Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRCGYPNF91G88HC6BXD3KQ

The steps down into Camden's old Tube station were a fall through damp air, the smell of mildew and something sweeter — iron and incense — clinging to Harlow Quinn like a wet scarf. Her shoes hit concrete that had not seen commuter feet in years, and the fluorescent tape strung along the platform fluttered faintly in a draft that came and went as if the station itself breathed. Vendors’ stalls, ragged and leaning, made a crooked street beneath the arched roof. Lanterns hung from wires, throwing a sickly gold across heaps of oddities: jars of humming light, bundles of bones wrapped in blue cloth, and a rack of masks whose smiles were too wide and too human. Papers on the platform crackled underfoot. Police tape sagged from rusted poles where the market’s usual banners had been torn away. A cluster of uniformed officers stood like stiff reeds beyond the tape, faces lit by torches and the glow from a single lantern balanced on an overturned crate. Someone had chalked a rough circle around the body, though the market's vendors would have scoffed — circles meant little here. The body lay half-slumped against a chest of drawers painted with stars, a shawl of velvet bunched under the shoulders as if someone had tried to make it comfortable. Harlow moved through the line of officers with the kind of attention that military years had taught her: scan, note, assess. She reached the body and stopped. Up close, details cut through the clutter as if someone had wiped a lens clean. The dead man was young, maybe early thirties, with a tangle of dark hair that had once been slicked back. His face was pale, lips parted, eyes open but unfocused in a way that made her skin prickle. There were no obvious wounds except for the thin, blackened ring seared into the center of his chest — a perfect circle, like the imprint of a coin. It wasn't blood. It wasn't scorch so much as a discoloration that sat on the surface of skin, like a bruise stained with ink. Harlow leaned in until the smell of him filled her nose: copper, laundry soap, and something floral she couldn't place. "Detective Quinn." Eva's voice, small and steady, came from the left. She stood with her satchel slung across one shoulder, glasses catching the lantern light. Her fingers were moving unconsciously, tucking hair behind her left ear — the same nervous gesture Harlow had watched since they were teens. Eva's green eyes darted from the dead man's face to the items strewn around him, and something like recognition softened her features. "What do you have?" Harlow asked. Eva swallowed. "Vendor name's Tomas. He runs the coin-stalls on the west end, sells —" She hesitated, adjusting the strap of the satchel. "— trinkets, little charms. He'd been listed on one of my docketed registries. He had access — a bone token. He was a vendor." Harlow noticed the token almost at the same time as she noticed the small brass instrument cupped in the victim's right hand. The bone token lay beneath the wooden finger, knuckled as if recently dropped. It was carved with a crude crescent; bone dust shaded the grooves. Someone had retrieved the token and tucked it back under him as a gesture of ownership, or as an apology. The compass, however, drew her attention more insistently. Brass, small enough to hide in a shirt pocket. The face was etched with sigils that glittered faintly at the edges where grease and grime had worn them down. Verdigris crowned the casing in a pale film. The needle rested at an angle that did not follow the arc of the body; it pointed, quite deliberately, toward the inner wall of the platform where the tiles were intact and blackened by soot. "That's a Veil Compass," Eva said, before Harlow could. "They're tuned to portals. The needle points to the nearest rift. Someone's been here who — who knows how to access the Market properly." Harlow felt the old scar of doubt rise in her. The word "rift" had a way of shrinking the field of inquiry into superstition; she had learned that when people looked at anomalies, they often stopped looking for the human hand behind them. She kept her eyes on the compass. It was genuine enough; the patina, the sigils. Eva's fingers hovered over the compass before she stopped herself. Her fingers trembled. "Does the needle feel loose?" Harlow asked, watching Eva's face for a reaction. "No." Eva's whisper was immediate. "It should swing freely." Harlow didn't need to touch it to see the way the needle had left a faint groove in the brass under its point. It was tiny, as if the needle had been nudged and then pushed aside again. Someone had forced it into position. "Why is it angled like that?" Harlow murmured. She slid a gloved hand closer and, with the casualness of someone who expected resistance, rotated the body a fraction to change the compass's orientation. The needle lazily realigned with the new frame, but the groove in the casing did not. The wound in the chest sat over the heart like a brand; the compass's needle had been moved to point there. "You think it's staged," Eva said, and she did not sound surprised. Her mouth was a small, hard line. "They wanted people to see the compass and assume—" "—assume a portal did it," Harlow finished. "Assume something uncontrollable." She let the words fall and watched the lanternlight catch them. The absence of blood told its own story. There was no spatter on the drawers, no smear along the cloth. No one had run their hands through this man's hair in panic. His shoes were tied; his satchel lay open a few paces away, pages of ledger peeking out like white teeth. Whoever had killed Tomas had not needed force. No broken nails. No tuft of hair gripped in a fist. Harlow moved her fingers under his chin and gently tilted his head to one side, examining the throat. The skin was unmarked. There were no livor mortis patterns that screamed long death; the body had the pinkness of someone who'd been dead for a matter of hours, not days. "Time of death?" she asked one of the officers. "Best estimate," the uniform said, voice pitched low, "two to four hours." Harlow considered the lantern's flame, the angle of shadows, the way the market's current shift would have meant Tomas was working through the night. She glanced at her leather watch — the worn thing had been an anchor through years on the force — and checked the time with an ease that was almost ritual. Her thumb brushed a groove in the casing. The watch kept its own stubborn, human time. She pulled a small evidence bag from an officer and, without ceremony, dropped the compass into it. The needle thudded faintly against the plastic. Harlow sealed it and labeled it herself. There was a humility in controlling evidence; it prevented people from turning it into legend. "I want everything sealed," she said. "Doors, stalls, vendor manifests. No one in or out without me." "You really don't think—" Eva began. "I don't think a thing until it's proven," Harlow said. She let her gaze drift over the crowd. A vendor with a table of bottled glimmers watched from the periphery. A man in a mask she recognized — a face dealer known as Marlowe — stood to the side, fingers worrying a coin. Their faces were arranged into polite masks, but their eyes moved in small, watchful arcs. Someone had wanted a story to spread through this crowd. Someone who could count on people here to prefer a tale about rifts to a tale about being murdered by one of their own. Eva's breath left her in a small, tight sound. "If the needle was forced, then why...?" Her hands worried at the edge of her satchel as if looking for an answer between pages. "If someone wanted to make it look supernatural, why not make more of a show? Why not burn the place? People here — they know how to stage things." Harlow crouched and looked at the man's hands. They were clean, nails trimmed. One ring was missing from the little finger; the finger's slight swelling suggested recent removal. A faint impression on the skin circled like a ghost. Whoever had taken the ring had done so after his death, or else it had slid off in the struggle she couldn't find. "Maybe he owed someone," Eva said. "Maybe someone wanted to take property. Or —" She stopped herself, staring at the small black ring as if it might unravel in front of her. "Maybe." Harlow's tone didn't promise agreement. "Maybe someone wanted to make it look supernatural because the Veil Market has ways of burying its crimes under other people's fear. People die here in a dozen ways. Selling an idea buys you cover." Her mind flicked to DS Morris, the partner she'd lost three years ago. She kept the memory like a brittle coin in her pocket: muggy night, too-perfect shadows, the kind of vanishing that didn't leave a body to be logged. The supernatural had edged itself into her life and then retreated, leaving a wound she couldn't name. She'd learned since then to distrust the option of overnight wonder. It begged the same responsibility as a mirror: it reflected what people wanted to see. Someone brushed past her and Harlow noticed the footprints in the dust along the edge of the platform: two sets, one heavier with a thick-soled stump pattern and another lighter, with a wedge of rubber missing from the heel. The heavy prints stopped at the edge of the circle around the body and did not continue toward the maintenance hatch that opened onto the service tunnels. The lighter ones veered, then doubled back, as if someone had come to the body, adjusted something, and then walked away the way they'd come. She took a picture with her phone; the officer beside her winced at the flash. "That doesn't match the way a rift would take someone," Harlow said. "If a portal opens here, there'd be heat. There'd be a siphon. Evidence of a sudden physiological event. This man's arteries are intact. There are no organ ruptures. No charring beyond that ring — which looks ceremonial. This is human work." "You think they staged the ring," Eva said, tentative, but the idea had weight. Her glasses slipped down her nose and she pushed them up, burying her face in research. "Someone used a branding tool. Something like what Marlowe sells. He has templates." Harlow's jaw tightened. A branding tool would scar. It might not leave an obvious wound if administered post-mortem with a heated metal disc. The ring's blackened edge could be burned skin or a chemical stain. "Collect Marlowe," she said. "And get me the vendor logs. Check Tomas's transactions. Look for anyone who purchased or borrowed a brass disc recently. Also catalog who had access to a Veil Compass within the last twelve hours." "Compasses are not registered," the officer said. "They're black market." "Then start with who left with one." Harlow stood. The answer narrowed like the beam of a flashlight cutting through the dark. "And keep an eye on the maintenance tunnels. Someone used them." Eva looked less like a scholar at that, more like someone drawn toward an answer she had not expected. "There was a ledger in his satchel," she said. She reached in and pulled out a small notebook, its edges feathered. "He kept patrons' names. I—" She snapped it shut as if to guard it. Her fingers traced the spine like a litany. "He keeps records for people who pay in trust. If someone wanted to disappear someone quietly, they'd go through those who keep ledgers. People trust ledgers." Harlow looked at the book. The idea was ordinary in a place that trafficked in the extraordinary: trust served as currency when law could not. She considered the likelihood that a vendor balanced his margins with favors. That's how criminals hid, by trading in favors larger than the coin in their pockets. "Lab will test for toxins," she told Eva. "Check his last transactions, get the list of frequent customers from Marlowe. Forensics will check the ring mark. I want a full canvas of the vendors on site tonight. Someone here saw someone linger." She paused. The market's hum seemed louder, as if the crowd had leaned closer to listen. A woman with a child's gaze traced her lips with a finger, waiting. The lanterns guttered as a breeze slid down the tunnel. "Be careful," Eva said, the plea compressing into a single syllable. Harlow let out a breath that was almost a half-smile. It wasn't fear she felt; it was something honed narrower by time and loss. "Always am," she said. "But don't forget: people here make their living by telling stories. They'll tell the one that keeps them safe. Our job is to find the bits they can't or won't tell." She looked back at the compass, its face a pale constellation of sigils. The needle rested now under plastic, helpless. In the pocket of the bag, the brass glinted like a coin that paid for secrets. The market had been given a story and handed it gently to anyone who would take it. Harlow wanted to know who had written it. She turned to the nearest constable. "Find me the one who sold Tomas the drinks tonight. Get every camera feed that covers the east approach. And someone bell the maintenance hatch — don't let it close." As the constable moved to obey, Harlow let her gaze sweep once more across the market's crooked street. Faces lined the stalls like knots in rope; each one a possible suspect, an informant, a frightened vendor. She kept watch on their mouths, their hands, the small habits that gave away an unpracticed lie. "Eva," she said softly, "if the needle was moved, the person who moved it wanted someone to look in the wrong direction. That someone else? Could be us." Eva's fingers stopped worrying the satchel. Her face was open and honest with worry. "So we look harder," she said. Harlow's lips pressed into a thin line. Harder was what she did. Whoever had staged this had hoped the Veil Market would swallow the story whole. They had not counted on the insistence of a detective who made a practice of untangling covers and veils. She pocketed her watch like staking a claim and walked the line of stalls, her eyes picking at details the market's storytellers thought insignificant: a thread of blue from a vendor's sleeve that matched a smear on the drawer, a cigarette butt crushed into a floorboard with a particular brand only sold at one stall, a vendor's hands that trembled as if they'd been held too close to heat. It would not be the rift, Harlow thought as she moved deeper into the market. It would be a ledger entry, a name smoked into a ring, a small brass needle moved by a human hand. But she had learned to listen for the quiet after the extraordinary — the way people rearranged their lies. That sound, she knew, would lead her to an explanation that fit the world better than any myth. Down in the dimness, the Veil Compass lay under plastic with the needle still just a hair out of true. The market's hum circled them both, promise and threat braided together. Harlow Quinn folded the hush around her shoulders and kept walking. The crowd shifted around her like wind through grass, and somewhere, among the stalls and the ledgers and the names people wrote down and trusted, someone counted the cost of silence. She would find that someone.