What if the summer after high school wasn't the beginning of freedom—but the end of everything?

Adam Wesley and his friends have one thing on their minds: a carefree summer of camping, parties, and the first real taste of independence. The crumbling world around them—mass unemployment, a collapsed economy, rampant crime—is someone else's problem.

Then they encounter a bot.

A reconnaissance robot, fast and lethal, leaves one of the friends fighting for their life. When Adam and the others race back to the city for help, they find something worse waiting: the streets are overrun. Martial law. Transition camps. People loaded onto buses and taken away. Not all of them come back.

Desperate and hunted, the friends go underground. In the maintenance tunnels beneath the city, they find Skip—a brilliant, eccentric hacker who has built a hidden refuge called the Nest, a Faraday cage invisible to the machines above. Using scavenged technology—dial-up modems, bulletin board systems, anything the bots can't detect—they begin to organize.

What starts as survival becomes something more. Without meaning to, Adam and his friends plant the seeds of a resistance that will reshape the war for humanity's future.

Of Courage and Sacrifice is the first book in the Bot Trilogy—a young adult dystopian science fiction series about friendship, survival, and finding courage when the world falls apart. If you love page-turning action, resourceful teen protagonists, and stories where ordinary people rise to face impossible odds, this is your next binge-read.

Book 1 of 3 in the Bot Trilogy. Followed by The Summer Winds of War. Also available in audiobook and paperback.