Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQRMDYWP4N5HXH2573E57M

Rain turned the street into a smear of color and light—neon, headlights, the bleached glow of shopfronts bleeding into puddles. It hammered the hood of the unmarked car, blurred the windscreen, and drummed a jittery rhythm against Harlow Quinn’s skull. She’d been watching the door of the betting shop for forty-seven minutes. She knew because she’d checked her worn leather watch five times and counted the slow, precise sweep of the second hand each time. Military habit. Eighteen years on the job hadn’t knocked it out of her. At forty-eight minutes, the suspect finally appeared. He slipped out under the half-collapsed awning, hood up, shoulders hunched against the downpour. Tall, wiry, in a black parka that swallowed his frame. Wyatt Keene—runner for the clique, small-time on paper, but his name kept surfacing where it shouldn’t. Two dead dealers in Hackney, a storage unit full of something SOCO didn’t have a category for, that burned through latex gloves and stainless steel trays. And Camden tonight. A betting shop that never seemed to take any bets. Harlow’s pulse picked up, a hard thud against her ribs. She watched Keene look up and down the slick pavement, his breath blooming white in the cold, then start south, away from the High Street. She popped the car door and stepped into the rain. It was the kind of cold that seeped through clothes and bone, that London damp that had teeth. Within seconds, water ran down the back of her neck, under the collar of her coat. Her closely cropped hair didn’t hold the wet; it just slicked against her skull. Keene was moving quickly, but not quite running. He thought he was alone. She fell in behind him, thirty, forty feet back. Enough to feel invisible. Enough to react if he bolted. His reflection jumped between puddles, warped by the tire tracks of passing cars. The traffic noise wrapped everything in a low growl—buses wheezing, horns sniping, tyres hissing over water. Neon from a kebab shop strobed red across his shoulders, then vanished as he cut down a narrow side street between a vape shop and a locked-up tattoo parlour. Harlow followed, her boots splashing through an overflowed gutter. The side street stank of grease and wet cardboard. Overflowing bins hunched along the brick walls, their lids crusted with old rain. A security light flicked on with a buzzing snap, throwing the alley into hard white relief. Keene glanced back. For a half second their eyes met—his pale and sharp under the hood, the pupils wide, a rodent flash of flight instinct. Harlow saw the recognition hit, the way his mouth tightened. Then he ran. She swore under her breath and lunged forward. The world narrowed to movement: his pounding steps, the slap of her own feet, the crackle of rubbish bags under their boots. He darted around a stack of wooden pallets, vaulted a low metal gate at the end of the alley. Water flew off his coat in an arc. Harlow hit the gate hard, metal biting into her thighs as she swung a leg over. She landed awkwardly, a twist in her left knee sending a bright spike of pain up her thigh. She pushed through it. Eighteen years of foot-chases and bad knees. Pain was a familiar companion. “Keene!” she shouted, her voice tearing down the tight corridor of the service lane beyond. “Police! Stop!” He didn’t even falter. The lane opened onto a service yard behind a line of shops. Delivery doors, graffiti, a skip brimming with broken-down cardboard and a dead fridge. At the far end, the brick wall had been worn down to a dark arch, a gap leading under the street. He shot for it. Harlow tasted metal at the back of her throat, her breath burning. Rain turned the yard’s concrete slick; her boot slipped, skidding sideways. She caught herself on the skip, fingers sliding over rust, then shoved off and kept going. Keene vanished into the darkness under the arch. She followed. The sound changed first. The rain muted, swallowed by brick and earth. The city noise dimmed to a dull muffled roar overhead, like distant surf. The air cooled further, damp in a different way—old damp, with a memory to it. She smelled oil, old metal, something approaching rot. A flight of stone steps led down, the edges rounded by a hundred years of feet. The arch above them had once been painted, but time had chewed the sign to a ghost. Faded letters, illegible in the dark. Keene’s footsteps slapped stone below, echoing. Harlow took the steps two at a time. Her hand grazed the cold wall, slimy with moss. Light spilled weakly from somewhere ahead—a low orange glow that pulsed, as if from a fire behind glass. We lost Morris underground. The thought came, unbidden and unwelcome, an image riding its heels: the yawning black of the disused service tunnel in Southwark, Morris’s back under the beam of her torch as he’d gone in first. The radio static. The scream that hadn’t sounded like his voice. Harlow gritted her teeth. Not now. The last stair leveled onto a broad service corridor. Pipes threaded the low ceiling like ribs. The glow came from the end of the corridor where a steel door sat ajar, light spilling from the gap around it. Keene was just reaching it, his hand already dipping into his pocket. “Wyatt!” Her voice bounced off the concrete. “You’re done. Don’t make me chase you any further.” He didn’t turn. Instead, he pulled something from his pocket—a small pale disc, bone-white even in the orange light. He slapped it against a metal plate set beside the door handle. There was no beep. No click of metal. The air itself seemed to contract. A faint pressure popped softly in Harlow’s ears, like a change in cabin pressure mid-flight. The bone disc glowed a sickly yellow for the briefest instant, then dimmed. The door opened inwards, pushed from the other side. A woman’s face appeared in the gap first—sharp and narrow, the skin oddly smooth as wax. Her eyes slid over Keene with bored recognition. “Running late,” she said. Her voice was paper thin, but it carried. Not London, not anything she could place. “Token.” Keene dropped the disc into her hand. “Market’s still on?” She didn’t answer him. Her gaze shifted past his shoulder and met Harlow’s. The boredom vanished. Her pupils thinned, weirdly, like a camera iris tightening. For a fraction of a second, Harlow thought her eyes looked wrong—too pale around the edges, the whites veined with something that moved. Civilian weirdness, she told herself. Contact lenses. Chemical high. Pick one. Harlow lifted a hand, already drawing on instinct. “Police. Step aside, love.” Keene acted. He shoved past the woman, slipping sideways through the gap. The steel door jolted, then began to swing closed again. No. Not after forty-eight minutes in the car. Not after the betting shop. Not after the shit they’d found in that storage unit and been told to keep quiet about. Harlow surged forward. Her shoulders hit the closing door. Something inside her left one tore hotly, but she forced the gap wider with a shout. The woman inside moved fast. A hand like a vice snapped around Harlow’s wrist, bony fingers digging in above the leather watch. “Token,” the woman hissed. Up close, her breath smelled faintly of cloves and something metallic. “I’ve got a warrant,” Harlow spat back, breath ragged. “And a badge. That’s all I need.” “Not here.” Harlow yanked her wrist free and got her boot between the door and the jamb. Keene’s footsteps were already retreating along whatever lay beyond, swallowed by a low, murmuring hum. Voices. Many of them. “I’m following a suspect,” Harlow said. “You want to obstruct me, we do this the ugly way. Move.” Somewhere in the scuffle, the bone disc had fallen. It lay at the threshold, half in and half out, wobbling on the dusty floor. It was no bigger than a two-pound coin, the surface etched with something like tiny runes. Or maybe it was just the grain of bone. She couldn’t tell. The woman followed her gaze, then flicked her own quickly back up. “Don’t touch that,” she snapped. So it was important. Harlow met her eyes, then deliberately lifted her foot just enough to nudge the disc fully onto her side of the door. It skittered, clicking against the concrete. Before the woman could move, Harlow dipped and snatched it up. It was warm. Not the warm of a pocketed object, but a live warmth, like holding something that had slept in flesh. Every instinct said: drop it. She curled her fingers tighter instead. “What’s this get me?” she asked. The woman bared her teeth. They were too straight, too uniform. “Trouble.” “Story of my life,” Harlow muttered. Behind the woman, the corridor beyond the door opened up into something bigger. The orange light was brighter there, flickering with an uneven, candle-like quality. The hum of voices rose and fell, words indistinguishable but tone unmistakable: commerce, negotiation, the sharp edges of argument. A crowd. Keene’s dark parka disappeared behind a hanging tarpaulin twenty, maybe thirty metres in. Harlow’s heartbeat ticked in her ears, counted out by the steady, indifferent sweep of the second hand on the watch clamped under the other woman’s fingers a moment ago. Token. Market. Underground. The memory of Morris screaming in the dark pressed like a thumb behind her eyes. “It’s not for you,” the woman said quietly. “You go in with that face, that badge, and you won’t come back out with anything you still recognise as yours.” “Who are you to make that call?” “Someone who sees the dead leave on their feet,” the woman answered, just as quiet. “Last chance. Turn around, Detective.” Harlow flinched at the use of her title. She hadn’t given it. She looked down at the token in her palm. It was carved from something porous, a honeycomb of tiny holes like spongy bone. A Saint Christopher medallion had felt like this once, years ago, against her fingers when she’d held Morris’s effects. Warm from his body. Familiar. She closed her fist. The rational move was to step back. Call it in. Get Armed Response, get backup, get anyone with more bodies and heavier vests. Seal the corridor, wait for Keene to try his luck coming out. If he did. If the door still led to the same place in an hour. If any of this made sense in an hour. He disappears tonight and they bury it again, the same way they buried Southwark, a bored press officer talking about gas leaks and faulty maps while she signed another form that said “Natural Causes” where nothing about it had been natural. Rain pattered faintly down the stairwell behind her, a diluted reminder of the world above—takeaway wrappers, council taxes, headaches she understood. The hum beyond the door had a different rhythm entirely. Like a hive. She heard a laugh from inside. Too high, too close to the edge of human. The hair along her forearms prickled. “Detective Quinn.” Her name again, from a different voice. She started. A man had appeared just inside the threshold, behind the woman. Mid-twenties or early thirties, olive skin, dark curls flattened by humidity. He wore a navy hoodie with the sleeves shoved up, the scar along his left forearm catching the orange light in a pale line. A Saint Christopher medallion glinted at his throat. His brown eyes took her in quickly—coat, stance, set of her jaw. A corner of his mouth twitched in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said in lightly accented English. Spanish, she pegged. Andalusian, if her ear wasn’t completely out of practice. “It’s not a safe market for your kind.” “My kind?” Harlow shot back. “What’s that? Sober? Tax-paying?” “Breathing,” he said. “Mostly ignorant.” The woman gave him a hard look. “Tomás.” He ignored her. “You’re chasing someone. Keene.” Her eyes narrowed. “You know him?” “I know everyone who ends up bleeding in there,” Tomás said. “And you will, if you go in alone. You think your badge means anything?” “It usually does,” she said. He glanced at the token in her fist, then back to her face. “Not here.” She could feel the decision space shrinking around her like a tightening noose. Back out, and she walked away from the first solid line she’d had on the clique’s operations in months. Walked away from Keene, from whatever he was carrying, from the whispered word she kept hearing in half-finished statements and redacted reports: Market. Go in, and she stepped into a place where the rules she relied on—law, procedure, backup, jurisdiction—might mean less than the small piece of bone burning in her palm. She thought of Morris again. The cold fluorescent light of the morgue. The pathologist’s careful, neutral words: “Cardiac arrest, possibly triggered by extreme stress.” No marks on his skin, no chemical explanation in his blood. Just eyes that had seen something they shouldn’t have, frozen in that final, silent question. She had never answered it. Harlow drew a slow breath. The air down here smelled like rust, damp stone, and a thin thread of something else winding beneath it—herbs, maybe, or chemicals, the sharp sting of solvents and something sweet rotting underneath. “What happens if I walk away?” she asked quietly. Tomás studied her for a beat that felt longer than it should have. “The world stays the same,” he said. “For most people. For you? You keep scratching at doors you can’t see. That doesn’t end well.” “And if I follow him?” “Then everything changes.” His mouth compressed. “For you. For us. For them.” He tipped his chin toward the orange-lit cavern beyond. “You’ll force lines to get drawn. On all sides.” “You sound like you’re inviting me,” Harlow said. “I’m telling you the odds.” He stepped back, opening the space between the gatekeeper woman and the door. “But if you go, you go fast. You don’t stop, you don’t stare, and you don’t touch anything you don’t understand.” “That’ll be a long list.” “Longer than you think.” The woman’s hand tightened on the edge of the door, knuckles pale. “We can’t—” “Shut it in her face?” Tomás said in a different tone, something harder. “She’ll call her friends. They’ll bring guns. You want bullets in the roof, Lirit? In the stalls?” Lirit. So the wax-faced woman had a name. She spat it like it tasted bad. “You think she’s better?” “I think she’s already here,” he said. “And that counts for something.” They were talking about her like she was a bomb someone had dropped in their hallway. Not entirely wrong. Harlow looked over her shoulder, once, at the empty stairwell. Water trickled down in thin, wandering lines. Somewhere up there, in the wet and the noise, London carried on pretending the world worked the way it was supposed to. Her hand around the bone token had gone slick with sweat. It was warmer now. Or she was imagining that. Didn’t matter. She turned back, squared her shoulders, and stepped forward. Lirit made a small, pained sound as Harlow pushed the door wider with her shoulder. The pressure of it against her bruised muscle flared white-hot, but she held. “Last chance, Detective Quinn,” Lirit murmured. “Close the case. Go home.” Harlow met her strange, pale gaze. “Home’s overrated.” She lifted the token, pressed it briefly to the plate as she’d seen Keene do. There was that soft, wrong pop in the air again, like reality clearing its throat. The orange light on the other side brightened for a heartbeat, then steadied. She pocketed the bone disc. Then Harlow Quinn crossed the threshold into the Veil Market, every nerve in her body screaming that this was a line you didn’t uncross, and went after her suspect.