Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR4SKQE46GX06A7PARV4ND

The rain came down in sheets, turning Soho into a slick mirror of neon and brake lights. Harlow Quinn ran. She ran with the economy of someone who had done this a hundred times—arms pumping close to her body, boots striking the pavement in a steady metronome, her breathing controlled despite the burn climbing through her legs. Ahead of her, maybe forty meters and pulling away, Tomás Herrera dodged between a cluster of tourists huddled under a pub awning and cut hard left onto Frith Street. She'd clocked him twenty minutes ago through the rain-streaked window of The Raven's Nest, sitting at the far end of the bar beneath those ridiculous old maps Silas pinned to every surface. He'd been leaning close to a woman Quinn didn't recognize, passing something small between their hands—a transaction that ended the moment his warm brown eyes drifted past the woman's shoulder and found Quinn standing on the pavement outside, the green neon sign painting her face in sickly light. He'd bolted. Not through the front door but through the back, and by the time Quinn shouldered past the bartender and made it through the narrow corridor behind the bar—past a bookshelf that stood oddly ajar, revealing a room beyond it she filed away for later—Herrera was already thirty seconds gone out the service exit and running north. Now the gap between them was growing. He was younger by twelve years and fast, his slight frame slipping through gaps in the Saturday night foot traffic that Quinn had to shoulder through. Her warrant card was in her pocket but there was no time to flash it, no time to shout the words that might make people step aside. She was off the books tonight. No backup. No radio. Just a worn leather watch ticking against her left wrist and an instinct she'd been sharpening for eighteen years that told her Herrera was the thread she needed to pull. He banked right onto Old Compton Street, and for a moment she lost him in the crowd spilling out of a theatre. She slowed, scanning. Rain dripped from her close-cropped hair into her eyes and she swiped it away with the back of her hand. There—the olive skin, the dark curls plastered to his forehead, the glint of something gold at his neck. His Saint Christopher medallion catching the light from a kebab shop. He was across the street, checking over his shoulder, and when he saw her seeing him his expression didn't harden with defiance or crumble with fear. It was something else. Something almost like apology. Then he dropped down a stairwell she hadn't noticed and vanished below the street. Quinn crossed the road in four strides, a black cab blaring its horn as it swerved around her. She reached the stairwell and stopped at the top. Metal steps descended into a service entrance—or what had once been one. The door at the bottom was industrial steel, heavy, scarred with rust, and it was swinging shut on its hinges with a low groan. She took the steps two at a time and caught the door before it closed. Beyond it, a corridor stretched into the dark, tiled walls glistening with condensation. Old tube signage. Camden Town—except that wasn't right, she was in Soho, miles from Camden. The geography didn't scan. The air that breathed up from the corridor didn't scan either: it smelled of cinnamon and iron and something electrical, like ozone before a lightning strike. Quinn stood in the threshold with one hand on the door and the other resting on her hip where her baton sat clipped to her belt. She could feel the border of things here. The line between the city she understood—its statutes and procedures, its chain of evidence, its courtrooms and custody suites—and something else. Something that had been circling the edge of her awareness for three years, ever since Morris had walked into a building in Deptford and never walked out. They'd found his radio. They'd found his warrant card. They'd never found Morris. The corridor ahead of her flickered. Not the lights—the space itself seemed to pulse, as if the walls were breathing. From deep within she could hear the murmur of voices, dozens of them, layered over a low ambient hum that reminded her of a generator running underground. She thought about procedure. She thought about calling it in, filing the report, running Herrera's name through the system and waiting for the machinery of the law to turn. She thought about how long she'd been waiting already—three years of dead ends and cold leads and incident reports that dissolved into nothing whenever they brushed up against whatever this was. Harlow Quinn was not a woman who believed in the supernatural. She was a woman who believed in evidence, in witness statements, in the patient accumulation of fact. But she was also honest enough with herself to admit that the facts had been pointing somewhere she didn't want to look. Every case connected to the clique dead-ended in the same way: witnesses who couldn't remember, CCTV footage corrupted, forensic evidence that contradicted itself. Something was wrong with the geometry of it all, and the wrongness always led down. Underground. Below. She stepped through the door. The corridor ran for perhaps fifty meters before it opened into a space that stopped her in her tracks. The abandoned station was vast—a cathedral of crumbling tile and ironwork, its arched ceiling lost in shadow. But someone had filled it. Stalls and booths lined the platforms on both sides, constructed from salvaged wood and draped fabric and what looked like old shipping containers cut open and repurposed. Lanterns hung from cables strung between the support columns, casting warm pools of amber light that turned the whole space into something out of a fever dream. Hundreds of people moved between the stalls, browsing, haggling, exchanging things Quinn couldn't identify from this distance. The murmur she'd heard from the corridor was the sound of commerce—conversation and negotiation and the clink of objects changing hands. The Veil Market. She'd heard whispers of it in informant debriefs, half-references that evaporated when pressed. A black market that moved locations every full moon, accessible only to those who carried a bone token. She didn't have a token. She'd walked in on Herrera's passage, riding his wake through whatever mechanism controlled access, and she had the crawling sensation that the door behind her might not open from this side. She didn't look back. Looking back was for people who hadn't already made their decision. The market swallowed her. She moved along the edge of the platform, keeping close to the tiled wall, letting the crowd flow past without engaging. The stalls sold things she catalogued with professional detachment: glass vials of iridescent liquid ranked by color, bundles of dried herbs that hummed faintly when she passed, books bound in leather that was too supple and too pale to have come from any animal she wanted to think about. One stall displayed rows of small bones arranged in geometric patterns on black velvet. Another was just a woman sitting behind a table with a silver bowl of water, whispering to a queue of customers who leaned in with desperate, hungry expressions. Nobody stopped her. Nobody asked for a token. But Quinn could feel attention shifting toward her in peripheral glances and quickly averted eyes—the way a crowd notices a predator moving through tall grass. She didn't belong here, and they knew it. She spotted Herrera. He was thirty meters ahead, standing at a stall near the far end of the platform, speaking rapidly in Spanish to a heavyset man in a canvas apron. The man was wrapping something in cloth—a package the size of a hardback book. Herrera's hands were shaking. Not from the cold. Quinn had seen enough fear in enough people to know what it looked like in the small muscles of the hands. She closed the distance to twenty meters. Fifteen. The crowd thinned near Herrera's position, as if the other market-goers were giving this particular transaction a wide berth. The man in the apron finished wrapping the package and held it close to his chest, waiting. Herrera reached into his jacket and produced something that caught the lantern light—a token, bone-white and roughly circular, with markings etched into its surface. He set it on the counter. The man examined it, nodded, and slid the package across. Quinn was ten meters out when Herrera turned and saw her. The apology was still in his face, but it had curdled into something more complicated. He clutched the package against his ribs with both hands, and she could see the scar running along his left forearm where his sleeve had ridden up—a pale ridge of tissue from wrist to elbow that she knew from his file had come from a knife attack two years ago. The Saint Christopher medallion had escaped his collar and hung against his chest, tarnished gold swinging gently. "You shouldn't be here, Detective." His accent was soft, mostly gone after years in London, but the stress brought Seville back into his vowels. "Neither should you, Tomás." She stopped five meters from him. Close enough to read his expression. Far enough that he couldn't bolt past her without committing to a direction. "What's in the package?" "Something that keeps people alive." "Banned substances. Alchemical compounds. That's what they're calling it?" His jaw tightened. "You don't know what you're talking about." "Then educate me." She kept her voice level, conversational, the same tone she used in interview rooms when she wanted a suspect to forget the tape was running. "Tell me what's so important that a man with paramedic training throws away his NHS license, goes underground, and starts running when a police detective shows up at his local." "I didn't run because you're police." The words came out ragged, torn at the edges. "I ran because being seen with you here could get us both killed." Quinn felt the attention around them sharpen. The ambient noise of the market hadn't changed, but something in its texture had shifted—fewer voices near them, more silence. She became aware of figures watching from the shadows between stalls, still as sentinels. "Then let's walk and talk," she said. "Get me out of here. Explain it on the way." Herrera stared at her for a long moment. Rain still dripped from his curls, though they were underground and it hadn't been raining when he'd entered the market. She didn't examine that thought too closely. "You followed me through the door," he said quietly. "Without a token." "I did." "Do you understand what that means?" "It means I'm resourceful." "It means the Market let you in." His voice dropped to barely a whisper. "And the Market doesn't do anything for free." The lanterns above them flickered in unison, a single coordinated pulse that rolled through the entire space like a heartbeat. When they steadied, the light was slightly warmer, slightly closer, as if the Market itself had leaned in to listen. Quinn's hand moved to her baton without conscious thought. Her sharp jaw was set, her brown eyes steady, and if the part of her brain responsible for self-preservation was screaming, it was screaming behind glass she'd installed a long time ago. "Then I'll settle the bill later," she said. "Right now, you and I are going to have a conversation." Herrera looked at her the way people looked at someone walking onto thin ice—not with contempt but with the bleak certainty that the cracking had already begun. He tucked the package inside his jacket, zipped it shut, and nodded. "Follow me," he said. "And whatever you do, don't stop walking." They moved together into the amber depths of the Market, two figures cutting against the current of the crowd, and the shadows between the stalls watched them go with the patient interest of something that had been waiting a very long time.