Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR9BYJ2W07Q3BXZVM8NT47

Detective Harlow Quinn stopped at the lip of the stairwell and let the air tell her what the briefing hadn’t. The Camden night above had been wet, all diesel and fried onions and nightclub bass. Down here it was different—cold stone, iron dust, something faintly sweet that shouldn’t have existed in an abandoned Tube station. A smell like bruised violets left in a glass. A uniform constable hovered by the taped-off entrance, trying not to look like he was hovering. His torch beam wobbled when it found Quinn’s face. “Detective Inspector Quinn,” he said, too loud in the tiled throat of the stairs. “They’re down on the platform, ma’am. It’s… odd.” Odd was what people said when they didn’t have the words and didn’t want to confess it. Quinn’s jaw tightened. She checked her left wrist out of habit—not for time, not really, but for steadiness. The worn leather watch had been with her through eighteen years of scenes like this. It hadn’t helped three years ago, either. It had ticked on, indifferent, while DS Morris stopped existing. She stepped under the tape with military precision, not because the tape mattered but because routines did. Routines kept you upright when the ground decided to shift. The stairs spiraled down into shadow. Old posters peeled off the walls in damp curls. The tiles were soot-stained, the way the city’s forgotten places always were, as if memory left residue. A smear of chalk marked the last step, a lazy arrow drawn by someone who’d wanted to be found. At the bottom, the corridor widened—and the corridor was wrong. It should have ended in boarded doors and rusted signage. Instead there were strings of paper lanterns hanging from conduit and bent rebar, glowing with a warm light that didn’t flicker like electricity. The air carried a low murmur, like a crowd heard through a wall. And there were stalls. Quinn slowed without meaning to, every instinct pushing back. A butcher’s slab laid with jars of dark liquid, a table of tarnished rings arranged in neat circles, a rack of coats that looked too heavy for a London autumn. The vendors weren’t there now, but the place held their presence the way a theatre held an audience after the curtain fell. This wasn’t a squat. This wasn’t a rave. It was the Veil Market, exactly where it had no business being. A man’s voice called from ahead. “Quinn. Over here.” Detective Sergeant Anwar Patel stood beside a crude cordon made of crime-scene tape tied to a lamppost that hadn’t been there last month. Patel’s suit was damp at the knees; he’d already done the crawling work. His expression was careful, as if he’d decided what he believed and didn’t want the scene to contradict him. Behind him, on the platform edge, another figure waited just outside the cordon: Eva Kowalski, the only civilian Quinn tolerated at anything resembling a scene, mostly because Eva’s usefulness was infuriatingly high and her fear was honest. Her curly red hair had escaped its tie and frizzed in the damp. Round glasses sat slightly crooked on her freckled nose. She clutched her worn leather satchel like it was a shield. Eva tucked hair behind her left ear when she saw Quinn, a nervous little reset. “Harlow,” she said, as if greeting her in a café and not under Camden with a body. Patel frowned at Eva, then at Quinn. “I didn’t authorize—” “I did,” Quinn said, and kept walking. She didn’t look back to see if Patel resented it. She could feel it anyway. The body lay on the platform between the yellow line and the track bed, positioned with a deliberation that made Quinn’s skin crawl. Male. Mid-thirties. Clothes too clean for a down-and-out but too cheap for a commuter. There was a gash across his throat—ugly, open, theatrical. And there was almost no blood. Quinn crouched. The tiles beneath the man’s head were dry except for a faint, glossy crescent at the edge of his collar. Not a pool. Not spatter. Not the mess a severed artery insisted on making. Patel hovered at her shoulder. “It looks like he got here after the cut,” he said. “Or someone cleaned up.” Quinn traced the line of the wound with her eyes, not touching. The edges weren’t ragged. They were… crisp, as if the flesh had been sliced with something very sharp and very clean, then held open for display. She’d seen knife wounds in alleys and kitchens and stairwells. This had the tidiness of a demonstration. “Temperature?” Quinn asked. “Cold,” Patel said. “But it’s freezing down here.” Quinn looked at the man’s hands. Fingernails intact. No defensive cuts. No bruised knuckles. His left palm was smeared with something grey-black, like charcoal ground into skin. “Bag the hands,” Quinn said. “And his boots.” Patel’s eyebrows rose. “Boot prints? There’s barely any dust.” “Exactly,” Quinn said. The platform was filthy in the way abandoned stations got filthy—centuries of soot and grit and flaked paint. But around the body, the tiles were scuffed clean in a tight oval, as if the dirt had been rubbed away by something dragged in a circle. Quinn stood and let her gaze widen. The stalls that lined the platform weren’t random. They formed a corridor that funnelled toward the body. Someone had turned the market into a stage and placed their prop in the centre. Eva edged closer, peering past the tape. “They shouldn’t be here,” she said quietly. Patel heard, of course. His mouth tightened. “Here we go.” Eva didn’t rise to it. She rarely did. She shifted her satchel to her other shoulder, the leather creaking. “The Veil Market moves every full moon. That’s… that’s one of the rules. It doesn’t stay put.” “Rules,” Patel echoed, flat. “Right.” Quinn watched him, watched the way his eyes refused to rest on anything that didn’t have a mundane label. Patel was good police. He could build a case, could read a room. He just didn’t have space in his brain for the idea that the room might be lying. “Tonight isn’t a full moon,” Quinn said. Patel shrugged. “Maybe your underground goth bazaar got its calendar wrong.” Eva’s green eyes flashed. “It isn’t a bazaar.” Quinn cut in before it spiraled. “What did uniforms see when they first came down?” Patel exhaled. “They were responding to a 999 call. Anonymous. Said there was a body in the old station. When they got here, this…” He gestured at the lanterns and stalls like he couldn’t decide if they were real enough to be insulting. “Was already set up. No one else present. No CCTV. No witnesses willing to talk.” “Willing,” Quinn repeated. Patel’s silence said yes. Quinn walked the perimeter. Her shoes made almost no sound; the station seemed to swallow noise. She paused beside a stall where glass vials lay in velvet hollows. Some were empty, some filled with liquids that caught lantern light and held it. One vial was tipped on its side, its stopper missing, a smear of iridescent residue dried on the table. Quinn didn’t touch it. The residue looked like oil in a puddle, all colours and refusal to be one thing. She moved on, scanning. The platform wall opposite the tracks was painted with old adverts and newer graffiti. A section of graffiti—thick black strokes in the shape of a crown—looked wetter than the rest. The paint gleamed. She stepped closer, tilting her head. The black wasn’t paint. It had depth, like a stain had sunk into brick and kept going. Her watch ticked in her ear. The second hand marched on, stubborn. Quinn knelt by the wall. The air here was colder, the kind of cold that didn’t come from drafts but from absence. She held her breath and listened. The murmur beneath the station’s silence rose for a moment, like distant voices leaning toward a door. Eva came up behind her, careful to stay outside the cordon until Quinn waved her in. Her shoes—practical boots—made a soft scuff on the tiles. “Do you feel that?” Eva asked. Quinn didn’t answer. She was looking at the base of the wall where brick met tile. There were scratches—fresh, pale gouges that cut through grime. Curved, as if made by something pulled free with desperate force. Patel crouched beside them, reluctantly pulled in by the undeniable. “Could be a dragged body,” he said. “Not with that curve,” Quinn said. “And not there.” She stood and looked back at the corpse. The man lay as if laid down, not dragged. His clothes weren’t torn. His boots—cheap black leather—were clean, except for the grey-black smear on the left sole. Quinn walked back to the body and crouched by his feet. She leaned close, ignoring Patel’s frown, and angled her torch at the sole. The tread was packed not with mud but with fine powder, grey and glittering. It clung in tiny facets. Eva breathed in sharply. “That looks like—” “Don’t,” Patel warned, irritated. “Don’t say fairy dust.” Eva’s mouth tightened. She pushed her glasses up with one finger, then, without thinking, tucked hair behind her left ear again. “It’s ash,” she said, controlled. “But not from fire. It’s… it’s the kind you get near rifts. Where something has crossed.” Quinn felt the old memory stir, unpleasantly vivid. Morris in the rain, laughing at something she’d said. Morris leaning too close to a case file, frowning. Morris stepping into a shadow between two parked cars because there had been a sound. A shape. A wrongness. And then Quinn calling his name until her throat tore and the alley stayed stubbornly empty. She forced her focus back to the present, to the details she could hold. “Bag it,” she told Patel. “Carefully.” Patel looked like he wanted to argue, but he motioned to the crime scene techs waiting further down the platform. They moved in with gloved hands and plastic evidence bags, their faces set in that careful neutrality people wore when they didn’t understand what they were seeing but understood it was above their pay grade. Quinn’s eyes caught something half-hidden beneath the corpse’s right elbow: a small brass compass, dulled with verdigris. It lay face-up, as if placed for discovery, its casing etched with tiny protective sigils that made her vision snag when she tried to count them. The needle trembled. Not north-south. It quivered as if impatient. Quinn didn’t touch it with her bare hand. She pulled on gloves, then slid the compass out. The metal was cold enough to bite through latex. Eva leaned in, unable to help herself. “That’s a Veil Compass,” she whispered. “Shade-crafted. It points to the nearest rift or portal.” Patel stared at the compass, then at Quinn. “You’re telling me the killer left a magic compass?” “I’m telling you,” Quinn said, watching the needle, “that someone wanted us to look in a specific direction.” The needle jerked, decisive, and pointed not at the tracks or the tunnel but at the wall with the black crown stain. Quinn held the compass steady and walked toward the wall. The needle held, unwavering. The closer she got, the more the air tightened, as if the station was bracing. Patel followed, reluctant but hooked now. “So what, he got his throat cut and then… walked through a wall?” “No,” Quinn said. “He got his throat cut somewhere else, or he didn’t get it cut at all.” Eva’s brows knit. “Harlow?” Quinn stopped an arm’s length from the stained brick. The compass needle vibrated so hard it blurred. The protective sigils on the compass face seemed to catch the lantern light and throw it back wrong, like the light didn’t like being near them. “Look at the wound,” Quinn said. “No arterial spray. No pooling. If he bled, he didn’t bleed here.” Patel folded his arms. “So he was killed elsewhere and dumped.” “Dumped through what?” Quinn asked. She gestured at the wall, at the scratches, at the scuffed-clean oval on the tiles. “There’s no drag trail. No blood trail. And this market—” she let her gaze sweep the lanterns, the empty stalls, the residue of strange commerce “—shouldn’t be here tonight. Someone set it. Someone held it in place.” Eva’s voice came soft. “To anchor a crossing.” Quinn didn’t look at her. She watched the black stain. The longer she stared, the less it behaved like paint and the more it behaved like a doorway pretending to be brick. Patel scoffed, but it sounded forced. “Or it’s a gang message. The compass is a prop. The stalls are props. Theatre.” “Theatre costs money,” Quinn said. “And time. And the kind of confidence you only get if you know the audience will show.” She thought of the anonymous call. Of the chalk arrow on the steps. Of a body posed like an offering. Of the compass placed in a dead man’s elbow crook as neatly as a clue in a puzzle box. Patel’s gaze flicked to her, sharp. “You think this is for you.” Quinn felt the truth of it settle, heavy but clean. “I think someone knows I can see the seams,” she said. “And they want me to pull.” Eva shifted, hugging her satchel closer. “It could be a warning.” Quinn’s mouth went tight. “Or an invitation.” She raised the compass until it was level with the stain. The needle nearly snapped toward it. For a second, in the glossy black, Quinn saw something that wasn’t her reflection. A sliver of light that wasn’t lantern light. A pale corridor bending away, impossible geometry. A shadow moving like a person deciding whether to step closer. Her pulse kicked. She held still. She refused to flinch first. Patel didn’t see it. His eyes narrowed at the wall, but he only saw brick and graffiti and Quinn’s stubborn attention. “Quinn,” he said, a little quieter now, “we need to call this in. Get forensics, get—” “We have forensics,” Quinn said. “What we need,” Eva murmured, “is to know who can force the Market to stay put.” Quinn lowered the compass and closed her gloved hand around it, feeling the faint tremor of its insistence. The sigils pressed into her palm through latex like raised scars. Her mind went, unbidden, to a file she kept locked in her desk drawer: Morris’s case notes, photos of an alley that looked ordinary until you stared too long. Reports dismissed with bureaucratic comfort—missing person, presumed dead. The sharp, silent absence that had taken up residence in her life. She looked at the corpse again. The man’s face was slack, eyes half-open in a dull question. He hadn’t fought because he hadn’t understood what was happening until it was done. Quinn knew the feeling. “This isn’t a dump,” she said. “It’s a drop.” Patel’s frustration sharpened. “Drop from where?” Quinn stared at the wall stain, at the scratches, at the compass needle twitching like a hound scenting blood. “From the other side,” she said. The words tasted like metal in her mouth. She turned to Patel, letting him see only what she needed him to see: confidence, control, the polished authority that made people follow even when they didn’t believe. “Seal the entrances,” she said. “No one in without my say. And get me a list of who called it in. I want the number, the tower ping, anything. Whoever invited us here thinks they’re clever.” “And you?” Patel asked, suspicion threaded through the question. Quinn slid the Veil Compass into an evidence bag, then into her coat pocket anyway, feeling its pull through fabric. “I’m going to prove they’re not.” Eva caught her eye, worry there, and something else—recognition, maybe, that Quinn was standing closer to the edge than she admitted. Quinn didn’t reassure her. Reassurance was a luxury. She glanced at her watch again as if it could tell her what came next. The second hand kept marching, steady as a heartbeat. The station murmured around them, lanterns breathing warm light into cold air. The stalls stood empty, patient, like teeth in a grin. Something had held the Veil Market in place when it wanted to move. Something had dragged a man through a seam in the world and left him like a note. Quinn faced the stained wall once more. She didn’t touch it—not yet. She let the wrongness press against her skin and memorized it. This time, she told herself, she would be the one doing the hunting.