Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQRJ9X968FPQCX9QWXP2S8

The emergency lights bathed the abandoned Tube station in harsh red, turning the dust motes into swirling blood. Detective Harlow Quinn ducked beneath the yellow tape, her worn leather watch catching on the edge as she stepped into what the uniforms had already designated Crime Scene Seven. Seven. In one night. "You're late, Quinn." DCI Thorne stood by the platform edge, his face grim in the emergency lighting. He looked like he hadn't slept in days—probably because he hadn't. Neither had she. "Traffic." She moved past him, her sharp jaw set as she surveyed the scene. "What have we got?" "Male, mid-thirties. No ID, no wallet, no phone. Found by a transit maintenance crew doing routine structural checks." Thorne gestured toward the platform. "No visible wounds. No signs of struggle. He's just... sitting there." Quinn approached the body. The man sat slumped against the tiled wall, legs stretched across the grimy platform floor. He could have been waiting for a train that would never come. His clothes were ordinary—dark jacket, jeans, trainers unmarked by the filth that covered every surface down here. That was wrong already. No one sat on these platforms without collecting twenty years of grime. She crouched beside him, noting the absence of the expected decay in the air. The station had been closed since the nineties. The smell should have been oppressive—mold, standing water, rat droppings, the particular staleness of air trapped underground for decades. Instead, the air tasted faintly of copper and something else. Something that prickled at the back of her throat. "Homeless?" she asked, though she already knew the answer. "Not with those clothes. Not with those hands." Thorne had moved to stand behind her. "Clean nails, no calluses. Soft palms. This man worked at a desk." "So what's a clean-handed office worker doing in a sealed Tube station with no visible entry wounds?" "That's the question." Thorne's voice carried an edge of exhaustion. "Patrol checked all the entrances. Sealed tight. Padlocks are rusted shut, have been for years. Graffiti's undisturbed. No footprints in the dust except the maintenance crew who found him." Quinn leaned closer to the body. The man's face was peaceful, almost serene. His eyes were closed, lips slightly parted. She'd seen enough corpses to know death rarely looked this comfortable. Even the gentle ones usually carried some final tension in their features—the body's last protest against the inevitable. This man had simply stopped. "Has the ME seen him?" "On her way. But Quinn—" Thorne hesitated, and she heard him shift his weight behind her. "The maintenance crew said something odd. Initial statement, before they lawyered up." She turned her head slightly, not quite looking at him. "What?" "Claimed they heard music. Faint, like it was coming from deeper in the tunnels. But when they checked, the tunnels dead-ended. Collapsed in the seventies, never repaired." "Music." She made the word flat, unimpressed. Through habit, she found herself cataloguing details: the man's jacket collar was damp, though the platform was dry. A fine residue clung to his fingertips, glinting faintly when she angled her torch across his hands. Not dust. Something crystalline. "There's more." Thorne was trying to keep his voice steady, but she caught the tremor beneath it. "The crew leader had a... episode. Started ranting about gates and doorways. Saying things that didn't make sense. They're holding him for psychiatric evaluation." Quinn stood, her joints protesting after years of too many crime scenes and too few rest days. She was forty-one and some mornings she felt twice that. She moved to the platform edge and looked down at the tracks. The rusted rails disappeared into darkness on both sides. No third rail—this line had been older, one of the first, decommissioned before electrification reached every tunnel. "Show me where they entered." Thorne led her through a service door, down a narrow corridor, to a ladder ascending toward a street-level grate. The padlock was indeed rusted, undisturbed. The maintenance crew had used bolt cutters on a different entrance entirely—another service access two hundred meters down the line, in an active station. "Nobody came through here," Thorne said. "I know how it looks, but physically, it's impossible. No way in, no way out. Even if someone killed him elsewhere and dumped the body, they'd have to carry him through tunnels that collapse if you look at them wrong." Quinn ran her fingers along the corridor wall. The tile was original, Victorian, painted over countless times before the station closed. The graffiti layered on top was decades old, tags and political slogans faded to illegibility. But here, near the floor, something caught her eye. She crouched again, angling her torch. A thin line of verdigris, like aged copper, traced along the grouting between tiles. It was fresh—the oxidation hadn't settled, hadn't been disturbed by time or touch. The line curved and doubled back, forming a shape she almost recognized. "What is that?" Thorne had followed her gaze. "Don't know yet." She pulled an evidence bag from her pocket and scraped a sample of the residue from the dead man's fingertips. The crystals caught the light, refracting it strangely. In the bag, they seemed to shift, though she hadn't moved. "What do we know about this station's history?" "Standard closure. Structural concerns. Low ridership." Thorne shrugged. "Same story as a dozen others." But Quinn was already moving, following the verdigris line along the wall. It wound around a corner, deeper into the station, past collapsed ceiling panels and pools of stagnant water that reflected the red emergency lights. She was conscious of Thorne following, his breathing heavy in the enclosed space. The line terminated at a service door. Unlike the others, this one showed no rust. The hinges were newly oiled. The handle turned smoothly under her gloved hand. "Quinn—" Thorne's voice was warning now. "This isn't cleared. We don't know what's behind there." "That's why I'm opening it." The door swung inward on soundless hinges, and Quinn's torch beam cut through darkness that seemed to resist the light. The space beyond wasn't a maintenance closet or a utility passage. It was larger, much larger, and the air that flowed out was cold and smelled of something she couldn't name but recognized somewhere deeper than memory. Her hand went to her wrist, brushing the worn leather of her watch. Three years ago, she'd stood in another impossible space, another scene that didn't make sense. Morris had been beside her then. He'd walked into that room and hadn't walked out, and the official report said structural collapse, and she'd stopped arguing because arguing got her nothing but concerned looks and mandatory psych evaluations. "Close the door," she said quietly. "Quinn—" "Close it. Don't look. You didn't see this." She turned to face him, and whatever was in her expression made Thorne step back. "The victim wandered in here. Got lost. Probably overdosed on something synthetic. We'll find drugs in his system, and this door will be explained away as an old maintenance entrance the records lost. That's what happened. That's what you'll write in your report." "That's not—" He stopped. Swallowed. "That's not what happened." "No," she agreed. "But it's what happened on paper. And you don't want the alternative in your file, Thorne. Trust me." She waited until he retreated, until the door clicked shut behind him. Then she turned back to the darkness and raised her torch. The beam fell on something half-buried in debris—a small brass compass, its casing etched with markings that hurt to look at directly, verdigris blooming across its surface like disease. The needle spun wildly, then stopped, pointing not north but inward, toward the heart of the impossible space. Quinn pocketed the compass without touching it directly. Her heart was hammering, but her hands were steady. Eighteen years on the force, and she'd learned to trust the evidence even when it led somewhere that didn't exist. Somewhere in the tunnels, faint as a half-remembered dream, music began to play.