Family is an outlawed concept. Friendships are forbidden. All procreation is artificial and government-controlled. Hazel, a factory-born military driver, accepts these rules as necessities for human survival after the Wipe Out. But deep inside, she is haunted by a loneliness she can't fully understand. When her assistant, Salt, dies in mysterious circumstances, clutching a photograph of what appears to be a mother and son, Hazel is assigned to Military Intelligence and ordered to track down the woman and boy. They are an anomaly - a breach of the strict Moral Code: No woman should ever know her own child. No child should ever meet his mother. Hazel enlists the help of military cadet Lake. Lake challenges everything Hazel has always believed, and they become close friends despite the rules.Their search leads them deep into a wasteland, where the people they meet force Hazel to re-examine the world: People like Zac, who couldn't be brainwashed; the young cadets risking their lives for the sake of their love for each other; and Ethan, the fugitive Psychoscientist who reveals everything he knows about a secret government research lab that's experimenting on healthy humans by infecting them with deadly viruses. Hazel agrees to help Zac and Ethan expose the human experiments. She leads Lake and the cadets in a series of daring raids, gun battles, and escapes, with government forces in hot pursuit.