In a future London reshaped by catastrophe, a teenage boy named Harvey Hunter prepares for a seemingly ordinary morning with his father and brother in the underground station. His younger brother Alex is restless, full of nervous questions and imaginary adventures. Their father is distant but calm, while their mother keeps a fragile warmth around them. The setting is claustrophobic but stable, a society in decay, not yet in collapse.
As the family boards a decommissioned Tube train, Harvey reflects on the rituals of safety that have become routine. But when a siren sounds, one never meant to be heard in their lifetime, order dissolves into chaos. The station erupts with panic. People scream. Families separate. Harvey loses sight of his father and brother. The scream of the siren merges with that of the crowd, and Harvey, stunned and disoriented, is swept into the unknown.
The narrative jumps twenty years forward.
Now an adult, Harvey lives in North Greenwich, a subterranean enclave ruled with quiet control by a man named Adam Stewart. The community survives on mushrooms grown in waste, pigs kept in tunnel-side pens, and power scavenged from solar panels above the ruins. Society is functional, but cold, militarized, and brittle.
Harvey has become part of this order, but he remains deeply marked by what he lost. As the chapter closes, he is summoned by Stewart through an unusual chain of command. Something is changing, perhaps again. Harvey prepares to face it, but his mind lingers on a single, fading hope: that some fragment of the past, his family, his brother, might still be within reach.
London Tube 2033 