Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR32X5YW41752SY2D0S4RE

The rain came down in sheets, turning the London pavement into a slick mirror of neon and shadow. Detective Harlow Quinn pressed her shoulder against the brick corner of an alley off Frith Street, her breath coming hard and fast. Three weeks of surveillance. Three weeks of dead ends and redacted files and that gnawing feeling in her gut that something was deeply, irreparably wrong with this city. And now she had him—a man in a dark coat who moved like he knew the streets were watching. She checked her watch. The worn leather band was soaked through, the face fogged at the edges, but she could still read the time. Quarter past midnight. The bar behind her, some dive called The Raven's Nest with its distinctive green neon sign buzzing like a dying insect, had been her starting point. She'd watched her suspect slip out the back, and she'd followed. That's what she did. She followed. The man rounded the corner ahead, and Quinn pushed off from the wall. Her shoes slapped against the wet ground, sending up sprays of dirty water that splattered her trousers. She didn't care. She'd spent eighteen years chasing people through streets like these, and she'd be damned if she'd lose this one. He was fast. Faster than she'd expected from someone who'd looked so unremarkable sitting at the bar, nursing a whiskey for over an hour. Average height, average build, face she'd already committed to memory—olive skin, dark curly hair, the kind of face that could disappear in a crowd. But there was nothing average about the way he moved now. No hesitation. No uncertainty. He knew exactly where he was going. Quinn cut left down a narrow service alley, gambling on a shortcut that would bring her out ahead of him on Dean Street. The smell hit her first—rotting garbage, old piss, something metallic underneath it all. She kept moving. Her hand found the wall in the darkness, rough brick scraping against her palm, guiding her forward. Rain drummed against the fire escapes above, a relentless percussion that drowned out the sounds of the city and left her with only her own heartbeat in her ears. She burst onto Dean Street just as her suspect sprinted past. Close. Too close. He glanced over his shoulder, and for a split second, she saw his face in the glow of a passing car's headlights. Warm brown eyes, wide with something that looked almost like recognition. Then he was running again, and she was running, and the chase was back on. "Stop! Police!" The words tore from her throat, but the rain swallowed them whole. No one stopped. No one even turned. The few people on the street at this hour walked with their heads down, collars turned up against the weather, moving with the determined disinterest of Londoners who had long ago learned to mind their own business. He led her north, through streets that grew quieter and darker with each block. The tourist traps and late-night restaurants of Soho gave way to shuttered shops and empty sidewalks. Quinn's lungs burned. Her legs ached. She was forty-one years old, and while she kept herself fit, there was a reason the job usually fell to younger detectives. But this was her case. Her white whale. And she wasn't about to hand it off to some rookie who wouldn't understand the stakes. They crossed into Camden, and the terrain shifted beneath her feet. The streets here were older, the buildings squat and industrial, the kind of neighborhood that had seen better days and was still waiting for gentrification to sweep through and polish everything clean. Her suspect ducked into an alley between two warehouses, and Quinn followed without breaking stride. The alley dead-ended at a chain-link fence. Beyond it, she could see the rusted entrance to an abandoned Tube station, the sort of ghost stop that dotted the London Underground like forgotten scars. The stairs leading down were barely visible in the darkness, a gaping mouth in the earth that seemed to swallow the rain before it could touch the bottom. Her suspect scrambled over the fence with an agility that made her curse under her breath. She hit the chain-link a moment later, fingers closing around cold metal, feet finding purchase in the diamond patterns. The fence rattled and swayed as she climbed, and by the time she dropped to the other side, he was already disappearing down the stairs. Quinn stood at the top of the steps, rain streaming down her face, and stared into the darkness below. She couldn't see him anymore. Couldn't hear anything over the sound of the storm. But she knew he was down there, in whatever lay beneath the city. The case had taken her to strange places over the past three years—places that didn't make sense, places that made her question things she'd once believed were solid and true. Ever since Morris. Ever since the night her partner had walked into a building that shouldn't have existed and never walked back out. She touched the spot where her watch sat against her wrist, a habit she'd developed without realizing it. Morris had given her the watch, years ago, when she'd made detective. "Time matters," he'd told her. "It's the one thing we can't get back." He'd been right about that. He'd been right about a lot of things. The entrance below wasn't entirely dark. As her eyes adjusted, she caught a faint glow, something phosphorescent and strange, like bioluminescence in deep water. It was wrong. Everything about this was wrong. But wrong had become her specialty. Quinn drew her weapon—a standard-issue Glock that felt heavier tonight than usual—and started down the stairs. The steps were slick with moss and moisture, and she had to keep one hand on the crumbling wall to keep her footing. The further she descended, the quieter it became. The rain faded to a distant whisper, then disappeared entirely. The air changed too, becoming warmer, thicker, carrying scents she couldn't name. Smoke and spices and something underneath it all that made her think of old blood. She reached the bottom and found herself standing in what had once been a ticket hall. The tiles on the walls were cracked and stained, the old posters peeling away to reveal brickwork beneath. But it was what filled the space now that made her grip tighten on her weapon. The market spread out before her like something from a fever dream. Stalls and tables crowded the platform, covered in goods that caught the strange light and threw it back in a thousand fractured colors. She saw bottles filled with liquids that shifted and moved on their own. She saw weapons that seemed to writhe in their display cases. She saw books with covers that pulsed like living things. And she saw people—creatures—moving between the stalls, haggling and trading and paying with things that weren't currency in any sense she understood. Her suspect was nowhere in sight. He'd vanished into the crowd, just another figure in a dark coat, just another shadow in a place built from them. And Quinn stood at the entrance, her weapon raised, her heart pounding, and tried to make sense of what she was seeing. This was impossible. This was insane. This was exactly the kind of thing Internal Affairs would use to strip her of her badge and consign her to a psychiatric facility. But it was also real. As real as the rain that still dripped from her hair onto the dusty floor. As real as the watch on her wrist and the scar on her shoulder and the empty space where Morris used to be. A figure at one of the nearest stalls turned to look at her. Its eyes—or what she thought were eyes—caught the light and gleamed. It made a sound, something between a whisper and a hiss, and Quinn felt the weight of attention shifting toward her. The market was noticing her. The market was deciding what to do about her. She could leave. She could back away, climb the stairs, return to the world she understood and pretend none of this had happened. File a report that omitted the impossible parts. Go back to chasing shadows in the regular world and let this particular quarry slip away into the dark. Or she could step forward. She could enter the market and hunt her suspect through stalls that sold nightmares and vendors who dealt in secrets. She could find out what had happened to Morris, finally, after three years of dead ends and redacted files. She could learn what this city really was, beneath the streets and the rain and the lies she'd been told. The figure at the stall gestured to her, beckoning. Its mouth—if it was a mouth—curved into something that might have been a smile. Behind it, the market stretched deeper into the abandoned station, a maze of impossible things waiting to be discovered. Quinn thought about Morris. She thought about the partner she'd failed, the truth she'd been denied, the answers that had always sat just beyond her reach. She lowered her weapon, but she didn't holster it. She stepped forward into the Veil Market, and let the darkness close around her like a fist.