Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQN63PN104BEJH51TXK0A5

Detective Harlow Quinn ducked under the sagging lintel and stepped down into the abandoned Camden spur with the careful economy of someone who’d spent years learning how to enter rooms that wanted her dead. The air changed on the first stair—warmer, damp as breath in a mouth, laced with incense that didn’t belong anywhere near London’s grit. Her boots landed on tile slick with condensation. The fluorescent strip-lights overhead were dark, but the place wasn’t unlit. It glowed. Not with electricity. With a low, bruised radiance that came from jars and lanterns and things that had no right to be alive: pale fungi in trays, glass vials filled with floating motes, a cage of moths whose wings pulsed like embers. Stalls had been dragged out onto the platform edge, tarps hung from old signage, the bones of the Underground repurposed into a warren of commerce. The Veil Market. A rumor, a joke, an excuse criminals used when they wanted to distract a detective with fairy tales. And now she had a cordon. Blue-and-white tape looked obscene down here, a strip of daylight pasted across a fever dream. Two uniformed officers stood at the top of the platform steps, uncomfortable in the damp glow, their torches sweeping like they expected rats the size of dogs. Quinn didn’t look at them long. She went straight to the body. It lay on the platform between a cart of blackened candles and a stall draped in what might have been fox pelts if the tails hadn’t been too long and too many. The dead man’s face was turned toward the tracks. His eyes were open, brown irises filmed over, his mouth slightly parted as if he’d died mid-question. Late twenties, early thirties. Clean-shaven. A bruise on his cheekbone with the shape of knuckles. The odd part wasn’t that he was dead. It was that the rest of the Market seemed to have held its breath around him. The nearest wares were untouched. No frantic scatter, no trampled chalk circles, no broken bottles. The candles stood in patient rows. The pelts hung straight. Even the old station clock above the platform—hands frozen at 3:13—looked undisturbed, as if time had paused out of respect. Quinn crouched beside the body, balancing on the balls of her feet. Her leather watch pressed cold against her left wrist. She kept her hands in her pockets for the moment, eyes doing what her fingers couldn’t. “Found him like that,” said a voice behind her. DI Carver had insisted on sending one of his detectives down with her, as if Quinn might suddenly run off and join a subterranean bazaar. DS Lyle Hart stood a few paces away, jacket collar turned up, notebook open. He was good at looking unimpressed even when his pupils were blown wide by strange light. “Who found him?” Quinn asked. Hart nodded toward a knot of people near the far end of the platform—vendors, buyers, whatever passed for citizens down here. They kept their distance from the tape, faces half in shadow. No one met Quinn’s eyes for long. “One of the stallholders. Says the Market opened an hour ago and he was already here.” Hart tapped his pen against the page. “No one saw anything, which is convenient.” “No one hears anything down here?” Quinn’s gaze skimmed the tiles behind the body. Dark streaks ran between grout lines—old soot, recent damp. Nothing like blood. “There was a… commotion,” Hart said, the word tight. “Some shouting. Then people noticed him. That’s all they’re giving us.” Quinn leaned closer. The dead man’s throat was intact—no cut, no puncture. His clothes were ordinary: jeans, trainers, a grey hoodie. Too ordinary for this place. But his right hand was clenched around something, knuckles white even in death. A brass compass. It sat in his fist like a secret. The casing was small, worn, its surface mottled with verdigris as if it had been buried and dug up again. The face wasn’t the usual neat cardinal points. It was etched with a ring of tiny symbols—sigils, her mind supplied before she could stop it. Quinn didn’t touch it yet. She studied how the fingers curled, the angle of the wrist. Rigor hadn’t fully set. The hand had been forced closed after death, or he’d died holding it with sudden intention. “Phones?” she asked. Hart grimaced. “His is gone. Wallet too.” “Of course it is.” Hart crouched on the opposite side, careful not to cross into her space. “Forensics thinks overdose. Needle mark could be on the inner arm under the sleeve.” Quinn looked at the man’s arms. The sleeves were pushed up to the elbows, either from heat or struggle. Skin pale, scattered with fine hairs. She saw no puncture. She saw something else: a faint rim of grey around the nails, like ash ground into the cuticles. “Overdose doesn’t bruise knuckles,” she said. “Could’ve been mugged, then dumped.” Hart’s pen hovered. He wanted this to be simple. “This place… it’s a den. People get rough.” Quinn’s eyes tracked the body’s position. The man lay too neatly, limbs aligned, spine straight. Dumped bodies didn’t look like that unless whoever dumped them cared about presentation. Or unless the body had dropped from a height and landed flat with a thump. She glanced up. The ceiling above the platform was low, stained with age, threaded with cables. No gaps big enough to push a body through. No access hatch. No ladder marks. She looked down toward the tracks. They were dark, filled with shallow water that reflected the Market’s sick light. The rails were rusted. No signs of a recent fall, no scrape marks on the platform edge. “Where’s the blood?” Quinn asked softly. Hart blinked. “If he overdosed—” “I mean from the bruise. From the fight you’re implying. There’s none on his clothes.” Hart hesitated, then gestured with his pen. “Maybe he was hit elsewhere.” “Then he was carried.” Quinn’s gaze slid along the platform tiles. “And carried carefully. No drag marks.” She let her eyes roam wider, past the tape, past the stalls. She catalogued what didn’t belong: a ring of salt scattered near a pillar, disturbed as if someone had kicked through it and then tried to brush it back into place. A cluster of pale feathers stuck to a damp patch on the ground. A smear on the tiled wall that wasn’t soot—too clean, too silver, like someone had pressed wet paint and pulled away. Hart followed her line of sight. “That could be candle wax.” “Candle wax doesn’t shine like that.” Quinn rose, joints complaining in the cold damp. She took a step toward the silver smear. The light changed as she approached it, and she realized it wasn’t the light. It was the air. A faint prickle rose on her skin, the hairs on her forearms lifting. Three years ago, DS Morris had stepped into a warehouse off the Limehouse Cut, chasing a suspect who’d vanished like smoke. Morris had looked back once, eyes wide, mouth forming Quinn’s name. Then he’d gone around a corner and never come out again. The door at the end of the hall had led to a brick wall. The building plans swore there was no room beyond. Quinn had spent weeks tearing it apart until Internal Affairs told her grief made people obsessive. Standing in the Veil Market, she felt the same wrongness, subtle as a lie told with confidence. “Quinn?” Hart’s voice tightened. “Don’t touch anything.” She ignored him and leaned in close to the silver smear. It wasn’t on the surface of the tile. It sat just above it, a thin film suspended as if the wall had exhaled and left breath behind. “Tell your uniforms to stop shining torches everywhere,” she said. “It’s making it worse.” “Makes what worse?” She straightened and turned her head slowly. The crowd at the far end had gone still. A woman pushed forward from the knot of onlookers, stopping behind the tape. She was small, freckled, her curly red hair shoved back like she’d been tugging at it. Round glasses caught the lantern-glow, turning her eyes into green coins. A worn leather satchel hung from her shoulder, bulging with books despite the damp. Eva Kowalski looked like someone who’d taken a wrong turn into a nightmare and decided to bring research materials. Hart frowned. “Who’s that?” Quinn’s jaw tightened. She’d been warned there were academics and archivists who treated places like this as fieldwork. She’d met a few in interviews—too calm, too eager to explain the inexplicable. Eva lifted a hand as if asking permission. Then she did what people down here seemed to do as a matter of habit: she reached up and tucked hair behind her left ear. Her fingers trembled. “I shouldn’t be here,” Eva said, voice pitched low. “But they sent for me.” “Who did?” Hart demanded. Eva glanced at the vendors, then at Quinn. “People who don’t want this handled by uniforms with torches. Detective Quinn, isn’t it?” Quinn didn’t like that her name was known. She kept her expression flat. “You’re Eva Kowalski. British Museum.” Eva’s shoulders dropped a fraction, as if acknowledgment was safer than suspicion. “Restricted archives, yes.” Hart let out a short laugh that held no humor. “We’ve got a corpse and you’ve brought a librarian.” Eva’s eyes flicked to the body. Something dark passed across her face—not squeamishness, not shock. Recognition. “That compass,” Eva said. “He shouldn’t have had it.” Quinn’s gaze snapped back to the dead man’s clenched fist. “You know what it is.” Eva swallowed. “It’s from here. A Veil Compass. They’re… expensive. Difficult. It points to rifts.” Hart stared at her, pen poised midair. “Rifts?” “Portals,” Eva said, as if choosing a simpler word might make it less insane. “Places where—” She stopped, aware of Hart’s stare, aware of how she sounded. She tried again, steadier. “Where the boundary thins.” Quinn felt the hairs on her arms lift again, like the air approved of the phrase. Hart looked at Quinn, seeking an anchor. “This is—” “Save it,” Quinn said, and surprised herself with the sharpness. She stepped back to the body and crouched again, this time pulling a pair of gloves from her pocket. She eased the compass free. The dead man’s fingers resisted for a second, then loosened with a soft, wet sound. The brass was cold against her palm, colder than it had any right to be in this humid air. The etched sigils caught the light and seemed to shift, not moving but refusing to settle into a fixed pattern. The needle wasn’t pointing north. It quivered, then pulled hard toward the wall with the silver smear. Quinn held it steady, watching. The needle trembled like an animal scenting blood, then locked. Eva let out a breath. “It’s active,” she whispered, as if speaking louder might wake something. Hart leaned in despite himself. “Magnets,” he said weakly. “It’s—someone’s playing with—” “His watch stopped at 3:13,” Quinn said. She glanced up at the dead station clock above the platform. Frozen at the same minute. “That’s not a coincidence. And there’s no blood, no drag marks, no sign of a struggle that ends in a body neatly laid out.” Hart bristled. “So what, he fell through the wall?” Quinn looked at the silver smear again, at the salt ring half-repaired, at the feathers stuck to damp tile. She thought of Morris’s last look, the corner that wasn’t a corner, the brick wall where a door should’ve been. “No,” she said. “He came out of it.” The words tasted wrong, but the evidence lined up with a sick, perfect clarity. The bruise on his cheek. The ash at his nails. The way his hoodie was damp at the shoulders, as if he’d been dragged through water. The absence of typical scene noise—no scattered goods, no chaos—because whatever happened had happened fast, like a trap snapping shut. Eva’s voice dropped. “If he came through a rift, he might not have been… fully here at first. That can do strange things to a body.” Hart’s eyes narrowed, trying to force the world back into rules he understood. “You’re saying he teleported and died.” “I’m saying,” Quinn replied, “someone wanted him found here. They chose a place where normal procedure breaks down. Where witnesses don’t talk, cameras don’t exist, and everyone has an excuse to call it magic.” She held the compass closer to the wall. The air prickled. Her gloves felt too thin, as if something on the other side could sense the warmth of her skin. Eva shook her head. “The Veil Market moves every full moon. Tonight’s close. That’s when rifts are easier to—” Quinn glanced at her leather watch, then at the frozen station clock. “And someone timed this.” Hart’s mouth tightened. “So we’re chasing some… wizard now.” “We’re chasing a murderer,” Quinn said. “Same as always.” She lowered the compass and studied the dead man’s face. The open eyes had a faint sheen, a film that wasn’t just drying. She leaned closer, ignoring Hart’s muttered protest, and caught it: a shimmer at the edge of the pupil, like oil on water. Not a drug sign. Not something she’d seen in overdoses. “What’s wrong with his eyes?” she asked, mostly to herself. Eva’s voice came small. “Sometimes, if someone looks through… they bring a little of it back.” Quinn straightened slowly. The crowd beyond the tape watched her with careful stillness. Their faces were guarded, mouths set like people who’d seen police before and survived by being forgettable. But beneath that was something else: fear that didn’t belong to criminals worried about a raid. Fear of whatever had opened in the wall. Quinn turned to Hart. “I want a full sweep of the wall and the platform. No one touches that salt. Get photos of every mark, every feather, every smear. And find out who he is—missing persons, hospital admits, anyone who went off-grid in Camden in the last week.” Hart opened his mouth, then shut it. He looked at the compass in Quinn’s hand, the needle still tugging toward the smear like it had a grudge. His skepticism didn’t vanish, but it shifted into something more cautious. “And her?” he asked, nodding at Eva. Quinn’s gaze flicked to Eva’s satchel, the books stuffed inside like talismans. An outsider, not police, but she’d named the tool in the victim’s hand without hesitation. She belonged to this strangeness in a way Hart didn’t. “I’m staying,” Eva said before Quinn could answer. Her fingers went to her hair again, tucking it behind her left ear with a frantic precision. “If that’s a rift mark, it shouldn’t be left alone. It—things can reopen. Especially near the full moon.” Quinn looked back at the wall. The silver smear seemed to brighten as if it resented being discussed. She felt, absurdly, that the station itself was listening. She slid the compass carefully into an evidence bag, but even through plastic she could feel its cold insistence. She didn’t tell Hart that the needle had jerked once, sharply, not toward the wall but toward her—like it recognized something in her proximity and wanted her attention. Or warned her away. Quinn’s throat tightened with an old, familiar anger. Morris’s ghost wasn’t a superstition; it was a set of unanswered questions that kept her awake. If this Market was real, if rifts were real, then someone had lied to her—deliberately or out of ignorance—and those lies had cost a good man his life. She looked at the dead stranger and felt no pity, only purpose. “Fine,” Quinn said to Eva, voice low. “You stay where I can see you. You touch nothing. You tell me what you know when I ask. And if you try to feed me a story, I’ll treat you like any other witness trying to obstruct an investigation.” Eva nodded once, quick and tight. “Understood.” Hart exhaled through his nose. “This is going to be a paperwork nightmare.” Quinn’s eyes stayed on the wall. The air there shimmered in a way that was almost invisible, like heat above asphalt. Almost. “Not if we call it what it is,” she said. Hart stared. “And what’s that?” Quinn lifted her chin, the old military precision settling into her bones like a familiar weight. She could feel the Market watching, could feel the rift-mark listening, could feel the compass’s cold impatience sealed in plastic at her side. “A doorway,” she said. “And someone’s using it.”