Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMT835887665CTKCZW0MN29

The bone token felt cold against Harlow's palm as she descended the rusted spiral staircase into the abandoned Camden station. Her worn leather watch read 2:47 AM, but time seemed irrelevant in this place where fluorescent emergency lighting cast sickly shadows across cracked Victorian tiles. The air tasted of copper and something else—something that made her tongue feel thick and her military-trained instincts scream warnings. "Victim's a thirty-something male, no ID," Sergeant Mills called up from the platform below. His voice echoed strangely in the tunnel, bouncing off surfaces that shouldn't exist. "Looks like a robbery gone wrong. Wallet's missing, no phone." Harlow's brown eyes swept the scene as she reached the platform. The body lay sprawled between two sets of tracks that hadn't seen a train in decades, arms akimbo like a discarded marionette. But something was off. The positioning was too deliberate, too staged. She'd seen enough genuine crime scenes to recognize artificial arrangement. "Who called it in?" She knelt beside the body, careful not to disturb the chalk outline Mills had already drawn. "Anonymous tip. Phone booth on Camden High Street, if you can believe that. Who uses phone booths anymore?" Mills scratched his balding head. "Caller said they heard screaming around midnight." Harlow checked her watch again. Nearly three hours ago, yet the blood beneath the victim looked too fresh, too bright. She'd learned to trust her instincts during eighteen years of service, and they were practically shrieking now. The same way they'd screamed the night Morris died, when the evidence had made no sense and the brass had wanted quick, clean answers. "Mills, look at his shoes." The sergeant squinted down. "What about them?" "No dust. No grime. This station's been abandoned for forty years, but his shoes are pristine." Harlow stood, brushing chalk dust from her knees. The gesture revealed something glinting near the body—a small brass object partially hidden beneath a loose tile. She palmed it quickly, her trained fingers recognizing the weight and texture of old metal. A compass, but wrong somehow. The face bore strange markings that seemed to shift when she wasn't looking directly at them, and the needle spun wildly before settling on a direction that definitely wasn't magnetic north. "Detective Quinn?" The voice made Harlow freeze. A young woman emerged from the shadows at the far end of the platform, carrying a worn leather satchel and pushing round glasses up her freckled nose. Curly red hair escaped from a hastily tied ponytail, and she had the pale, bookish look of someone who spent more time with ancient texts than living people. "This is a crime scene, miss. You need to leave immediately." Harlow's hand moved instinctively toward her radio, but the device remained silent despite her finger pressing the call button. "Eva Kowalski, British Museum." The woman tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear, a nervous gesture that seemed automatic. "I'm a research assistant in the restricted archives. I think I might know what happened here." Mills laughed, but it sounded forced. "Another psychic, Quinn. Should I call for backup to escort her out?" Harlow studied Eva's face. Fear lurked behind those green eyes, but also knowledge. The same look she'd seen in Morris's eyes those final weeks before he died, when he'd started talking about patterns that didn't fit and evidence that defied explanation. "What do you know about this place?" Harlow asked. Eva glanced at Mills, then back at Harlow. "This isn't just an abandoned station. It's something else. Something that moves." She opened her satchel and withdrew a leather journal filled with handwritten notes and sketches. "I've been tracking disappearances in London for two years. People vanish near certain Tube stations on specific dates. Always during the new moon." "That's ridiculous," Mills interjected. "This is a straightforward robbery-homicide." But Harlow was studying the journal, recognizing the methodical documentation of someone trained in research. Dates, times, locations, witness statements—all meticulously recorded. Her detective's mind began connecting dots she hadn't seen before. "The emergency lighting," she said suddenly. "Mills, when did London Underground install emergency lighting in abandoned stations?" "They didn't," Mills replied slowly. "Budget cuts years ago meant—" "Exactly." Harlow pointed at the fixtures humming overhead. "So where's the power coming from?" Eva tucked her hair behind her ear again. "It's not a normal market. The Veil Market. It appears in different locations every full moon, selling things that shouldn't exist to people who shouldn't know about them." The brass compass in Harlow's pocket grew warm against her thigh. She pulled it out, and Eva's eyes widened. "Where did you get that?" "Found it near the body." The needle was spinning faster now, almost agitated. "What is it?" "It's a Veil Compass. Points toward supernatural rifts." Eva's voice dropped to a whisper. "Detective, your victim didn't die here. He died somewhere else entirely. This is just where his body ended up." Mills shook his head. "This is insane. Quinn, we need to stick to facts, not fairy tales." But Harlow was remembering Morris's final case, the inconsistencies that never made sense, the way evidence seemed to rearrange itself when no one was looking. The way he'd tried to tell her about things beyond their understanding before that final night when he'd simply vanished, leaving only a blood-stained badge and questions that haunted her dreams. The compass needle suddenly stopped spinning, pointing directly at a section of tunnel wall that looked solid but cast no shadow. As Harlow watched, the air seemed to shimmer like heat waves, and she caught a glimpse of something impossible—market stalls draped in midnight-blue fabric, figures in hooded cloaks, and the glint of objects that hurt to look at directly. "Mills," she said quietly, "I think we're going to need a bigger crime scene." The sergeant's face had gone pale, his confident dismissals dying on his lips as he too saw the impossible made manifest. In the distance, something howled—not quite human, not quite animal, but entirely wrong. Harlow checked her watch one more time. 3:15 AM, and her carefully ordered world was about to become much more complicated.