Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNFB96RX7YZ5QC8CZQPRR1Y

The air in the abandoned Tube station was thick with the smells of damp concrete, ozone, and something metallic that Quinn couldn’t quite place. Yellow police tape, a garish slash of modern authority, was strung across the arched entrance to the old platform, cordoning off a world that most of London didn’t know existed. The Veil Market had moved on, as it did every full moon, leaving behind only echoes and this. Quinn stepped under the tape, her boots scuffing on grit-strewn tiles. The single overhead work lamp the techs had set up cast a harsh, unforgiving light, creating long, dancing shadows that made the cavernous space feel even more immense. In the centre of the pool of light was the body. A man, late thirties, dressed in the kind of expensive but nondescript clothing favored by those who moved in the Market’s circles. His wallet was still in his pocket, his watch still on his wrist. This wasn’t a robbery. “Quinn.” The voice came from the edge of the light. Eva Kowalski stood there, her freckled face pale, her hands clutching the worn leather strap of her satchel. Her round glasses reflected the lamplight, hiding her green eyes. “It’s a mess.” “Tell me something I don’t know, Kowalski,” Quinn said, her voice flat. She kept her gaze on the body, her mind already cataloguing. She’d pulled Eva into consulting on cases like this over a year ago, after the Morris incident. The girl from the museum’s restricted archives understood the things Quinn’s training couldn’t explain. Most of the time, Quinn hated needing that understanding. “The initial report called it a magical discharge,” Eva said, tucking a curl of red hair behind her left ear. A nervous habit. “Backfired ritual. It happens down here. People get greedy, try to channel more than they can hold.” Quinn finally looked at her. “Does it?” Eva gestured vaguely at the scene. “Look at the scorch pattern. Radial, outward from the centre. The stone is vitrified. The energy had to come from him.” Quinn knelt, ignoring the protest from her knee, a souvenir from her military days. She examined the floor around the body. The concrete was indeed blackened and glassy in a near-perfect circle, the epicenter directly under the victim’s torso. It looked textbook. A perfect, self-contained accident. But textbooks didn’t account for the feeling in Quinn’s gut, the same cold coil of wrongness she’d felt three years ago in a warehouse by the docks, just before the world went sideways and Morris stopped answering his radio. She focused on the details, the things that didn’t demand a PhD in the occult to see. The man’s jacket was unbuttoned. His left hand was curled into a loose fist, but his right was splayed open, palm up, as if he’d been reaching for something. Or offering it. “What was he doing here after the Market cleared out?” Quinn mused, more to herself than to Eva. “Maybe he was late. Maybe he was meeting someone for a private sale.” Eva hugged her satchel closer. “The energy signature is clean, Quinn. Brutal, but clean. It reads like a catastrophic personal failure, not an attack.” Quinn’s eyes kept moving, tracing the lines of the scene. The radial burn was perfect. Too perfect. An explosion, even a magical one, wasn’t a geometric exercise. There should be irregularities, tendrils of energy, something. This looked like a stencil. Her gaze drifted from the body, past the circle of light, into the deeper shadows of the platform. Something glinted. A tiny, dull reflection near the wall, about fifteen feet from the body. Away from the epicenter. She stood and walked toward it, her movements precise, controlled. Eva followed, a silent, anxious shadow. “Where are you going? The scene is here.” Quinn didn’t answer. She crouched again, fishing a pair of nitrile gloves from her pocket. The glint was a small, brass object half-hidden in a crumbling gap between the platform and the wall. She picked it up. It was a compass. Small, the casing etched with intricate, swirling designs that looked less like navigation aids and more like protective sigils. A patina of green verdigris coated the metal, and the glass over the face was smudged but intact. “What is that?” Eva asked, peering over her shoulder. Quinn didn’t know, but it was out of place. It was too deliberate, too crafted, to be random debris in this grimy tomb. She held it flat in her palm. The needle didn’t point north. It quivered, spinning in a slow, uneasy circle before settling, pointing unerringly back toward the centre of the platform. Toward the body. “It’s pointing at the residual energy,” Eva said, her voice gaining a note of academic curiosity. “A locus compass. They’re used to find sources of power. See? It confirms the discharge came from him.” Quinn watched the needle. It wasn’t pointing at the centre of the scorch mark. It was pointing at a spot just to the left of the victim’s outstretched right hand. She walked slowly back to the body, keeping the compass level. The needle held its course. She stopped where it indicated. There was nothing there. Just scorched floor. “Quinn, the circle is the source. The compass is just confused by the aftermath,” Eva insisted, her nervous tic returning. She kept looking toward the tunnel entrance as if expecting the Market to return any second. But Quinn was no longer listening to Eva. She was listening to the silent scream of the evidence. The perfect circle. The body positioned in the centre, yet with one hand reaching out. The compass, pointing not to the man, but to a void beside him. She looked from the empty spot on the floor to the victim’s splayed right hand. The posture wasn’t one of someone being exploded from within. It was one of someone offering an item. Or having an item taken. The wrongness in her gut solidified into a cold, hard certainty. “It’s not a discharge,” Quinn said, her voice low and firm. “It’s a cover-up.” Eva stared at her. “What? How can you—” “The burn pattern is too clean. It’s not an explosion; it’s an application. Someone used a hell of a lot of power, but they directed it *at* him. They burned him out from the outside in and crafted this perfect circle around him to make it look self-inflicted.” She held up the compass. “And this? This wasn’t confused. It was dropped. It led me right to the point of origin. The real one. Right here.” She pointed at the empty space on the floor. “Someone stood right here and did this to him.” She looked at the victim’s open hand. “He was holding something. Something important. His killer took it, then used enough force to vaporize not just the man, but any botched ritual. This was an assassination. Neat, professional, and designed to be misread by anyone who knows her earlier confidence deflated. She looked from the body to the compass in Quinn’s hand, the implications settling over her. “A Shade artisan crafted that compass,” she whispered. “They’re… precise. It wouldn’t be wrong.” Quinn closed her fingers around the cold brass casing, the etched sigils pressing into her palm. She looked from the manufactured scene of the crime back into the hungry darkness of the tunnels. Someone had walked out of here. Someone who knew how to make magic lie. Someone who thought they were clever. But they’d been in a hurry. They’d dropped a key. And now Detective Harlow Quinn was holding it.