The train left London behind with little resistance.
Phillip felt it in the way his shoulders loosened as the city thinned, in the way the noise retreated from layered urgency to linear rhythm. Steel on steel. Steam venting in predictable intervals. The countryside returned not suddenly, but in stages—longer stretches between buildings, wider fields, hedgerows softened by winter growth.
He watched without impatience.
Across the aisle, a man slept with his hat pulled low. Two seats ahead, a woman read a folded paper slowly, lips moving as she traced the lines. No one spoke to Phillip. No one recognized him here. He preferred it that way.
The poles reappeared outside the window, first sporadically, then with familiar regularity. The wire ran alongside the track, dipping and rising with the land, indifferent to Parliament and dinners and arguments framed as policy.
Phillip followed it with his eyes until the motion lulled him into stillness.
