Every Fire Started Underground

Deep beneath the streets of Chicago, the ground has begun to burn.

When senior structural inspector Malik Vance discovers melting steel rails and superheated concrete ninety feet below the Loop, his warnings are dismissed by transit officials as a minor steam leak. But as automated sensors systematically fail and the concrete itself begins to fracture, Malik realizes the city is sitting on a subterranean furnace.

For five years, Malik has lived in the shadow of a previous tunnel collapse, isolated by his obsession to uncover the truth and estranged from his daughter, Maya, a transit dispatcher. Now, as massive, unexplained fires erupt beneath major metropolitan areas worldwide, the two must set aside years of silence to survive. Together with geophysicist Dr. Lin Wei, they discover that a highly classified, deep-ground energy project has triggered a catastrophic thermal runaway in the earth's bedrock.

With the military enforcing a lethal quarantine and preparing to seal the zone by collapsing the subterranean network, Malik, Maya, and Lin are trapped inside the failing city. Their only escape lies through a nineteenth-century granite water tunnel beneath Lake Michigan—but the lake itself has begun to drain into the deep tectonic fracture, building a pressurized steam dome that threatens to blow the entire basin apart.

Every Fire Started Underground is a disaster conspiracy thriller about the fragile structures we build, the secrets we bury, and the trust required to survive when the ground beneath our feet begins to burn.