In the depths of North Greenwich station, Harvey meets with station manager Adam Stewart after hours. The atmosphere is tense and subdued. The station appears still, yet Harvey senses something beneath the silence, something watching. The meeting begins with quiet ritual, but Stewart quickly moves to the real reason for calling him: two couriers, Adrian and Mason, sent with an important diplomatic message, have not returned.
Stewart explains the stakes, this wasn’t just a personal mission, but a vote that could shift the fragile balance of power among London’s surviving underground stations. The vote was intended for a summit at Green Park, meant to establish a formal alliance, economic coordination, and shared governance. Without their vote, the entire proposal risks collapse. And more than that, Stewart suspects the vote may have been intercepted.
As Stewart and Harvey speak, layers of the political tension unfold: Salim al-Kadir, the de facto ruler of the west of the London Tube, has built a covert power structure that threatens to splinter the Tube into rival factions. Stewart fears Salim is preparing for secession, not cooperation. Worse, his regime operates through coercion, systematic extortion, armed control, and the silent dismantling of shared systems.
Meanwhile, Harvey is haunted by signs that something more dangerous may be rising from above. As scouts and smugglers have carved new paths into forbidden strata, there’s a risk that the deforms, warped, silent predators from the surface, might use these routes to descend. Stewart doesn’t speak it aloud, but Harvey knows: if those paths open too wide, it won’t be politics that ends the Tube, but something much older, much darker.
The chapter shifts to Adrian, who regains consciousness, bound and hooded, inside a silent rail vehicle. Two anonymous captors, one mocking, one wordless, escort him deeper into the tunnels. Adrian is disoriented, gripped by rage and confusion, with fragments of memory and mission slipping through his mind. As he struggles, he realizes the message he was carrying is likely gone, Mason’s fate unknown, and that he may be close to something irretrievable.
The chapter closes on a knife-edge: two threads, Harvey’s call to action, Adrian’s silent descent, unfold in parallel. Both are bound by silence, and the growing certainty that whatever is coming, it won’t be stopped by votes or treaties. The Tube is no longer stable. And the silence is no longer empty.
London Tube 2033 