Wild Children by Hannah Ross

Post-war America is divided. Most people live in the crowded but safe haven of the Boundary. Outside are the wild lands, abandoned for more than a century due to post-war pollution. Here live the outcasts, the damaged, the unwanted by those within the Boundary, leading a precarious existence.

Rebecca stumbles upon a dark conspiracy when she discovers the son she was forced to give up no longer leads a safe but bleak life as a ward of the state but was shipped outside the Boundary with a group of other preteens and left to fend for himself or die.

Driven by anger and grief, she begins to learn secrets – dangerous secrets like what the population control laws are really for, what happens when human rights are stripped away, and how far corrupt and greedy leaders are prepared to go to enhance their wealth and gain the secret of eternal life.