Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQE6P65M9X4WPA9059D7CW

The rain came down in sheets, turning Soho into a blur of reflected neon and running gutters. Harlow Quinn moved fast, her boots striking the wet pavement in a rhythm that matched the hammering of her pulse. Ahead of her—thirty metres, maybe thirty-five—Tomás Herrera cut left down Wardour Street, his dark jacket flaring behind him as he ran. She keyed her radio without slowing. "Suspect heading south on Wardour, approaching Old Compton. IC1 male, five-ten, dark hair, olive skin. Moving fast." Static answered her. The rain did that sometimes, ate the signal. Or maybe her battery was going again. She stuffed the radio back against her hip and kept running. Herrera glanced over his shoulder. Even at this distance, through the curtain of rain, she caught the whites of his eyes—the particular look of a man calculating whether he could outrun what was behind him. She'd seen that look a thousand times across eighteen years. It never ended well for the runner. He ducked right, disappearing past a row of bins behind a restaurant she couldn't name. Quinn adjusted her line, vaulting a low railing meant to pen in café tables that had been folded and stacked for the night. Her left knee sent a familiar bolt of protest up her thigh. She ignored it. Three years of ignoring it had made the practice routine. The alley was narrow and stank of fryer grease and something sweetly rotten. Herrera's footsteps echoed off the brick walls ahead—rapid, splashing. She followed the sound, one hand trailing the wall to keep her bearings in the dark. Her fingers found wet brick, the cold edge of a drainpipe, then nothing. She emerged into a wider passage behind the row of buildings. The green neon glow of The Raven's Nest sign bled around the corner to her left, painting the puddles an eerie jade. She knew the bar. She'd pulled CCTV from across the street just last week, watched the same faces cycle through its front door at odd hours—Herrera among them. He wasn't heading for the bar. He was heading past it. Quinn rounded the corner in time to see him drop down a set of metal stairs she'd never noticed before, half-hidden behind a dumpster and a stack of rotting pallets. The stairs descended into what looked like a service entrance—old, probably Victorian, the kind of infrastructure London swallowed and forgot about. She reached the top of the stairs and stopped. Below, darkness. The sound of his footsteps changed from the metallic ring of the stairs to something hollower, more resonant—tunnel acoustics. She could smell it rising up: damp stone, old air, and beneath that, something else. Something that reminded her of burnt sage and copper. The rain ran down her face and dripped from the sharp edge of her jaw. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, the leather of her watch cold against her skin. Standard protocol was clear. You don't follow a suspect into an unknown enclosed space without backup. You call it in, you set a perimeter, you wait. Every training course she'd ever sat through, every operational briefing she'd ever delivered, said the same thing. And yet. She thought about DS Morris. She thought about the last time she'd followed protocol—stood at the perimeter, waited for the Armed Response Vehicle, done everything by the book—while her partner went into the Rotherhithe warehouse alone because they'd heard screaming from inside. By the time the ARV arrived, Morris was dead. Not shot, not stabbed. Dead in a way the pathologist couldn't explain and the coroner had ultimately filed as cardiac arrest brought on by acute stress response, which was a bureaucratic way of saying nobody knew what the hell had happened. Quinn had seen his face. She'd seen the expression frozen on it. Acute stress response didn't cover what she'd seen. Herrera's footsteps were fading. She tried the radio one more time. "Control, this is Detective Quinn, collar number seven-seven-four-one. I'm in pursuit of a suspect on foot, entering a subterranean structure behind—" She paused, tried to fix her position. "Behind the junction of Wardour and Brewer Street. Requesting backup to my location." Nothing. Not even static now. The radio's light was on, the battery indicator showing half-charge, but the signal was simply gone, as if something below her feet was drinking it. She pulled out her phone. No bars. She held it up toward the rain and the sky and got one bar that flickered and died before she could dial. Herrera's footsteps were almost gone. Quinn made her choice the way she always did—not as a decision but as a failure to stop moving. Her boots hit the first metal step, then the second. She drew her baton with her right hand and held her phone in her left, its torch cutting a pale wedge through the darkness. The stairs went down farther than they should have. Two flights, then three, then a landing that opened into a bricked tunnel. The walls were London stock brick—yellow-brown, soot-stained—and the ceiling was arched in a way she recognized from the older Tube stations. Camden Town, she thought. The architecture was wrong for Soho. The distance was wrong. She couldn't have descended far enough or walked long enough to be anywhere near Camden, and yet the tunnel had the unmistakable character of the Northern line's abandoned infrastructure. She kept moving. The air grew warmer, which was wrong too. Underground should have been cooler, especially in November. But the temperature was climbing, and with it came sounds—low conversation, the clink of glass or metal, a rhythmic tapping that might have been a hammer on an anvil. The tunnel curved, and light appeared. Not electric light. It had the warm, unstable quality of flame—oil lamps or candles, dozens of them, set into niches carved into the tunnel walls. The brick gave way to tiled surfaces, white with blue borders, and she could read the ghost of old station signage beneath layers of chalk markings and painted symbols she didn't recognize. This was a platform. A Tube platform, long since sealed off from the working network, and it was full of people. Quinn pressed herself against the tunnel wall and killed her phone torch. The platform had been transformed. Stalls lined both sides, constructed from salvaged wood and draped fabric, their goods arranged on tables and blankets and the old wooden benches that must have once served waiting commuters. She saw jars of liquid in colours that didn't exist in nature—not fluorescent, not pigmented, but somehow luminous from within, as if the liquid itself were alive and burning cold. She saw knives laid out on velvet, their blades etched with patterns that seemed to shift when she looked at them indirectly. She saw books chained to a table, their pages turning in a wind she couldn't feel. There had to be fifty people on the platform, maybe more. They moved between stalls with a practiced ease that suggested regularity—this wasn't a one-off gathering. This was an institution. Some of the shoppers looked ordinary enough, if you didn't look too hard. Others were harder to categorize. A woman in a red shawl had hands that were too long, fingers jointed in places fingers shouldn't have joints. A man haggling over what appeared to be a taxidermied raven had skin that caught the lamplight with an iridescence that reminded Quinn of petrol on water. She saw Herrera. He was twenty metres ahead, weaving through the crowd. He'd slowed to a walk, his panic from the street-level chase apparently dissolved now that he'd reached his territory. As he moved, people acknowledged him—a nod here, a hand raised there. He was known. He paused at a stall where a heavyset woman in surgical gloves was decanting something from a copper vessel into small glass vials. They exchanged words Quinn couldn't hear. Herrera reached inside his jacket and produced what looked like a leather pouch, passed it across. The woman held it, weighed it in her palm, then nodded and handed him three of the vials. A transaction. Quinn's investigator's brain catalogued it automatically: suspect, vendor, exchange of goods, possible controlled substance. But she knew, with the part of her mind that still heard Morris's name on every Met memorial list, that what she was looking at went far beyond the Misuse of Drugs Act. The question was simple. The answer was not. She could step out onto that platform. She could identify herself as Metropolitan Police and attempt to detain Herrera. She had no warrant, no backup, no radio contact, no phone signal, and no understanding whatsoever of where she was or what governed this place. She was outnumbered fifty to one by people who, if the woman with the wrong hands was any indication, might not be entirely people. Or she could retreat. Go back up the stairs, find a signal, call it in. Bring a team. Come back with numbers and authority and the full weight of the law behind her. But the stairs might not be there tomorrow. The market might not be here. She had no bone token—she'd seen the phrase in the file she'd assembled, picked up from an informant's mumbling before the informant had stopped returning her calls—and she didn't know the rules of entry. She'd followed Herrera in on his passage, like a draft pulled through an open door, and the door might not open for her again. She watched Herrera pocket the vials and shake the woman's hand. He turned, heading deeper into the market, toward the far end of the platform where the tunnel mouth gaped dark and the lamplight didn't reach. Quinn checked her baton. Checked her watch. Twenty-three seventeen. She stepped off the tunnel wall and onto the platform. The nearest stallholder—a thin man with grey dreadlocks and circular glasses that reflected the lamplight as solid discs of gold—looked up at her. His gaze dropped to her boots, her stance, the baton in her hand. Something shifted in his expression. Not fear. Recognition. He knew what she was the same way she'd know an off-duty officer in a crowd: by the bearing, the watchfulness, the particular tension in the shoulders. He didn't raise an alarm. He just watched her, the way you watch weather rolling in—noting its direction, calculating its potential for damage. Quinn moved into the crowd. The smell hit her first. Underneath the sage-and-copper scent from the tunnel, the market had its own atmosphere: woodsmoke, dried herbs, old paper, and something metallic and bright, like the air before a lightning strike. The crowd parted around her without acknowledgment, which was worse than confrontation. They flowed around her the way a stream flows around a stone—naturally, without effort, as if she were an obstacle of no real consequence. She kept her eyes on Herrera's back. He was thirty metres ahead now, approaching the tunnel mouth at the platform's end. Her phone buzzed in her hand. She looked down. One bar of signal, impossibly, for half a second. Long enough for a text notification to slide onto the screen. Unknown number. Five words. *You shouldn't have come down.* The signal died. The bar vanished. Quinn looked up. Herrera had stopped at the tunnel mouth. He was looking back at her. His hand had gone to his chest, to the shape of the medallion she'd seen in his file photographs—Saint Christopher, patron saint of travellers. He was holding it the way a man holds a talisman, not out of faith but out of need. His warm brown eyes met her brown eyes across the length of the platform, across thirty metres of impossible underground market, and she saw in his expression something she hadn't expected. Not guilt. Not defiance. Pity. Quinn tightened her grip on the baton and kept walking.