Stranger Protocol

Kade held a gun to Maya Reeves’s throat and called her by her dead mother’s secret codename. Then he whispered, “Your mother is alive. You have three days to find her.” Maya has survived the quarantine zone by forging papers and trusting no one—but Kade has the medicine she needs, the files she thought were destroyed, and knowledge of her past that only the dead should possess. Forced to escort him through three military checkpoints, she must choose between protecting the stranger who keeps saving her life and killing the man who may have ruined it. With every mile, Kade reveals another buried secret, until Maya can no longer tell whether he is her mother’s final messenger—or the trap designed to destroy her. At the first checkpoint, Kade gives her one impossible choice: cross the line with him and risk learning the truth, or leave him behind and let her mother die again.