The Fever Code

The Fever Code is a novel by the American writer James Dashner, published on 27 September 2016, and the second prequel to his Maze Runner series.

The book is set before the events of the earlier volumes and after the collapse described in The Kill Order. A plague known as the Flare has spread across the world, governments have failed, and an organisation called WICKED, working on a cure, has begun gathering children who appear to have some resistance to it. The story follows the children as they are taken from their families, given new names and put to work testing the systems that will become the maze, and it explains how the organisation justified what it was doing to the people in its care. Dashner tells it from inside the project rather than from the maze, so the reader sees the decisions that built the world the earlier books take place in, and the novel answers questions that the first volumes leave open, including how the maze came to be built at all.