Trust Is Scarce Here

In a city that edits people, every alliance is a bet.

Not a slogan. A cost. Techno-Synth does not need your loyalty if it can rewrite your past. What it cannot buy cheap is the person who still chooses a side when the cameras are already listening.

That is the weather of Shadows of the Forgotten. Book One does not soft-land rebellion. It earns it.

A bet, not a brochure

Hard dystopian Sci-Fi fails when found family arrives pre-packaged. I wanted the opposite. Allen Mercer wakes with nothing that belongs to him — no proof, no map, no safe name for the face in the glass. Mia Turner does not hand him a brochure. She offers a war. Between those two doors is the question this post keeps closed on purpose: who do you trust when the city can file you, erase you, and sell the blank as weather?

I will not name every seat at that table. You meet them when Allen does. Trust stays expensive because it can fail. Provisional. Real because it costs.

Rebellion is not a costume

Unity. Safety. Order. The billboards never blink. The street still refuses the script. Rebellion, in that light, is not a costume change. It is a cut wire and a bet that someone else will not sell you back to the regime before morning.

Plenty of futures put cameras on poles and call it tension. Book One puts the lens closer than that — close enough that identity itself becomes the currency. If the system can strip who you were, every ally is a risk. That pressure stays on the page. This post does not explain the system. Explaining is how mystery dies.

Walk in through the first chapters

If you want the cold open — the blank, the bet, the city that treats memory like contraband — the first chapters unlock free on the site. Confirm once. Decide after you feel who Allen trusts first.

• Free opening chapters: Free opening chapters
• Shadows of the Forgotten is available now from the site buy links when you want the full book

Somewhere in the bones of the old world, a resistance is already moving.
Trust is scarce here.

Book One earns the war.
It does not soft-land it.