Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQY7QG0WBYDJXA2397ZBSN

The bone token felt wrong in Quinn's palm. Too light, like holding a piece of chalk that had been hollowed out. She'd found it in the victim's coat pocket three days ago, and it had taken her that long to learn what it was for—and longer still to find someone willing to tell her where to use it. The abandoned Tube station beneath Camden smelled of damp stone and something else, something that reminded her of the ozone tang before a lightning strike. Quinn descended the last few steps, her torch beam cutting through darkness that seemed to push back against the light. The platform stretched before her, empty save for the crime scene tape she'd ordered strung across the far end and the single figure already waiting there. Eva Kowalski stood with her back to Quinn, her worn leather satchel slung across her shoulders, her curly red hair catching the weak glow from the emergency lights that still functioned down here after all these years. The young woman was studying something on the ground, her round glasses pushed up on her nose. "You're early," Quinn said, and her voice echoed strangely off the tiled walls. The acoustics were wrong. Sound should have carried further, bounced more. Instead, her words fell flat, absorbed by something she couldn't see. Eva turned, tucking a strand of hair behind her left ear. "I've been here for an hour. The market moves every full moon, Detective. We've got three days before this whole place shifts and takes whatever evidence is left with it." Quinn crossed the platform, her footsteps precise, measured. Eighteen years on the force had taught her how to read a crime scene like text, but the words here were written in a language she was only beginning to learn. The body had been removed two nights ago—a John Doe, mid-forties, cause of death listed as cardiac arrest despite the fact that his heart had been found six feet from his chest, still beating when the first responder arrived. That detail hadn't made it into the official report. Quinn had made sure of it. "Walk me through what you see," she said. Eva crouched near a scorch mark on the platform's edge, pulling a small brass compass from her satchel. Quinn recognized it—she'd seen drawings of similar objects in the restricted files Eva had shown her, files that weren't supposed to exist in the British Museum's archives. The compass's face was etched with symbols that seemed to shift when Quinn tried to focus on them, and its casing bore a patina of verdigris that spoke to age far beyond what brass should accumulate. "The Veil Compass is reading active," Eva said, her voice dropping to barely above a whisper. "There was a rift here. Recently. The needle's still spinning, which means the energy hasn't fully dissipated." Quinn knelt beside her, studying the scorch mark. It wasn't char, she realized. The blackening wasn't on the surface—it was in the tile itself, as if the ceramic had been stained from within. She pulled a penlight from her jacket pocket and angled it across the mark. At a certain slant, the black seemed to shimmer with an iridescent quality, like oil on water. "The official theory is that our victim was killed during a deal gone wrong," Quinn said. "Underground market, illegal goods, someone decided he wasn't worth the trouble of paying." "That's not what happened." "I know." Quinn straightened, scanning the platform. The market stalls were gone now—packed up and vanished into whatever shadow roads the Veil Market's vendors used to transport their wares. But she could see the traces they'd left behind: scuff marks in the dust, a dropped coin she'd already bagged as evidence, the faint chalk lines that had marked out vendor territories. "His heart was removed without a single cut to his chest. No incision, no trauma to the surrounding tissue. The pathologist nearly quit on the spot." Eva stood, the compass still in her hand. Its needle had stopped spinning, pointing now toward the tunnel's dark mouth at the platform's north end. "There are creatures that can do that. Reach inside you and take what they want without breaking the skin. The old texts call them Hollow-Handed. They're servants, usually. Someone else's weapon." "Someone at the market?" "Or someone who wanted something from the market. Something specific enough to kill for." Quinn walked the perimeter of the scorch mark, counting steps. Twelve feet in diameter. Almost perfect circle, save for an irregular bulge on the eastern edge. She pulled out her notebook—leather-bound, worn soft from years of use—and sketched the shape. "The bulge," she said. "What does that tell you?" Eva crossed to examine it, her satchel swinging against her hip. The books inside rustled with the movement, pages shifting against pages. She was quiet for a long moment, her green eyes tracing the mark's edge. "Interrupted," she finally said. "The rift was interrupted. Someone—or something—tried to close it before it fully formed. See how the edge here is jagged? A clean rift leaves smooth borders. This one was fought." Quinn thought about that. Thought about the victim's face, frozen in an expression she'd first read as terror and now reconsidered. Not terror. Determination. His hands had been clenched when they'd found him, fingernails torn and bloody, but there had been nothing under them. Nothing physical, at least. "He wasn't the target," Quinn said slowly, the pieces beginning to align. "He was trying to stop something." "Or protect something." Eva pointed to a second scorch mark, smaller, partially hidden beneath a collapsed advertising board. Quinn hadn't noticed it during her initial sweep. She moved toward it, her worn leather watch catching on her sleeve as she knelt to examine the mark. This one was different. The same internal staining, the same iridescent quality, but the shape was wrong. Not a circle. A crescent, curved like a cupped hand. "A shield mark," Eva said from behind her. "Someone was standing here, protected by something when the rift opened. Our victim took the hit meant for them." Quinn's jaw tightened. Three years ago, DS Morris had died in a warehouse fire that had burned cold—flames that froze everything they touched, that left her partner's body unmarked but utterly, impossibly dead. She'd been told it was a gas leak. A chemical reaction. Something that made sense in a world where sense still applied. She'd known it was a lie. She just hadn't known what the truth looked like. "Who would he have been protecting?" she asked. Eva was already moving, following some pattern Quinn couldn't see, her compass held out before her like a dowsing rod. "The market deals in information as much as goods. Someone here knew something worth killing over. Worth dying over." She stopped near the tunnel mouth, the compass needle now pointing directly into the darkness. "The rift didn't just open randomly. It was aimed. Targeted. Whoever our victim died protecting, they went that way." Quinn stood, brushing dust from her knees with military precision. The tunnel stretched before her, its darkness absolute beyond the reach of the emergency lights. Her torch suddenly felt inadequate. A child's toy against whatever waited in that black. "The official investigation ends here," she said. "Cardiac arrest, suspicious circumstances, case pending further evidence." She met Eva's eyes, seeing the same calculation there, the same weighing of risk against necessity. "Unofficially?" Eva smiled, but there was no humor in it. Just a grim recognition between two people who had seen behind the curtain and couldn't pretend the world was still what they'd believed it to be. "Unofficially, Detective Quinn, I think you're about to solve a murder that never officially happened, committed by something that officially doesn't exist, to protect someone who officially wasn't here." She pulled a second bone token from her satchel and pressed it into Quinn's hand. "You'll need this. Where we're going, cash won't spend." Quinn looked at the token. Same hollow lightness, same chalk-white surface, but this one was marked with a symbol she didn't recognize—a spiral that seemed to turn inward the longer she looked at it. "What is it?" "Payment. For the kind of answers you're looking for." Eva shouldered her satchel, adjusting the strap. "The Veil Market moves every full moon, but the people who run it have longer memories than that. Three days isn't much time, but it's enough to find out what was worth a man's life." Quinn pocketed the token and checked her watch. Half past eleven. The darkness in the tunnel seemed to pulse with something almost like a heartbeat. "Then let's not waste it." They walked into the black together, and behind them, the scorch mark on the platform floor began, very slowly, to glow.