Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQTGS9ZNK6GA2FJXTC5W6X

The green neon of the Raven's Nest hummed through the rain like an accusing eye. Harlow Quinn stood under the shallow awning, rain cutting a cold grid down the slope of her shoulders, and watched the door spit a shadow out into the street. The man moved with the casual arrogance of someone used to disappearing—shoulders hunched against the weather, collar up, steps calculated. A pocket clinked. A hand brushed the inside of his coat, then came away empty. Harlow checked her watch because she always checked her watch, the worn leather strap a familiar pressure against her left wrist. She didn't need the time; the night measured itself in heartbeats and puddle-slashed light. Eighteen years of service taught her rhythm. The rhythms tonight had changed. The Nest's maps and old photographs smeared in the neon behind her were cold witnesses. She had come for answers, not clichés. But she had a file on the man, a name inked into margins, a picture that didn't quite align with the thing she felt when she watched him move. He belonged to a clique—people who trafficked in things she couldn't pin down—and pinning them down had teeth. She moved. Her boots sent up the wet smell of London: petrol, soap, warm dog fur, the distant fryer oil. Rain gathered at the edges of her collar. The man glanced back once, not enough to slow. He ran. Harlow's pace was more determined than urgent; she had soldier's efficiency in her stride. Running was a precise thing—economy of motion, breath metered, body that kept count of its own limits. The man cut left into an alley, and for a second she wondered if he'd become something else in the dark. She did not want to think of DS Morris. She did anyway—the way his laugh folded, the way his hands smelled of the things they both hated. He'd died on a night that never made sense. Officially it was an unresolved case. She kept the rest in a drawer marked Don't Ask, and sometimes at two a.m. that drawer creaked open. She pushed into the alley. The man had disappeared around a corner where a delivery van blocked sight. Harlow flattened herself against cold brick and listened. Street noises had miserable magnitudes in rain: tires whooshed, a double-siren far away spun an ache into the city, a couple argued in clipped, Hebrew-sparked Spanish that sounded like the man in the alley's homeland. She thought of the scar that would run along a forearm, a Saint Christopher medallion, a paramedic's hands—Tomás Herrera—someone who fixed people like they were fragile things and then sold them solace. She'd met him once, in the Nest's back room, exchanging words over coffee gone cold. He'd warned her away. Tomás didn't believe in rules. A shadow slid along the far wall and she saw the flash of a hood. The man's boots were lighter than a trained runner's. He vaulted a low iron fence, heaved himself up the side of a convenience store, then dropped into a narrower back street. Harlow followed. The chase stripped the city down to essentials: sound, ground, the steady discomfort of damp fabric. Adrenaline darkened her sight to edges. Her mouth went dry. She could hear the man's breathing, quick and ragged, like a thief's conscience. The route narrowed until it pushed them both into Camden proper—graffiti knives across derelict brick, the neon of a music venue like a bruise. The man didn't stop. He went for the station stairs as if he knew the route. Harlow's heart knocked against the leather of her watch strap with a steady military beat. She didn't carry a radio; she hadn't expected a foot chase. She'd called it in earlier from the Nest—"possible involvement with the clique"—and the voice at the other end had been polite and uncommitted. She had the right to stay, to observe, to wait for backup. She also had the right to follow. The rights felt like sharpened things in her hand. At the top of the Tube stairs the world tightened. A rusted sign—CAMDEN ROAD—hung crooked. Steam pulsed from a vent like a living thing, and the air smelled of wet iron. A man blocked the entrance for a heartbeat, then slipped inside. Harlow saw a flash of pale bone light before the man vanished: a small, carved disc, pale as a dried tooth, glinting between his fingers. He pressed it to a rusted seam and the metal sighed. The seam opened because it wanted to. Harlow's breath paused. The Veil Market migrated like a disease, and tonight the disease had set up in an abandoned Tube station under Camden. She'd heard the name—Veil Market, the Market—the rumor soft as moth wings in the Nest's back room. It was the place people talked about when they wanted to hush even more: enchanted goods, banned alchemical substances, whispers sold by the gram. Entry required a bone token. The market moved every full moon. She knew it was full because the light hit the rain the way the full moon makes things hungry. She had not believed in its literalness. She admired the city's ability to rewrite its own rules without permission. Harlow had no bone token. She had a warrant and a badge and a taste for consequences. She had also lost a partner to something that didn't fit into her categories. The idea of a place where rules bent made her hands cold. There, on the damp pavement, the man pushed through the seam as easily as if he'd walked between curtains. He was swallowed by an entry that should not have existed. Her body replied before her thought did. She stepped forward. Military training and habit moved her through surrender to the idea of a different surrender: she reached for the seam's edge as the token left the man's fingers. The bone disc spun, fell, and for a second the world slowed to the soft, absurd arc of a small thing. Her fingers closed around it. It was cool—not the dead chill she'd expected from bone but a warmth that matched her skin, like something alive that was shy. She felt a hum through the pad of her thumb, a small imposition of rhythm against the beat of her heart. The Tunnel sighed open wider at her touch as if the token recognized a claim. The city smelled different below, not just of rust and damp but of lemon peel and something medicinal, the air carrying the faint copper tone of blood. Her first instinct was to drop it and run, to find a police line and tape and light, to do everything correct and bureaucratic. Another instinct, older and meaner, said if she let him vanish now she would never catch up. She thought of Morris—of the last file she kept beside his photograph—and how the official path had led them nowhere. Official paths closed like trapdoors. Unofficial ones opened to less tidy ends. She could not let the man step inside and become someone else on the other side of a rule she did not recognize. She had to follow. The decision came with a memory so bright it almost hurt: DS Morris's hands, shivering once in the rain, saying he'd smelled "wrongness"—a word the report never used. Morris had laughed at Harlow's careful notes and then he'd been gone. The investigating team had chalked it up to panic. Harlow had thought of survivor's guilt, not as an emotion but as a functional thing: do not let the dead be wasted. She slid the bone token into her palm and pushed. The seam closed behind her like a mouth. Sound changed; the city above was reduced to a heartbeat far away. Below, the station had the architecture of a forgotten thing: tiles cracked with grime, map frames flaking into ghost lines. But the platform had been transformed. Stalls ran along the rails, draped with fabrics that drank the light and spat it back too bright. Lanterns swung, lighting wares that made her muscle memory flare. Bottles glowed with liquids that breathed. Cases held talons and teeth and metal devices with names she didn't want to know. A scent, sharp and herbal, brushed her face. A voice in the crowd said something in Seville-accented Spanish that made her freeze. She didn't mean to stop. She did. Tomás. He stood bent over a makeshift table, bandaging a hand that belonged to a man with more ribs than sense. The patchwork apron around his waist had seen better days; his sleeves were rolled and his forearm was a map of a healed knife wound. The Saint Christopher medallion she had half-remembered from their conversation in the Nest rested against his sternum, dull and small. His hair was damp with rain; the curl at his temple stuck up like he was permanently surprised. When his head turned, his warm brown eyes found hers and for a second the market's noise locked into a silence that meant everything. "Harlow?" he said, voice low as if the market listened for words. He had the practiced calm of a medic who saw too much. There was an ease to him now she didn't like and didn't trust and somehow had to rely on. He was a man who'd chosen to sell his skill to people who would not read him in reports. She wanted to ask him why he was here. She wanted to ask him why he kept a bone token on a string under his shirt. She wanted to demand he hand it over and accompany her back to the surface and let the proper machinery grind down this place. Instead she watched him tuck the medallion under his apron, fingers quick and familiar. He gave her a look like someone who had been told not to interfere in a time of war and would never be able to keep his hands out. "Tomás," she said instead, because names tethered people. He smiled in a way that was all apology and challenge. There were lines near his eyes she hadn't noticed before. Rain etched tracks on his face. "The Market isn't for police," he said, and he used English in a way that left edges for other tongues. "You know that." She did. She also knew how to break rules. "It is if the criminal went in," she said. She didn't lower her voice. Words traveled in underground markets in expensive ways; she wanted him to know there was a choice to be made. He shook his head. "You don't have a token." She showed him the bone, the cool disc in her hand with the hum she could still feel. He flinched, not in fear but in recognition, as if the simple thing changed the story. For a moment she saw something like admiration or worry on his face. A paramedic's instincts were to protect; his had been compromised, or corrupted, or simply rerouted. "How did you get that?" he asked. "Found it," she said. The word felt small and untrue. She could have told him about the man fleeing the Nest, about the clique, about Morris. She could have said none of that and meant more. Instead she let the rain lessen on her cheeks. Tomás looked at the token, then at her, and the decision in his eyes wasn't for her. It was for himself. "Once you're in, you can't go back the same," he said quietly. "You can't be the same." People told Harlow that all the time—words about being changed by the job, by the city, by the night. This was different. His words had the weight of someone who had measured his own breaking. She could step back and climb the stairs and call squad cars and let report lines climb the bureaucracy of it all. The wheels would turn, slowly and cleanly. The man in the alley would vanish. The Market would keep its secrets, and the clique would close the ledger on yet another page. She thought of Morris in a way that had nothing to do with files. She thought of his laugh. She thought of how precise he had been when he had been alive. Precision, she now realized, could be the enemy of justice when the world was wrong. She could be correct and be useless. She put the token in her pocket. The hum faded to a warm thrum against her thigh. Tomás's eyes flicked to the seam that had swallowed the man; there were more seams here, everywhere, like a skin with too many holes. "Don't get yourself killed," he said, not quite an order. He busied himself with sterile cloths, hands moving in automatic care. The man he tended flexed his fingers and smiled with too many teeth. Life had a different shape here. Harlow shrugged, an action that felt spent of irony. "I don't intend to die tonight," she said. It was a lie she told to herself more than anyone else. She had survived worse. She had not survived unspecified monsters. She didn't know which haunted her more: the idea she could lose herself down here or the idea she would crawl back up with answers and no one to hear them. She moved away from Tomás and into the market. The stalls smelled of star anise and iron. A vendor offered her a small bottle for a coin she didn't have. People watched, the look of those who trade in secrets: quick, curious, unblinking. The city above seemed a lifetime away, muffled and small. Her leather watch ticked steady, a human metronome in a place that bent time the same way some people bent truth. Every step was a test. Every stall a riddle. She kept her shoulders squared and her jaw tight, tracking the movement she had come for. The man from the Nest was here somewhere; she could feel the space he left like a missing tooth. The market ambled, bartering murmurs, and Harlow kept to the edges where light and shadow were in honest contest. Her military training taught her to read patterns; the Market had a different grammar, one she would learn in action or else pay for ignorance. She had crossed an invisible line. Above, a man in a raincoat would mark her absence and call her name into the night and get no answer. Below, something watched and waited, delighted by the game. Harlow had made her decision. She had followed the man past the seam, past the rule, past the memory of the partner who was gone. If she found nothing, she would have the weight of the choice. If she found something, she would have to decide how much of herself she would trade to hold it. The wet tile at her boots reflected a shard of lantern light. It was a place of bargains. She tightened her jaw and let the market swallow her.