Shadows and Screams

London never needed saving. It needed surviving.

The city was always full of ghosts. Wren Locke just happened to be one of them — a phantom thief who moved through shadows and left nothing but locked doors and missing valuables in his wake. Known in the city's criminal underworld as the Latchkey Ghost, he had one simple rule: never get involved.

Then the world ended.

One night, mid-job, a signal tore across the city's skyline. PRIORITY CALL OMEGA. All registered powered individuals report to PENUMBRA. A few hours later, London's heroes answered that call. Most of them never came back.

What came back instead was something else entirely.

Now the streets belong to the infected. The ordinary — the unlucky, the unregistered, the unseen — wander in hollow silence, mindless and unreachable, the people they once were simply gone. But those who carried power before the fall are something far worse: twisted, purposeful, and terrifyingly aware. The Cape Coalition has gone silent. The city's grid fractures and pulses like a wounded nervous system. And somewhere beneath it all, something is still broadcasting, still watching, still thinking.

Wren never wanted to be a protector — but ghosts don't get to stay uninvolved forever. Especially when they're carrying something they can't explain: a chip, stolen before the world broke, small and unmarked and quietly wrong in ways that grow harder to ignore. It shouldn't matter anymore, not with London on its knees and the dead outnumbering the living. But something encoded inside it doesn't belong to any system he recognises — and it seems to know far more about what happened than anyone still breathing.

Shadows and Screams is a dark, electric noir set in a near-future London where the superhero age didn't end with a bang — it ended with a silence that no one could explain. And somewhere in that silence, a mystery is waiting to be found.