Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQXAVCZAT7XV9T6YX1MQZD

The rain hit the streets of London like a personal vendetta, turning the asphalt into a mirror of reflected neon and sodium light. Detective Harlow Quinn ran, her worn leather watch slapping against her wrist in rhythm with her footfalls, water streaming down her sharp jawline and soaking through the collar of her coat. Behind her, the suspect—a thin man in a charcoal hoodie—was pulling away, his trainers splashing through puddles on Wardour Street. She'd spotted him leaving The Raven's Nest twenty minutes ago. Just a glimpse, really, but enough. Her instincts had been honed over eighteen years in the Met, and right now they were screaming. This was one of them. One of the ones connected to the clique she'd been tracking for the better part of two months. Her breath came hard and controlled. Military precision dictated every movement, even now, even as rain hammered down hard enough to blur her vision. She vaulted over a street-level barrier, cutting across the alley that ran parallel to the main road. The suspect didn't look back. That was interesting. Most runners looked back. Most panicked. This one just ran like he had somewhere to be, like he'd planned this exact route. They descended into Soho, deeper into the warren of streets where London kept its secrets. Quinn's shoes found purchase on wet cobblestones; her breath came white in the cold night air. She was gaining. Forty-one years old and she could still run, could still feel the burn in her legs and chest that meant she was alive, that she was doing something that mattered. The suspect cut left, into an alley so narrow Quinn could nearly touch both brick walls if she spread her arms. She followed, her hand hovering near the torch at her belt. Somewhere in the back of her mind—the part that still remembered DS Morris, her partner, the way he'd looked when they found him three years ago—a warning bell was ringing. This was getting deep. This was getting into territory she didn't have clearance for, didn't have backup for. The alley opened onto a street she didn't recognize. That shouldn't have been possible. She knew this city like she knew the scar tissue on her knuckles. But here they were, in some pocket of Soho that seemed to exist just outside her mental map. The suspect didn't pause. He ran straight toward what looked like a defunct Tube station entrance, the art deco signage so weathered the letters were barely legible. Quinn's jaw tightened. Every rational instinct told her to stop, to call for backup, to wait for daylight and proper channels. But Morris had taught her something about instinct. Morris had taught her that sometimes the rational choice was the wrong one. She followed the suspect down into darkness. The stairs descended at a steep angle, rain-slicked and ancient. Quinn's torch beam cut through the gloom, revealing tiled walls that must have been white once, decades ago. Now they were the color of old teeth, stained and cracked. The temperature dropped as she went deeper, and her breath became more visible against the thin beam of light. At the bottom, a platform stretched out into shadow. The Tube tunnels curved away into both directions, their mouths impossibly black. The suspect was gone. Quinn's hand found the torch again, and she swept the beam across the platform, searching for movement, for heat, for any sign of where he'd gone. That's when she heard it. Music, faint and warped, coming from somewhere beneath her feet. And underneath that, the smell—sharp spices, something like cinnamon mixed with something acrid she couldn't place. Something organic and wrong. Quinn descended further, following the platform around a curve. The wall on her left had changed. Instead of standard London Transport tile, there was stone—old stone, worked with symbols she didn't recognize. Her torch beam caught on them, and for a moment she felt something like electricity run through her spine. She'd never seen anything like them before, but something in her body reacted to them anyway. The music grew louder. So did the smell. The platform opened into a wider space, and Quinn's torch revealed the impossible: a market. An actual market, underground, beneath the Tube station that shouldn't have had any substructure below its platform. Stalls lined makeshift corridors. Hundreds of people moved through narrow passages, their faces obscured by hoods and shadow. Lanterns hanging from the ceiling cast everything in amber light, and everywhere Quinn looked, there were things that didn't belong in the rational world. A vendor at one stall was selling bottles filled with liquid that seemed to move of its own accord. Another was dealing in what looked like carved bone tokens, each one unique, each one pulsing with some kind of subtle luminescence. The suspect had disappeared into the crowd, but Quinn could see him now, near a stall marked with symbols that hurt to look at directly. She made a decision. Quinn stepped down from the platform onto the market floor, her hand resting on her warrant card even though she knew it would mean nothing here. The crowd seemed to part around her, though no one actively moved. It was more like the market itself was creating space for her passage, a kind of breathing acknowledgment. A vendor caught her eye. He was older, with a face scarred by something more than time, and he was watching her with an expression that suggested he'd been expecting someone like her. Not her specifically, perhaps, but something like her. The attention of the law. The attention of someone who didn't belong here. Behind him, partially obscured, Quinn saw a curtain of dark fabric, and beyond that, a light. Not electric light. Something older. Something alive. Her fingers tightened on the torch. She could feel the city above her, the rain still falling, the normal world carrying on. She could turn around now, climb back up those stairs, call it in, get a warrant, do this by the book. By the rules. The safe way. The way Morris had trained her to do things. The way Morris was dead. Quinn made a choice. She pushed deeper into the market, toward the suspect, toward the fabric curtain and whatever lay beyond it. The vendor didn't try to stop her. He just smiled, and in his smile was the certainty that she'd made exactly the right decision—or exactly the wrong one, and that maybe there wasn't any difference anymore. The warrant card in her pocket felt like a talisman from another world.