Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQE6P5W38F3FPQXMF0WA47

Rain hammered the city hard enough to blur the streetlights into smeared halos. Quinn’s boots slapped the slick pavement, water splashing up her trouser legs as she ran. “Suspect heading north on Parkway,” she barked into the radio, breath tight in her chest. “Male, dark hoodie, grey backpack. I am in foot pursuit.” Static crackled back; Control’s voice dissolved into useless hiss. Typical. Camden on a Thursday night, radios might as well be paperweights. She kept her eyes locked on the fleeing figure ahead, that grey backpack bouncing against his shoulders. He moved well—too well for a gutter kid. A quick, confident stride, constantly checking over his shoulder, spotting gaps before they opened. Professional. Or trained. He glanced back once, the sodium glow catching pale, angular features, wet hair plastered to his forehead. Rafi Haleem. He matched the file photo in her head exactly, minus the smug smirk: small-time runner turned go-between for bigger fish. The kind of little bastard people like to underestimate. The kind of little bastard who’d been seen going in and out of properties linked to the clique for the last six weeks. He’d stepped out of a Camden backstreet twenty minutes ago with that backpack, right after meeting with a man whose face never quite lined up on CCTV, like the pixels couldn’t settle. And when plainclothes officers tailed him, their car had simply…stopped. Electrics dead, engine humming, every system offline for twenty long, silent seconds until his silhouette disappeared into the crowd. Now it was just her, the rain, and Haleem’s pounding footsteps. He darted across the road, horns blaring as a black cab swerved, tyres hissing on wet tarmac. Quinn cut between parked cars, lungs burning, breath tasting of diesel and cold metal. Her damp shirt clung to her back beneath her coat. She felt the familiar awareness of her body: the measured cadence of her stride, the weight of her Glock sitting heavy at her hip, the worn leather band of her watch digging into her wrist with each swing. Forty-one, not twenty. But she could still run. Haleem juked between a cluster of umbrellas, scattering drunk students with takeout boxes and glitter smeared down their cheeks. He vaulted a council bollard like he’d rehearsed it and darted into a side street that sloped down from the main drag. Quinn swore under her breath and followed. The narrow road dropped away from Camden’s neon and noise into older brick, the kind with soot cooked into it from another century. Rain here fell darker, fewer streetlights reaching this far. Her breath came louder in her ears. Water pooled in the dips of uneven paving stones, reflecting thin strips of white from high, barred windows. Haleem was ahead, still running hard, shoes slapping. He veered suddenly right through a gap in the wall Quinn had never noticed in eighteen years of walking this city—an alley crushed between two old office blocks, half-choked with wheelie bins and a rusting skip. He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t slow. Quinn did. Instinct. The alley smelled wrong. Not just rot and old oil, but something like hot pennies and damp earth. Metallic. Familiar in some way she didn’t want to think about. Three years ago, under a different sky, different rain, DS Morris had gone down an alley that smelled like that. Her chest tightened, a ghost of another weight at her side—Morris’s shoulder bumping hers as they ran, his laughter in her ear, the sharp bark of it like he was daring the world to try him. Then the silence that followed. Quinn pushed on. She could think about Morris later. Or never. Never was working fine. She squeezed between the bins, one shoulder brushing cold corrugated metal, the other gritty brick. Her coat snagged on a piece of twisted wire; she wrenched it free with a curse. The alley narrowed, then widened again to reveal a black iron stairwell dropping away, fenced off by a tall, padlocked gate crusted with rust. Flaking white letters on a rotting board read: UNDERGROUND STATION – CLOSED. Haleem was at the gate. He didn’t touch the padlock. He reached through the bars instead, hand closing around something Quinn couldn’t see. There was a dull scrape—a metallic grind that made her teeth ache—and the gate shuddered. The chain slithered to the ground as if something had passed through it rather than undone it. The padlock hung there, still locked. He didn’t look back this time. He pushed the gate and slipped through, taking the stairs two at a time, grey backpack dancing. “Quinn,” she whispered, voice ragged, forcing air deep into her lungs. “Move.” She caught the gate before it swung shut. It was colder than it had any right to be. The metal burned her palm with a chill that bit through the damp leather of her glove. The stairwell dropped into darkness. A thin ribbon of light glowed at the bottom, pulsing faintly like breath. Sound welled up from below, muffled by distance: a low thrum, not quite voices, not quite machinery. She hesitated just long enough to tap her radio again, thumb hard on the transmit. “Control, this is DI Quinn. I’m at a disused station, alley off Parkway near the rail bridge. In pursuit of suspect Haleem. I’m going underground. Repeat, underground. If you don’t hear from me in ten, send units.” Static. A warble of interference. No human voice. Of course. She checked her watch. 21:17. She’d give herself until 21:27. Ten minutes to be smart enough not to end up like Morris. Then she started down. The air cooled with each step, city smells peeling away layer by layer: fried food, exhaust, wet concrete. What replaced them was older. Damp stone. Stale dust. A faint iron tang that curled at the back of her throat. The stairwell walls were tiled in that old Transport for London cream, cracked and greened with age. Someone had painted over the old signage, but faint letters still bled through: CAMD…N… The tiles glistened in the light of her phone torch, every droplet of condensed moisture catching it like tiny mirrors. Her footsteps changed: from slap on wet asphalt to hollow clank on metal, then muffled thuds as she hit the bottom. The faint glow resolved into a smear of yellowish light leaking out from beneath a half-rolled metal shutter ahead, just beyond the old ticket barriers. The barriers were frozen mid-gesture, one arm up, one down, like someone had hit pause on the world. Haleem was nowhere in sight. Quinn’s heart knocked against her ribs. She moved forward, slower now, weight balanced on the balls of her feet. Her right hand hovered near her holster. The metal shutter ahead hummed faintly, the vibration travelling up through her boots. Light flickered at its edges, not quite steady, like fire viewed through frosted glass. She stepped around the ticket barrier and froze. The shutter wasn’t just a shutter. Etched into the metal, in lines so fine she’d missed them at first, was a circle of symbols. Not letters. Curving strokes, dots, tiny sharp angles that seemed to shift if she looked at them too directly. They formed a ring around a central indentation, just at chest height. It looked like it wanted something. A key, maybe. Or— A disc. Small, palm-sized. Bone. She knew that shape. She’d seen impressions of it in photographic evidence from two separate scenes. Once in the scorched floorboards of a Dalston squat. Once pressed deep into the skin at the back of a dead woman’s neck, no bruising, no break in the flesh, just the mark as if the bone had remembered it. Her stomach turned. She licked rain from her lips and wished it burned like whisky. Something moved to her right. Quinn pivoted, hand on the butt of her pistol, adrenaline sharpening everything. A man stepped out from behind a derelict ticket booth. Hands raised, palms empty. “Easy,” he said. His accent was Spanish—soft Andalusian vowels, a twist of Seville. “Don’t shoot. Please. That would be…unnecessary.” He was late twenties, maybe. Olive skin gleaming faintly with sweat or damp, dark curls cropped short. He wore a dark hoodie under a battered leather jacket, jeans, trainers. A small silver medallion on a chain winked at his throat, catching the flicker from the shutter—Saint Christopher, if Quinn’s Catholic grandmother hadn’t lied to her. A faint scar tracked the length of his left forearm, pale against his skin, disappearing under his sleeve. “Hands where I can see them,” Quinn said anyway, voice steady. “Keep them up. Step forward. Slowly.” He obeyed, two careful paces, warm brown eyes never leaving her face. He moved like someone very aware of how fast things could go wrong. “You’re Detective Quinn,” he said. Not asked. Stated. The fine hairs along the back of her neck prickled. “That supposed to impress me? Turn around. Face the wall.” “I don’t have a weapon,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “My name is Tomás Herrera. I’m a medic.” The name landed like a file thudding onto her desk. She knew it. Saw, for a heartbeat, a printout: NHS disciplinary hearing, license revoked. Gave unauthorized treatment to John Doe in an alley off Old Street. Patient later disappeared from morgue before post-mortem. Her finger tightened slightly on the trigger. “You’re with them,” she said. No need to specify who. They both knew. His mouth quirked. Not quite a smile. “Depends who ‘they’ are. I patch people up. That’s all.” “Where did he go?” She jerked her chin at the shutter. “Haleem. Five-seven, bad hair, worse shoes. Backpack. Ran down here about thirty seconds before me.” Herrera’s gaze flicked to the circle of symbols, then back. “Through there.” “Open it.” He exhaled, a sound half laugh, half sigh. “That’s…not a good idea.” “It wasn’t a request.” He dropped his hands slowly, watching her as if expecting the gun to bark. When it didn’t, he reached into his jacket pocket with exaggerated care and pulled out a small disc. Bone. Off-white, polished smooth by handling, edges worn. The same sigils carved faintly across its surface, darkened with age or something else. The air between it and the shutter seemed to thicken. Quinn’s throat went dry. “That’s illegal as hell,” she said, more to have something to fill the space than anything. “In your world, maybe.” He rolled the disc across his knuckles like a coin, the movement fluid, unconscious. “In there, it’s just a ticket.” “In where?” Her voice came out flatter than she intended. He studied her face for a moment, as if weighing how much to say. Some answer hardened behind his eyes. Not the whole truth. Maybe not even half. “An old market,” he said. “For things you’ve never seen and people you don’t want to meet. We call it the Veil.” “You’re going to get cute with me now?” “I’m trying to keep you alive.” He held her gaze, warm brown steady, no flinch in them. “Detective, you really don’t want to go in there.” From beyond the shutter came a swell of sound, as if his words had conjured it: voices layered over one another in languages she didn’t recognize, the clatter of metal, a low animal murmur. The air that leaked around the edges grew thicker, carrying scents that made no sense: star anise and motor oil, singed hair and ozone, river water and hot stone. She imagined rows of stalls under flickering lights, hands swapping not just cash and dirty pharmaceuticals, but other things. Remembered stolen CCTV of packages that didn’t cast proper shadows. Of faces blurred as if the lens itself had looked away. Morris on a gurney, sheet over his face, the imprint of something circular at his wrist. Skin untouched, but every bone shattered beneath like glass. Quinn’s grip on the gun tightened until her knuckles protested. “My suspect is in there,” she said. “That’s my world.” Herrera nodded once, like he’d expected that too. He lifted the bone disc, fitting it neatly into the central indentation on the shutter. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the metal warmed. The etched symbols flared dull red, one after the other like a circuit closing. The circle completed, and a thin, high sound bled into the air—too low to be a whine, too high to be proper tinnitus. It made her eyes water. The shutter rolled up with a slow, shuddering grind, revealing a gap just wide enough for two people to walk side by side. Beyond was…wrong. Not in any way she could articulate to a supervising officer, not yet. It looked, at a glance, like an ordinary underground concourse extended further than physics usually allowed: a long, gently curving tunnel lit by lanterns hammered out of old signal lamps. Stalls spilled into the space, makeshift counters constructed from scavenged train benches and packing crates. Figures moved between them, cloaked and hooded, or bareheaded with hair in colours no dye should manage. One man passed close enough to the threshold that she could make out the pattern of scales along his cheekbone, shining oily green-black in the lamplight. The air beyond the threshold felt denser, like the humidity before a storm. Sound inside was clear, crisp, yet when it hit the line where station floor met market, it dulled, like it had to pass through invisible glass. Her body rebelled. Some primitive, preserved instinct screamed that stepping through that gap was a bad idea. A not-coming-back kind of idea. Herrera tucked the disc back into his pocket. The symbols on the shutter dimmed but didn’t fully die, still glowing faintly like banked coals. “You hear about things,” he said quietly, not looking at her now, eyes tracking the figures within. “In your circles. Officers who go places they shouldn’t. Cases that never make it to court because there’s no…how do you say…” He clicked his fingers, searching. “No frame to put them in.” She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The cold from the gate, the humming metal, the scent in the air—it all folded into the weight that lived at the base of her skull, the weight that was Morris’s absence and eighteen months of internal reviews that had gone nowhere because there was nothing sensible to write in the box marked Cause of Death. “They told you to drop it, sí?” Herrera went on. “Three years ago. Another alley. Another door that shouldn’t have been there.” Her eyes cut to his face, hard. “You’re one word away from obstruction.” He met her look, something like regret flickering there. “I’m a medic,” he repeated. “I clean up after. I see what places like this do to people who come in blind.” “Then you know I’m going.” Her voice surprised her, steady as a range line on a rifle. “Step aside.” He didn’t move. For a split second, the station held its breath. Distant city thunder vibrated through old tiles. The market beyond went on unconcerned, commerce humming, lives brushing past each other in a world she’d been trained her whole career not to see. Quinn thought of Haleem moving deeper inside that throng, disc in hand, backpack full of whatever filth the clique was shifting now. She thought of the photos on her incident board: overdoses with no drugs in the system, CCTV ghosts, a growing constellation of bone-white marks on cooling skin. She thought of Morris, grinning at her in the rain, saying, We’re coppers, Harlow. Our job is to go where the bastards don’t want us. Her watch ticked on her wrist. 21:19. “Last chance,” she said softly. “Move.” Herrera held her gaze another beat, then exhaled and stepped to one side, shoulders slumping like someone adding another name to an internal list. “At least keep your hands visible,” he said. “And if someone offers you anything for free, don’t take it. Nothing is free in there.” Quinn holstered her gun with a snap, fingers numb and buzzing. Badge tucked out of sight. She rolled her shoulders back, set her jaw. The threshold was a line on the floor. One step. Two. The air changed the instant her boot crossed it. Pressure popped softly in her ears. The scent of the market hit her full-force: blood and spices and wet fur and ozone, wrapped around the faint, sterile tang of antiseptic emanating from Herrera at her back. The voice of every superior officer she’d ever had chorused in her head, a Greek chorus of policy and caution and fuck’s sake, Quinn. She ignored them. Duty was simple, in the end. A line you walked until it killed you. She stepped fully into the Veil Market, and the city above her closed like a lid.