Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQJWZA637QMN14X6M81AF1

The rain came down in sheets, turning the Soho streets into rivers of reflected neon. Detective Harlow Quinn's shoes splashed through puddles thick with city grime as she pushed through the late-night crowd, her eyes locked on the figure ahead. Tomás Herrera. The paramedic who'd vanished from three different crime scenes in the past six months. He'd been tailing the entrance to The Raven's Nest when Quinn spotted him, and the moment their eyes met across the rain-slicked pavement, he'd bolted. Quinn's worn leather watch caught the light from a passing taxi—11:47 PM—as she lengthened her stride. Twenty-three years on the force, eighteen of them decorated service, and her knees still didn't complain when she moved like this. Herrera was fast, but he was panicking. Panicked people made mistakes. He cut left onto a narrow side street, the kind that tourists never found. Quinn knew these alleys intimately—every corner, every fire escape, every dead end that would trip up someone unfamiliar with the geography. She'd run down dozens of suspects through these streets. She could do it in her sleep. The rain intensified. Her short salt-and-pepper hair clung to her scalp, water streaming down her sharp jawline. Herrera's silhouette was only twenty meters ahead now, his curly dark hair plastered to his head, his olive skin slick as he stumbled slightly on the wet pavement. "Police!" Quinn shouted, more out of habit than hope. Herrera didn't slow. He reached the corner of Bateman Street and instead of turning, he disappeared. Quinn's muscles tensed. She'd run this exact grid a hundred times. There was nowhere to disappear to. She rounded the corner hard, her breath coming in controlled bursts, and found nothing but empty street. The rain drummed against the pavement like a thousand impatient fingers. Then she saw it—the grate. A basement entrance she'd passed a thousand times without truly seeing. The kind of thing London was full of, forgotten infrastructure from forgotten times. Herrera had left it open. Quinn's hand instinctively went to her hip, checking the position of her service weapon. She'd been thirty-four years old when she lost DS Morris. Six months into that case, he'd gone into somewhere he shouldn't have, investigating leads that made no sense, talking about things that couldn't possibly be real. Three years later, they still hadn't found his body. The case file gathered dust in her office, a personal mission that her superiors had quietly filed away. She'd spent those three years telling herself that she didn't believe in the impossible. That there were rational explanations for everything. That the world operated according to laws she understood. The grate descended into darkness. Quinn pulled her phone from her jacket pocket, activated the flashlight, and peered down. Concrete stairs, painted institutional green decades ago, now faded and peeling. Water trickled down the walls, carrying the smell of earth and something else—something that made her sinuses prickle. Chemical. Old. She could call for backup. Standard procedure. Except that Herrera had evaded three crime scenes, and each time, the evidence had vanished. He was part of something larger, something that moved faster than the Metropolitan Police could react. If she called for backup, he'd disappear again. Her sharp jaw clenched. Morris had made that same calculus, probably in this same part of the city. Morris had thought he could handle things alone. Quinn descended. The stairs seemed to stretch longer than they should, longer than the building's foundation would logically allow. After what felt like a dozen steps, the concrete gave way to something older—stone, worn smooth by time and footsteps. The water that had trickled down the walls earlier ran more freely here, forming rivulets that flowed deeper into the darkness. Her flashlight beam caught the glint of moisture on the walls, and she realized with a strange twist in her stomach that they weren't painted green anymore. They were covered in mold, or algae, or something that grew in places light didn't reach. Her breathing sounded loud in the confined space. At the bottom of the stairs, a tunnel opened up. Not a modern Tube tunnel—she'd grown up in London, knew the maps of the Underground the way other people knew their own homes—but something older. Victorian, maybe. The curved brick of the walls arched overhead in a pattern that suggested purpose beyond modern utility. Gas lamps, now converted to electric fixtures, hung at irregular intervals along the ceiling. Most of them were dark. Her flashlight beam played across one that still functioned, casting deep shadows that made the tunnel seem to breathe. She could hear voices ahead. Multiple voices. That stopped her cold. Quinn had been trained to move toward threats, not away from them. But something in the tone of those voices—the cadence, the underlying current of anticipation—made the hair on her arms stand on end. She wasn't hearing normal conversation. She was hearing the sound of people who were expecting something. Waiting for something. She pressed herself against the tunnel wall and moved forward, her breathing shallow. The voices grew clearer as she approached. She caught fragments. "—token for entry?" "New blood tonight?" "Market opens at midnight. Silas is already setting up the ward stones." The Veil Market. She'd heard whispers about it over the past few years, rumors that the regular folks at the Nest would exchange in low voices when they thought she wasn't listening. An underground market that moved locations every full moon, where you could buy things that didn't officially exist. Where you could find people who didn't officially exist. A place her missing partner might have gone. The tunnel opened into a vast space that her mind struggled to process. It was too large to fit beneath Camden, too impossibly vast. The walls stretched up into darkness that her flashlight couldn't pierce, and the floor was covered with market stalls arranged in concentric circles. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Each one glowing with the kind of light that didn't have a visible source. And everywhere—everywhere—there were people. Or things that were shaped like people. Her detective's mind registered the details: the woman with too many fingers adjusting bottles at a stall, the man whose skin seemed to shift between colors, the child whose eyes reflected her flashlight beam like a cat's. Quinn's hand went to her weapon without conscious thought. Tomás Herrera stood near the center of the market, no longer running. He was talking to an older man in an expensive coat, gesturing urgently. When Herrera's eyes found her across the market floor, he pointed. Every face in the market turned toward her. Quinn's watch ticked audibly against her wrist. 11:53 PM. Time kept moving forward, even in impossible places. Especially in impossible places. That was the thought that crystallized in her mind as she stood at the threshold of the tunnel, one hand on her weapon, the other still holding her phone's flashlight like a candle against the dark. She'd been trained to protect civilians from criminals. She'd never been trained for this. Quinn's jaw tightened as she made the calculation. Herrera was here, in the market. That made him a witness, at minimum. It made him a lead she couldn't afford to lose. She'd spent three years watching for impossible things, for the cracks in reality where Morris had fallen through. She'd built her career on rational explanation and evidence-based investigation. But evidence was everywhere now. Unavoidable. Staring her in the face across a market that shouldn't exist in a tunnel beneath a city she thought she understood. She stepped forward into the market. Behind her, the tunnel entrance seemed to close, or perhaps just to darken. Quinn didn't look back. Her eyes tracked Herrera as he backed away, moving deeper into the impossible crowd, and she followed—a detective chasing a suspect into territory where the rules of her world no longer applied, where the only thing that still made sense was the pursuit itself.