Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQHPJRHTGPFR3W18P6EZAG

The rain came down in a sheet, blurring the green neon of The Raven’s Nest into a smear that bled over wet brick. Harlow Quinn stood under a narrow awning, collar up, raindrops ticking down the back of her neck. She checked her watch—worn leather strap, face scratched from a fall down stone steps last winter—and let the seconds slide past. Twenty-three minutes since the runner slipped inside. The Nest drew them like a drain pulling at the dregs of the city. Too many faces who looked away when they should look up. Too many shipments that left with no manifest. Her people called it a rumor mill. She called it an artery. He came out with the door’s squeak swallowed by rain. Thin, hood up, a courier’s quick glance at both ends of the lane. Harlow didn’t need the mugshot she’d memorized; she knew the silhouette by the way it hugged itself. Light on the balls of his feet. Always looking to cut across. She slid from shadow. No shout of “Police.” She wanted him ignorant and moving. A quiet tail and a hand at the end of it, that’s what she needed. He darted east, skimming puddles, crossing under the smear of a streetlight. Harlow moved, every piece of her rain-slicked coat whispering. The ache in her left knee announced itself on the first sprint. She ignored it. She’d told herself it was just old impact, nothing more. The voice of a physio saying rest up had no place here. At the corner he glanced back. She tucked her chin, made herself a shape among others. Drunks leaving music; a couple arguing over a cab already speeding off. He didn’t see her. He ran. Harlow let him have a lead, then cut left through an alley where the rain fell in slices from a gutter, the light coming from somewhere orange and warm inside kitchens. Steam rose from vents, smelling of garlic and old oil. Her breath came steady, patterned. Eighteen years of service wore a groove. You read the room, you read the street. You keep your feet. People called her precise. It wasn’t precision; it was survival. There was a time when footsteps alongside hers matched her stride note for note. DS Morris had been taller, with a loping gait that made everything seem easy until it wasn’t. The runner hit the main road, and traffic blew horns like a brass section out of tune. He cut in front of a bus; its brakes screamed, light turned her rain into a white wall. Harlow fell in tight behind, slid between bumpers pocketing the smell of diesel, then broke back to the pavement with a mutter of apology thrown over her shoulder. He didn’t head for the river like some did when they wanted darkness. He angled north, taking roads that got narrower and dirtier as the night bled from early to late. Camden. Harlow’s jaw tightened. She didn’t like Camden at night. Too many corners promised music and gave you something else. He glanced back again. She’d closed the gap to twenty meters. One flash of his face beneath the hood—young, blades for cheekbones, a mouth that had never meant yes, ma’am in his life. He clutched his side, palm on something that didn’t bounce. Package. Good. Then he was in among stalls someone had forgotten to take down after open hours, tarps snapping, slick ropes at ankle height. He hopped a low chain and kicked a crate into the path behind him. Harlow’s shin met wood with a jolt that rang up her bone. She swore and kept moving. He took the stairs to the old station two at a time, past welded gates and faded signs that told nobody anything useful. The main entrance was shuttered, but the staff door to the side stood ajar an inch. Light leaked out—yellow, not the blue-white of official bulbs. Harlow slowed. Rain ran off her buzzed hair and into her eyes. She wiped with her sleeve, tasted city. This was wrong. Someone else should be here, someone in uniform with a radio that worked in basements. She palmed her mobile. No bars. She looked at the open door and heard an old echo: Morris’s laugh when she said she hated tunnels, said if anything came at her from the dark she’d punch first and file reports after. He’d died in a place that smelled of stale water and electricity. The lights had stuttered like they were scared. She’d tasted copper then, too. The runner slipped through the opening like smoke. She could turn back. RD would say she wasn’t dressed for a burrow, wasn’t cleared to go alone. RD would shake his head and talk about jurisdiction. He hadn’t known Morris. None of them had seen Morris’s hand slide out of hers in a shaft of light that didn’t come from any bulb she could name. Harlow breathed in. The rain was a curtain. She stepped through the door. The corridor beyond sloped down and narrowed, walls sweating. The sound of the city dulled at her back until the only thing left was the slap of her soles and a vague hum ahead, like bees in a paper bag. She trailed fingers over paint that peeled up in curls and thought of winter mittens in childhood coming away fuzzed with frost. The hum grew voices. Footsteps. The scrap and clatter of a crowd under stone. A platform appeared like a submarine rising out of dark. The signs had once said Camden something; now the letters were scratched out, and someone had chalked a different word over them. The chalk had dripped and been rubbed and reapplied until it looked like a ritual. Electric lanterns glowed on poles, but their cords ran into nowhere. The air smelled of iron and smoke, with an undernote of something sweet as rot. People were moving on the platform. Not commuters. There was a flow to it, a tide. A line arched toward an opening that hadn’t existed in any official plan—ragged archway, bricks offset in a way that made Harlow’s eyes ache. At its mouth stood two men and a woman in coats cut like uniforms but in no service she knew. They swapped flat, carved discs with the waiting. Each person passed something palm to palm—a turn of wrist, a touch of thumb—and the guards let them through in a rhythm that didn’t slow. Harlow scanned faces for her runner. He was there, up near the head of the line. The hood had come down; his hair was plastered to his forehead. He jounced on the balls of his feet, urgent. He had something cupped in his hand. When his turn came he showed the disc. One of the guards—a woman with a scar that drew a white wick down her lip—tilted it to the lantern and nodded. He vanished into the arch. Bone tokens, the rumor went. Not currency. Keys. Harlow swallowed. She pictured the refusal at the door. Turn back, little cop. You don’t know the password. She put a hand to her coat’s inside pocket out of reflex. Warrant card. Service pistol. Neither would open that arch. On the bench to her left a man breathed wet into a handkerchief, a bag of shopping at his feet. He stood to join the line, and as he did, his coat flared. Something small and pale swung at his belt—a disc on a loop of dark thread. It was the size of a two-pound coin and wore a pattern she couldn’t read. Harlow moved to intercept, steps casual. She bumped him with an apology and a look that said sorry in a way a Londoner believed. Her hand came away with the disc threaded over two fingers. He never knew; he was coughing again, head bowed. She didn’t like how easy it felt. She told herself she’d drop it back on his knee when she came out. If she came out. If he was lucky he’d be done by then and not discover anything missing until his bed or wife or cat, and by then everybody would be fine. At the mouth of the arch, the scar-lipped woman looked Harlow up and down. Her gaze tracked from Harlow’s closely cropped hair to the watch on her wrist. Harlow rolled the disc in her palm the way she’d seen, showed its face without presenting, neck loose, breath easy. She could feel her pulse knocking under jaw and thought of that shaft of light again, of skin going cold on a railway tie. “Your token,” the woman said. Her voice packed the vowels with sand. Harlow lifted it. “I bought it.” She kept her voice flat, East London that could go posh if it needed to. The woman ran a thumb over the surface. Her expression didn’t change, but something in the set of her shoulders did, the slightest slack. “Don’t lose it.” She stepped aside. Harlow stepped under the brick. She expected chill; she got heat. The hum tightened into music and barter, into laughter that rubbed against whoops of pain or delight. The passage sloped again and then spilled her into a space so wide it made the ceiling feel low. The Veil Market was a name that had skulked around her case files for months, always in quotes, always with a smirk attached to the lips that said it. It was not a joke in stone. Stalls sprouted like tents in a desert, their canvas patched and dyed strange colors. A man in a silver waistcoat shook a vial and its contents fizzed the color of old copper coins. A woman with hair in loops like snail shells packed powder into paper twists and lined them up like cigarettes. Someone offered knives that drank light. Moths the size of her palm roosted on a beam and opened and closed their wings with soft clicks. Braziers smoldered and gave up smoke that clung to her clothes and slid down her throat. The people—humans, she told herself, because what else?—moved in the tailored drift of any market. Good bags. Good shoes. No one bumped. Bodies spaced themselves with an instinct she couldn’t map. The watchers on the corners watched with pupils that didn’t adjust when the lanterns flickered. She pressed tongue to teeth and told herself that was just bad lighting. Somewhere a man called out fat dates and hot tea. Somewhere someone laughed and the sound climbed the brick like ivy. Harlow spotted the runner again. He cut to the right toward a stall draped in blue cloth, where a woman in a wool cap counted disks out into an open tin. Harlow moved, slipping behind a display of old maps that looked like skin if you didn’t look square at them—don’t be ridiculous, she told herself—and kept eyes alive. The runner ducked his head and produced his package. The woman glanced around quick, then took it. She slid it under the cloth, and from beneath drew up a satchel that bulged. The runner took it and slung it over his shoulder in one go, like he’d done this born and bred. Harlow’s hand had found the weight of her service pistol and stayed there. She couldn’t fire here. She couldn’t flash her badge ten feet from a man selling snake’s milk from a terrarium. She needed him to start moving again and give her a corner to pull him into. He turned. Harlow stepped forward—and someone stepped into her path, just enough to make her brush their sleeve rather than cut cleanly around. “Mind your step,” the man said, accent cut from Seville and sanded by London. His voice carried a smile you couldn’t see on his face. He wore a paramedic’s bag across his chest, not NHS issue. Olive skin. Hair curled short and damp at the temples. A white scar zipped along his left forearm like a bad stitch, visible when his coat sleeve tugged up. A small Saint Christopher medallion shone at his throat. Harlow knew him from a file she’d broken a lunch over. Tomás Herrera. Former paramedic. License lost. Off-the-books everything. A caretaker for criminals, she’d written when no one else would. Her gaze dipped to the bag. Bandages, vials, things that made you sleep. “Sorry,” she said. “You’re new,” he said, not unkind. His eyes were warm the way old wood is warm. When he looked at her, he looked like he was seeing beneath her jacket to the gun and the badge and the careful stance of her feet. Like he told himself a story that fit and didn’t. He stepped back half a pace, creating space instead of stealing it. His hands stayed empty and visible. “I’m shopping,” she said. “You and everyone else.” He let a beat pass. “Careful whose toes you tread on.” The runner was getting away. He shouldered through the crowd, making for an exit Harlow hadn’t seen. A cut in the canvas that led deeper. If he vanished again, she’d have to choose between weaving herself into this place and going home with nothing but the stink of it in her clothes. “Out of the way,” she said. It came out too sharp. Tomás tilted his head. He stepped aside. As she went by, he said, low and matter-of-fact, “You won’t keep your phone here.” She didn’t look back. “Didn’t plan to,” she said, as if that had ever been anything but a lie. She shoved the flap aside and followed the runner into a narrower artery. Here the stalls pinched into cubbies. The lights hung lower, and objects on the tables seemed to bend their shadows around themselves. Voices were fewer; trades were quieter. Something wet thumped in a bucket. The runner’s shoulders hunched. He knew what she was. He couldn’t know, but he knew. He broke left into an even thinner lane. The bricks were damp and smelled of old wool. Harlow reeled him in foot by foot. Her breath stayed steady, but the beat under her tongue had gone to a drumroll. He reached back without looking and flung something. Glass flashed. Harlow dodged and it shattered on the wall, splashing across her sleeve. It hissed and smoked where it touched leather, leaving a white bloom like lichen. She jerked her arm and slapped at it with her palm. It stung cold, then cold went to heat. Adrenaline burned the edge away. He ran on. He was flagging now. The bag on his shoulder hit his ribs with every stride. Harlow lengthened hers. Two more turns and he’d hit a dead end because of the way sound came back wrong from up ahead, and— Her stomach dropped. She stopped fast enough her boots slid. The lane opened into a chamber with a ceiling so low all the heat collected there. The far side wasn’t brick. It was a curtain of hanging bones, strung close together on bent wire, each piece a vertebra or a short, neat slice of a long bone. Beyond it, nothing was visible but a black gap. The runner paused long enough to dip his token into a shallow bowl mounted on the wall. He pressed it against something hidden behind the bones. There was a sound like breath over a grass reed, and the bone curtain stirred though nothing touched it. A gap let him through, just wide enough for a thin boy with a satchel and fear at his back. Harlow stood three steps away, token in her pocket and taste of tin in her mouth. She could put her hand to the bones. She could feel chill damp from beyond. If Morris’s voice had been in her head before, now it was her own saying don’t go without backup, don’t go without eyes on you. Her radio would squawk with static here. No one up there knew this door existed. She could make the call anyway, climb the slope and surface to rain and wait for uniforms who would tramp through a shuttered Tube entrance and find only brick and silence. A shadow fell across the mouth of the lane behind her. She turned enough to see Tomás again, ten paces back, not pretending to shop now. He didn’t hold anything but the strap of his bag. His expression was not unkind and not soft. He had the look of someone who’d seen people step into dark places because whatever they loved was already there. “You don’t want to make enemies in there,” he said quietly. “Already have them,” she said. Her voice came back to her thin and hard. “You won’t get what you think.” He seemed to consider, then added, “But you might get something.” She hated the calculus of it. She hated that the part of her that had learned to hear lies in men’s breathing and children’s silences was alive and jittering in a place that didn’t care about her sense of probability. She saw the runner’s skinny shoulders vanish and thought of photos on her board that refused to line up. She thought of the green neon above a bar that refused to shut, and of Morris’s empty locker that someone had cleaned too quickly. She slipped her hand into her pocket and felt the bone token’s chill and grit. It was heavier than it looked. It felt old in a way that made the flesh on her arms pebble. “Is that all it takes?” she asked without looking behind her. “For some doors,” Tomás said. “What’s the price?” He half smiled. “Depends what you bring back.” She stepped forward. She had never minded risk when it was hers to eat. It had been the cost she’d put on Morris’s ledger that kept her awake. She drew the token out and it sat on her palm like a promise. The bowl on the wall held something viscous that caught the lamplight and threw it back a sick yellow. She dipped the token. It came out slick. Bones clicked like teeth. Harlow pressed the disc to a notch she could barely see. Behind the bone curtain something moved. Air sucked past her, smelling of almond worms, of pond water at night. The curtain sighed open. The gap was sized for someone who had already learned to make themselves small. She took a breath that felt like her first and last, and went through.