Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQWX5N0Y92M693479EFBC7

Rain needled down in cold, relentless lines, turning Soho into a smear of reflected neon. The Raven’s Nest glowed a sickly green across the street, its sign humming above the doorway like an insect about to die. Harlow Quinn watched it from the shadow of a bus shelter, coat collar up, hands in her pockets, the wet creeping past the leather and into her bones. 18:47, her watch read. The same cracked face, the same pitted leather strap that had been flecked with Morris’s blood three years ago. The second hand shivered forward. “Come on,” she muttered, eyes on the door. The Nest’s clientele flowed in and out—couples hunched under umbrellas, loners with cigarettes cupped in their hands, a knot of kids with inked knuckles and wired eyes. She catalogued faces automatically. None matched the grainy CCTV still in her pocket. Until one did. Gray hoodie, dark jacket, messenger bag slung crosswise. Mid-thirties. Pale in the green neon. The beard was shorter than in the photo, the hair shaggier, but the jawline was right, the nose with that slight crook. Samir Ghali. Last seen leaving a basement in Brixton where three bodies had been found arranged in a circle, eyes burned out. No prints, no DNA. Only his blurred back on camera and the word Morris had managed to gasp before the life leaked out of him underground: “Market.” Samir stepped out of the Nest, blinked up at the rain. His gaze swept the street. Too casual. His shoulders were tight, bag clutched a fraction too close. Harlow slid out from the shelter’s shadow, letting a passing taxi block his view as she moved. When the cab cleared, she was already in stride behind a pair of tourists with plastic ponchos, using them as cover. Her hand brushed the cold metal of her badge in her pocket, then dropped to the reassuring weight of the Glock at her hip. Samir reached the curb, hesitated, then went east instead of toward Oxford Street’s brighter wash. Wrong choice if you wanted crowds. Right choice if you didn’t want to be seen. “Of course you don’t,” Harlow breathed, and followed. The side street narrowed fast, brick closing in, rain suddenly louder without the main road’s traffic to swallow it. Her boots hit slick cobbles, water splashing up under her jeans. The air smelled of fried oil, cigarette smoke, and rotting bin bags. Samir picked up pace. He knew. She saw it in the set of his shoulders, the way his head dipped without quite turning. Flight coiled in his muscles. Harlow sped up, keeping two, three car lengths between them. Close enough to chase; not close enough to spook. He broke first, a sudden burst into a sprint. “Bollocks,” she hissed, and ran. Her world telescoped to the slap of her boots and his ahead of her, the sharp stitch already digging under her ribs, the rain thrown back from his spinning soles. A woman swore as Harlow shoved past, her umbrella swinging wide. A cyclist rang a useless bell before swerving into a puddle. Horns blared on the cross street as Samir darted between a pair of buses that roasted the air with hot diesel. Harlow hit the curb and jumped after him. Headlights washed her in white. A car skidded, its tyres shrieking on the wet tarmac. She found a strip of space and cut through, a gust of wind from the bus buffeting her, flipping water into her face hard enough to sting. She landed on the far pavement without breaking stride. Her lungs burned, but the rhythm of running dug in, old muscle memory from years before the Met, before Morris, before the night something in the dark had taken him and left her with nothing but red on her hands and questions no one wanted answered. Samir was still ahead, still just in reach. He ducked down an alley, past a metal gate tagged with layers of graffiti. Harlow followed, leaping over a stack of milk crates, knocking her shoulder into a brick corner hard enough to send pain up her neck. The city blurred and reassembled around her: out of Soho’s tangle into broader streets, then narrower again, the lights changing, the adverts vanishing from shiny screens to peeling posters. Time slipped. The chase became disjointed fragments—a set of steep stone steps, a stretch along a canal where rain made the water boil, the black arches of railway bridges, the fast-food stink of late-night Camden wrapping everything in grease and salt. By the time she realized they’d crossed half the city, her thighs were jelly and her chest was a furnace. The rain had soaked through every layer. The wool at the back of her neck pressed cold and heavy against her skin. Samir flung a look over his shoulder. His eyes found her, widened. He swore—she couldn’t hear it, but she saw the shape of his mouth—and he dug for one last reserve of speed. “No,” she growled, jaw clenched. “Not losing you, too.” The memory came whether she wanted it or not: Morris’s hand slipping out of hers in the dark, the weight of him dragging her down toward that painted circle on the floor, his fingers slick. The hum in the stone room rising to a scream. Light without a source. His eyes, wide and bewildered and then… empty. Market. Harlow pushed harder. Camden High Street loomed up in a smear of neon and shuttered shops. The usual chaos was thinned by the rain, but there were still clumps of people standing under awnings, smoking, laughing. Music bled out from somewhere tinny and distorted. Samir cut across the street toward the black mouth of an alley between a shuttered tattoo parlour and a boarded-up off-license. He disappeared into it. Harlow followed, the noise of the main road dropping to a dull roar behind her. The alley stank of old beer and piss. A single sodium lamp buzzed high above, throwing everything into a jaundiced glow. The walls sweated water. Ahead, at the far end, a chain-link fence blocked the way, plastic ribbons tangled in the mesh. A metal sign hung crooked on it: NO PUBLIC ACCESS – LONDON UNDERGROUND. Samir didn’t slow. He slipped sideways, disappearing through a shoulder-width gap where the fence didn’t quite meet the brick. For a second, his bag snagged on the wire. He yanked it free, vanished. Harlow reached the fence, fingers catching the cold metal. The rain had eased to a mist here, a fine spray that made the yellow light halo. “Samir!” she barked, voice raw. “Police! Stop!” Her shout bounced off brick and went nowhere. She shoved at the loose section of fence. It groaned inward. The gap was there, jagged teeth of cut wire at shoulder height. Someone had made it and used it more than once. The ground beyond dropped steeply out of sight, a stairwell plunging underground. A dead Tube entrance, she realized. One of the old ones they’d walled off when the lines were reorganized. She’d seen them on old maps, pencil-sketched in Morris’s notebooks. An old habit of his—chasing ghosts in the Underground’s history. Her pulse jumped, fast and sharp. She slipped through the gap. Wire scratched at her coat sleeve, snagged her hair. A bead of blood ran warm down her wrist where metal bit skin. She didn’t feel it properly, not over the drumbeat in her ears. Concrete steps fell away into shadow, slick with moss and rain-wash. A fine white tag sprayed on the wall near the top showed a stylized skull split in half, a line of runes she didn’t recognize painted beneath in careful strokes, not the usual lazy scrawl. The air that lifted from below wasn’t the stale, cold draft of a disused station. It was warm. It smelled of spice and metal and something sharp and electric that made the hairs on her arms stand on end. Harlow paused at the top of the stairs, listening. Voices rose from the dark—dozens, more. A low, constant murmur, punctuated by the clink of glass, the scrape of wood on stone, a peal of laughter that had too many notes in it. There was music, thin and quick, some stringed instrument she couldn’t place. Beneath it all, a faint hum like a transformer about to blow. Her radio crackled uselessly on her shoulder. She realized she hadn’t thumbed it once since leaving Soho. She could do it now. Call it in. “Detective Quinn, in pursuit of suspect, last seen entering an unsecured Underground entrance in Camden.” The duty sergeant would send uniform, request ARU if she used the right words. They’d set up a perimeter. They’d descend together, methodical, by the book. And Samir would melt into whatever waited below, as gone as if the earth had opened and swallowed him. Like Morris. Her hand hovered over the radio. The memory of his voice crawled up from the past, hoarse and disbelieving: “Harlow… they’re not—” She took her fingers off the mic. “Later,” she whispered to the dark. “I bring you something first.” She started down. The steps curved, wet underfoot. The light above shrank to a dusty coin. Halfway down, a new glow began—a washed-out, shifting color that couldn’t decide if it was blue or green or both at once. The hum grew stronger, crawling up her teeth. At the base of the stairs, the passage widened. A rusted metal gate loomed across it, the word WAY OUT barely visible under flaking red paint. The gate stood half-open, the padlock hanging useless, its shank cleanly severed. On the other side, in a pool of that indecisive light, a man waited. He was huge, his shoulders nearly filling the passage, coat dark and glossy with rain. His face was wrong in a way Harlow felt before she identified it—something about the proportions, the way the jaw was too wide, the cheekbones too heavy. His eyes were black, not just the irises but the whites as well, like twin spills of ink. Harlow’s hand went to her hip. She didn’t draw, not yet. “Detective Harlow Quinn, Metropolitan Police.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “Step aside. I’m in pursuit of a suspect who just came through here.” The man—or whatever he was—regarded her without interest. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly soft, carrying that low hum in it. “Bone.” She frowned. “Step aside, or I will—” “Bone,” he repeated, slightly slower, as if she were thick. He lifted one hand, palm up. Something pale lay on the thick skin. “Token.” It was a sliver of off-white, smooth and worn at the edges, punched with a small hole. Etched lines spiraled in on themselves across one surface, precise and dark. Not plastic. Not stone. Bone, her brain supplied, clinically. Human? Animal? The thought sat heavy. The big man tilted his hand. The token caught the odd light and glowed faintly. “Entry,” he said. “With bone. Without…” His eyes flicked over her, resting for a heartbeat on the bulge of her holster, the badge clip at her belt. “…no entry.” Behind him, beyond the gate, the space opened suddenly, cavernous. Harlow caught flashes: stalls stacked under rusting iron ribs, canopies of mismatched cloth, shelves of jars holding things that moved sluggishly in murky liquid. A woman with skin the color of old parchment and a mane of white hair passed, a string of beads rattling at her throat—except they weren’t beads but tiny vertebrae. A man in a hooded coat leaned over a table where blue fire burned without smoke. Something with too many joints in its fingers counted coins that shone dull gold and bright, rose-pink. In the air above it all, hanging like tethered moons, floated glass spheres filled with trapped lightning. It crawled along their inner surfaces in lazy forks, flaring when someone passed beneath. The Veil Market, something in her thought, dredged from Morris’s late-night ramblings over case files and cheap coffee. A ghost story. A fairy tale cops told each other when cases went sideways and nothing made sense. When you couldn’t find where the drugs came from, or where the weapons went, or why the victims had circles carved into their chests that didn’t match anything in any book. She wet her lips. “You let him in,” she said. “The man before me. Dark hair, gray hoodie, bag across his chest.” The doorman’s expression didn’t change. “He had bone.” Her radio crackled again, a hiss of static and someone saying her callsign from what felt like a very long way away. Harlow ignored it. “This is obstruction of justice,” she said. It sounded thin, even to her. Useless. Law written for another world, pushed up against this… whatever it was. “If you don’t—” “You have no jurisdiction,” the man said, not unkindly. “Not here. You have bone, you enter. You do not, you leave.” Simple as that. Like deciding whether to cross the tape on a crime scene. Like stepping over the chalked circle under Morris’s body, ignoring the way the air pulsed inside it. Her throat tightened. The rational part of her screamed: Walk away. Get backup, get sane eyes on this. This is a fever dream. You’ve been chasing shadows for three years and now you’ve found the brick wall at the end. But the smells drifting from beyond the gate were real and thick and specific—cardamom, hot metal, damp stone, something like ozone after a lightning strike. The hum made fillings buzz in her teeth. Samir was inside that impossible space, walking those aisles, putting distance between them. And she had never once forgiven herself for letting Morris go downstairs alone that night. “Scout the perimeter,” he’d said. “I’ll be right behind.” He hadn’t been. She hadn’t been. Not in time. Movement brushed against her right boot. She glanced down, muscles tightening. Something small and pale had rolled out from the shadow of the wall, knocked loose by a scurrying shape—rat or something far less mundane that disappeared behind a broken tile. It was a token, twin to the one in the doorman’s palm. A little smoother at the edges, the spiral etched on it slightly deeper, dark lines filled with something that caught the light like oil. It lay there on the wet stone, innocent as a dropped coin. Harlow’s breath hitched. She flicked a look at the man. He hadn’t moved. Either he hadn’t seen it, or he was pretending not to. “Choice,” he rumbled. Her skin crawled. Every instinct, every hour of training and policy briefings and weary, shouted arguments in squad rooms told her that taking that step would be breaking something she couldn’t unbreak. This wasn’t just going off-book; this was stepping out of the book entirely. She could turn, climb those steps back into the downpour and the familiar stink of kebab shops and bus exhaust. Call in a cordon. Bluff her way through a report that wouldn’t sound insane. Pretend she hadn’t seen hanging lightning and vertebrae beads and a man with ink-black eyes asking for bone. But then what? She would go back to her desk, pin this on the wall with a string that joined it to Morris’s photographs and scribbles, another question mark among the many. She would lie awake again, staring at the dark ceiling, hearing his last half-word over and over. Market. Her fingers felt stiff as she bent and picked up the token. It was warmer than it had any right to be, heat pulsing softly against her skin. The etched spiral seemed to catch her thumb, drawing it inward, like the tug of a whirlpool. “Detective Harlow Quinn,” she said quietly, more to herself than to him. “Metropolitan Police.” Then she stepped forward and held out the bone. The doorman’s gaze dipped to it. For the first time, one corner of his mouth ticked up, an approximation of a smile that didn’t touch those black eyes. He closed his huge fingers around her hand, not hard enough to hurt, but enough that she could feel the ridges under his skin. His flesh wasn’t entirely flesh. Something bony pressed against the musculature, shapes that didn’t fit any human anatomy she knew. “Welcome,” he said, and the hum around them deepened for a heartbeat, like a low cheer. “To the Veil Market, Detective.” He released her and swung the gate wide. Noise swallowed her. The space inside had once been a station concourse. Harlow recognized the curve of the ceiling, the brickwork arches, the faded advertisements still clinging like ghosts to the high walls. Everything else had been devoured and replaced. Stalls packed every inch of floor. Some were simple tables, others elaborate constructions of stacked crates, velvet-draped cabinets, iron cages. Colors assaulted her—bolts of cloth bright as bruises, glass vials in every shade, powders that shimmered and crawled in shallow dishes. Creatures moved among the crowd that her brain skittered away from naming: a figure whose shadow lagged half a second behind its body, something tall and thin with no face and a too-wide smile painted where one should be. Coins clinked, but there were other exchanges too: teeth, feathers, little bags that writhed as if full of live eels. Voices rose, some speaking languages she’d heard in London her whole life, others in tongues that seemed to catch against her eardrums and slide off. Above it all, the hanging lightning balls flickered and spat, casting everything in a restless, stormy light. Harlow forced herself not to stop. Not to gape. Eyes front, she reminded herself, the same way she did walking into a crime scene for the first time. Take it in, catalogue later. Right now: target. Samir was a knot in the flow of bodies ahead, a gray blur weaving between a stall selling knives with curving, almost organic blades and another with shelves lined in orderly rows of teeth, each set on a ruby cushion. His bag bumped his hip. He didn’t look back. Harlow set her jaw and moved after him, her palm still tingling where the bone had lain. Something brushed her arm. A man stepped out of a stall to her left, almost colliding with her—a flash of olive skin, dark curls plastered damply to his forehead, a Saint Christopher medallion glinting at his throat. He held bloodied gauze in one hand, the other raised in apology. “Perdón,” he said automatically, then caught sight of her eyes, the way her hand hovered near her holster. His gaze flicked to the badge at her belt, then up again. For a split second, something like recognition—or maybe just wary intelligence—flared there. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said quietly, accent soft Spanish over London edges. “Story of my life,” Harlow shot back without breaking stride. His mouth pressed into a line, but he didn’t call out, didn’t raise an alarm. He stepped aside, revealing behind him a makeshift clinic: camp beds, a table laid out with medical instruments far too clean for this place, a person lying with their shirt off while a seam of black, oily smoke was sutured closed in their side instead of flesh. Harlow yanked her gaze away and locked back onto Samir’s retreating shoulders. She followed him deeper into the Market’s throat, the hum closing in around her, bone token cooling like a stone in her pocket, each step a choice she was already too far gone to reverse.