Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRBKXXD5MXXRD6H6CA9CXC

The smell hit her first—old brake dust and wet stone, copper under it all like a bitten tongue. Detective Harlow Quinn counted her steps down the iron treads, each one ringing once, neat and symmetrical, and the echo swallowed by the abandoned platform below. Her watch caught a glint from a portable floodlight. 02:17. She straightened out of reflex, spine slotting into place. Military cadence—no wasted movement—into the hush where the city didn’t reach. Generators hummed. Cables ran like black veins across cracked tiles. Blue tape fluttered in a wind that didn’t exist down here. Two uniforms guarded the entrance through the service door; one nodded, relief swimming up in his eyes as if her presence could make order of it. “It’s a fall?” she asked without turning, careful not to let her voice carry. “DCI Saunders says so,” the taller one offered. “Bloody chav got into the tunnels and—” She held up a hand and the uniform closed his mouth. Her brown eyes took in the scene with a practiced sweep: the body at the platform edge, sprawled in a way that would have sold a fall to anyone not paying attention. No blood on the tracks. No fresh scorch on the third rail. The floodlight had bleached the everything into hard edges, but darkness pooled in the vaulted ceiling like damp ink. “Where’s Saunders?” she asked. “On his way. DC Briggs is with SOCO.” She stepped under the tape and down the length of the platform. Her boots clicked against grit and old glass. Booth-like structures—not booths, she corrected herself, scaffolds lashed together with cord and wire—stood in crooked rows, some knocked awry, as if hurriedly broken down and not quite put away. A paper lantern sagged and turned in air that had nowhere to go. Wax had dripped and fossilized in pale stalactites from a beam, and some of the wax was dark with ash. Market, she thought, the word arriving before she wanted it. Not the ordinary kind. Her jaw tightened a fraction. Full moon had been two nights ago. The Veil Market moved when the calendar did, vanishing under new stones and old water. Tonight it had been here. She crouched beside the body. Male, mid-thirties. Worn parka. A face that would have slipped past in a crowd. His jaw was slack, but not with drunken sleep. There were bruises high on his neck, just under the angle of the mandible: small, precise, almost crescent-shaped. Not the right pattern for a fall. The parka was zipped to the throat and yet there was dirt on his sternum as if something had pressed there. She placed two fingers inside his collar, lifting enough to see. No lividity where it should be. Gravity had not had its say in the current position. He’d been elsewhere for a while first. “Noah,” she said without looking up, and heard the hurried footfalls for what they were. DC Briggs ran warm, hair never fully compliant, tie askew even at crime scenes. Enthusiastic to a fault. He slowed as he approached, taking in the exactness of her squat, the angle of her head. He mirrored her without quite meaning to. “Looks like he went over,” he said. “Kids come down to drink, slip, hit their heads. There’s no current in the third. They cut it when DID called. No arc marks, anyway. Might have been dead before, yeah?” “Hmm,” she said. It would suffice. SOCO was bagging small items on a collapsible table. A shape caught her eye, half under the dead man’s open hand, no more than a glint of green against brass. Harlow eased it free. A small compass, thumb-sized, its casing gone soft with verdigris. Protective sigils etched into the face in tight, careful work that didn’t belong in a hiking shop. The needle shivered as if catching a breath, then settled, pointing not north but toward the far curve of the platform where a brick arch had been closed up a century ago and then painted with a spray of crude tags. She felt an absurd tug in her chest, as if something of her recognized the tension on that tiny pin. “What’s that?” Briggs leaned in. “One of those cheap market things? Tourists, innit.” “Cheap?” She could taste the metallic tang of the brass on the air. “Keep your gloves on.” He lifted his hands in mock surrender, latex crinkling. “All right, guv. I’m only saying—bloke like this, comes down chasing ghosts. They set up tents sometimes, squatters. He could’ve nicked his neck on, I dunno, rebar.” Harlow reached for the throat again and this time lifted the chin properly, eyes tracing the bluish ovals and the faint, parallel lines on the side of the neck, like something thin had bitten there and been tugged away. Rebar didn’t leave orderly marks. Ligature, then. Narrow. Wire? And on the skin, a dusty smear that her brain cast into the shape it wanted: chalk. Not white, not quite. Bone has a different color in powder. She glanced at her watch as if it might argue. It did not. She dropped his chin, scanned his hands. Faint burns on the pads of both index fingers, not the palms. Contact transfers. Wax on the knuckle hairs. Candles, then. Not for mood. Harlow stood and let her gaze roam to what the others hadn't seen. On the tiled floor—a map of scuffs in crescents and arcs, too deliberate to be traffic and too many to be one pair of shoes. Under one set of scuffs lay a ghost of circles drawn and then trodden through. Not perfect circles either; a hand had made them with the urgency of someone trying to finish a thought. She knelt, tipped her head against the light's glare, and saw the pattern half rubbed: a ring with four smaller marks on the circumference, one at each cardinal point. Not summoning. She’d seen that sort of pattern once before, when DS Morris had brought her to the inside edge of his last case with a look on his face like a man testing the ice. Protection. He’d said it like a prayer. “Guv?” Briggs was hovering. “We’ve got a satchel strap mark on his shoulder. Left side. Bag’s missing. Might’ve been a mugging.” “He’s still got a watch,” she said. It was battered and cheap, but thieves didn’t tend to make aesthetic judgments. “Wallet?” “In the parka. Notes still in it.” “Then they wanted something else.” She let the compass lie on her palm and watched the needle twitch toward the walled-up arch. Not north. Not magnetic. Drawn to something that had been open and now wasn’t. From beyond the tape a small riot of red curls and a leather satchel appeared, hesitated, resolved into a woman whose round glasses reflected the floodlights into blanks. Freckles made constellations across her nose. She tucked her hair behind her left ear, like she’d done it a thousand anxious times and a thousand would follow. “Hey,” the uniform started, stepping out. “Scene’s closed.” “I called her,” Harlow said, and let the words be the shape of authority. Eva Kowalski gave her a quick, grateful half-smile and stepped under the lifted edge of tape, careful where she put her feet. The satchel brushed her hip with a sleepy thud of books. Briggs stiffened. “Guv, I didn’t know we were bringing in—” “Consultant,” Harlow said. “British Museum. Restricted archives.” “I’m just a research assistant,” Eva said, soft and quick, automatic. She breathed through her mouth and then stopped, as if the taste of it surprised her. “God, it smells like… Is that tallow?” “Wax,” Harlow said. “And something else.” Eva crouched, unbothered by dust, her eyes drawn to the half-eaten circles on the floor. She traced the air above them, not quite touching. “Four points,” she murmured. “Cardinal guardians. Not a call. A ward.” Briggs made a sound like a laugh and a cough had had a child. “Guardians.” Eva looked up at him then in a way that would have made most men glance at their shoes. “You brought me here, Detective Quinn?” Harlow held out the compass, flat on her palm. Eva’s eyes widened, the little glass circles on her face magnifying the reaction. She reached with a gloved finger and tapped the casing. “Shade work. They prefer brass—it holds a charge longer without taking a taste of the owner.” “Shade?” Briggs said flatly. “Artisans.” Eva’s tone dropped into a cadence Harlow knew from testimonials on the stand, that controlled patience. “They work behind the Market’s veil. This is a compass for rifts. Portals, if you like fairy-tale words. The needle—does that.” “Points somewhere it has no business pointing,” Harlow murmured, and glanced up at the bricked arch. A faultline was there in her peripheral vision, a ripple in very old mortar that should not have rippled. Eva followed her gaze and shivered. The tuck of hair again, reflexive. “There was a door here. Not the physical kind. Someone… closed it. Hard.” Briggs shifted his weight. Harlow heard the faint squeak of latex on tile. “He could’ve bought it. Knickknacks. The Market sells tat like any other.” Eva’s gaze softened infinitesimally, not at him but at the idea. “The Market sells information. People buy maps to places you can’t draw. Compasses like this aren’t cheap. They’re made to order.” Harlow let the compass rest in her hand another heartbeat and then, against procedure and her better angels, she slid it into the pocket of her coat. Briggs saw the move, registered it, chose not to fight her with SOCO looking. She filed away the I.O.U. in the tilt of his mouth. “The bag’s missing,” Harlow said. “He came in carrying something worth more than a wallet.” “Bone dust,” Eva said, surprising her. Harlow had not said the word. “On his shirt, see? Chalk would be brighter. This is… off-white. And the smell—no, don’t laugh— it’s sweet, a little. He was using it to draw, and his hands were… burned?” “Candles,” Harlow said. “He lit them and then…” She trailed off into the shape of the evidence. The bruises. The moved body. The ward circle scuffed like a message half delivered. She had to remind herself to inhale. “Someone strangled him with wire. Quick, quiet. Took the bag and whatever was in it. Took his token, too.” “Token?” Briggs asked. Eva pulled a coin-sized disc from the dust with two fingers as delicately as if plucking a moth from a curtain. It was circular, smooth, and white as a tooth. Carvings around the edge made it look almost like a coin. “Bone,” she said. “You can’t get in without one. Usually sewn inside a cuff or strung under a shirt. Whoever did this might have taken it, but sometimes when you run—” She stopped herself, an internal braking Harlow could almost hear. “Sometimes when you run, it breaks,” Harlow finished, thinking of DS Morris’s hands when he’d told her not to follow. How his fingers had worried at something at his throat not a cross or badge. He’d gone toward a place like this with a terrible certainty and she had been left with an empty space shaped like his name. Briggs scratched the back of his neck through his collar. “Look, say it’s all very—” he waved a hand in a circle that took in wax and scuffs and fear, “—Market. That still makes it a mugging, yeah? He’s carrying something fancy. Someone kills him quiet. Drags him. Leaves him like a fall. We call it what it is.” “We call it what we can prove,” Harlow said. The edge in her voice made him drop his eyes. She softened it a fraction. “But this wasn’t sloppy. He drew a ward and didn’t finish it. He tried to open a way out and failed. Or someone closed it for him. After he died, his body was moved to make you say ‘fall’ when you wrote it up because no one wants a death down here that breathes like this.” A hush fell around her words that wasn’t only the dead air of the tunnel. Across the platform the generator hummed as though waking to itself. Harlow glanced at the arch again. The hair on her arms prickled. The compass might have still been cheap brass in her pocket but it had weight. It had angles. It was a promise and a threat. “What would close it?” she asked, still watching the bricks, the gaps between them blacker than shadow. “The… door.” Eva’s eyes moved in a small, habitual scan as though checking footnotes. Her hand came up and hovered over her left ear and then returned to the satchel strap, gripping it. “Opposite pressure. Another ward. Or—” She bit the inside of her lip, a quick flare of color in her face. “A token snapped in two on the threshold. It forces a collapse. It’s messy. Dangerous.” “To whom?” Harlow asked. “Everyone nearby,” Eva said. “But mostly to the one without a token. They get… lost.” Her gaze flicked, uninvited, to Harlow’s left wrist where the leather of her watch had long ago begun to fray. “I’m sorry.” Harlow didn’t blink at the apology. She didn’t say Morris’s name here where the air might have known it. She rolled her shoulders once, small calibration. “SOCO will catalogue the wax and the dust. Bag the bone disc.” She caught Briggs’s eye. “You’ll go through the footage from the access points. I know.” She preempted his protest with a look. “It won’t show anything useful, but you’ll do it anyway.” “Guv,” Briggs said, resumed the formal shape of it as if it were a coat he could hide inside. “If this is… whatever it is, how do we write it?” “We write facts. He was strangled. He was moved. We note the absence of his bag. We describe the residuals without naming them.” She allowed herself the smallest curl of a smile. “Let the report itch on the page. Someone will scratch it.” He huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite surrender. “And the compass?” “Evidence,” she said, without moving her hand. “On loan.” When Briggs left to make calls and SOCO sank into their work with tweezers and muttered ciphers, the noise rolled back. Eva stood too close to the broken circle and Harlow wanted to pull her by the elbow. “Don’t,” she said, gentler than she wanted. “If there’s charge left in it, you’ll feel it for days.” Eva looked at her. “You’ve felt it before.” “Once.” Harlow’s mouth went dry. The brick arch wavered in her sight like heat. “It took something I wasn’t done with.” Eva’s hand found the strap again, tightening. “Then you know this wasn’t an accident.” “I knew that when I walked in and the air tried to be winter in July,” Harlow said. Somewhere close by a drip started—a measured, infuriating sound like a clock that wouldn’t admit to time. She stepped to the edge of the platform and glanced down. No blood. No trace of contact with the rail. Clean as a lie. She looked back along the platform, following in her head the path a man would have taken if he were trying to outrun a noose and an idea. He would have cut through the stalls, knocked over a lantern, dropped bone dust that said he had planned something and been denied his planning. He would have slammed into that circle and not had time to finish marking the last point. He would have looked up and seen the arch and believed in something opening. And then hands behind him and a wire he didn’t see. Harlow let the market skeletons and wax ghosts sit where they were. She could taste metal on her tongue and thought of the compass’s needle suspend, wanting. Her watch ticked on her wrist, the second hand stubborn in its little orbit. She drew breath slow and steady, measuring the empty underground in the rise and fall of her ribs. Then she moved, precise as a metronome, to the edge of the tablets and spoke to the nearest SOCO. “Photograph everything. Twice. And then we’re going to look for footprints where the dust isn’t. Our killer knew to step inside the spaces that don’t exist.” The SOCO gave her a look that started as confusion and grew a spine. “Right. Yes.” Eva smiled in some private corner of her face and then tucked her hair away again, fighting the curl that wanted to claim the air. “You always talk like that?” “Only when it works.” Harlow’s eyes went to the arch one more time. If there had been a door here tonight, the hinge paint would be imagined. She did not imagine the weight in her pocket or the pull in the needle. “Tell me what a Shade would charge someone for a compass like this.” “Depends on how bad they want to leave where they are,” Eva said. “And how quickly they need to do it.” “So we’re looking for someone with means and fear,” Harlow said. “And someone else who knows how to make that fear useless.” She wrote the words in the air with the line of her shoulders, the turn of her head, the direction of her questions. Around them the Market’s bones creaked softly, and the city slept as if it hadn’t just rolled over on top of a secret and tried to smother it. Harlow Quinn planted her feet in the dust that had been bone, listened for footsteps where none should be, and let the itch of the facts rise under her skin until it felt like a map.