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Bree Ward follows the rules. She has no choice. In City Center, Protectors attack citizens who don’t. Her life is pre-determined by big data, including her future spouse and career. Programming feels like part of her DNA, but she doesn’t buy into contributing to Metadata Aggregation Group (MAG)’s power choke.

When MAG assigns her older brother, Eron, to a job as a Protector and a stranger for his wife, Bree rebels since her Pairing Day is just a year away. She sneaks out to the forbidden Fringes and encounters a Hacker named Seph. His radical ideas and Grunge music from the Time Before stir something within that makes her feel alive for the first time in her sixteen years.

She wants more of it, but what starts out as an innocent prank turns into a life-or-death decision to accept her destiny or create a new one.

What if you had to lose everything—including your identity—to find out who you really are?