Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQR83Y0SR41DCJ907NF2B4

The rain in Soho didn't fall so much as it dissolved, coating the brickwork and the pavement in a slick, oily sheen that caught the garish glow of the city’s neon. Detective Harlow Quinn adjusted the collar of her wax-canvas coat, her eyes fixed on the man slipping through the crowd forty yards ahead. He moved with a nervous, twitching energy, his shoulders hunched as if he expected a blow from the sky. Tomás Herrera. Quinn knew the file by heart. Former paramedic, Seville-born, NHS wash-out with a penchant for treating people who didn’t officially exist. She flicked her gaze to the worn leather watch on her left wrist. 11:14 PM. She had been trailing him since he’d emerged from The Raven’s Nest, that cramped hole-in-the-wall where the light from the green neon sign turned every patron into a ghoul. Tomás took a hard right, his boots splashing into a deep puddle. Quinn didn’t speed up. She maintained her pace, a rhythmic, military stride that ate up the distance without drawing eyes. She was forty-one, with eighteen years of Metropolitan service etched into the lines around her eyes and the set of her sharp jaw, and she knew that a chase was often won in the pauses, not the sprints. "Control, I'm following the subject southbound toward the Camden borders," she murmured into the collar-mic hidden beneath her coat. Static was her only answer. The city felt dense tonight, the air thick with more than just humidity. It felt heavy, like the atmosphere before a massive electrical storm. She remembered that feeling. She’d felt it three years ago, on the night DS Morris had vanished into a warehouse fire that left no ashes. They had found his badge and his gun, but Morris—solid, dependable Morris—had simply been deleted from the world. The department called it an unexplained casualty. Quinn called it a lie. Tomás glanced over his shoulder. The warm brown of his eyes flashed in the dark, wide with a frantic sort of terror. He saw her. The chase shifted from a stalk to a sprint. Tomás bolted, weaving through a group of tourists with a dexterity that spoke of a man used to running. Quinn didn't shout. Shouting was for rookies who thought authority came from the throat. She simply ran. Her boots hammered the pavement, her breathing controlled and shallow. He lunged toward a construction hoarding, slipping through a gap in the plywood. Quinn followed, her shoulder catching the rough wood as she squeezed through. They were behind the main thoroughfare now, in the shadow-drenched guts of a redevelopment site. Ahead, Tomás was a dark silhouette silhouetted against a rusted iron gate. He didn’t climb it; he dived beneath it, disappearing into a stairwell that shouldn't have been there. Quinn reached the gate and skidded to a halt. The stairs led down into the throat of an abandoned Tube station. A cold, metallic draft wafted up from the depths, carrying the scent of ozone, rot, and something sickly sweet, like burnt sugar and old copper. She reached into her inner pocket and drew her service pistol, checked the slide, and held it in a low ready position. She looked at the yawning black mouth of the tunnel. Her instincts—the ones that had kept her alive for nearly two decades—screamed at her to wait for backup. But backup wouldn't come here. Not to the places Tomás Herrera frequented. She stepped onto the first stair. The concrete was cracked and slick with a slime that looked purple under her tactical torch. As she descended, the sounds of London—the sirens, the tires on wet asphalt, the distant thrum of the city—faded into a pressurized silence. At the bottom of the flight, a heavy steel door stood ajar. A man sat on a crate beside it, his face obscured by a hood. He didn't look like a vagrant. He looked like a gargoyle carved from shadow. As Quinn approached, he held out a withered hand, palm up. "Bone," he croaked. Quinn didn't lower her weapon. "Police. Move aside." The man didn't flinch. He gestured toward a small wooden bowl on the floor. It was filled with jagged, white fragments that looked uncomfortably like human knuckles. Quinn reached into her pocket. She didn't have a bone token, but she had the silver whistle Morris had carried—a lucky charm she’d pulled from the ruins of the warehouse three years ago. She didn't know why, but she threw it into the bowl. The whistle hit the wood with a dull thud. The hooded man nodded and kicked the door wider. Quinn stepped through and felt the world tilt. She was standing on a gantry overlooking the tracks of a station that appeared on no modern map. This was the Veil Market. Below her, the platform was a riot of motion and impossible colors. Stallholders shouted in languages that sounded like clicking stones and rushing water. The air was thick with the smoke of incense that burned blue and orange. She saw things that defied the neat, clinical reports she filed at the station. Glass jars filled with shimmering, liquid light; racks of silk that seemed to move of their own volition; bundles of herbs that bled when cut. And there, weaving through the throng of buyers and sellers, was Tomás. He moved toward a stall near the far end of the platform, his left hand clutching his forearm. Quinn saw the flash of the Saint Christopher medallion around his neck as it swung out from his shirt. He looked small here, diminished by the madness of the market. He stopped at a counter draped in black velvet and began speaking to a figure hidden behind a screen of hanging beads. Quinn moved down the gantry stairs, her heart hammering against her ribs. She was a woman of logic, of evidence, of the tangible. This place was a physical assault on her reality. She passed a woman selling shadows trapped in jars and didn't look back. Her eyes remained locked on the back of Herrera's head. She reached the floor of the platform, her hand tight on her holster. The crowd didn't part for her; they ignored her, a sea of overcoats, cloaks, and things wearing human skin. She shoved past a man whose eyes were entirely golden and reached for Tomás’s shoulder. "Herrera! Hands where I can see them!" Tomás spun around, his face pale, sweat silvering his forehead. He gasped, his back hitting the velvet-covered stall. "Detective. You shouldn't be here. You don't have the blood for this." "I don't give a damn about blood," Quinn snapped, stepping into his space, her jaw set like granite. "I want names. I want to know who you were treating in Mayfair. I want to know how a man burns to nothing in a cold warehouse." Tomás looked at her with genuine pity. He reached out, not to strike, but as if to comfort her. Quinn caught his wrist—the one with the long scar running up the forearm from a knife attack she knew had occurred in a back alley two years ago. "The world isn't what you think it is, Harlow," Tomás whispered. "Morris found that out. He didn't die. He was traded." The name hit her like a physical blow. The noise of the market seemed to roar in her ears—the chanting, the haggling, the strange, rhythmic thrumming of the heartbeat of the earth. "Traded to who?" she demanded, her voice cracking. Tomás looked past her, his eyes widening. "We have to go. Now. The wardens... they don't like tourists." From the shadows of the tunnel, three figures emerged. They wore long, grey coats that seemed to absorb the light, and their faces were obscured by porcelain masks with no eye slits. They moved with a synchronized, mechanical grace that made Quinn’s skin crawl. She looked at Tomás, then at the masked figures, then back at the stairs she’d descended. The logic of the precinct told her to arrest the man and find a way out. The instinct of the hunter told her that if she stayed, she’d become another missing badge in a folder. "Run," Tomás said, his voice urgent. He shoved a small, heavy velvet pouch into her hand. "Go back to the Nest. Look for the maps. Use the maps, Quinn." He didn't wait for an answer. He dived into the crowd, disappearing behind a display of antique mirrors that reflected a dozen different versions of the station. Quinn stood for a split second, the cold weight of the pouch in her palm. The grey-clad figures were closing in, their movements silent and relentless. She looked at the bone-white masks and saw her own reflection in the porcelain—frightened, determined, and suddenly very small. She turned and ran. Not away from the truth, but back toward the only world she knew, clutching a piece of the darkness in her hand. As she scrambled back up the concrete stairs, the green neon of Soho felt like a dream she was trying to wake up from, while the cold rot of the Veil Market stayed lodged in her lungs. She reached the surface, the rain hitting her face like a benediction. She didn't stop until she reached the corner of the street, ducking into the recessed doorway of a closed tailor shop. Her breath came in ragged gasps. She opened her hand. In the center of her palm lay a small, tarnished brass key and a single, human tooth. Harlow Quinn looked out at the rain-soaked streets of London. The city looked the same—the buses hummed, the tourists laughed, the lights flickered. But the skin had been peeled back. She could see the veins now, and she knew she’d never be able to look at the world the same way again. She tucked the key and the tooth into her pocket, adjusted her coat, and began the long walk back to the station. The hunt wasn't over. It had just changed shape.