Some characters speculate that this preference is due to their need for sadistic gratification: given that the Crossed are so insane that they will mutilate themselves voluntarily, it isn't as fun to torture fellow Crossed as it is to torture uninfected, frightened victims. His father always wanted to learn about everything, especially reading and writing, and to know the meaning of everything. But after going through hell and high water (almost literally), there is a new plot development that keeps them from being together. Crossed women who have given birth are, however, gleefully willing to murder their own newborn babies. Soon after, the Crossed had overrun most of Yorkshire and other parts of northern England and Scotland, with smaller outbreaks appearing further south.

D., Crossed numbers began to drop significantly, and eventually regular humans once again outnumber the infected, though small family-groups of Crossed continued to inhabit some areas, breeding new generations by refraining from killing their young. The plot follows Cassia and Ky's respective journeys to find each other again in the outer provinces as they begin to learn of a growing rebellion against the Society.The second narrative goes 75,000 years in the past, where a group of early humans, led by the young hunter Lion, are captured by the "Blood Men" ( Homo tortor) after their village is wiped out; they are subsequently brought to the Blood Men's "city of cities" to fight in an arena against men and giant beasts that the Blood Men had collected. In the Crossed: Dead or Alive webcomic, the characters discuss a collapsed bridge, and speculate it was detonated by the U. In comics by Simon Spurrier, this is attributed to some quality in the infected or their circumstances before infection; it's suggested in one issue that the disease doesn't always take proper hold in a "broken brain".

I was hoping that there would be more action and drama, and more depth to the characters, however Crossed lacked the stuff I was wanting, more severely than Matched. Depending on the story, it took anywhere from a week to a mere matter of hours for the infection to spread across the globe. The rate at which a person becomes infected ranges from several hours to a matter of minutes, and once infected there is no turning back. In March 2013 Crossed: Dead Or Alive, an upcoming series of live action webisodes written and directed by Ennis, was announced. As his guilt grows and rumors of other "Super-Crossed" reach him (featuring a cameo of the twins from the Homo Superior arc), Oliver realizes that Smokey is far too dangerous to leave alive; especially when the Crossed reads his journal and assaults a nuclear base for its weapons.She falls in with The Livers, three survivors that have formed a close bond despite their mutual insanity and occasional cannibalistic tendencies, and finds a new way to survive. Matched was chosen as one of YALSA's 2011 Teens' Top Ten and named as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Children's Books of 2010. In a flashback, Ky reveals that his father was a member of the Rising and was in line to be a pilot. In The Fatal Englishman, the main characters note that they have never seen this trick succeed in the five years they survived since the outbreak; on the other hand, the survivors seen at the beginning of The Quisling attribute their survival to the "fake cross" tactic, although they admit that they weren't sure if it would've fooled the Crossed for more than a passing glance (it should also be noted that they carried parts of the dismembered corpse whose blood they used for the fake crosses with them, which may or may not have "enhanced" the illusion to the Crossed).