Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR1EZ4H89PMBQQ7NN0ZFCM

Rain carved silver lines down the street, blurring tail-lights and traffic signals into a smeared, red-green artery. The city hummed around it—night buses sighing, the rumble of distant trains, the wet hiss of tyres over standing water. Detective Harlow Quinn ran through it all. Her boots hit the pavement in a steady, punishing rhythm, water exploding up her trouser legs with each stride. The worn leather watch on her left wrist bit against her skin as her arm swung. She ignored it. Ignored the ache building in her thighs, the stitch threatening her ribs. Eyes fixed ahead. The suspect cut through the few stragglers on Camden High Street, a dark hoodie, pale trainers flashing, shoulders hunching as he glanced back. Brief, scared profile: sharp nose, too-young mouth twisted in effort. He clutched something against his chest under the hoodie—rectangular, wrapped in black plastic and gaffer tape. Package first. Then him, Harlow promised herself. Traffic honked as he veered off the pavement and sprinted between a stopped minicab and a delivery van. The driver leaned on his horn, shouting, his words torn apart by passing wind and rain. Harlow followed, weaving, her palm slapping against the van’s wet flank to steady her. “Hart!” she shouted, voice knifing through the wet air. “Lewis Hart! Police!” He didn’t slow. If anything, he pushed harder, shoulders pumping as he burst into a side street that fell away from the bright chain-store lights into the jaundiced glow of old sodium lamps. Her breath sawed, warm in her chest, then flashed cold as it hit the night air. Eighteen years on the job and she could still run down most of the kids who thought they could outrun the Met. Not because she loved the chase. Because she remembered the last time she hadn’t been fast enough. Morris, vanishing through an unmarked fire door in Whitechapel. Shout over his shoulder: “I’ve got him, Harlow!” The peculiar dead air that had rolled out of that doorway—too still, like the world had been put on pause. The gunshot echo that didn’t sound quite like a gunshot at all. She put her head down and ran harder. The side street twisted, funnelling them away from the main drag. Terraced houses loomed close, windows fogged and yellow, some dark. Overflowing wheelie bins crowded the pavement. He vaulted one; she planted a hand and swung around it. Something sharp scraped along her knuckles. Stung. Her radio crackled at her shoulder, blurred by wind. “—Unit Three-seven, update on—” She slapped it off with a gloved thumb without slowing. No time to talk them through this corner of the warren. Hart knew these back ways. She’d clocked it watching him for weeks outside the Raven’s Nest in Soho—smoker’s breaks that turned into vanishing acts, routes that never matched CCTV. He surfaced in one camera, gone in the next, like there was a missing frame in the film. Now, at least, there were no blind spots. Just rain, brick, and Hart’s pounding feet. He took a hard right down a narrow passage that barely qualified as an alley, squeezed between two shuttered shops at the bottom of the street. A hand-painted sign for a tattoo parlour dripped water onto his hood as he ducked beneath it. Harlow followed, her shoulder catching the edge of the sign. Wood bit into muscle. Pain flared and she hissed between her teeth but didn’t slow. The alley stank of wet concrete, old fryer oil, and something metallic underneath. It doglegged sharply, then opened into a yard pitted with puddles that reflected the sickly glow of a single floodlight. Ahead, Hart darted across the open space, feet skidding, and threw himself at a rusted steel door embedded in a wall of soot-stained brick. Above it, the remnants of a faded roundel clung to the brickwork—ghost of the Underground logo, red circle flaking into nothing. The blacked-out letters beneath were just readable in the slanting rain. Camden… something. The rest lost to time and paint. Harlow’s brain filed it in a flash: one of the old ghost stations, sealed when they modernised the lines. She’d read about them once, scrolling on her phone during a dead hour at the station. Curiosities. Rat palaces. Nothing more. Hart hammered at the steel door with the heel of his fist in a frantic rhythm. Bap-bap-bap, bap-bap. A code. As Harlow hit the edge of the yard, gun hand instinctively free, her palm slick with water, the door shifted. A slit snapped open at eye level, no wider than a letterbox. A band of yellow-white light spilled out; Harlow caught a glimpse of a face behind it—female, middle-aged perhaps, skin the colour of wax and an eye that shone milky in the narrow gap. “Token,” the woman inside said. Hart fumbled at his pocket, fingers clumsy. For a heartbeat Harlow thought he’d drop whatever he was carrying and run, but his hand came away with something small and bone-pale. Not a coin. Not quite a chip. Something too irregular for either. He held it up, rain beading on his fingers. The milky eye in the slit shifted, assessing. Then the slit clacked shut. Heavy bolts scraped. The steel door groaned inward. “Hart!” Harlow shouted, picking up speed, water launching from her boots. “Stop! Armed police!” He didn’t look at her. He slipped through the gap like smoke, package tight to his chest, disappearing into the light. Harlow threw herself at the door before it could swing fully shut. Her shoulder hit cold steel with a hollow boom that rattled in her bones. The door juddered but kept moving, heavier than it looked, pulled by an unseen hand from within. A set of thick, scar-cabled fingers darted out, trying to haul it closed. “Back off,” a voice snarled from the other side. Male, rough, an accent she couldn’t place under the growl. “You don’t walk in without—” She jammed the toe of her boot into the narrowing gap, teeth bared, leaning all her weight into it. Pain screamed up her shin. The door inched open again, moaning on its hinges. The milky-eyed woman loomed in the gap now, closer, face distorted by a fisheye spy-lens screwed into the steel, making her features bulge and warp. It should have been funny. It wasn’t. There was nothing of humour in the flat way that pale eye moved. “Police,” Harlow snapped, shoving her warrant card up toward the spy-lens with one hand while her shoulder braced the door. Her heart hammered, chest aching. “Open the door.” “Token only,” the woman said. The words came slow, thick. “No token. No entry.” “My suspect just came through there with a Class A package,” Harlow said. “You think I’m going to stand out here in the rain and—” “No token,” the woman repeated. Something moved behind her, a shadow blotting part of the harsh light. The male voice again, closer this time. “Let it go, luv. Market’s not for her kind.” A market. Underground. In a decommissioned Tube station. Something black-market, then. Guns. Drugs. People. The kind of operation you didn’t stumble into without the right introductions and the wrong moral compass. Her foot slipped on the wet concrete. The door shoved back another inch, steel biting into the leather of her boot. They were strong on the other side of it, whoever they were, and they had leverage and angle. She had rain, an aching shoulder, and a sworn duty to bring in a kid who’d just vanished into whatever was happening below London’s bones. Her radio was a hard, awkward weight at her collar. One press and she could call this in, lock it down properly, do it by the book. Surround the area. Wait for Armed Response. Seal every exit they could find. Hart might still wriggle out on some back stair or service tunnel, but procedure would be satisfied. Paperwork, too. That route, she knew, ended in Hart laughing in interview with a solicitor beside him, the package long gone to ground. Ended in a report filed under “unable to proceed”. Another thread snipped from the web connecting his little crew at the Raven’s Nest to three overdose deaths, twelve missing persons, and the file at the back of her filing cabinet with Morris’s name on it. You waited on back-up that night, she reminded herself harshly, teeth grinding. You followed procedure. Morris went through that door alone and he didn’t come out. The rain felt colder suddenly. “Last chance,” she said, voice low. “Open the door, or I call in enough uniforms to turn this entire block inside out and see what falls out of your cupboards.” Something flickered behind the milky eye. Not fear. Calculation. A second face slid into view behind the spy-lens, crowding the first aside. A man this time, early thirties, olive skin, rain-dark curls plastered to his forehead. A Saint Christopher medallion glinted at his throat, catching the harsh interior light. His warm brown eyes widened as he took her in. He looked, she realised abruptly, like he recognised her. “Shit,” he muttered in a soft Spanish accent. “Detective Quinn.” Harlow stared back, thrown. The name swam up from a half-forgotten briefing Alex from Organised Crime had given her over lukewarm coffee and a table scattered with photographs. Tomás Herrera. Former NHS paramedic. Licence revoked. Known to provide off-the-books medical care to individuals connected to several ongoing investigations. Hard to pin down. Harder to get talking. She’d seen his photo paper-clipped to a file six months ago. In the file, his scarred forearm had been prominent, a knife wound courtesy of some fight he’d dived into. Now, she caught a flash of that same pale, roped line as he braced a hand against the door from the inside. “Open it, Herrera,” she said, grasping for leverage in his name. “You’re already on my radar. Don’t make it worse.” For a heartbeat he didn’t speak. Rain pattered off her hood, loud in the sudden lull. Somewhere behind him, faint and distorted, she heard noise—voices layered over one another in more languages than she could track, the clink of glass, a low hum like distant machinery or bees. It was wrong, somehow. Too much sound coming from too far away. Like a whole other city was living under their feet. Herrera’s gaze flicked sideways, as if consulting someone out of sight. When it came back to her, something like pity lived in his eyes. “This is not your place,” he said quietly. “You don’t want to come down here.” “You don’t get to decide that,” she shot back. “Step away from the door, or I’ll—” “Shoot?” He lifted his brows. “Through a locked door, into a crowd? That is not you, Detective.” He knew too much about her. She clenched her jaw, muscles jumping. Her left shoulder burned where it pressed the lip of the steel door. Her boot slipped another millimetre on the slick concrete; the gap narrowed, just a fraction, but enough to make her pulse spike. On the other side, Tomás’s fingers tightened white on the metal. “You go back,” he said, voice low but firm. “You forget this door. Grant yourself that mercy.” Mercy. The word hit an odd nerve. Mercy had sounded like Morris saying, Let it go, Harlow. We can’t save everyone. We pick the ones we can and live with the rest. He’d said it after the third overdose tied to Hart’s crowd. The first two had looked like accidents. The third had been a seventeen-year-old found blue-lipped in an alley, strange symbols inked on her wrists. Harlow leaned in, putting all her weight behind her shoulder, gritting her teeth against the screaming protest from her booted foot. “Someone just fled a crime scene and ran into your… whatever this is,” she said. “That makes it my place. Now you open this door, or I will find another way in, and I will make certain you wish you’d been more cooperative.” For a second, something like amusement tugged Tomás’s mouth. Not disdain—bewildered admiration, almost. Then his eyes went hard. “You think the thing you are chasing ends with him,” he said. “It does not. And you are not ready for where it leads.” Morris hadn’t been ready either. Harlow pictured the crime-scene photos again, the ones she’d cycled through on sleepless nights. Morris laid out on the mortuary table, face waxy, eyes closed. The coroner’s report had said “heart failure.” Thirty-eight, runner’s resting pulse, no history. Heart just… stopped. She’d gone back to that basement alone the next day, found the walls marked with symbols that prickled the back of her neck and made her teeth ache. The air had been wrong there too. Too still. Too heavy. When she’d blinked, just once, one of the symbols had seemed to crawl, shifting like something alive. Officially, she’d logged it as stress-induced hallucination and pushed everything she’d seen into the file at the back of the cabinet. Unofficially, she’d started carrying a small torch in her pocket and counting her steps every time she went through an unlit corridor, just to make sure the world stayed the same length it was meant to be. Now there was that same pressure at the threshold, that sense of standing before something that didn’t quite fit inside her idea of London. Her damp hair prickled under her hood. The air leaking out from the inch-wide gap between door and frame was warmer than it should have been, tinged with a smell she couldn’t place—metal and ozone and ginger, undercut with something low and feral like wet fur. You can walk away, a small, traitorous voice suggested. Call it in. Let Surveillance set up. Live long enough to take a proper look instead of plunging into whatever madhouse sits under Camden. You’re not obligated to follow every rabbit down every hole. But Hart’s trainers had flashed once more in her mind’s eye, his hand clutching that taped package. Maybe it was just heroin. Maybe it was something new, something worse. Something that made a seventeen-year-old girl’s pupils go blacker than black before she dropped, according to the hysterical friend who’d called it in. The gap shrank another fraction. Her foot burned. Muscles shook. “Move,” she said through clenched teeth. Tomás hesitated. The milky-eyed woman muttered something in a language Harlow didn’t recognise. The sounds slid against her ears like oil. Thunder cracked somewhere overhead, echoing off the brick canyons of the city. The floodlight flickered. For one heartbeat, Harlow saw it: not with her eyes, not exactly, but inside her gut. A vision of herself easing back, letting the door slam, feeling the wet night close in around her again. Filing the report. Losing Hart. Adding another unsolved entry to the ledger in her mind. Then, just as quickly, she saw the other path. Her body braced in a dark stairwell that spiralled down past the arteries of the city she knew into somewhere else. Somewhere loud and bright and dangerous. The sense of being the only cop in a room that didn’t believe in cops. That second image knotted something in her chest. Fear, yes. But under it—something sharper. A jagged kind of hunger. She was so tired of ghosts and half-truths. Of doors shutting in her face. Her decision came out in a raw, simple breath. “Move. Or I swear I will plant myself here every night until I learn every face that goes through this door. Your Market won’t stay hidden long.” Tomás stared at her. Water from his hair traced slow lines down his cheeks, beading on his jaw. Behind him, the hum of that unseen space rose and fell like a breath. “Madre de Dios,” he whispered, and there was no contempt in it now—only resignation. “Fine.” He stepped back, dragging the milky-eyed woman with him. The pressure on the door eased. Harlow lunged, driving her shoulder forward before they could change their minds. The steel door snapped open with a protesting shriek, her boot skidding on the wet threshold as she stumbled through into a wash of light and sound and heat. The air inside hit her like a physical thing. The smell—spices and scorched metal, sweat and incense, animal musk and something electric—swept over her, erasing the wet concrete chill in a heartbeat. Noise crashed in after it. Hundreds of voices, the murmur of bargaining and laughter, the sharp bark of argument, music from three different sources clashing in the air. The ceiling rolled high overhead, curved and ribbed, the bones of the old Tube station still visible under strings of mismatched lights and banners. Stalls sprawled along the old platform, bleeding onto what had once been tracks now paved over with wooden planks and patchwork rugs. Tables groaned with goods she could catalogue at a glance—knives, locked cases of vials that glowed faintly from within, jars of herbs that looked almost but not quite familiar. And then there were the other things, the things her mind slid off: curved bones the size of her forearm with intricate notches carved along their length, masks whose eyes seemed to follow her, boxes that hummed against her eardrums without making a sound. People moved through it all in dense, shifting currents. Some looked like any street crowd—hoodies, leather jackets, cheap umbrellas dripped closed and forgotten. Others… didn’t. Too-tall men whose skin had a grey-green cast, a woman whose eyes reflected the light in a way no human retina could. Something large and furred hunched in the shadow of a pillar, the shape lost under a heavy cloak but the smell unmistakable. A market, her brain insisted, trying to impose familiar order on it. Just a market. Just people selling things they shouldn’t in a place they don’t have permission to use. Her right hand fell automatically to the butt of her pistol anyway. Tomás slid in front of her, blocking the immediate crush of bodies, hand lifted. His bare forearm brushed her sleeve, the old knife scar rough as rope against her skin. He looked smaller in here, somehow. Less certain. “Keep your voice down,” he said under the roar, mouth close to her ear. “You announce ‘police’ in here, you won’t make it five metres.” Harlow’s heart jackhammered against her ribs, adrenaline still roaring. Hart was out there somewhere in this impossible maze of faces and stalls and shadows with his package. Every second she stood gaping, he got further from her. “Where did Hart go?” she demanded, scanning the nearest aisle. “Find me the kid with the black hoodie and a taped parcel before I start arresting everyone in sight.” Tomás barked a laugh, sharp and without humour. “Arrest?” he said. “You still think the law applies down here, Detective?” Her gaze snapped back to him. He raised his hands defensively. “You wanted to come,” he said. “Now you’re in. Welcome to the Veil Market.” The name slid into her bones like a cold blade. She tightened her jaw, forcing the perimeter of her world to hold. Underground or not, supernatural or not, it was still London. Still under her patch. And suspect Hart was still somewhere ahead of her, moving deeper into the crush, into the strange. She drew a slow, steadying breath, tasting ginger and metal and rain evaporating from her coat. Fear flickered in the base of her skull, an old, animal thing whispering that she was out of her depth. That she was following Morris’s ghost down another dark stairwell. But the other part of her—the part that had pushed through the door—flared hotter. “Then you’d better stay close, Herrera,” she said, eyes scanning, body angling forward into the current of the crowd. “Because until I have Hart in cuffs, this Market is very much my business.” And with that, Harlow Quinn stepped fully into the underground throng, letting the door slam shut behind her, the echo swallowed in an instant by the living, dangerous heart of the Veil Market.