The Kill Order

The Kill Order is a young adult novel by the American writer James Dashner, published in 2012. It is a prequel to The Maze Runner, set thirteen years before the events of the first book, and it fills in the history of the catastrophe that the other novels take for granted.

The story opens in New York City with the solar flares, which devastate the planet and leave the survivors to work out what to do next. Mark, Trina and the small group they escape with are ordinary people who happen to be in the wrong place and who get out because they move quickly.

The virus changes the terms of the problem. It spreads among the survivors, it removes whatever it was that kept people from acting on their worst impulses, and it turns neighbours into immediate dangers. Mark and Trina believe there is a way to protect the people who are left, and the novel follows their attempt to find it in a country where what remains of civil order is being organised by people with their own priorities, and where a person's survival may be worth less to those people than their death.