Never Fade

Never Fade is the second novel in the Darkest Minds trilogy by Alexandra Bracken, published in 2013 and set in an America where an epidemic has killed most of the children and left many of the survivors with dangerous abilities.

Ruby has survived by keeping her talents secret, and her country has spent years deciding what to do with young people like her. She joins the Children's League, a revolutionary organisation that offers information about the epidemic in exchange for her cooperation, and finds that the League has its own plans for what somebody with her abilities can be used for. The novel follows her work inside that organisation, the people she is told to trust, and the information she is trying to recover about the disease that destroyed her family and her country. It is a book about alliances that are made for practical reasons and cannot be walked away from once they are made.

Bracken writes a dystopian series about children who have been classified, feared and put to use, and this second volume asks how much of herself Ruby is willing to trade for answers.