Hugo shone the torch beam over the walls, and the shaft of light revealed a small metal hatch in the side of the Tube tunnel.

“This must be it,” said Audrey. “I guess you open it with this wheel thing,” she tapped her fingernails on the round metal structure. “Hugo, you wanna get started on this?”

He slid the giant backpack off and stepped up to the steering wheel of a handle. He grasped it forcefully, pulled the wheel with the weight of his whole body, and it slowly began to budge.

The hatch opened with a heavy clunk, revealing behind it another rounded tunnel, smaller and metaller. Jessa volunteered to go first and took the torch from Hugo, and quickly realised she couldn’t quite stand at her full height. Hugo and Dr Mortlock looked particularly uncomfortable as they contorted their tallness to fit in the tunnel.

Hugo pulled the hatch door closed with a slam, and they were sealed into the next section of their journey.

Where the ground of the Tube tunnel had absorbed most of their footstep thuds, the new tunnel amplified each step with an inescapable chime. A count down. Counting down to something inevitably strange and strangely inevitable.

The tunnel came to a stark end as it opened perpendicularly into another thoroughfare. The intersection was a mixture of old and new, as the modernity of the dark metal tunnel gave way to an old brick passageway, narrower indeed but tall enough to stand in, and smelling of damp and dust and age.

“We make a right turn here,” Hugo consulted his notes.

Stirring up dust with every cautious step, they all steadied their traipse by running hands along the inside of the passageway walls. They scuffled and turned, right, then left, then right, then left again, then right again, in a bubble of illumination that moved with and around them.

The brick-lined beige corridors reminded Jessa of a video game she’d played as a child; a first-person romp through Medieval times that made her feel like she was transcending worlds and time. Now she felt like she was transcending real life. Transcending. Escaping. Protecting.

Eventually, the passageway came to a welcome end and opened into the vastness of the underground bunker. They all stretched away the hunches and compression of tunnel claustrophobia.

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“Whoa, this is gigantic,” Flynn observed as Jessa cast the light all around. “Why is this even here?”

“A lot of bunkers like this were built in the event that people would need to be evacuated underground, like in a nuclear fallout,” Audrey explained. “There’s a lot more than you’d think, all over the world, actually. I’m not sure why it was built into this church specifically, though. And St Paul’s predates any nuclear power, so that couldn’t possibly have been a factor in its design.”

“So you have no idea why this is here,” Jessa scoffed.

“Well, I don’t know for definite. I could hypothesise—”

“You mean you could guess. But you don’t know.”

“Jessa, please. Not now.”

They moved curiously and carefully through the caverns of the bunker, travelling through rooms and around corners until there was only one possible way out. A skinny stairwell took them upward and outward, spiralling in steps of stone. Jessa took some solace in knowing the underground would soon be deep beneath them once again.

“It’s blocked,” said Flynn. “We’re trapped.”

Hugo tapped on the object hindering their exit, and it sounded hollow and heavy.

“Flynn, you want to help me with this?” he said.

“Really?”

“Sure, why not?”

Flynn shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t often get asked to help move heavy things.”

“You look perfectly strong to me,” Hugo said. “Here, just do what I do. Lean into it with your body, keep your knees slightly bent, and keep your back straight. That’s all there is to it. Ready? One…two…three…go!”

Hugo and Flynn pushed against the timber with all their might, and slowly it began to budge.

“Keep pushing, Flynn!”

“It’s too heavy!”

Jessa handed the torch to Audrey and joined them, pressing her weight as hard as she could into the object.

It moved a little more, announcing their arrival to the other side with the conspicuous screech of heaviness pushing across bare floor.

As soon as the gap was large enough, Hugo snuck through, armed and poised, pointing the gun in any direction that someone could be lurking.

“Clear,” he announced, and Jessa, Flynn, Audrey and Felicia Mortlock exited the secret passageway and joined him in a new room.

It was an old office, still equipped but lacking signs of life. They inspected other rooms along the corridor and found much of the same. Abandonment under broken lights.

“Hello?” Rachel’s voice crackled in Jessa and Hugo’s ears.

“Rachel!” Jessa said.

“Hey Jessa, are you all okay?”

“We’re fine. We just got inside.”

“I thought as much. You just appeared on my satellite map again. It looks like you’re still underground, though. Are you in the main building?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Hugo joined in the conversation, creeping into an empty room with a gun drawn. “These rooms look like they haven’t been used for decades.”

“Clear!” he called to the others.

“Over here,” Flynn waved. “There are stairs leading up.”

They departed the deserted corridor and ascended from the bowels of the building. Their eyes gulped at the brightness in hearty, deliberate blinks. A heavy door closed behind them with a click, locking them out of their entrance and giving them no choice but to continue.