Book Introduction

London did not perish in the flames of war, it was simply pushed inward.
In 2013, when nuclear clouds engulfed the capital, the few who didn’t burn in the first moments learned to breathe the darkness. The Tube tunnels became the gut of a new world, where each station grew into a separate organ, with its own laws, its own currency, and its own blade.

Twenty years later, beneath the dead city, the network of stations has become a precarious conglomerate of communities surviving on recycled oxygen and mutual suspicion. North Greenwich, one of the oldest underground colonies, maintains a fragile balance under the clear-headed leadership of Adam Stewart, but tensions are rising. Trade is shrinking, alliances are cracking, and the shadows of the Iron Legion, the new army of Salim al-Kadir, stretch ominously eastward.

Harvey Hunter, a seasoned scout and the station’s adopted son, carries within him an old fracture: the loss of his father and younger brother in the first hours of the cataclysm. Rescued by Stewart, he became one of the few capable of moving safely through the tunnels. When two couriers vanish en route to Canary Wharf, Harvey is recalled from the false peace of his routine.

Behind the disappearance lies more than mere delay: Stewart entrusts him with a direct mission, to reach Green Park and deliver a sealed message personally to the President of the Tube. But above, on the surface, in a London ravaged by radiation, deformities, and hostile silences, Harvey discovers the mission has already unraveled: the plan has changed. Alliances have collapsed. Power has shifted.

Back in the station, Stewart offers him a different path, a reconnaissance mission that will force him through stations buried in silence, in hunger, in lies, and in promises of total control. The journey, a full circle, will lead him once more to Green Park, but this time with a much heavier burden: not a vote, but a verdict.

There, Harvey receives what appears to be his final mission. An order that sends him beyond the tunnels, through the ruins of Buckingham Palace, into a capital that is dead yet still full of eyes, and then beyond fear, beyond personal purpose, towards a final objective no one dares speak aloud.

Caught between loyalty to Stewart, the silences that no one dares break, and the threat of a definitive rupture in the underground network, Harvey must decide what remains of a man when nothing around him belongs to humanity anymore.

Because in the Tube, death doesn’t always come from above, sometimes, it rises from within.