Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQW36ATJ89HKZK9EE8Z9R1

The air down there was colder than it should have been. It lay close to the skin, old and damp, a breath of iron and soot that had been holding itself for decades. Quinn descended the last rung and stepped onto the tiled platform with the same care she’d used getting off helicopters in Kandahar. Generators throbbed behind the blue-and-white tape, throwing hard light into an abandoned Tube station everyone pretended didn’t exist. The tiles still held the memory of white. Old enamel advertisements blistered and peeled between rows of glazed brick. Beyond the edge of the platform, the rails ran off into a throat of black. Spray-chalk numbers glowed in the arc lights where SOCO had marked their finds; paper-suited techs stooped and rose in a slow insect flow. Her watch told her 05:42. She felt the weight of it on her wrist, warm leather against the cold. “Morning, Guv.” Callum Reed came out of the gloom with a notebook in his hand and coal dust ghosting the cuffs of his trousers. Thirty-five, hair too long for CID, a slouch he thought read as ease. He’d been the first senior through the service door. He rolled his shoulders like he could shrug the place off his back. “We’ve got one male, mid-twenties, single puncture wound to the abdomen. Night shift maintenance officially shut this section a decade ago. Couple of kids or rough sleepers could’ve got in through the north access. Looks like a robbery turned nasty.” Quinn moved past him, eyes on the body. The man lay half on his side, half on his back, one arm thrown toward the platform edge as if he’d changed his mind about falling. The arc lights flattened him, took all the warmth out of the freckles across his nose, out of the curls stuck to his forehead with dried sweat. There was a hole just below the sternum, neat as a button. No arterial spray. No pooling on the floor big enough to fit the story, either. “The rough sleepers are punctual, are they?” she said. “They bring generators and fix their own lighting, do they?” Reed winced. “Guv.” She crouched, the grit singing beneath her boots. The blood on the front of the shirt had clotted in a starburst that radiated out and then petered off in places that shouldn’t have dried first. The hem was damp but the jacket was clean, a cheap black bomber without a single stain. Whoever stabbed him had done it while he was standing, and then they’d laid him down. She slid on gloves. The watch on her left wrist nudged the cuff of her coat and ticked steadily. She touched the man’s right hand, peeled his fingers away from his palm. There, pressed against the lifeline, rested a small brass compass gone green around the edges with age and handling. Not the kind they sold to tourists on Camden Lock. The face wasn’t a pretty north-south, but a crowding of marks—etched sigils that had bitten deep enough to survive years of friction. The needle jittered and then settled, not at North, but somewhere off at thirty degrees to the platform. It looked like it was listening to something she couldn’t hear. “Found that just there,” Reed said. “Trinket. He probably nicked it, got in a scrap over it.” Quinn didn’t answer. She thought of Morris for a heartbeat—Morris with his ugly tie and the way he’d argued for coffee so strong it made her teeth hurt. Morris in a utility corridor three years ago, the air charged like just before a storm, saying, Can you hear that? and then not being there at all. She tucked the thought away where she kept it: in the gap behind her ribs where nothing touched it until it did. She turned the compass over. The casing was old brass, the sort that grew a patina like bruises. The back had been worn smooth in spots, finger-tracks polished like a relic. Between the engravings, she could taste metal and, absurdly, something like cloves. Protective sigils’ edges bit the pad of her thumb. She knew the shape of a proper sailor’s compass. This wasn’t it. “CCTV?” she asked. “You’re joking,” Reed said. “This place is a ghost. No power, no cameras. TfL says the north access hatch has been chained since nineteen seventy-eight. We found it unchained this morning, which, yes, is a problem. No fingerprints that aren’t a decade deep in grime. We’ll try prints off the body, run him through Missing Persons. No wallet, no phone.” Quinn looked at the man’s pockets anyway. The front left had been turned inside out with more force than finesse. Thread frayed at the seam, as if a ring had caught there. A smear of something the colour of old whiskey stained the lining—resin or oil. She leaned closer. The smell of it cut through rust and dust. Not engine oil. Something resinous, faintly floral. Behind her, the generators hummed, a pulse to work by. “You think robbery,” she said. Reed shrugged. “No wallet, no phone, no ID. His watch is gone. You see the tanline. They didn’t take the jacket because—what, blood? Maybe they bottled it. Kids mess about down here. There’s chalk everywhere, pentagrams and—” He waved his pen at the tiles across the platform, where a low line of chalk marks ran along the breeze-block pilasters like tide-lines. Quinn stood, her knees crackling. The chalk wasn’t kids. It wasn’t pentagrams. It was older than that, and it lived low where hands could reach from a stool, marks retraced and retraced until the lines had become shallow grooves in the glaze. Between them, wax had run and set in dry little tears the colour of bees. Once, there’d been cloth hung here, perhaps, the faintest ghost of ribbon on wire; the bricks were cleaner in narrow bands where something had shielded them from soot. She swept her beam along the platform edge, slow. There, faint as breath, were heel scuffs with a pattern too fine for modern cheap soles—hand-cut leather with a turned seam. Nearby, a circle of grit and crushed something white and flaking. Bone, or chalk too aged to say. She crouched again and pinched a fragment between glove and glint; it was hard, not powder. Someone had cut token-thin discs. The fragment edged under the pressure, not like chalk at all. “Scene of one of your ghost stories,” Reed said. He stood with his hands in his coat, mock casual. “You’ve heard the rumours, yeah? The Market under Camden. My brother-in-law never shuts up about it. Sells tea towels on weekends. Says the real money’s downstairs with the freaks and wizards. Moves around every full moon as not to pay business rates.” He laughed once, a quick bark. Quinn didn’t humour him. The rumours had reached her desk long before today, mostly attached to petty thefts that couldn’t decide if they were petty or not. Stolen artefacts that turned up a block away in a bin with the tags still on, empty as a shell. A shipment of antique bone needles intercepted, then lost again. People who knew better had gone quiet when she’d asked. She didn’t write Market in her notes. You didn’t write a thing like that until you had bone, not breath. She moved the light along again and found drag marks. Not many. They were careful, whoever they were. But an iron fleck notched in the grout held a trail of dark brown that ran from the far wall to where the man lay. Someone had laid him down by the edge like a man done sleeping. At her feet, a shoe print broke the station dust—deep heel, faltering toe. The resin scent clung to that mark like a fingerprint. The shape was narrow, left foot angled inward as if the wearer’s hip had a hitch. The pattern of the sole was cross-hatched in a way that felt bespoke. The other set of prints, faint as whispers beside it, had a different bite: broad, cheap soles from a trainer with a worn flank, right foot dragging slightly. Two people. One doing the lifting; one watching or getting in the way. She set a marker and stood, tightness stretching under her jacket across her shoulders. The hair at the back of her neck prickled. High overhead, from the dead mouth of the tunnel, a breath of air moved that shouldn’t have. No trains for years, no drafts she could map. Her vision narrowed and she lifted the compass again without thinking, the temptation as bad as touching a sore tooth. The needle clicked hard left and quivered. “SOCO photographed that,” Reed said. “Don’t go contaminating your… trinket.” She pocketed it. Bag later. The needle had pointed not to the centre of the tracks or the service tunnel ahead, but to a section of the far wall where the tiles sat cleaner than their neighbours in a tall, narrow rectangle. The rectangle’s grout held flecks of wax and—if you wanted to imagine it—script scuffed and half-scrubbed out where a casing had rubbed for years. Someone had moved a thing that had stood there a long time. The floor in front of it showed parallel lines faint as dried tears. Wheels. She followed them to where they vanished into foot traffic. “Any witnesses?” she said. “Security at street level saw no one. Bloke walking his terrier claimed he heard a clang around half one, could’ve been a delivery lorry. There was a woman at the cordon when we arrived, museum type. Bit of a cheek, used her British Museum ID like a passport. DC Ainsworth kept her up top. She said she’d got a phone call from an unknown number telling her to bring—” He checked his notes. “A book. She wouldn’t say what. She wouldn’t hand it over. She wanted to come down here and play librarian.” Quinn lifted her head. Above, beyond tape and the ladder well, a cluster of voices drifted, cool air pouring in through the vent shaft like a promise of weather. She could see just the tops of heads in silhouette. One of them caught the generator’s edge-light and flashed a copper halo; a narrow face behind round glasses turned as if watching for her like a bird watches the cat. “Keep her,” Quinn said. “If she was summoned to a rendezvous and our friend on the floor isn’t here to meet her, I want to know why.” “Guv, TfL will have kittens about us stomping their—what do they even call this? Heritage.” “TfL can queue,” she said. “And they can give us records going back twenty years of every maintenance hatch opened within a kilometre of here. Check above-ground cameras along Camden High Street and Chalk Farm Road. Anyone with a hand truck or a wheeled cabinet between ten p.m. and four a.m., I want eyes. Send someone to the British Museum, find out what sort of book one of their assistants brings when an unknown number calls in the small hours.” Reed’s pen scratched. He didn’t argue. He looked where she looked, at the rectangle of clean on the wall, and she could see him, for a second, imagine it. Imagine a market strung here with twine and shadows, candles guttering in jars, money changing not hands but the space between them. He wrapped himself back up in a smirk. “Kids,” he said, but softer. Quinn knelt beside the body one last time. She watched the way the fabric of the shirt tugged at the wound, the circle of it tight, closed enough that you might mistake it for neat work if you didn’t know better. A blade with a triangular profile maybe, or a bodkin. Penetration straight on, no defensive cuts on the forearms, no bruising on the knuckles. He hadn’t fought, or he hadn’t seen it coming. She turned his left hand, thumbed the pads. Ink stained the webbing between the fingers, an old blue ground-in you only got by living with it. Numbers, cramped, done somewhere stiff-backed and quiet. The letters on the inside wrist read in an arc, incomplete—VE. It wanted to say “Vera” or “Vermin” or—no. She didn’t finish it with her mind. His nails held soot under them, ground deep but not fresh; on the right index, a glint caught. Not gold. Bone again, curved and polished, the edge sawed with tiny teeth where a string might have passed. “You’re thinking what?” Reed said, close now, breath light like he was trying not to let his lungs touch the dust. “Some occult thing. Sacrifice. They took his watch and phone but left his little magic needle.” “I’m thinking he didn’t die where he lies,” she said. “I’m thinking somebody needed it to look like a fall and didn’t have the height to make it convincing. I’m thinking someone with a left hip problem and someone whose right foot drags moved him together. I’m thinking they were in a hurry but not panicked. I’m thinking they opened a thing that’s been closed a long time.” She touched the rectangle on the wall with her eye, not her hand. “And I’m thinking that whatever they opened was why we’re all standing in a station that doesn’t exist.” Reed followed her gaze and swallowed. “Course. Or—it’s kids with a trolley and a sense of humour.” “Bag everything,” she said. “Especially fragments that aren’t chalk. Those tokens. Call TfL to send us an engineer who remembers how this place breathes. And get the woman from the museum out of the cold.” Reed nodded and stepped away to bark orders at Ainsworth. The station swallowed his voice, made it round and small. Quinn was alone with the dead for a moment, and with the low hiss of generators that didn’t quite manage to drown the other sound—something she wouldn’t admit to hearing, the whisper of a draft that didn’t come from anywhere she could point at. She put the compass in a bag. Before she sealed it, she watched the needle shiver and settle, shiver and settle. It pointed at the clean place on the wall like a dog straining against a lead. It did not waver when she turned her body. It sat absolutely sure of itself in a room full of tricks. On the tiles near the plinth, someone had made a mark below the reach of a standing hand, at knee-height where someone seated might idly carve while they waited. The mark was half-scraped, soot inside it. She bent closer. It wasn’t a letter, exactly; it was the curve of a sigil she’d seen drawn on the back of an evidence envelope once, years ago, when Morris had joked in a voice that hadn’t been a joke that they ought to get a priest to bless it. It touched the edge of her vision and skittered away, unwilling to be seen straight on. She straightened. Her watch ticked against the bones of her wrist like a metronome meant for steadier hands. Up top, voices shifted; footsteps clanged on a ladder. When Ainsworth swung down with a woman in a pea coat close behind, the generators threw their light across a face freckled like constellations. Curly red hair pulled back. Round glasses. She hugged a satchel to her chest as if it were something alive. The leather looked older than she was. “I told him my credentials are in order,” the woman said without waiting for introduction. Her voice kept amusement and worry on the same breath. She tucked a curl behind her left ear, a reflex, fingers quick. Her eyes went past Quinn to the chalk lines, to the rectangle on the far wall. Green eyes, sharp. “But he insisted the floors aren’t safe. Do you know what those markings mean?” “Later,” Quinn said. “Name.” “Eva Kowalski.” She lifted her chin. “I got a call last night. No number. A woman’s voice. She said to bring a specific text to ‘the old platform under Camden,’ before the moon set. Lynnaea Occulta Traversalium.” She glanced down at her satchel like she could feel the spine through the leather. “It’s seventeenth-century. It doesn’t leave the British Museum’s restricted archive, officially. I didn’t— I came to the top of the stairs and thought better of it. Then I saw your cordon go up and thought perhaps my conscience had saved me a different mess.” Reed sucked his teeth. “She turned up with contraband, Guv.” Quinn watched the way Eva’s hands gripped the satchel, the knuckles pale. She watched the eye flick to the rectangle of wall and back. She believed in people’s tells the way some people believed in saints. “You didn’t bring the book,” she said. “I brought a facsimile I’d put together for a senior researcher,” Eva said. “I am not completely stupid.” Quinn liked her more for that. “You’ll tell me everything about the call. And about what those chalk marks mean. After we take a formal statement.” Eva’s mouth thinned but she nodded. “They’re not pentagrams,” she said, unable to stop herself. “They’re wards. Poorly maintained. Someone’s been careless.” Quinn glanced at the dead man. Poorly maintained had a body count now. She looked at the compass bag, at the needle obedient to a wall that had no door, and at the rectangle of clean tiles framed by grime like a picture in a fire-sale shop. Reed’s version of the story was easy. It would write itself. Junkies. Robbery. An old place where you shouldn’t have been. But the floor told a different account in scuffs and wax and little white discs that were bone, not chalk. The air told one in cold that didn’t belong. And the compass—Christ—the compass didn’t know how to lie. “Inspector?” Reed said. He was careful when he used the title. She’d trained him out of “ma’am.” She pulled latex from her fingers one by one and slid them into her pocket. “We find who came through here,” she said. “We find what got opened. And we don’t write this off to kids with chalk. Not this time.” The generators hummed and the station listened. Far off, inside the dead tunnel, something settled with a sound like a sigh. Quinn set her shoulders. Her watch ticked. The needle in the bag pointed where it pointed. And for the first time in months, Harlow Quinn felt like she had hold of a thread that might lead somewhere other than back to the dark place where Morris had gone. She’d follow it, even if she didn’t like where it tugged. Especially then.