Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQQXNNSPD6SN30VEQ6R9S7

The stench hit Quinn before she even reached the platform—copper and rot mixing with the damp mineral smell of the Underground. She ducked under the police tape strung across the entrance to what should have been a sealed section of the old Camden Tube station, her worn leather watch catching on the yellow plastic before she freed it with a practiced twist. Below, arc lights flooded the abandoned platform with harsh white glare, throwing shadows against walls covered in decades of grime and graffiti. Two uniformed officers stood near the far end, their faces carefully blank in the way that meant they'd seen something that troubled them. DS Chambers waited halfway down the platform, his bulk silhouetted against the lights, hands shoved deep in his coat pockets. Quinn descended the non-functioning escalator, her boots finding purchase on steps slick with moisture. Eighteen years on the force had taught her to catalog details before emotion could cloud them—the way the air moved wrong down here, too still for a space this size; the smell underneath the blood, something acrid and chemical; the scuff marks on the platform edge that looked deliberate, patterned. "Victim's a young woman, mid-twenties," Chambers called up, his Yorkshire accent flattening the vowels. "No identification. Forensics is running prints now." Quinn reached the platform and stopped, letting her eyes adjust to the interplay of shadow and light. The body lay near the tracks, positioned with unnatural precision. Arms crossed over the chest. Legs straight, ankles together. Someone had arranged her post-mortem—Quinn had seen enough death to know the difference between a body fallen and a body placed. "Cause?" she asked, moving closer but staying outside the evidence markers. "That's the odd bit." Chambers shifted his weight, a tell she recognized. He was uncomfortable. "No obvious wounds. No ligature marks, no signs of struggle. Could be poison, could be something else. ME's on her way." Quinn crouched at the perimeter, studying the victim's face. Pretty, with freckles still visible under the pallor of death. Red hair spread in a careful fan around her head. The positioning spoke of ritual, of meaning. This wasn't rage or opportunity. This was deliberate. Her gaze tracked outward from the body. The platform around the victim had been swept clean—actually swept, she could see the marks in the dust. A rough circle, maybe twelve feet in diameter, with the body at its center. Beyond that circle, the accumulated filth of decades lay undisturbed. "Who found her?" Quinn asked. "Urban explorers. Two kids with cameras, looking to film the abandoned stations. They called it in straight away, didn't touch anything." "Lucky they didn't contaminate the scene." She stood, walking the perimeter of the clean circle. "This station's been closed since the seventies. How'd they even get down here?" "Maintenance entrance two streets over. Lock was already broken." Quinn filed that away. She moved to the edge of the platform and peered down at the tracks. No power to them, hadn't been for fifty years, but the rails still gleamed dully in the artificial light. Something caught her eye between the tracks—small objects arranged in a pattern. She pulled out her phone, activated the torch, and directed the beam downward. "Did forensics photograph this?" she called to Chambers. "Photograph what?" "The items on the tracks." Chambers joined her, leaning over. "Christ. I didn't even see those." Eight objects, arranged in a perfect octagon around a ninth at the center. Quinn's torch beam picked out details: small bones, maybe chicken; bundles of dried herbs tied with dark thread; glass vials filled with liquid that caught the light strangely. At the center, something that looked like a compass, its brass casing green with age. "Get the photographer back down here," Quinn said quietly. "And don't let anyone touch those until they're documented." Chambers pulled out his radio, moved away to make the call. Quinn stayed at the platform edge, her mind working through possibilities. The cleaned circle. The positioned body. The arranged objects. The sealed location. This wasn't a murder—at least not like any murder she'd worked before. Three years ago, DS Morris had been investigating a series of disappearances when he'd stopped answering his phone. They'd found him two days later in a warehouse by the Thames, dead from what the ME ruled as sudden cardiac arrest. No signs of foul play. No evidence of anything except that one moment his heart had been beating and the next it hadn't. But Morris had been whispering about strange markets and impossible things in the weeks before his death. He'd filled notebooks with sketches of symbols that looked disturbingly similar to the markings Quinn could now see etched into the concrete around the swept circle. She'd thought he'd been cracking under the pressure. Had recommended he take leave. Had failed to see what was right in front of her. Quinn pulled out her notebook, began sketching the pattern of objects on the tracks. Her hand moved with military precision, each line exact. The compass at the center drew her attention repeatedly. Even from this distance, she could see symbols on its face, tiny etchings that seemed to shift in the uncertain light. "Quinn." Chambers had returned, his voice lower than before. "Found something else. You're not going to like it." She followed him to the far end of the platform, where the tunnel entrance gaped like a mouth. He directed his torch beam at the wall just inside the tunnel. More symbols, these painted in something dark that had dried to a rust-brown. "Could be paint," Chambers said, but his tone suggested he didn't believe it. Quinn moved closer, careful not to step beyond the evidence markers the uniforms had laid. The symbols covered perhaps six feet of wall, arranged in concentric circles around a central mark that looked like an eye bisected by a vertical line. Her pulse kicked up a notch. She'd seen this mark before, in Morris's notebook. "We need to seal this entire station," she said. "No one in or out until we've processed every inch." "Already done. But Quinn—" Chambers hesitated. "This feels like something else. Something we're not equipped for." "We work what's in front of us." She kept her voice level, professional. "Murder's murder, no matter how it's dressed up." But even as she said it, she knew it wasn't true. This was something else, something that existed in the spaces between what she'd been trained to see and what she'd refused to acknowledge. The victim's clothes were clean, expensive—leather satchel beside her body, its contents spilled across the platform. Books, mostly. Old books, the kind with leather bindings and gilt edges. One lay open near Quinn's feet, its pages covered in dense text and hand-drawn illustrations of symbols that matched the ones on the tunnel wall. She photographed it without touching it, zooming in on the page. The text was in Latin, but the header was English: "Concerning the Veil Market and Its Keepers." Quinn's jaw tightened. She glanced back at the body, at the red hair and freckled skin, at the round glasses that had been placed carefully beside the victim's left hand. At the worn leather satchel full of books. Something cold settled in her chest. This wasn't random. This was a message, a warning, a line drawn in whatever strange territory she was now stepping into. And if she was right about what she was seeing, then everything she thought she knew about Morris's death needed to be reconsidered. "Get me everything," she told Chambers. "CCTV from every camera within a mile. Door-to-door in the area. I want to know who knew this station could be accessed. And I want that compass from the tracks. Carefully." She turned back to the scene, her mind already cataloging, connecting, deducing. The evidence was there, she just needed to learn how to read it. And if that meant acknowledging that the world contained more than what she'd been trained to see, then so be it. Morris had tried to tell her. Now someone else was dead, and Quinn wouldn't make the same mistake twice.