Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR353W7PEBGXNE79EP4859

Rain hammered the city. Silver rivers raced along Soho’s pavements, sloshed at the hems of Harlow Quinn’s trousers, and varnished The Raven’s Nest’s neon sign until the green bled like poison through the gloom. She kept her head down, sodden collar raised, eyes locked on a hunched figure darting around the corner—just beyond the edges of the street lamp’s narrow reach. Quinn lengthened her stride. Army-cadence, measured breath, left foot always a half-beat ahead. Her pulse pounded not with adrenaline, but with calculation. She’d already decrypted the route: from Silas’ bar, down the alley marked by that graffiti fox, then east along Dean until you hit the stairs. No time to radiate doubts, not with the suspect—slim, hooded—slipping farther away with every splash. She crossed after him, ignoring the stares from a pair of cabbies smoking under an awning. Quinn’s boots landed square in a gutter puddle. Water seeped through the seams, icy at the ankle. She cursed quietly and pressed on. Ahead, the suspect glanced back. Streetlight caught his cheek—a mole by the jaw, that detail stamped into her memory from the shaky phone footage she’d reviewed a dozen times. The man quickened, vanishing down a set of stone stairs descending beneath a battered sign *DANGER: NO ENTRY*. Quinn skid-slammed to a halt above the stairwell. Cold rain pattered from her hair, painted long trails down the hard edge of her jaw. She scanned the shadows swallowing the steps, let her senses drink in the metallic taint of old tracks and ozone. Somewhere below ground, someone’s laugh ricocheted up. She checked her watch—a battered leather thing, the only piece of kit she still wore from her academy days. The minute hand ticked past three. Above, the city’s usual noise blurred to something far-off, as if she’d already left its jurisdiction. No backup. No radio. Only her, a notebook in her pocket, and a hunch pieced together with the same desperate logic as battlefield triage. If she let him slip now, she’d be back to square one—again—the clique wriggling from her grasp for another week. Another body, maybe. Another call she wouldn’t be able to answer at the coroner’s inquest. The suspect moved again—just a flicker beyond the lower landing, a pale hand catching the banister. Quinn set her jaw, banishing the memory of DS Morris: his hand clamping her shoulder, hard, their last conversation before his vanishing trick. She moved. Down the stairs. Darkness, ankle-deep litter—soggy newspapers, a bottle cap crunching beneath her heel. The air changed, turned thick, sour with rot and something less nameable. She reached the last step and found herself inside what had once been a Tube platform, now a half-world painted in grime. Floodlights strung along the ceiling sent pools of light skating over rusted rails. Faded posters from thirty years past gaped with eyeless models and slogans for vanished products. The suspect was already at the end of the platform, talking hurriedly with someone cloaked in patchwork rags. Quinn caught movement—a flick of a hand, bone white in the lamplight, passing something small to the ragged figure. A token? She’d seen tokens like that before. Bone, worry-smoothed, pocket-warm. The sort you needed for entry, if the rumors whispered by crooked informants crawling out of King’s Cross to spend hush-money on her turf were true. The ragged figure turned, seemed to sense her. The hood fell back, revealing a shock of white-grey hair and eyes that glimmered a faint, unnatural gold. He crooked two fingers in a beckon. Overhead, a train rumbled, impossibly close, but nowhere near this forsaken branch. Quinn’s breath steamed, quick and hot. She stayed near the wall beneath a sign daubed in a looping hand: *NO MARKET TODAY. NO MARKET EVER. MOVE ALONG*—overpainted with a date, today’s date, erased and written again. The suspect disappeared through a slick black door cut flush into the bricks behind the ragged doorkeeper. Quinn moved forward. Gravel rolled under her boots. Her hand went to the butt of her torch—a Maglite, not quite good enough for smashing, but intimidating in a pinch. The doorkeeper planted himself in front of her as she approached. “Don’t suppose you have a token, do you, darling?” His accent was clipped, British, but with something twisted deep inside, like a ventriloquist parody. She kept her hands visible. “I’m just meeting someone,” she said. His gaze slid down her, from rain-dark shoulders to worn boots to the badge strung around her neck beneath her jacket. “Looking for something particular in the Market?“ he asked. “Or just passing the time?” He said ‘market’ as if it deserved a capital letter. Something about the way the letters curled in his mouth sent a cold trickling down her spine. Morris, three years gone, would have punched through, badge lifted high, righteous rage his shield. She’d seen how well that’d worked. “I’m not buying,” she said. Careful now, Harlow. “But the man who just came through? I need a word.” “No token, no Market.” He gave her a smile full of small, square teeth. “House rules.” She glanced past him, caught a quick glimpse of a corridor lined with lanterns—then what looked like a food stall hunched against tiled walls, tendrils of violet steam leaking from a battered kettle. The call of something alive throbbed beneath it all: a market’s song, but wrong, stranger. She catalogued it, filed it under things to explain or deny in the morning. “Step aside,” she said, quiet but with all the steel the Met had beaten into her over eighteen years. “You’re obstructing a police investigation.” He shrugged. “I don’t see a copper. I see a woman who’s about to have a very bad night if she crosses this threshold without an invitation.” Quinn weighed her options, heart under control but body on alert. The suspect was in there—no doubt. There might be witnesses to lose, evidence to smudge, doors to lock once she was gone. She’d trained for threats, but the rules down here felt loose, written in pencil, not law. A sudden brush of air at her side—she tensed, half-raising the torch, but it was only a woman hurrying past, her arms cradling a bundle wrapped in waxed linen. She flashed a token at the doorkeeper; he stepped aside for her. Quinn saw the token: bone, rune-etched, edges smoothed like water-worn stones. She patted her pockets. Nothing like that, of course. But she carried a Saint Christopher medal, inherited from her mother, tucked above her badge. She rolled it between her fingers, the gesture half habitual, half superstitious. The doorkeeper watched her, amused. “Lost your coin, love? Or are you one of those, what do they call it? Officials.” She drew herself up, military bearing. “Let’s make a deal,” she said, her words measured, chosen. “Let me in. Five minutes. I don’t want trouble. I just want to talk to your guest from earlier.” She let him see her face—the ambition, the threat, the hint of desperation. He tilted his head, weighing her. “Why should I?” Because if I let another one vanish, I’ll never sleep again, she thought. Instead, she said, “Because sooner or later, the law comes through every door. Even this one.” He considered that, then threw his head back and laughed, a deep sound that echoed around the ruined station. “Five minutes,” he said. “I must be mad.” He offered a grimy palm. “But something for passage. That’s the way.” Quinn hesitated, then pressed the Saint Christopher medal into his hand. “I want that back,” she said. “We’ll see,” he replied, and let her through. Inside, the corridor twisted, acrawl with shadows. The Market unfurled like a fever dream—stalls made from scaffolding, their counters stacked high with jars pulsing with muted glow, boxes of herbs whose scent made her eyes water. Traders watched her with flat, ancient gazes, some masked, some in scraps of velvet and tattered wool. Her boots squeaked. She tried to blend, but knew everyone marked her—wet, hunched forward, a cop’s stride. She caught a whisper as she passed: “Met,” from a man with hands like bird claws, who withdrew into shadow. She didn’t care. She kept scanning for the suspect—slim, with that distinctive mole. At a stall fenced with twine and wire, dealing in jars of humming blue fireflies, she saw him bargaining with a heavyset woman in a trilby hat. He turned, caught her gaze, and panic flooded his face. He bolted, slamming a tin kettle so hard the contents shivered out in a cloud of violet steam, tangling her vision. Harlow lunged after him, ignoring the stallholder’s cursing. The crowd pressed in—her quarry a flash between shoulders, ducking under a canvas banner. She swerved past an old man hawking shrunken apples, slid around a barrel of black salt. Steam and strange spices warped the air; her vision wavered. She saw the suspect ahead, pushing through a door painted sickly green. She followed, shoulder-first through the resistance of the crowd, into a narrow hallway. A sharp pain seared behind her left ear—a warning, quick and fierce. She spun, torch raised, but there was only shadow, then the shriek of a train in the tunnels beyond. Quinn wiped water from her eyes and pressed on, deeper in, fighting down the nagging doubt that every step away from the familiar city above loosened another of the laws meant to protect her. She caught the glint of the suspect’s brown eyes ahead, framed in a shaft of jade light filtering from a glass lamp. His jaw was set. He ran again. Harlow Quinn marked his escape route, measured the thin line connecting her to the world above—and followed him into the belly of the Veil Market, heartbeat steady, promise silent on her tongue: no one slipped past her again. Not tonight.