Warcross
Warcross is Marie Lu's 2017 young-adult science-fiction novel, the first of a duology. Set a few years in our own future, the book is built around Warcross, a global virtual-reality game played by hundreds of millions of people through neural-link headsets and contested at the highest level by professional teams competing in a yearly international championship. Emika Chen is a nineteen-year-old New York hacker and freelance bounty hunter who tracks down players betting illegally on the game while drowning in her late father's debts. During the chaotic opening ceremony of the championship in Tokyo, she glitches herself accidentally into the game, in front of a worldwide audience. Within hours she receives a private call from Hideo Tanaka, the brilliant, reclusive young creator of Warcross, who hires her as a wildcard player on a championship team and gives her a quieter assignment: locate a dangerous figure named Zero, who is exploiting the game from inside.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Warcross
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Eighteen-year-old Manhattan bounty hunter Emika Chen lives in an East Village walk-up and pays the bills hunting Warcross gamblers for the NYPD.
Yes. Marie Lu's Warcross duology is Warcross and Wildcard.
No. It is YA with a romantic subplot at fade-to-black level.
No. It is YA with a romantic subplot at fade-to-black level.
Warcross was written by Marie Lu, published in 2017 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
Warcross is 416 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Warcross takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Warcross is a standalone novel by Marie Lu, not part of a series.
Warcross is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.