Sixteen-year-old Reid thinks life is back to normal. His sister Lucy pulls herself together and cuts him free from a year of foster care. She promises to take care of him, that her new boss and her new life are what they both needed to start again. Until Reid is taken in the middle of the night, dumped in a wild stretch of forest far from home with no idea why he is there. Lost and afraid, he learns to run from the hunters who prowl the darkness, their only pleasure chasing down kids like him. And killing them.

Reid isn’t sure if he’s grateful to be alive. He’s managed to save a small group of kids from the hunters, but only by trapping them all underground without food or water or a way out. If starvation doesn’t kill them, thirst will. Still, they are out of the hunter’s reach and that’s something. Reid refuses to stop trying, even when the kids find out they aren’t alone in the mine after all.

Reid is tired of running, tired of hiding. It’s time to take the fight to the enemy. No more picking the kids off one by one, wearing them down with terror and starvation. He is ready to act and so are his friends. But something is changing inside Reid, an effect of the strange dust the hunters dissolve into when they die, and he worries he is turning into one of the very creatures he despises.

Reid has joined the hunters. But even now he is unable to avoid being pursued. Caught between the army and Dr. Lund's mercenary forces, he is made to hunt under orders or be killed. Now his only hope of escaping slavery means trusting the very man who condemned him to this life in the first place.