Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQE6P3TZPB8Z25CK5MYPFD

Rain hammered against the green neon sign above The Raven’s Nest, turning Soho’s cobblestones into a mirror of fractured light. Detective Harlow Quinn stood in the mouth of an alley opposite the bar, her spine pressed to wet brick, watching the door. Eighteen years on the force had taught her patience, but the leather watch on her left wrist felt heavier than usual, its worn strap drinking in the downpour. Three years to the day since Morris had died in circumstances the coroner had described as “unexplained cardiac event” and she’d described as bullshit. The file was still open on her desk, dog-eared, whispering. The door opened. Tomás Herrera stepped out, olive skin pale under the streetlamps, short curls plastered to his skull. Even from forty yards, Quinn saw the glint of the Saint Christopher medallion against his chest and the pale track of the scar snaking along his left forearm as he rolled down his sleeves. Former paramedic. Current criminal. He paused, scanning the street with the hyper-awareness of prey animals, and then he ran. Quinn was moving before her conscious mind caught up, her 5'9" frame cutting through the rain with military precision. Her boots struck the pavement in tight, controlled bursts, salt-and-pepper hair—cropped close to her skull for exactly this reason—shedding water in flicking droplets. She’d been watching the clique for months, and Herrera was the soft spot, the one who treated their wounded, who carried guilt in the slope of his shoulders. He was fast, though—twenty-nine years old, long legs, and he knew these streets like prayer. He darted left onto Wardour Street, weaving between late-night revelers who stumbled from curry houses. Quinn followed, her sharp jaw set, her breath steady despite the hammer in her chest. She was forty-one, not twenty-five, but she compensated with economy. No wasted motion. Her left arm pistoned, the leather watchband chafing against her wristbone as she pumped up speed. Herrera glanced back. Their eyes met—warm brown against her own dark irises—and then he vaulted a railing and dropped onto the access road running parallel to the Tottenham Court Road construction site. Quinn swore under her breath and followed, her palms slapping cold metal, the impact jarring up through her knees as she landed. Mud squelched. The smell of diesel and wet earth choked the air. He was heading north. The chase narrowed into the service alleys behind Camden High Street, where the streetlamps were broken teeth of sodium light. Quinn’s thighs burned. She could hear his breathing now, ragged, and the clink of the medallion bouncing against his sternum. He was making for the old Underground entrance—the one boarded up after the 1980s expansion, marked only by a mosaic sign half-covered in graffiti. He knew she wouldn’t follow him down there. That’s what the look back had been. A dare. Quinn reached the entrance as Herrera pried loose a plywood sheet and slid into the dark maw of the abandoned station. She stood at the threshold, rain drilling the pavement behind her, her chest heaving. The blackness inside smelled wrong—not like urine and dust, which would be natural for a derelict Tube station, but like ozone and burning sage, like copper pennies held under the tongue. Her hand went to her watch. Morris had died in a place like this. Not here exactly, but somewhere that smelled of this wrongness. She’d found him in a warehouse in Whitechapel, eyes wide, skin marked with patterns the forensic team couldn’t explain, his mouth open in a scream that had frozen solid in his throat. She’d never understood what he’d stumbled into. Only that it had killed him. Below, she heard footsteps scrambling down the escalator shafts—the old wooden ones, rotted through in places. She stepped inside. The darkness enveloped her like a fever. Her eyes adjusted slowly, picking out phosphorescent glows that had no business existing in a decommissioned station. The air grew warmer, humid, fungal. As she descended the fixed ladder—escalator steps long since removed—her fingers found graffiti that wasn’t graffiti at all, but gouges in the concrete, symbols that made her teeth ache. At the platform level, she crouched behind a crumbling pillar and looked out. The Veil Market. It shouldn’t have fit. The space yawned wider than the architecture allowed, archways receding into shadows that moved independently of the light sources—glowing orbs drifting between stalls made of scrap metal and velvet. Figures haggled in whispers over vials of swirling liquid, over bundles of herbs that smoked in the damp air, over information traded on slips of paper that seemed to burn as they were handed over. The bone token requirement was visible at the entrance arch: a skeletal hand carved from ivory or actual bone, where visitors pressed small, yellowed discs to gain passage. Herrera stood at a stall near the tracks, his scar visible as he pushed up his sleeve to accept something small and glass from a vendor whose face was hidden beneath a deep hood. He looked scared. Not of Quinn. Of what he was handling. Quinn’s hand drifted to her hip, to the service weapon holstered there. The weight was familiar, comforting, real. But the market wasn’t real. Not in the way her training had prepared her for. This was the world Morris had found. The supernatural substrate beneath London’s skin that she’d dismissed as trauma-induced hallucination in the witness reports she’d read, trying to solve his death. Her watch ticked, audible in the sudden stillness. A vendor turned, eyes gleaming with too many pupils, sensing her heat, her pulse, her solidity. Herrera looked up. Saw her. His expression wasn’t surprised. It was resigned. He held up the small vial—something amber, something that moved against gravity—and shook his head slowly. Warning her. Or begging her. Quinn stepped out from behind the pillar. Her boots crunched on debris that might have been rat bones or something older. The air pressure changed, pressing against her eardrums. She was uninvited, untokened, armed, and alone forty feet beneath Camden in a place that moved every full moon to avoid exactly this kind of intrusion. She thought of Morris’s body in the morgue, the incomprehensible burns on his fingertips. She walked toward the archway. Toward the bone token gate. Toward Herrera, and whatever truth had killed her partner. The decision was already made. It had been made three years ago, standing over a body that science couldn’t explain. Quinn reached into her jacket, withdrew her badge—not bone, but metal, stamped with the authority of the Metropolitan Police—and stepped into the market.