Krista Warner is a young political journalist in Washington DC, who knows there’s something terribly wrong about America in 2039. Determined to find a peace apart from the mad buzz of the capital, she ignores the warning signs - but then a covert political source gives her clues to a deadly conspiracy that intends nothing less than the extinction of half of America’s people. As she uncovers even more awful and deadly truths—among them an order for her execution—she escapes the city, seeking some place to hide. What she doesn’t realize is that the government knows she has proof the vice president ordered the murder of 75 million Americans, and they’ll never let her go.

Pursued by federal assassins and the deadly Neovirus, Krista and her young friend Ada Lang flee across the country for the safety of California, staying under the cover of night and the shadows, aided by the poor the government has marked for extermination. As she tries to wriggle from the government’s grasp, she fans the flames of growing populist unrest. However, she soon learns that she’s not only waving the flag of that revolution—she’s become its leader.

As the nation’s government begins to collapse, weakened by a worsening currency crisis and growing urban rioting, Krista discovers that the power to deliver the fatal blow to the vice president’s plans had been by her side the entire time. The one hitch—it’s hard to strike a blow for freedom when you’re exhausted by the hunt, from the day and night pursuit on land and from the sky.

Intrigue swirls around Washington as the president dies—and assassination is suspected—and the murderous vice president assumes the nation’s highest office as a powerful religious sect plots to wrest the office from him. They’re not the new president’s only challenge, though: now he has to fight an unlikely rebel army as well.

After crossing into California, Krista discovers that her executioners can reach her even there. With Neovirus on the border, though, she has no time to fight back or play the rebel leader; she and Ada have to save California’s thirty million people before they can save themselves. As they work to turn back the tide of the virus, though, the California Republic declares itself a free and independent nation, thrusting the reluctant Anarchista into the front lines of a civil war.

War, love, and redemption weave together in the epic conclusion to The Continental Divide, as the revolution rises at last, the nation is riven by uprisings from coast to coast, and the land trembles as the rebels battle the remnants of the federal government for the independence of the California Republic.