Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQFQ3J6J83AJD4V8HS75K6

The stairwell smelled of rust and old rain, a damp, metallic breath that hit Harlow Quinn as she came up from the street. Her shoes sank once into grit on the platform; the light from the forensic van made long, thin pools on the tracks. Tape flapped in the stale wind, but it was the wrong kind of cordon for a place like this—police issue, neat and antiseptic—where the Veil Market preferred shadows and bone tokens. Beneath the yellow tape the market had been stripped of its usual chaos: stalls shuttered, ropes furloughed, an overturned crate that still smelled faintly of cedar and something like lavender—an incense she could not name. Detective Quinn kept her arms at her sides because that was how you tracked movement—you noticed what was compressed and what returned to shape. Her watch, a worn leather thing that had belonged to a sergeant long dead, read 03:16. Her jaw tightened with a habit she had not earned but had been given by eighteen years of service: catalogue, pattern, anomaly. Eva Kowalski stood by the body as if it were a specimen on a slab. She had pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose and was tucking the same curl behind her left ear with a nervous thumb, the motion giving her face a little staccato of thought. The satchel at her hip bulged with the edges of paper and bindings; the leather was cracked from use. She wore a shawl that smelled faintly of old book glue. "You're late," Eva said without looking up. Her voice had the patient disbelief of someone losing a footnote. Harlow glanced at the two constables marking notes, at the forensics tech crouched with a camera. "Traffic," she said. She didn't say what she meant—that it was always busy, that lines and stairs and the city itself stalled and restarted and that now the world had a way of making people late right before something broke. The body lay on a tarp, knees half-splayed, one shoe missing. No obvious burns, no singed hair. No ritual ash. No circle of salt. There were, instead, abrasions along the forearms that looked like the victim had dragged themselves. There was a neat, blunt laceration atop the skull, a clean red line where skull had met stone. A pale smudge on the jacket where someone had knelt. Eva's eyes were on the thing beside the body: a small brass compass, its casing bright with verdigris, sigils etched fine across the face. Someone had propped it to the victim's chest with a ribbon. Under the camera's light the needle flicked once, then spun and settled pointing down the tunnel. "See?" Eva said. "Compass, sigils, placement. Veil artifact. Somebody opened a rift and—" Harlow watched Eva's hand tremble just slightly when she spoke. Observation in the little moments: the tug at the hair, the voice pitched an octave up—those were the cracks where reason aired itself. She moved around the tarp, careful, boots scuffing the grime ATF had left in neat straights. Her eyes found the platform edge, the smear of rubber where someone's shoe had hugged the line, the small clump of earth ground into the tiled grout. She counted the scuff marks the way a carpenter counts nails—because the pattern told a story the person had not intended to tell. She crouched. The missing shoe was too clean. The exposed sock had a half-moon of blood high on the ankle, dried and flaked. The victim's hands bore the print of palms that had been roughly washed; the wash was deliberate. There was a faint chemical smell—ozone?—but it had a sharp sweetness behind it, petroleum and spice: methylated spirits. She could taste the memory of it in her teeth. "Why place the compass on the chest?" Eva asked softly, as if the question was for herself as much as for Harlow. "A marker. Protection. A guide." Harlow's fingers brushed the tarpaulin. It had been placed recently: clean folds, edges still tacky. She looked at the knot that cinched the ribbon around the compass—it was a left-handed tie. Left-handed knots weren't common; most people used right-handed. Left-handedness narrowed things. Her partner's absence widened it. She felt the old weight of Morris at her shoulder, a phantom presence that tasted like regret. Morris had been right-handed. He had not make left-handed ties. "Who prepped the body?" she asked. Her voice was flat, practical. Eva blinked. "A seller. A vendor. Someone who wanted it found here. Someone who knew the Market's... language." Harlow watched Eva's gaze slide over the sigils, linger on the verdigris. Eva's mouth formed soft vowels as if reading them into existence. The compass had been crafted, Eva knew, by a Shade artisan. That was a fact she'd told her three times in the past year. She said it like an inheritance. The thing was old enough to be convincing, old enough to be dangerous as an accusation. Harlow picked the compass up. The brass was cool, the engraved sigils pleasantly rough under her thumb. The needle did not tremble when she twisted her wrist. It pointed steadily—not toward the dark farther down the track where the market would sit in secret—but toward the service tunnel that fed out under the borough. Someone had placed it deliberately with its needle pointing away from the Platform Three rift. Someone had meant to send an investigator to the wrong place. "Why dress it up?" Eva said. She sounded wounded the way people were when evidence contradicted what they already feared. "If this was a hate killing or a robbery, they wouldn't bother." "They would, if misdirection worked." Harlow lowered herself to sit on a crate, the wood protesting in tiny cracks. The forensic tech had left a coffee cup half full. She did not drink from it; she noted the dent in the lip instead. The body had no trace of oxygen deprivation—no froth at the mouth. There was no singeing smell in the hair. A genuine rift left a particular absence of soot, an otherworldly dryness, and a fug of cold that made the hair stand on the arms. This place smelled of damp stone and old tea and a deliberate chemical scent. If you faked fire with methylated spirits, it left a different kind of mark: an even char, a tidy edge. Supernatural burns blew thing apart on a molecular honesty no domestic arsonist could replicate. "Look at the skull wound," she said, and for the first time she let herself be clinical. The blunt force looked recent, clean. It had not been accompanied by any radiating fracturing of the facial bone, the kind you saw in falls into rails or collapsing into a rift-mouth. It suggested a single strike delivered by someone who knew how to dampen an impact—an old trick from crowded alleys, a gloved fist with a blunt instrument hidden in a coat. The glove had left no fibers. But there were smudges on the coat seam, a fingerprint in the fresh dirt that an untrained hand had wiped with a sleeve. "They staged it," Harlow said. "They wanted the story to point to the Market. Put a Veil object on him, choose a place people will believe, and if anyone digs they'll find the market's signature. If you're a cop who wants a clean answer you stop there." Eva's eyes were glossy. "But the compass—it's a Shade piece. No one outside the Market could make these. Even a replica—" "Replicas circulate," Harlow cut in. "Same as fake watches and 'antique' silver. The market's goods are stamped like factory marks. Forgeries are a thing. More importantly—" she tapped the needle with a gloved finger, careful, "—it points away. The perpetrator wants us to look down that tunnel. They want us to follow the compass and find nothing. They want the idea of a rift out there, open and dangerous, to stay in the paper. A perfect scapegoat." Eva's fingers tightened around the strap of her satchel. Her glasses reflected the camera light in two hard circles. "You sound like you're trying to protect them." Harlow's laugh was low and unamused. "Protect who? People who traffic in charms and stolen spirits? The Market sells dangerous things. So does a rack that sells fentanyl. The difference is intention and method. If someone is clever enough to stage a supernatural death, they're trying to leverage our fear." Her memory flared—the soft, impossible absence at Morris's body. The skin around his throat had been bruised in a pattern that had not been human. She had watched a Shade weave a ribbon of shadow once in a memory she did not have permission to own. The unnatural things had an inside smell she couldn't forget. There was nothing like that here. And that told her more than the presence of a compass. "See those shoe prints?" Harlow pointed to two parallel scuffs that ran like tracks from the platform to the tarp. "One set is deeper. The one that's lighter—he dragged his leg, but someone else was doing the heavy lifting. Look at the grout. It's been scraped with something like a crowbar's tooth. That means they moved him from somewhere else and left a scuffle. They wanted it to look like he collapsed here." Eva followed her finger and the color drained from her face. "So he was killed somewhere else." "Or he was hit somewhere else and dragged here," Harlow corrected. "They wanted an audience." "An audience of who?" Eva asked. "A police narrative," Harlow said. "The kind that'll tidy up the mess and write it off as external: 'dangerous occult activity.' It's tidy. It's neat. It lets people sleep upstairs." They were both quiet for a long moment. The market around them smelled like damp paper and old cedar and a human attempt at incense. Harlow felt the weight of that quiet like a stone. "A toe nail under the victim's left hand," Eva said suddenly. She was riffling the satchel without asking. Her fingers were quicker than they looked. She pulled free a small, narrow envelope. Inside a tiny flake of keratin clung to the glass like a fossil. "I thought—" she looked at Harlow, something like pleading in her face, "—I thought maybe he fell through a portal and someone tried to patch the story because—" "Because a rift is an easy narrative," Harlow finished. "Because people like things with edges. Because people get scared." She slid the compass into her coat pocket with more care than the market deserved. The brass was warm from the light. The sigils made a tiny whine in her fingers, a sound that was almost a promise. She felt the old, brittle fear at her ribs—the one that had settled there the day Morris had died in a way she still couldn't prove—and she let it be a tool instead of a wound. "Call for footwear analysis," she said. "Trace the scrape marks for metal impressions. Check the subway blip for movement between changes. Whoever dragged him needed gloves, a van, something with a flatbed. We'll want CCTV from up top and delivery logs for any vehicles. Start with the morning at 01:00. The vendor on the corner with the cedar smell—track his routes. Someone who trafficks in replicas would hit the market for materials." Eva's hand found the compass in Harlow's pocket for a second, an unconscious reach for evidence she wanted to prove true. Harlow did not stop her. "You think they framed the Market," Eva murmured. "I think somebody used fear as a coat," Harlow said. "Whether it's a clique looking for cover or a clever killer who knows how to move in the dark, it's human work. And human work leaves human mistakes." She let a small, sharp smile cut the air. "You can't fake a left-handed knot and forget about the scuff patterns on the platform." Eva's fingers stilled against the brass. She let out the breath she had been holding and drew in another, tasting the metallic tang of the station. "All right," she said. "All right. We test the compass anyway. If it points like it's meant to point, I'll eat my satchel." Harlow's mouth twitched. "Don't eat your satchel, Evie. It'd be a mess. We dust everything. We canvass. We check the CCTV. And you—" she softened, because some things needed gentleness, "—you keep cataloguing the sigils. If someone's forging artifacts they're sloppy in different places. Their metalwork might be good, but their patterns repeat. The Market is full of makers. Forgeries are a signature too." Eva nodded, and the curve of her shoulders hinted at grudging relief. Harlow rose, letting the platform settle under her. The compass was heavy at her side, a small, domesticated thing with a needle that lied as well as it told the truth. Behind them the tunnels breathed and the city continued. Up above, life kept its clean narratives. Down here, under the market that moved with the moon, Harlow felt the familiar shape of a case beginning to form—a person whose fear had been used like a currency and a body who had been laid down like a ledger entry. The detective tightened her watch strap absently and counted off the steps she would take: boots on tile, camera angles, the forensics timeline. The world was full of explanations. It took a careful eye to sift which were real and which were polished to look like truth. She had learned to watch for the fingerprints the clever left behind—the ones they thought no one would notice. She glanced at Eva, who had already returned to her notes, lips moving around half-formed words. The friend had always been better at reading old alphabets than new lies. Harlow had learned to rely on that. For now she let the compass sit in her pocket, a small prop to the larger plot. She would not be led down the wrong tunnel by a needle. She had lost one person to the thing that had no shape and no smell; she would not lose her grip on the other things that were painfully, distinctly human.