PLAYER ZERO

Twenty-two-year-old Zara Calloway is standing in a hospital room watching her mother die when it happens. Her mother — comatose for forty-seven days, declared beyond recovery — opens her eyes. Grabs Zara's wrist. Delivers a warning: Don't let them hollow you out. Then flatlines. For real this time. Before Zara can process a single second of grief, text materializes in her vision — clean, cold, and impossible: PLAYER DESIGNATION: NULL-001. YOU HAVE BEEN DRAFTED. Zara is now a Player in the Verdict Protocol — an invisible, deadly game run by a god-like entity called the Summoner who conscripts human beings and forces them to complete missions: survival trials, dungeon dives, battle royales, and worse. Players who refuse are voided. Players who fail are killed. No one has ever broken their contract. She has twenty-four hours to complete her first mission or cease to exist. Armed with nothing but a Tier F ability called RECALL — the power to replay anything she's witnessed with perfect clarity — and a mind that never stops looking for the exit, Zara fights her way up from the lowest designation ever recorded in the history of the Protocol. But the deeper she gets, the more wrong it all feels. Her drafting wasn't random. Her mother's warning wasn't an accident. And Dorian Voss — cold, brilliant, infuriating Dorian Voss — keeps appearing at the exact intersection of every secret she's trying to uncover. She was drafted to play the game. The Summoner intends for her to replace him