Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR7DEY14SW18RZM7BJJEBW

The station smelled of old rain and tin, the kind of damp that had soaked into tile and iron and lived there long before the Market moved in. Harlow Quinn kept her shoulders squared against it, as if posture could keep smell and superstition at bay. Her boots made a soft, uniform thud on the cracked platform. The leather strap of her watch creaked when she checked the time—military habit, not the orientation of a detective—and the face told her nothing she didn't already know: late enough for the Market to be winding down, early enough for the mood of it to be raw. Strings of mismatched lamps hung over a cluster of stalls where, under ordinary circumstances, someone would be haggling for a bone whistle or a vial that smelled faintly of midnight. Tonight a sheet covered the nearest table, and under it the shape of a body made the hush of the Market feel thicker. People lingered at the edges—shadows with wallets and secrets. A Market hand in a patched coat cleared a space for her with the kind of submission reserved for those who carried badges that meant more than law. Eva Kowalski was already there, crouched beside the sheet with her satchel at her feet and the left sleeve of her sweater pulled back as if to keep it clean. She'd pushed her glasses up on a freckled nose and was tucking hair behind her left ear with the nervous habit Harlow had watched form over too many nights of shared coffee and mortuary visits. Up close, Eva's green eyes looked too bright for the subway gloom. "They let you in," Eva said without looking up. Her voice had the careful cadence of someone used to being told some things were nonsense and others weren't. She had the look of a museum conservator faced with something fragile and possibly cursed: reverent, annoyed, and entirely keyed into detail. Harlow nodded. "They closed the entrance across Camden Road. Asked the brass if Metropolitan had a warrant." She moved the sheet back with a gloved hand. The body was male, mid-thirties, fine clothes ruined and a coppery sheen around the mouth. The throat bore a shallow ring of abrasion, like fingernails or a wire. There were no fractures, no blunt-force trauma, no obvious cause for the slackness of limbs. The eyes were almost unnaturally clear. Blood pooled at an angle on the platform, not where the body lay but collected in a crescent near the wall tiles. It hadn't congealed into the thick, matte clots Harlow expected; it lay like someone had taken the edge off life and let it spread. She crouched and took in the smear pattern: a long drag from the table edge to the crease at the base of the platform, then a clean break. Whoever had moved this body had worked with intent, not panicked hands. "You tell me what this is, Evie," Harlow said. There was no irony in it; she didn't call Eva that in front of the brass. Eva's name carried other things—mileage in museum corridors, a degree from Oxford, a knack for seeing a sigil where an ordinary person saw graffiti. Eva flipped through the man’s pockets with gloved fingers, the way someone reads a book by skimming the margins. She drew out a small brass compass, its casing dulled by verdigris, its face etched with protective sigils that caught the light like old teeth. Harlow's breath caught and she felt the old, stubborn ache in the place where another ghost lived—Morris—then shoved it down. "A Veil Compass," Eva said softly, half to Harlow and half to herself. "Shade work. Crafted—" she tapped the metal, "—by a Shade artisan. This points to the nearest supernatural rift." Harlow's first impulse was to catalogue this as evidence: item 1, potential origin, chain of custody. Her second thought was to remember how Morris had once brought her a compass much like this and how control had slipped out of his hands. She leaned forward, watching the needle. It did not rest. It drifted, minute and precise, and settled, pointing not toward the dark mouth of the old tunnels but toward the tiled wall at the far end of the platform. "It's probably tampered with," Harlow said. She kept her voice flat. It had been flat for three years now, a practiced thing that stood between her and the thing she didn't understand at all. "Needle's been dampened before, or the magnet's been reversed. You can fake a number of effects with brass and a thin wire." "Or—or it was used," Eva countered. Her fingers brushed the compass like a conservator would a relic no one should touch. "Someone took this down, led the rift-shift toward the stall to—" She swallowed. "To hide the exit. To make it look like something else." Harlow studied the compass. The patina around the hinge had a fingerprint dug into it. The skin oil had turned the brass dark in a crescent shape; whoever had held it had something like soot under their nails. There was also a smudge of something pale, chalky, in a sigil across the face that didn't belong to the compass's maker—the line was too fresh, the powder unburned. She checked the body again and saw what the others hadn't. Along the inner wrist of the dead man, neat abrasions circled the bone in a pattern too regular to be mere struggle marks. The abrasions were small, like the serrations from a clasp or the teeth of a metal ring dragged tight. On the back of his hand, a crescent of darker skin was patterned as if ringed tightly for hours. Harlow peeled back a corner of his sleeve and found the underside of the forearm was cleaner; hairless in the way people shaved their limbs for reasons that had nothing to do with hygiene. Someone had prepared this body. "He's been restrained," she said. "Not killed in a fight. Held. Something on him for a long time. Look at the fingernails. No defensive wounds. That hand didn't reach for a throat—it was busy." "It could be the rift took him," Eva said. "Rifts don't have to—" She hesitated, then added, "They siphon. They take—life-heat. Look at the blood." Harlow looked at the smear again. The blood was colder than it should be; it held a metallic smell that suggested a preservative or a chemical with a haemostatic property. Forensics would have a field day, but Harlow didn't need the lab to tell her acid doesn't smell like tin. The blood bore the faint tang of something burnt: bone ash. The tile had a dusting in a pattern that matched the sigils on the compass face. "Someone ground bone into a powder," she said. "Token work. Bone is entry currency here; people trade with it. They dust the sigils for ceremony, but they also use it to con—make something look ritual when it's a cover." Eva's hand, bare and trembling now, reached for the compass again, and Harlow snapped it back into a chain-of-custody bag like reflex. "You saw the marks?" she asked. "On the wall? The tiles where the blood pooled?" Eva nodded, eyes huge behind her round glasses. "It's not just the compass's needle pointing to the tiles. Someone drew a line—rudimentary—out of ash. Looks like a circle but not complete." Harlow stood and walked the line with the discipline of someone measuring danger as geometry. The circle was clever in its errors, a man-made approximation of something older. The part nearest the ventilation shaft broke the pattern: a faint scuff as if someone had forced the grate and risen through, or placed something heavy against it. "Look for prints," Harlow said. Her voice was small in the hollow of the station, but authority made bodies move. Market hands obliged, and someone produced a cheap lamp. Under yellow light, the tiles told stories: a child's boot—too small and shallow for an adult—made a print near the tile seam, as if to suggest innocence or misdirection. Adult boots traced toward the grate, but there was a peculiar tread there, two parallel slashes in the rubber and a crescent of fine metal filings embedded near the heel. "Custom sole," Eva said, peering. "That's not on the market. Someone commissioned that." Harlow's mouth thinned. Someone had wanted a direction. Someone had wanted it to look like the rift had demanded this man be taken. They'd used the compass to point and ash and token bone to make the scene speak a language of otherworldly hunger. But a body doesn't move itself into a staged sigil, and the blood didn't evaporate into a breathless maw. People moved it. Hands did what the rift would not. "Why use a Veil Compass if you're staging?" Eva asked aloud, the question fragile with hope for the thing she wanted to be true. "Because gestures have power if people already believe," Harlow said. "Because if you make it look dangerous enough, people walk away. You don't get a second look after a 'rift.' But you leave traces that point to you if you don't know what to hide." Her mind slid to Morris then—the vague handful of details that had never added up, the compass in his pocket smeared with someone else's oil. She had never allowed herself to link that memory to this until now, but the same bittered powder, the same circle half-drawn, the same fresh, skillful abrasions. "Whoever did this is part of the market," she said. "Someone who knows the theatre. Someone who wants us to believe the Market eats its own, because that's a faster deterrent than locks." Eva's fingers found the compass again through the plastic; she traced the pattern of the sigils with a fingertip. "Or someone wants to send a message," she whispered. "To the Shades, to the traders. Show them what happens when someone talks." Harlow felt a step tighten inside her. "Or to me." The thought was small and dangerous. It was not a polite thing for the earth; it prodded at the scar of a partner lost to a set of circumstances that had not been put to rights. "Morris thought a clique was selling something out of the Market. He started poking—he found a compass, maybe. He told me nothing would be ordinary. Maybe some of them haven't forgiven that." A Market hand interrupted, breath hot with fear. "We found this by the grate," he said, offering a torn scrap of leather. It was part of a token pouch, bone dust smudged inside. Someone had tried to clean it; the thread was frayed, but the stitch pattern was particular—two loops, impossible to do if your hands shook. The Market man looked away when Harlow's eyes landed on the neatness. Harlow folded the leather into evidence. The watch on her wrist clicked as she tightened the strap, the sound like a countdown. "We catalogue everything," she said. "We get a full sweep of prints and fibres. We find anyone who bought a Veil Compass in the last month. We ask who commissioned soles like these." She paused. "And we do not let word leave that this was a natural rift. Someone wants that on record." Eva swallowed hard. "You think it's them," she said—the clique. Not a formal name, but a shape they'd both known for months: people who trafficked in the Market's gray morals, who kept secrets too useful to trade away. Harlow stared at the compass through the bag. The needle had settled at last, pointed a hair to the right of where it had pointed when she'd arrived. It was inexplicably warm through the plastic; someone had handled it very recently. "We get forensics," she said. "We find the grate. We check the tunnels behind it. And we follow the circulation of bone tokens—who's been buying, who can't explain where they came from." She looked at Eva. "You come with me to the archives. Get me everything on Shade artisans, on whoever has been commissioning compass work. If this was staged, someone made it possible." Eva tucked her hair behind her ear once more, long enough for Harlow to see the pinch of worry between her brows. "If it's staged," she said quietly, "it might be staged to keep people from seeing a real slip. It could be both." Harlow thought about Morris and the terrible clean cut of unanswered questions. She thought about the Market's tendency to move with the moon, to hide and reappear like a beast with a human face. If the clique had learned to mimic the rift, then the danger was not only supernatural; it was human ingenuity dressed up as terror. "Then we'll prove which one is wearing the mask," she said. Her jaw tightened; the watch glinted low on her wrist. "And if it's someone from the Market's inner ring, we'll show them what happens when you try to make a ghost of someone who knows the difference." The lamps hummed overhead. Someone pulled the sheet back over the dead man with a tenderness that looked absurd among concrete and ash. Harlow handed the compass-bag to a uniform and watched the exchange of glances. She felt something else now on the station floor: not the residual trace of a rift but the imprint of a plan, a human thing cut with intent. She took one last look at the half-circle in the ash and the child's boot print and the custom sole tread. There was a message here, faint as a whisper: make them fear, and no one looks for the hands. Harlow walked away from the platform with Eva at her elbow, the Market's noise folding around them like a living thing. She did not like the way her mouth tasted—like metal and old ash. She did not like the knowledge that the compass's needle could be used for deception. But she liked the certainty of the evidence she had: prints, scars, a compass whose face had been rewritten, a token pouch, the pattern of things that humans leave when they try to look like monsters. Outside, the station mouth led back into rainy Camden and the ordinary lights of a city that did not know it sheltered its own shadow trades. Harlow kept her shoulders squared. Her jaw was sharp. Her watch was a metronome. There were questions she would ask tonight and people who would find out Harlow Quinn had a memory too long to be fooled.