Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQQEM1EM3VAAD6V5VRC2WQ

Detective Harlow Quinn paused at the foot of the service stairs and let her eyes adjust to the underlight. The air down here didn’t smell like London. It smelled like damp iron and old smoke and something sweet that didn’t belong in a tunnel—clove and hot resin, like an incense stick ground under a boot. A uniform in a high-vis vest waited two steps below, keeping his voice low out of respect or nerves. “DI Quinn? This way. They—uh—opened it for us.” Opened it. As if a door had been stuck, not as if the city had folded back on itself and revealed a place that wasn’t supposed to exist. Quinn took the steps with military economy, one hand skimming the rail. Her worn leather watch rode her left wrist, the strap softened by sweat and years; the second hand ticked like a metronome against the hush. She didn’t like being kept outside anything, especially a crime scene, and she didn’t like the feeling she’d had at the top of the stairs when she’d handed over the little object that had gotten her admitted. A bone token. Smooth, pale, carved with a notch that felt like a toothmark. She’d confiscated it off a pickpocket two weeks ago and logged it as “unidentified carved charm.” It had sat in an evidence bag until last night, when an anonymous text had landed on her phone with a location ping and two words: VEIL MARKET. Now she was here, stepping into an abandoned Tube station beneath Camden that should have been sealed and bricked and forgotten. Instead it breathed. The corridor opened into a wide platform where ancient advertising panels had been repurposed into stalls. Strings of low lanterns gave off a viscous yellow light. Bodies moved in clumps—too many coats, too many hoods, too many faces half-hidden. The low murmur wasn’t English alone. It was bargaining, laughter, the occasional sharp bark of anger, and underneath it all a faint, constant hum that made the fillings in Quinn’s molars ache. A pair of plainclothes officers stood at the edge of a taped-off section of platform, looking like they’d wandered into a fever dream. One of them, a stocky man with a shaved head, held his notebook so tightly his knuckles had gone white. Then Quinn saw the body. It lay half on the platform, half on the gravel bed between rails that hadn’t carried a train in decades. A man in his thirties—maybe. Clean-shaven, expensive coat, shoes that didn’t belong in underground filth. His head was turned to one side as if he’d fallen asleep mid-step. His mouth hung open slightly. His eyes were open, too, fixed on nothing. No visible blood. That was what made the scene feel wrong first. People died messily. The city did mess. Even a clean kill left something behind: a spatter, a smear, a bruise you could read like handwriting. Here the gravel looked undisturbed. The man’s coat was dusty, but not torn. His hands were empty. His pockets, Quinn knew before she reached him, had already been checked by someone eager to find a phone, a wallet, an ID. The sort of person who thought the quickest answer was the best one. A woman stood just inside the tape, small in her oversized coat, curly red hair catching the lantern light like copper wire. Round glasses. Freckles. A worn leather satchel slung across her body so the strap cut from shoulder to hip, bulging with books as if the underground market were an inconvenient stop on the way to a library. Eva Kowalski tucked hair behind her left ear with an absent, nervous precision, then looked up and met Quinn’s gaze without flinching. “I told them you’d come,” Eva said. Quinn felt the familiar, sharp irritation she reserved for civilians who inserted themselves into investigations. It was an old reflex, honed through eighteen years of telling people to step back, to shut up, to let the trained do the work. But this wasn’t a regular civilian, and they both knew it. “How did you get past the door?” Quinn asked, stepping under the tape without waiting for permission. Eva lifted her chin a fraction. “The same way everyone does. I had a token. I work nearby.” “You work at the British Museum,” Quinn said. She kept her tone even. Facts, not accusations. “Restricted archives.” Eva’s green eyes flicked to the body and away again. “And I research things that the Metropolitan Police typically dismiss as folklore.” Quinn crouched by the dead man’s shoes. The soles were clean. Too clean. The gravel beneath him held no scuff marks, no drag lines. If he’d stumbled down from the platform, there would be a scatter pattern—stones disturbed, a skid. Instead it looked as if someone had placed him there and stepped away without leaving so much as a toe print. “Name?” Quinn asked over her shoulder. The shaved-head officer cleared his throat. “No ID, ma’am. Wallet’s empty. Phone’s missing. We’ve got—uh—CCTV?” He said it like a question because there were cameras in the tunnel, mounted high on the columns—old housings that should have been dead. One of them hummed softly, its red light blinking. Quinn looked up. The camera’s lens was not pointed at the body. It was pointed at the wall. She filed it away. Eva knelt on the other side of the corpse with a sort of careful familiarity, as if she’d learned long ago how to be close to dead things without letting them touch her. “He’s not from the Market,” she said quietly. “The regulars would know him.” “And you’re a regular?” Quinn’s voice stayed flat. Eva’s mouth tightened. “I’m a researcher. Sometimes information isn’t in books.” Quinn leaned closer to the man’s face. His lips had a faint bluish tint. Not cyanosis from drowning; not enough. The skin along his jaw looked… dry. Like parchment left too long near a radiator. She pressed two fingers gently to his neck. Cold. Not the normal chill of a body in a damp tunnel—this was deeper, as if the heat had been pulled out rather than spent. “What’s your interpretation?” Quinn asked, though she already knew Eva had one. Eva swallowed. Her hand went to her left ear again, tucking hair behind it with a quick, unconscious motion. “It looks like rift exposure.” Quinn’s fingers stilled at the man’s throat. “Explain.” Eva nodded toward the rails. “If a portal opens—if the boundary thins—heat and moisture can be displaced. It’s like… standing too close to an open freezer, only it’s not cold air. It’s absence.” Quinn looked at the man’s coat again. There were faint crystals along the hem, like salt or dried frost. In London’s underground in early autumn, that didn’t make sense. She scraped a bit with her nail. It flaked like ash. “Mundane causes,” Quinn said, because she was a detective and that was her job. “Hypothermia. Chemical exposure. A staged dump.” Eva’s gaze stayed on the corpse. “Then why no footprints? No drag marks? Why bring him here at all, to a place that moves every full moon and requires a token to enter?” Quinn didn’t like the way Eva said it so calmly. As if the shifting location of the Veil Market was as ordinary as a change of shift at the station. She stood, letting her knees pop, and took in the wider platform with a slow sweep. Stalls pressed close to the cordon; faces watched from the edges, eyes bright in the lantern glow. A vendor with hands stained black by ink leaned on a crate and pretended not to listen. A woman with a veil over her mouth stood too still, as if she were holding her breath. Quinn clocked security—men with heavy coats and heavier stares—positioned in the shadows with the practiced indifference of bouncers. No one was panicking. That was another wrong note. A dead body in a market should create chaos—fear of police, fear of whoever killed him, fear of collateral. Here it was contained, like an inconvenience. As if they’d seen it before. Quinn stepped back toward the rails and crouched again, this time looking not at the body but at the space around it. She scanned for the small betrayals the world always offered: a displaced stone, a smear of dust, a broken thread. There, near the man’s right hand: a faint line in the grit. Too straight to be random. Quinn angled her head, letting the lanterns catch it. The line shimmered, not with moisture but with something like oil on water—an iridescent sheen that bent the light. She reached for an evidence marker and stopped. Her hand hovered over the shimmer, hesitating for the first time since she’d walked in. Something in her remembered another scene, three years back: a warehouse floor, clean concrete, her partner DS Morris bleeding out with no obvious wound, his eyes wide and furious and afraid. The way the air had felt wrong then, too—thin, sharp, like the world had a tear in it. She’d filed that memory away under “unexplained,” because she’d had to keep functioning. Because the Met did not have a form for “reality broke.” Quinn looked at Eva. “You said rift exposure. Where would it be?” Eva’s gaze lifted, tracking Quinn’s earlier observation to the humming camera, then further—past the corpse, past the rails—to the wall the camera stared at. The wall was tiled in old white ceramic, grime-streaked, with an advertisement panel bolted into it. The poster inside was sun-faded but still legible: a smiling family selling holidays from a time when people trusted trains. The tiles beneath the panel were too clean. Not scrubbed—simply untouched by soot, as if the grime avoided them. Eva stood, adjusting her satchel. “There,” she said. Quinn walked to the wall. The closer she got, the more her teeth ached. Her skin prickled under her coat as if she’d stepped into static. The hum in the air thickened. She lifted her hand toward the clean patch of tile, and the hairs on her knuckles rose. The shaved-head officer watched her with open discomfort. “Ma’am… what are we—” Quinn held up a finger without looking at him. Silence. She listened. It was faint, but it was there: a whispering sound like paper sliding against paper. Not from the market crowd. From the wall. “Do you have any tools?” Quinn asked Eva. Eva blinked. “Tools?” Quinn’s sharp jaw tightened. “Something that reacts. Something that points.” Eva hesitated, then unshouldered her satchel and rummaged with quick, practiced fingers. Books shifted. A glass vial clinked. She drew out a small brass compass, no bigger than Quinn’s palm. The casing had a patina of verdigris, green blooming in the grooves. Its face was etched with protective sigils so fine they looked like scratches until the light caught them. “This is from here,” Eva said. “A Veil Compass.” Quinn took it, surprised by its weight. Brass, cold. The lid snapped open with a crisp click. Inside, the needle trembled, not settling on north. It spun once, twice, then jerked toward the wall with a hungry certainty. Quinn followed the needle’s direction. It pointed not at the tiles generally, but at the seam between the advertisement panel and the wall. “A portal,” Eva said softly. “Or the residue of one.” Quinn kept her face still, because she could feel eyes on her from the market. Their attention was a pressure. If she gave them a reaction, they’d take it as permission or weakness. She stepped closer and examined the bolts holding the panel. They were old, rusted, but the rust looked wrong—too uniform, like it had been painted on. She touched one. It crumbled under her fingertip into fine red dust. Not rust. Something else pretending. Quinn’s mind ran its neat lines, connecting points the way it always did. Victim appears without disturbance. No footprints. No drag. Market requires a token—so either the killer had one or didn’t need one. A rift could bypass entry. The camera pointed here, not at the platform. Someone wanted this seam watched. “Who called it in?” Quinn asked. The stocky officer cleared his throat again. “Anonymous. Payphone to dispatch. Said there was a body at—” He swallowed. “At this location. But dispatch didn’t have it on file. We had to… we had to follow a bloke who met us topside.” A guide. Of course. Quinn pictured a handoff, a controlled entry. Someone had wanted police here, but on their terms. Quinn leaned down and peered along the edge of the panel. There was a hairline gap, no wider than a fingernail. In that gap, the air looked different. Not dark—dense. Like looking into deep water. She drew back and glanced at the corpse. If the portal had opened there, it could have deposited him without a struggle, without physical contact. Drop, close, leave. No footprints. But why kill him? Why here? She looked at Eva again. “You said he’s not from the Market.” “No,” Eva said. “But he might have been looking for it.” Quinn’s gaze traveled to the dead man’s hands. Clean nails. No grime. Not a tunnel dweller. Not a vendor. Someone with enough money to buy information and enough arrogance to think it was safe. A thought flickered: informant. Undercover. Or worse—someone from her own world, bridging into theirs. Quinn crouched by the body one last time, this time inspecting the neck and collar. She parted the coat carefully, not disturbing the crystals along the hem. On the skin just above the collarbone she saw a mark: a pale indentation shaped like a small circle with a notch. Token-shaped. Not a bruise from impact. An impression, as if something had been pressed there hard, long enough to leave its pattern without breaking skin. Quinn straightened slowly. The Veil Compass in her hand quivered, needle unwavering toward the wall. “He had a token,” Quinn said. Eva’s brows drew together. “You can tell that from—” “The mark.” Quinn kept her eyes on the indentation as if she could force it to explain itself. “Someone pressed it into him. Like a signature. Or like… a key.” Eva’s throat worked. “Some tokens are keys.” Quinn’s watch ticked. The market’s murmur rolled on around them, too steady. She felt, suddenly, the shape of a trap—not for the victim, but for her. Someone had lured her into a place that ran on rules she didn’t understand, and left her a body and a doorway. Her partner’s face flashed in her mind again, Morris on the concrete, lips moving around words he’d never gotten to finish. Quinn had carried that unsaid sentence for three years, heavy as a stone in her pocket. She closed the compass lid and held it in her fist. Brass bit into her skin. “All right,” Quinn said, voice low and controlled. “We’re treating that wall as an access point. No one touches it. No one goes near it without me.” The shaved-head officer looked relieved to have an instruction he understood. “Yes, ma’am.” Eva’s eyes stayed on Quinn, searching her face for something Quinn refused to give. “You believe me,” Eva said, not quite a question. Quinn glanced at the clean tiles and the seam that whispered. She didn’t believe. Belief was too soft. She accepted what was in front of her because denial didn’t solve murders. “I believe the evidence,” Quinn said. “And right now the evidence says someone walked through a door that shouldn’t exist.” She slipped the Veil Compass into her coat pocket, feeling its weight settle against her ribs like a new organ. Then she looked out at the market crowd, at the still faces and the careful distance they kept, at the bouncers watching her watch them. Somewhere in all of that, the person who’d arranged this was listening. Quinn lifted her chin. “Find out who he is,” she told her team, then nodded at Eva. “And you—if you’re going to keep inserting yourself, you’re going to do it usefully. Tell me what opens that kind of door.” Eva’s fingers went to her left ear again, tucking hair back as if to clear her head. “Doors like that,” she said, voice barely above the hum, “don’t open for everyone. They open for what they recognize.” Quinn’s jaw tightened. “And what would it recognize?” Eva looked from the wall to the body and back. “A token,” she said. “Or a person who’s been marked.” Quinn thought of Morris. Thought of the clean concrete and the wrong air. Thought of the notch-shaped mark on the dead man’s skin. Her hand went, without her meaning it to, to her own collarbone—just skin there, just the steady pulse of her life. For now. She lowered her hand and stared at the seam until her eyes watered. “Then we find the mark,” Quinn said. “And we find who’s handing out keys.”