day. Simultaneously, she continues to follow the photographs from her childhood in an attempt to beat the game and track down her father, her one key to saving the world as we know it. Part The Matrix, part retelling of the Pandora myth, Doomed has something for gaming fans, dystopian fans, and romance fans alike.
EXCERPT:
“That’s not the really puzzling part,” Agent Lessing finally continues. “Especially if you insist on your innocence in this matter, how is it that starting at seven-fifteen this morning, someone from this IP address opened the twelve different sections of code that make up this worm and uploaded them onto the internet, one by one?”
Emily gasps and I want to protest. I want to tell the FBI agent that she’s crazy. That I have no idea what she’s talking about. But the truth of the matter is that suddenly I do. I know exactly what I was doing at seven-fifteen this morning.
The tentative fairy tale I’ve been building in my head all day—the one I wasn’t even aware of until right now—collapses. I swear, I feel it shatter and my stomach, though close to empty, chooses that moment to revolt.
I spring up from my chair.
“Hey, you can’t go anywhere. Sit back down!” Lessing tells me firmly, reaching into her jacket and pulling out her gun.
I don’t stop; I can’t. Even so, I barely make it to the trash can in time. I don’t know how long I sit there, puking my guts up, but by the time I finish, Lessing has put away her gun. Emily is looking at me in dismay, while Mackaray and Lundstrom—who rushed in at Lessing’s alarmed shout—are wearing identical expressions of smug triumph. Even Lessing seems satisfied, and I know it’s because I’ve blown it big time.
It’s pretty hard to protest your innocence when you get so upset by what they’re telling you that you hurl.
