Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR2SRNC0XY6W63SR9AM31B

The bone token felt heavier than it should in Detective Harlow Quinn's palm, its surface worn smooth by countless hands before hers. She'd taken it off a suspect three months ago—a fence who'd died of a heart attack in holding before she could question him properly. The medical examiner had called it natural causes. Quinn had her doubts. She descended the rusted maintenance ladder into darkness, her worn leather watch catching on a rung. The abandoned platform materialized below her in increments: first the cracked tiles, then the defunct ticket booth, then the impossible. The Veil Market sprawled across what should have been an empty Tube station, a fever dream of stalls and tents illuminated by floating orbs of pale blue light. Vendors hawked wares that defied explanation—jars of something that moved, blades that seemed to drink the shadows, books bound in materials Quinn chose not to identify. The air smelled of incense and copper and something older, something that made the hair on her arms stand at attention. Three years ago, she would have called this a hallucination. Three years ago, Morris had still been alive. The crime scene tape—actual Metropolitan Police tape, incongruous against the supernatural backdrop—cordoned off a stall near the platform's edge. Two constables stood guard, their faces pale, their hands nowhere near their weapons. Smart, Quinn thought. She doubted standard-issue Glocks would do much good down here. "Detective Quinn." The voice came from behind a stack of what appeared to be taxidermied creatures that had never existed in any nature documentary. Eva Kowalski emerged, her curly red hair escaping from a hasty bun, her round glasses slightly fogged. She clutched her worn leather satchel against her chest like a shield. "I didn't expect them to call you." "They didn't." Quinn ducked under the tape, her movements carrying the military precision that eighteen years on the force had drilled into her bones. "I have a scanner on the dispatch frequency. Heard the code and came running." "What code covers this?" Eva gestured at the scene before them. Quinn didn't answer. She was already cataloging. The victim lay sprawled across a display table, arms outstretched as if reaching for something that wasn't there anymore. Male, early forties, dressed in clothes that might have been expensive once but now bore the peculiar wear of someone who spent too much time in places like this. His eyes were open, staring at the vaulted ceiling of the abandoned station. They had no irises—just endless white, like someone had erased the color. No blood. No visible wounds. No signs of struggle on the body itself. But the stall told a different story. Glass cases had been shattered, their contents scattered across the concrete floor. Quinn crouched, careful not to touch anything, and examined the debris. Small brass objects, most of them, tarnished with age and covered in markings she'd learned to recognize even if she couldn't read them. Protective sigils. One piece caught her eye—a compass, its casing showing a patina of verdigris that spoke of decades, maybe centuries, of existence. The face was etched with more of those sigils, and the needle spun lazily despite there being no magnetic pole to orient toward. "Veil Compass," Eva said, appearing at her shoulder. She'd tucked her hair behind her left ear, a nervous habit Quinn had noticed during their previous encounters. "They're used to locate supernatural rifts. Portals. That kind of thing." Quinn filed the information away without acknowledging it. "You know this vendor?" "Knew. His name was Solomon Vance. He was a Shade artisan—one of the last who knew how to craft compasses like that one." Eva's voice carried the particular grief of someone losing a research contact rather than a friend. "I'd been trying to arrange an interview for months. The Museum's archives have records of similar objects, but no one alive who understood how they worked." "Until now." "Until now." Quinn stood, her knees protesting the movement. Forty-one wasn't old, but some mornings her body disagreed. She surveyed the broader scene, letting her eyes go soft, looking for patterns rather than details. The destruction radiated outward from the body in a rough spiral. Not the pattern of a fight—too deliberate, too geometric. And the other stalls nearby were untouched, their vendors watching from safe distances with expressions that ranged from curious to terrified. "The constables are saying robbery gone wrong," Eva offered. "Someone wanted his inventory, things got violent." "No." "No?" Quinn pointed to a small chest that had been knocked from the display table. It lay open on the ground, revealing a velvet interior studded with indentations where objects had once rested. Three of the indentations were empty. The rest still held their treasures—more compasses, rings that glowed faintly, a pair of spectacles with lenses that seemed to show different images depending on the angle. "A thief would have taken everything. This is someone who knew exactly what they wanted." She moved around the body, studying it from different angles. "And the victim—no defensive wounds. No bruising. No indication he fought back at all." "Maybe he couldn't. Maybe it happened too fast." "Maybe." Quinn pulled a pair of nitrile gloves from her coat pocket and knelt beside the body. She'd learned to carry them everywhere after Morris. After she'd touched something she shouldn't have and spent three days in hospital with burns that doctors couldn't explain. "But look at his hands." Eva crouched beside her, peering through her round glasses. "They're... relaxed." "More than relaxed. Open. Palms up." Quinn indicated without touching. "This man crafted delicate objects for a living. His hands were his tools, his livelihood. If someone attacked him, his first instinct would be to protect them. Ball them into fists, tuck them against his body. Instead..." "Instead he opened them. Like he was offering something." "Or having something taken." Quinn stood again, circling the scene. The constables watched her with a mixture of respect and unease. They knew her reputation—eighteen years of decorations, cases closed that should have stayed open, a solve rate that bordered on supernatural. They didn't know about Morris. About the nightmares. About the three years she'd spent chasing shadows that turned out to be more literal than metaphorical. "The compasses," she said finally. "The ones that were taken. Were they different from the others?" Eva's brow furrowed. She pulled a small notebook from her satchel—hand-bound, Quinn noticed, with pages that looked older than the leather cover. "I don't have a complete inventory, but from what Solomon told me in our correspondence... he had three compasses that were special. Attuned to specific locations rather than general rifts. One pointed to a doorway in Prague. One to something beneath the Seine. And one..." "One?" Eva tucked her hair behind her ear again. "One pointed to a rift that opened only once every century. The next opening is supposed to be in six months." Quinn felt the familiar tightening in her chest—the sensation she'd learned to trust, the one that told her she was standing at the edge of something larger than it appeared. "Where?" "London. Specifically, beneath the Thames. Near where they found those bodies in 1888." The Ripper murders. Quinn had read the files—the real files, the ones that had been sealed and buried and occasionally leaked to conspiracy theorists who had no idea how close to the truth they stumbled. The victims hadn't just been killed. They'd been hollowed. Like Solomon Vance's eyes. "This wasn't a robbery," Quinn said. "This was a retrieval. Someone needed those compasses to find something. And they couldn't just torture the information out of Vance because—" "Because he didn't know," Eva finished. "The compasses know. He just made them." Quinn looked down at the scattered brass objects, at the spinning needle of the Veil Compass still lying amid the debris. It had stopped spinning. Now it pointed steadily toward the tunnel at the far end of the platform—the tunnel that, according to Transport for London records, had been sealed with concrete in 1943 after a bombing raid. "Detective." One of the constables approached, his voice barely above a whisper. "We've been down here for two hours. The market—it's supposed to move. Full moon's tonight. If we don't clear the scene soon..." "Then we'll move with it." The constable's face went grey. "Ma'am, with respect, we can't—the regulations—" "The regulations don't cover this. Nothing covers this." Quinn pulled an evidence bag from her coat and carefully collected the Veil Compass. The metal was cold against her gloved fingers, colder than it should have been. "But someone down here saw what happened. Someone always sees." She turned to face the watching vendors, the curious onlookers, the creatures and beings that defied classification. Her brown eyes swept across them with the steady intensity that had made hardened criminals confess. "I'm going to find out what was taken," she announced, her voice carrying across the impossible market. "I'm going to find out who took it. And I'm going to find out what opens in six months that's worth killing for." No one answered. But Quinn saw the way they looked at each other, the way secrets passed in glances and gestures she was only beginning to learn to read. The bone token in her pocket hummed against her thigh—a sensation she'd never felt before, as if the market itself was acknowledging her presence. Acknowledging her threat. Good, she thought. Let them be afraid. Whatever had killed Solomon Vance, whatever had taken those compasses, whatever was coming in six months—it had made a mistake. It had given Detective Harlow Quinn a crime scene. And she didn't leave cases unsolved. Not anymore. Not after Morris. "Eva." She turned to find the researcher already scribbling in her notebook, her green eyes bright with the particular fever of someone who'd found a thread worth pulling. "I need everything the Museum has on rifts, portals, and whatever happened in 1888 that they didn't put in the official records." "That's going to require accessing some very restricted archives." "Can you do it?" Eva tucked her hair behind her ear one final time, a smile playing at the corners of her freckled face. "Detective, I've been waiting three years for someone official to ask me that question." The floating lights of the Veil Market flickered, and somewhere in the depths of the sealed tunnel, something that might have been wind—but wasn't—began to whisper. Quinn checked her worn leather watch. Six hours until the full moon. Six hours until this market vanished and reappeared somewhere else, taking its witnesses and its secrets with it. She had work to do.