Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQXWVW17X99TJCV7SCSF3S

The first thing Harlow noticed was the air. Not the usual damp concrete breath of an abandoned station, but a layered smell that didn’t belong underground at six in the morning—smoke that wasn’t from a fire, metal and old grease, and beneath it all, a cloying sweetness, like spices left too long in a cupboard. She ducked under the blue-and-white tape strung across the rusted service gate, her torch beam cutting a narrow path into the gloom. Her steps on the metal stairs were precise, measured; the tired constable at the top of the shaft had already tried to tell her what to expect. “Like a rave gone wrong, ma’am. Rail maintenance called it in. Whole place is… off.” She’d heard that note in his voice before. People said “off” when they meant something in their lizard brain was backing away with its hands up. Harlow checked the time on the worn leather watch at her wrist—06:03—then went down. The staircase spiraled past layers of peeling cream paint and old adverts half-slid from the walls, their curled corners yellowed to sepia. Water dripped somewhere below, the plink echoing up like a slow metronome marking time in an empty hall. The temperature dropped with every turn, a chill settling through her coat. At the bottom, the corridor opened into the station proper, and the beam of her torch painted the curve of a forgotten platform. Camden’s abandoned spur. She’d read the file years ago: closed after the war, sealed, left to rot so the open lines could carry more traffic. How many Londoners rode trains above this place without knowing a dead station slept under their feet? “About time,” a voice called from the shadows near a pillar. DS Lennox stepped into her light, squinting. Late thirties, compact, the overnight stubble and crumpled shirt of someone whose shift was meant to have ended hours ago. He nodded toward the far end of the platform. “You’re going to love this one.” The sarcasm sat strangely on him. He took things seriously, usually. Harlow followed the line of his gesture. The platform had been cleared of benches long ago, but it wasn’t empty. The space was littered with shapes that, at first glance, mimicked a shambolic market hoard: folding tables overturned, crates split open, a scattering of cloth and paper and broken glass ground underfoot. Forensics tented lamps threw harsh white circles over everything, carving the darkness into islands. And in the brightest circle, thirty feet down, a body lay in the open, arms flung wide as if in supplication. Harlow walked toward it, boots crunching on something brittle. Not glass, she realized. Bone. Small shards that clicked like teeth. “Rail maintenance were doing an inspection topside,” Lennox said as he fell into step. “Smelled smoke from one of the ventilation grates. Found this. Called us.” “Any fire service report?” she asked. “Minor heat signatures, no active fire when they got here. Couple hot spots on the thermal camera, already cooling. They focused on making sure the line above wasn’t affected.” Harlow filed that away. Her torch skimmed past a makeshift stall of milk crates still stacked against the tiled wall, an old blanket tacked above like a canopy, its edges singed. A tangle of fairy lights lay dead at her feet, the copper wires blackened in places as though someone had taken a blowtorch to them. “Looks like a market,” she said. “Or a party,” Lennox replied. “We found nitrous canisters in that corner.” He pointed with his pen beyond the body, where a scattering of small silver cylinders winked in the light. “Balloons, too, but they’re melted.” The dead man lay on his back, head tilted slightly to one side. Early thirties, maybe; mixed-race, close-cropped hair, dark eyes open and staring at the stained ceiling. No visible trauma. No blood. His mouth was parted, lips drawn back just enough to show teeth, as if his last breath had been dragged out of him. Harlow stopped just outside the chalk line the prelim team had laid. The air around the body felt… tense. She crouched, her knees protesting. Her brown eyes swept from shoes to forehead before she let herself look closer. The soles of his trainers were clean. Too clean, given the grime of the platform. There were tiny flecks of something pale on the leather—dust, but when she brushed one with a gloved fingertip, it left a faint smear, greasy rather than powdery. “Thoughts?” Lennox asked. “You first.” He rocked back on his heels. “We’ve got scorch marks on the far wall, melted plastic, some kind of explosion from one of the stalls. Illegal market, maybe some kids dealing gas and dodgy anything-else. Cookstove goes, punters stampede. Bloke here gets trampled, maybe hits his head, maybe has a heart attack. Crowd clears, leaves the mess. Someone switches off whatever they rigged for lights. Maintenance smell the aftermath and call it in.” “Trampled where?” Harlow asked mildly. Lennox frowned. “What?” “Show me where he was trampled.” He looked at the body, then the ground around it. The layer of dust and detritus was interrupted by shoeprints, yes, overlapping treads and smears, but most of them skirted around the chalk line. Closer in, the dust lay strangely undisturbed. Lennox shifted. “They could have moved him after. Panic, then someone drags him clear. Hard to say until forensics are done with impressions.” “Maybe.” She leaned close to the dead man’s face without touching him. No soot in the nostrils. The faint plastic tang of cooled wiring, but his skin had that slack, too-quiet look she’d learned to trust over the years. Not the fresh collapse of a clubber who’d dropped an hour ago, but the set of tissues that had been without a heartbeat a while. “How long did Fire say he’d been down?” she asked. “Body temp suggests three, four hours.” Lennox shrugged. “Night shift pathologist had a feel. We’ll know more later.” “Three or four,” Harlow repeated. She checked her watch again. Six-oh-eight. That puts time of death around two. Three, at a stretch. She let her gaze wander outward. The scorch pattern on the far wall hit her next. From this angle, it looked like a rough black blossom, edges feathered, center pale where the heat must’ve been most intense. But when she stepped around so her line of sight ran parallel to the tracks, the geometry changed. It wasn’t a splash against the wall. It was a widening cone that began halfway down the platform—not at a power source, not at an obvious device—and flared outward, kissing the tiles in a near-perfect arc. Her skin prickled beneath her shirt. “Where’s the origin?” she asked. “Electrics team think a short from one of those.” Lennox gestured at the dead fairy lights. “Some bod wires into an old junction box, overloads it. Sparks, boom.” Harlow crossed to the wall. The tiles here were old but intact, the ancient posters above them blistered, paper bubbling where the heat had run. She laid her gloved palm near the blackening. Cool. Whatever had happened, it had cooled long before maintenance poked their heads in. Directly opposite the most intense burn, the middle of the platform floor was oddly clean. A circle, maybe eight feet across, where the grime underfoot thinned, the concrete showing through. Around its edge, objects had collected, as if flung outward by something that had erupted from the center. A crate of glass vials, half-shattered. A wooden box with metal fittings, its lid blown open, its contents gone. Coins. Not British—she picked one up, turned it under the lamp. Heavy, with an off-center hole drilled through, engraved with a language she didn’t recognize. She felt its weight, then set it precisely where she’d found it. Something glinted near a fold of scorched tarpaulin. She bent, brushed it aside. A small brass compass lay there, its casing tarnished with a greenish bloom of verdigris. The glass had survived whatever had blasted this place; beneath it, a single needle trembled slightly, then settled. She held it up. The face wasn’t marked with the usual cardinal letters. Instead, intricate lines like overlapping circles had been etched into the cream enamel, threaded with minuscule symbols that could have been runes or just an artisan’s idea of fancy decoration. “North?” Lennox asked dryly, stepping closer. “Not unless the Earth’s flipped since sunrise,” Harlow said. She knew roughly where north was; eighteen years of orienting herself on scenes did that as much as any map. The compass needle pointed instead at a spot on the tiled wall three yards to her right, unwavering. She rotated the casing slowly. The needle compensated, stubborn as a magnet held to a lodestone. Always back to that same patch of tiles. “Cheap tourist tat,” Lennox said. “We’ve got a dozen like that in the kids’ box at home. Gimmicky things.” “Maybe.” She didn’t think it was cheap. The weight of it in her palm was wrong for a toy. Too dense, too balanced. And those sigils weren’t random; they repeated in patterns, forming a ring around the center. She’d seen something like them before, in the margins of photocopied pages from Morris’s files. Drawings that had never made it into any official report. Her jaw tightened. She clicked the compass shut and slipped it into an evidence bag from her pocket. “You okay?” Lennox asked, watching her. “Fine.” She sealed the bag, labeled it with a code in her tight, angular handwriting. “Any ID on him?” “Nothing in his pockets. No wallet, no phone. Either his mates panicked and stripped him so they wouldn’t be connected, or someone took the opportunity after they fled.” Lennox rubbed a hand over his face. “There’s CCTV in the service tunnel, but someone’s cut the feed. Cables are severed. Clean cut, not ripped.” “So they knew where the cameras were,” Harlow said. “And how to kill them.” He nodded toward the far end of the platform, where a forensics tech in white Tyvek was photographing a panel hanging open. “Could be someone familiar with the infrastructure. Rail staff, maybe, or someone who’s been using this place a while.” Harlow looked back over the scattered stalls. The pattern emerged slowly, like a photograph in a darkroom tray. Folding tables all along the wall, spaced at regular intervals. Each with a crude sign above—cardboard rectangles, some scorched, the ink run: HERBS, TINKERS, READINGS, in cramped hands. Someone had been selling… what? Junk? Drugs? Charms? Behind HERBS, bundles of dried plants drooped, their leaves blackened at the edges but still giving off a ghost of scent—metallic sage, something sharper she couldn’t place. Under TINKERS, the remnants of more intricate items: gears, wires, bits of metal shaped into spirals and cages, all corroded an olive green. “Not kids with glow sticks,” she murmured. “Hm?” Lennox said. “This isn’t a rave,” she said. “It’s a market. Organized. Look at the spacing. You could walk a crowd through here.” She gestured, the path obvious now. “There was some kind of… trade happening. Stalls, vendors—whatever you want to call them. That explosion—if it was an explosion—happened after they’d set up. But—” She pivoted slowly, taking in the floor. “Where’s the rest of it?” “What rest?” Lennox asked, defensive tension creeping into his shoulders. “Tables are overturned, but only some. There’s debris, but it’s spotty. Gaps.” She pointed to a stretch of wall between READINGS and CHARMS where a faint rectangle of cleaner tiles stood out. “Something stood there. For a while. See the outline? It’s empty now. And yet there’s no drag marks, no boot scuffs leading away. If they took things out, they did it carefully, lifted straight up. And they had time to do it.” “So they packed up after whatever happened,” Lennox said. “Cleared the valuable stuff, legged it. They don’t care about the body.” “Then why leave the cash?” She nodded at another glint on the floor: more of those heavy, holed coins scattered like dropped change. “Panic doesn’t stop for money.” He opened his mouth, closed it. Shrugged. Harlow’s gaze snagged on the body again. The angle of his arms. Not shielded over his face, not curled as if he’d fallen. They were stretched wide, palms up. Not natural. “Has he been moved?” she asked. Lennox checked his notebook. “Prelim team say no obvious shift marks. No smeared pooling—” “There is no pooling.” She cut him off. “No lividity visible from here because he’s on his back, but there’s no blood, no fluids. Whatever killed him didn’t break the skin. No burns on his clothes, either.” She reached carefully, peeled the collar of his shirt away from his throat. A faint, almost imperceptible pattern lay against the skin there—a ring of darker flesh, as if something cold had been pressed to him hard enough to leave a mark. “Strangulation?” Lennox ventured. “Not from rope.” She traced the air above the line. The ring was thin, nearly uniform. “Maybe a wire. Maybe a collar. But there’s no bruising at the jaw. And his tongue isn’t swollen.” She let the fabric fall. “Check for petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes when the ME gets him. I want tox screens, full. And I want time-of-death nailed down.” “You think he died somewhere else,” Lennox said slowly. Not quite a question. “I think this scene’s been worked,” she replied. “Something happened here. Something big enough to leave that”—she pointed at the scorch arc—“and tidy enough that most of the paying customers are gone, along with their wallets, bags, anything that could tell us who they were. But him?” She looked into the dead man’s eyes. “He’s deliberate. Left where he’d be found.” “To send a message?” Lennox asked. “To someone,” Harlow said. The compass in her pocket tugged at her awareness like a weight on a line. She could feel it against her hip, solid, alien. Pointing not north, but at that patch of wall. Her skin drew tight across her knuckles as an image tried to surface from three years ago: another room, another impossible pattern burnt into plaster, Morris’s hand slipping from hers as something she couldn’t name moved in the corner of her eye. The same sense that the world had… flexed. She pushed the memory down, smoothed her expression before Lennox could read anything there. “Check with the rail archive,” she said. “I want full schematics of this station. Official and otherwise. Every service duct, maintenance corridor, and glorified rabbit hole. Especially behind that wall.” She nodded at the tiles where the scorch mark’s arc seemed to kiss its midpoint. “You think there’s a way through?” Lennox frowned. “They sealed this place after the war. There shouldn’t be anything—” “‘Shouldn’t’ wasn’t in the vocabulary of whoever set up shop down here,” she said. “Get the plans. And pull any reports of trespass or strange activity in the tunnels around Camden in the last six months. Vagrants, kids, rail enthusiasts. I want them all.” He hesitated. “Harlow… if this is just some hipster black market that went wrong, we’re throwing a lot of manpower at—” “It isn’t just anything.” Her voice was flat. She gestured at the scorched fairy lights. “Someone brought electricity down here without tripping half the station above. They knew their way around. This wasn’t a one-off.” Lennox studied her, then nodded reluctantly. “All right.” He walked off toward the forensics team, his footsteps receding, swallowed by the curve of the platform. For a moment, the station felt very quiet. The kind of quiet that had weight. Harlow stepped toward the wall the compass had indicated. The tiles there were no different than any others—cracked here and there, stained with age. Up close, she saw faint, chalky smudges low to the ground, half-scrubbed away. Lines forming part of a circle, maybe, or a symbol. Someone had tried to erase them in a hurry and hadn’t quite finished. She imagined the compass needle behind her, aligning itself, unwavering. Pointing. Her palm itched where she’d held it. She tore her gaze from the wall and looked back over the mess. Everyone else saw chaos, a rave, a cookstove explosion. She saw emptiness where there should have been clutter. She saw careful cuts in the CCTV cables, and stalls stripped with purpose. She saw a market that had packed up in the middle of the night and moved on, leaving one man behind like an offering. Something else had been here. Something that made Morris’s case stop being an anomaly in her mind and start to look like a pattern. Harlow straightened, squared her shoulders. The station’s stale air pressed close, as if listening. “We’re missing the main event,” she said under her breath, to the silent tiles and the body and the scorch on the wall. “But we’ll find it.” On her way back up the platform, her hand brushed the compass through her coat. For just a second, she had the absurd, irrational impression that the needle inside had twisted, straining, as though whatever it was attuned to had shifted, sliding away into some other hidden tunnel beneath the city, taking its secrets with it. She didn’t believe in ghosts. She believed in facts, in patterns, in things that could be drawn on a whiteboard and made to confess under fluorescent light. But as she climbed the cold steel stairs back toward the waking city, the small brass weight in her pocket felt less like evidence and more like a key she did not yet know how to turn.