Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQG1FVGHK8PZ0KXEDZNXK0

Detective Harlow Quinn hated stairs that weren’t built to code. The maintenance stairwell dropped off the service corridor like an afterthought, concrete treads slick with old condensation, the handrail sticky with something that smelled faintly of pennies. She put her boot down with the same measured care she used on a witness statement—slow, deliberate, leaving no room for surprises. Her torch beam cut a clean wedge through damp air and drifting dust. Below, the abandoned Tube platform opened up, wide and dim, the curve of the tunnel swallowing light. Once, there’d been posters and commuters and a scheduled hum. Now there were cables like dead vines, puddles that didn’t move when her light hit them, and a low murmur that wasn’t quite sound and wasn’t quite silence either. The cordon tape looked wrong here. Metropolitan Police blue-and-white against soot-black tiles felt like a theatre prop. Beyond it, the space had been made into something else: stalls cobbled from doors laid on crates, cloth canopies that hung without sagging, lanterns burning with small, steady flames that threw no heat. A market, but not any market she’d ever raided. The Veil Market, the intel had said. Under Camden. Moves locations every full moon, like that was an ordinary footnote instead of insanity. A uniform stepped toward her from the tape, his helmet tucked under his arm, cheeks pink with the underground chill. “DI Quinn? Sorry—Detective Quinn,” he corrected, eyes flicking to her warrant card. “It’s… it’s down there.” “I can see that.” Her voice came out flat, clipped. Eighteen years taught her that if she sounded uncertain, everyone else would panic. “Who found the body?” “Transport worker. Well—maintenance contractor. Came through looking for copper. Found a bloke laid out by the old edge.” He swallowed. “Then this lot came out of the shadows like it was bloody market day.” “This lot” stood just beyond the cordon—men and women in layered coats and scarves despite the damp, faces turned away from the uniforms as if refusing to be counted. Some watched Quinn without blinking. Others pretended to haggle over jars and paper-wrapped bundles, as if a murder was just another inconvenience. A detective sergeant ducked under the tape and met her halfway. DS Gallagher: rumpled suit, eager eyes, the kind of man who filled silences because he couldn’t bear them. “Quinn,” Gallagher said, relief in the name. “Thank God. This place is… it’s something.” “It’s a crime scene,” she said. He gave a short laugh. “That’s one way to put it. Forensics are having a fit. Won’t touch half the items because they’re—” He glanced over his shoulder, lowering his voice as if the soot-stained tiles had ears. “Because they’re claiming it’s ‘contaminated.’” Quinn’s left wrist itched under the strap of her worn leather watch. She adjusted it, feeling the familiar crease of the band. It was an old habit from before—back when DS Morris would fall in step beside her and murmur a joke about her being married to time. Morris had died three years ago on a case that still wouldn’t sit straight in any report, no matter how many times she reread the statements. Unexplained circumstances. A locked room. A scream that cut out halfway like a tape. Blood that wasn’t where blood should be. She kept walking. The platform edge was marked by a yellow line, faded to a sickly grey. The body lay just past it, on the track bed where the rails had been ripped up. A man in his thirties, maybe, dressed in a dark hoodie and jeans. His shoes were expensive—clean soles that didn’t belong in a place like this. His skin had the waxy pallor of someone who’d been dead a few hours in cold air. But it was the way he lay that snagged Quinn’s attention. Not sprawled. Not curled. Arranged. His arms were straight at his sides, hands open, palms up as if offering. His head was turned slightly, chin elevated, eyes half-lidded. The blood was wrong. A thick stain spread beneath his torso, but it didn’t radiate like it should. It looked as if it had been poured, not bled—an even pool with edges too smooth. And there were thin lines of it rising in threads up the tiles behind him, as if gravity had taken a brief holiday. Quinn crouched without waiting for permission. The air smelled of metal and something sweet, like bruised apples left too long. Gallagher hovered. “We think it was a knife. There’s a wound in the chest. Could be a robbery gone sideways. These—these traders—” He waved vaguely toward the stalls. “—they sell all sorts. Illegal goods. He might’ve come down here looking to buy. Or to steal.” Quinn didn’t answer. She leaned closer, letting her torch beam skim the victim’s sweatshirt. The fabric around the chest was cut clean, but not torn. No fraying. The wound itself—what she could see without disturbing anything—looked like an opening made by something sharp, yes, but too precise. Too… neat. She looked at the man’s hands. No defensive cuts. No bruising on the knuckles. No broken nails. Either he hadn’t fought, or he hadn’t been able to. “Where’s the weapon?” she asked. Gallagher spread his hands. “Not found. Could’ve been taken.” Quinn traced the line of the victim’s body with her eyes. There were faint marks on the concrete under his heels, as if he’d been dragged a short distance, but the rest of him was too clean. No scuffing under his shoulders. No grit ground into his clothing. That didn’t happen if you hauled a dead weight across a track bed. “Bag?” she asked. “None.” Gallagher’s voice sharpened as if he was trying to be useful. “No wallet on him either. Just his phone.” He nodded toward an evidence bag on a nearby crate, held by a gloved uniform who looked like he wanted to run. Quinn stood and turned slowly, taking in the market around them. Lanterns hung from hooks hammered into tile grout. A stall to the left displayed jars of dark liquid with labels handwritten in languages she didn’t recognise. Another had piles of bones—small, bleached, arranged like jewellery. A woman with a scarf over her hair stood behind them, eyes down, fingers counting something that clicked softly. At the far end of the platform, near where the tunnel mouth yawned, a crowd had gathered in a loose semicircle. Not police. Market people. They held themselves apart, as if there was an invisible boundary on the concrete. Quinn walked toward them. The murmur grew thicker with each step, like walking into a low electrical hum. “Move,” Gallagher called behind her. “Let the DI through.” They parted reluctantly. On the ground, between the stalls and the tunnel, someone had drawn a circle in chalk. Except it wasn’t chalk. Quinn crouched and pinched a bit between her gloved fingers. It crumbled finer than chalk, gritty like ground bone. Inside the circle were markings—lines and angles, repeating patterns that made her eyes want to skip. Protective sigils, her mind supplied, though she didn’t know why she had the word. “Who did this?” she asked. A voice answered from behind the semicircle, cool and dry. “That wasn’t there last full moon.” Quinn stood and turned. The speaker was a young woman with curly red hair that bounced in damp spirals around her face. Round glasses perched on her nose. Freckles stood out starkly in the lantern light. She wore a coat with too many pockets and a worn leather satchel slung across her body, the strap cutting diagonally over her chest. She looked like she’d stepped out of a library and into a nightmare by accident, except her eyes—green, alert—missed nothing. Quinn took her in with the swift inventory she reserved for potential threats. Not police. Not a uniform. Not one of the market traders either, not exactly. “And you are?” Quinn asked. The woman hesitated, then tucked a curl behind her left ear in a nervous motion that was too human to be rehearsed. “Eva Kowalski.” Gallagher blinked. “You’re not supposed to be in here. This is a cordoned scene.” Eva’s gaze slid to him with polite impatience. “Your tape isn’t keeping anyone out. It’s just decorating the air.” Quinn kept her face blank. “How do you know what was here last full moon?” Eva’s mouth tightened as if she was weighing how much truth to risk. “Because I’ve been here. It moves. The market. You know that, otherwise you wouldn’t have found it.” Quinn didn’t confirm or deny. She glanced back at the circle. The grit on her glove looked like fine ash. “What does it mean?” Quinn asked. Eva’s eyes flicked to the tunnel mouth. “It’s meant to keep something from crossing. Or keep something in.” Gallagher made an exasperated noise. “Come on. That’s—this is just people playing at the occult. They sell charms, they draw circles, they spook tourists.” Quinn straightened. “Tourists don’t come to abandoned platforms beneath Camden with bones in their pockets.” Gallagher opened his mouth, then closed it. His cheeks reddened. Quinn stepped closer to the tunnel mouth. The air changed. Cooler, sharper, as if the damp itself had been filtered. Her torch beam hit the darkness and seemed to dim, swallowed instead of reflected. The hum she’d noticed became more insistent, a vibration felt in her teeth. At the very edge of the drawn circle, something lay half-hidden under a scrap of cloth. Quinn crouched and lifted it with two fingers. A small brass compass, its casing mottled with verdigris. The face was etched with tiny sigils that reminded her uncomfortably of the circle on the ground—protective, repeating. The needle inside didn’t settle. It trembled, then swung hard, pointing not north but straight into the tunnel’s black mouth. Quinn’s pulse clicked faster, steady as a metronome. She’d seen compasses misbehave near magnets, near certain electrical equipment. This wasn’t that. This was purposeful. Gallagher leaned in. “What’s that?” “A compass,” Quinn said. He snorted. “Looks like it’s had a rough life.” Eva stepped nearer, her satchel creaking. Her gaze fixed on the brass instrument with the hungry focus of someone spotting a rare book on a shelf. “That’s not just a compass.” Quinn didn’t take her eyes off the needle. “Tell me what it is.” Eva swallowed. “They call it a Veil Compass. From here.” She nodded toward the market, as if the word “here” held weight. “It points to rifts. Portals. Places where—where the boundary is thin.” Gallagher laughed once, sharp. “Right. And I suppose the tooth fairy uses it to find her way.” Quinn ignored him. She held the compass steady. The needle strained toward the tunnel like an animal on a leash. She shifted her hand slightly left. The needle followed, correcting, insistent. She moved right. It tugged back. It wasn’t spinning. It was tracking. “What’s in that tunnel?” Quinn asked. Eva’s fingers curled around her satchel strap. “Depends on the night. Depends on who’s opened what.” Quinn felt the old memory press at the back of her skull: Morris’s body on a polished floor that should have shown drag marks but didn’t. A locked door with no forced entry. A witness insisting the air had “ripped.” She looked back at the victim on the tracks. Neat wound. Blood climbing tiles. “Show me the wound,” Quinn said. Gallagher frowned. “Quinn, forensics—” “Now.” He hesitated, then motioned a uniformed SOCO tech over. The tech looked like he wanted to argue, then thought better of it. He lifted the sweatshirt carefully with gloved hands, exposing the chest. Quinn leaned in. The wound wasn’t a stab. Not really. It was a slit, narrow and clean, as if something had sliced through skin and muscle with the precision of a razor and the force of a closing door. The edges weren’t ragged. There was no tearing. No bruising around it from impact. A blade could do clean. A skilled hand could do neat. But there was something else—something in the way the tissue sat, as if the body had been cut by an absence, not a thing. Quinn straightened slowly. “This man didn’t fight,” she said, thinking aloud. “No defensive wounds. No signs of restraint. No bruises. He wasn’t dragged the way the marks suggest.” She pointed at the faint scuffs by his heels. “He was placed. Or… he arrived here in a way that didn’t involve walking.” Gallagher’s face tightened. “Or he was knocked out and carried.” “Then his shoulders would show it. His clothes would be filthy.” Quinn’s gaze swept the victim again. Clean shoes. Minimal grime on knees. Not consistent with being hauled over track gravel. “And the blood—” She jerked her chin toward the thin trails climbing the tiles. “That’s not arterial spray. It’s not cast-off. It’s wrong.” Gallagher folded his arms, defensive. “So what are you saying? Magic did it?” Quinn looked at the compass needle vibrating toward the tunnel, then at the circle of ground bone laid like a boundary, then at the market people watching with tight, wary faces. They weren’t shocked by a death. They were frightened of what had caused it. “I’m saying we’re missing a mechanism,” Quinn replied. Her voice stayed controlled, but something inside her had gone taut, like a wire pulled to breaking. “A tool. A doorway. Whatever happened here didn’t happen like a normal knife attack.” Eva cleared her throat softly. “If a rift opened—just for a moment—it could cut. Like—like a seam closing.” Gallagher stared at her as if she’d spoken another language. “That’s… that’s not evidence.” Quinn met Eva’s eyes. “You said the circle wasn’t here last full moon. Who would draw it?” Eva’s gaze slid over the market stalls, over faces that turned away too quickly. “Someone with reason to expect trouble. Someone who knew something would try to come through.” “And the victim?” Quinn asked. “Would he know?” Eva hesitated. “Maybe he had the compass. Maybe he was looking for the rift.” Quinn’s mind moved, assembling pieces into a shape she didn’t like. A man with clean shoes comes to a black market beneath the city. He carries a device that points to the nearest tear in reality. A protective circle is drawn near the tunnel mouth. He ends up dead with a wound like a closing seam and blood that forgets gravity. Not a robbery. Not a random knife. A meeting. A transaction. A mistake. Quinn turned her torch into the tunnel. The beam reached a few metres, then dimmed as if swallowed by thicker darkness. The hum deepened, resonant, and for a split second she thought she saw the air ripple, the way heat rippled over asphalt in summer—except it was cold here. Cold enough that her breath fogged. She remembered Morris’s last case file, the parts redacted, the phrases the senior officers had used with careful blandness: structural collapse, equipment failure, unavoidable. Lies. Or ignorance dressed as policy. Quinn stepped back from the tunnel mouth and looked at Gallagher. “Get the entry logs from the contractors. Find out how the uniforms got in. Who had access to this platform in the last twenty-four hours.” Her tone sharpened to command. “And I want everyone’s phones collected who was down here before we arrived. Contractors, market people, anyone who’ll hand it over.” Gallagher blinked. “They won’t cooperate.” “Then we make them.” Quinn glanced toward the semicircle of watchers. “This market exists because someone lets it. Someone takes money to look away. I want names.” She looked back to Eva. “And you. You’re coming with me.” Eva stiffened. “I’m not a suspect.” “Maybe not,” Quinn said. “But you know what this is. You know what that compass does. And right now you’re the only person here who’s said a single useful thing.” Eva’s fingers tightened on her satchel strap. “If I help you, I’m not—” She faltered, eyes darting to the market crowd. “I’m not safe down here.” Quinn’s jaw set, sharp and uncompromising. “Neither is anyone else. That’s the point.” She slipped the brass compass into an evidence bag herself, sealing it with hands that didn’t shake. The needle still twitched inside the plastic, straining toward the tunnel as if it could sense the dark through layers of protocol. As Quinn rose, her watch caught the lantern light, the worn leather band familiar against her skin. Time moved forward whether she understood the world or not. Morris had died in ignorance. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. She looked once more at the blood climbing the tiles, at the circle drawn in ground bone, at the tunnel that drank her torchlight. Something had opened here. And if it could open once, it could open again.