Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNEZ0KPNKJ0PE7RJ7X4D4AH

The air in the abandoned Tube station was a thick, cold soup of damp stone, ozone, and something else, something metallic and coppery that Harlow Quinn knew all too well. It was the smell of a life violently spent. The flickering blue-white glow of police emergency lights bounced off tiled walls slick with condensation, turning the cavernous space into a disjointed funhouse of shifting shadows. Her boots echoed with a military precision against the grimy platform as she approached the cordon. A dozen uniforms were milling about, their movements sluggish in the unnatural chill. At the center of it all, a forensic tech in a white bunny suit was on his knees, carefully examining the victim, a man whose throat had been opened in a wide, grisly smile. “Detective Quinn.” A young sergeant, his face pale and pinched, nodded at her as she ducked under the tape. “Nasty one.” “They always are, Collins,” she said, her voice a low rasp. Her sharp jaw was set, her brown eyes already cataloging the scene, missing nothing. She adjusted the worn leather watch on her left wrist, a nervous tick. The stillness was wrong. A murder this brutal should have left a chaotic imprint, a frantic energy. This felt… precise. Ceremonial, even. Eva Kowalski stood a few feet from the body, clutching her worn leather satchel to her chest like a shield. Her curly red hair was a splash of vivid color in the monochrome gloom, her round glasses reflecting the scene back at her. She tucked a stray coil of hair behind her left ear, a nervous habit Quinn had noted the first time they’d met. “Detective,” Eva said, her voice softer than the surroundings warranted. “They let me in. I was researching the… history… of this place for the museum. I heard the commotion.” Quinn gave a curt nod. The British Museum’s ‘restricted archives’ were a convenient cover for the girl’s real expertise, one Quinn was only beginning to grasp. “What’s your take, Kowalski? Before the good doctor here gives me the official cause of death.” Eva’s green eyes darted around the platform, taking in the strange, makeshift stalls shrouded in dark canvas, the sigils scrawled in what looked like chalk on the pillars. This was no ordinary crime scene. This was the Veil Market, or at least, its most recent location. The place ran on bone tokens and moved with the moon. A killing here was a message. “It looks straightforward,” Eva ventured, her freckled complexion looking almost ethereal in the bleached light. “A robbery, perhaps. It’s a market, after all. He was probably a seller. Someone wanted what he had and decided not to pay.” Quinn’s gaze swept over the body again. The man was well-dressed in a fine wool overcoat, now ruined. His hands were clean, his nails manicured. Not a street-level dealer. A facilitator. “Robbery,” Quinn repeated, the word flat. She knelt, ignoring the protesting twinge in her knee, and pointed a gloved finger at the victim’s right hand. It was curled loosely, not in a defensive posture, but as if he had been holding something. “No defensive wounds. No signs of a struggle. He let his killer get close. That’s not a mugging. That’s an execution.” She shifted her attention to the pool of blood. It had seeped into the cracks between the paving stones, a dark, almost black lake. But the flow was wrong. It didn’t radiate out from the body in a perfect circle. It was disturbed. “Look at the spill pattern here,” she said, more to herself than to Eva. “It’s been smudged. Something was dragged through it after he fell. Or someone knelt in it.” Eva leaned closer, her satchel brushing Quinn’s arm. “Or something was taken from beside him. Something that was sitting in the blood.” Quinn’s eyes narrowed. She scanned the immediate vicinity. The forensics team had already laid out numbered evidence markers, but they denoted nothing of interest—a discarded cigarette butt, a scrap of cloth. The killer was careful. Meticulous. Her gaze fell on a patch of disturbed dust a few feet from the body. It was a perfect circle, about the size of a small saucer, with a faint, greasy residue at its center. She’d seen marks like that before. Three years ago, at the scene where they’d found Morris. The memory was a cold knife in her gut. “Collins,” Quinn called out, not taking her eyes off the mark. “Did anyone bag a small item from this location? Brass, maybe? Tarnished green?” The sergeant consulted his clipboard. “No, ma’am. Nothing logged from that grid.” Eva was watching her, a new intensity in her expression. She understood. “A seller of rare items,” she murmured, almost inaudibly. “In a market that sells… unusual things.” Quinn stood up, her mind racing, piecing it together. A high-end seller, executed with cold efficiency. No struggle. He knew his killer, or at least, he didn’t see them as a threat. They took something specific, something small enough to hold in one hand, something that had been placed on the ground, leaving that tell-tale ring in the dust. And they’d been calm victim’s blood to retrieve it. “This wasn’t a robbery,” Quinn stated, her voice cutting through the hum of the generator. “It was a repossession. He had something someone else wanted back. Desperately.” Eva’s hand went to her satchel again, her fingers tracing the worn leather. “A thing of power,” she whispered, so only Quinn could hear. “Something that leaves a trace. Something that can be tracked.” Quinn’s eyes snapped back to the greasy circle in the dust. A residue. An echo. She looked at Eva, at the satchel full of books on things that shouldn’t exist. The girl wasn’t just a researcher; she was a roadmap. “Kowalski,” Quinn said, her tone leaving no room for argument. “That compass you mentioned last week. The one that doesn’t point north. You still have it?” Eva’s eyes widened behind her glasses. She gave a slow, hesitant nod. “Good.” Quinn’s gaze swept over the bizarre, hidden market one last time, seeing not just a crime scene, but the edge of a much deeper, darker world—the same world that had taken Morris. The evidence hadn’t added up because she’d been trying to solve a human crime with human logic. But the faint, verdigris patina of a supernatural signature was now all she could see. “Get it. We’re not looking for a who. We’re following a what.”