Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNFHR9W1YHG9PHYJFE7GGFB

The flashlight beam cut through the darkness like a blade, illuminating the curve of the disused platform where the Northern Line once carried Londoners to Camden Town. Detective Harlow Quinn swept the light across the tiled walls, counting the steps her boots made against the platform edge. Seventeen steps from the tunnel mouth. The air tasted of rust and something older—something that reminded her of Morris, three years gone, and the case that had taken him from her. Behind her, DC Wainwright's torch bobbed uncertainly. "Christ, guv. What sort of bloody place is this?" "The sort of place where someone left a body," Quinn said. She didn't turn around. Her eyes were fixed on the dark shape sprawled across the far end of the platform, half-hidden beneath a rusted signalling board. "The sort of place that doesn't exist on any of our maps." The body was a man, middle-aged, his face turned away from them. He wore a expensive coat, now torn at the shoulder, and his hands were clenched at his sides. No wallet. No phone. But his fingers were stained black, as if he'd been handling something corrosive, and around his neck— Quinn moved closer, her训练的本能 keeping her steps measured, preserving what she could of the scene. The man's throat bore a mark she couldn't immediately identify. Not a ligature mark. Not a bruise. Something like a burn, but precise, almost deliberate in its shape. A symbol, maybe, etched into the skin. "Uniform's already checked the missing persons," Wainwright said, consulting his notebook with the torch held between his teeth. "Nothing matching. No reports of anyone gone missing from the area." "Because there's no 'area,'" Quinn murmured. She crouched beside the body, not touching it, studying the way the man lay. His legs were straight. His arms were at his sides. No defensive wounds on his hands. Whatever had killed him, he hadn't seen it coming—or he hadn't been able to fight back. "That's not right," she said. "What's not right?" She stood, brushing dust from her knees. "The position. If he'd fallen, he'd be crumpled. If he'd been attacked and run, he'd be closer to the tunnel mouth. But he's placed here, almost—" She gestured at the rusted board. "—almost arranged." Wainwright frowned. "Maybe he came to grief and crawled here to die." "Maybe." Quinn circled the body, her boots crunching on decades of accumulated grit. "But there's no blood. No trace of injury beyond that mark on his neck. And his shoes—" She pointed with her flashlight. "Polished. Recently polished. This man took care with his appearance. Yet he comes to a place like this?" "Could've been meeting someone. Could've been a deal gone wrong." "A deal." Quinn's voice was flat. "In an abandoned Tube station with no entrance from the street. In a tunnel that's been sealed for twenty years." Wainwright shifted uncomfortably. "Maybe there's another way in." "There isn't. I had uniform check." She didn't tell him she'd also run the location through every database she had access to, and a few she probably shouldn't. The station had been closed since 1995. Flooded, then sealed. No records of any activity in the underground since. But someone had been here. Recently. She crouched again, this time angling her flashlight beneath the signalling board. There—scuffed into the concrete, half-obscured by debris, a mark that didn't belong. Two parallel lines, about a metre apart, with a smaller line bisecting them. Burned into the stone. "Get SOCO over here," she said. "I need this preserved." "What is it?" "I don't know yet." But she was already photographing it with her phone, the flash washing out the darkness. The symbol reminded her of something. Something she'd seen before, in Morris's case files, in the reports he'd been compiling before he died. She'd dismissed it at the time as circumstantial—her partner had been chasing shadows, she'd told herself, chasing conspiracy theories that had gotten him killed. But here it was. Burned into the stone. Exactly like the marks in Morris's photographs. Wainwright was speaking, his voice distant. "Guv? There's something else you should see." He was standing near the tunnel mouth, pointing his torch at the wall. Quinn joined him, and felt her stomach tighten. Writing. Scrawled across the tiles in what looked like charcoal, though it caught the light strangely—almost iridescent. Symbols she didn't recognise, interspersed with what might have been English, or might have been something older. Her eyes traced the letters, struggling to form words from the unfamiliar shapes. "Translation's going to take ages," Wainwright said. "If it's even a language. Could be nonsense. Some kids playing at occult nonsense—" "It's not nonsense." The words came out harder than she'd intended. Quinn touched the wall, her fingers brushing the symbols. The stone was cold—far colder than it should have been, down here, in the residual warmth of the city above. And beneath her fingertips, something pulsed. Faint. Rhythmic. Like a heartbeat. She pulled her hand back. "Guv?" Wainwright was watching her with concern. "You all right?" "Fine." But she was already moving back toward the body, crouching beside it again, searching. Her hands found the inside pocket of the coat—and closed around something small, metallic, circular. She drew it out. A compass. Brass, tarnished green with age, its face etched with symbols she didn't recognise. The needle was spinning, never settling, pointing everywhere and nowhere. Except—wait. Quinn tilted the compass, watching the needle. It wasn't spinning at random. It was vibrating, oscillating between two points. Between the body and— She looked up. Toward the tunnel mouth. Toward the writing on the wall. Toward the darkness beyond. "Get a uniform on this tunnel," she said quietly. "No one goes in or out until I say so." "Guv, we don't even know where it leads—" "But someone does." She stood, tucking the compass into her pocket. "Someone knew exactly where to bring this man. And they left him here deliberately, with that mark on his throat, with this—" She held up the compass. "This isn't a murder scene, Wainwright. It's a message." "What kind of message?" Quinn thought of Morris. Of the files he'd kept, the ones she'd never quite been able to throw away. Of the symbols that had been appearing at the edges of her cases for three years, always dismissed, always explained away. The clique, he'd called it. A network of people operating in the spaces between the world's layers. Dealing in things that shouldn't exist. The same people, perhaps, who had left a man dead in an underground station with a symbol burned into his throat and a compass that pointed to nowhere. "The kind of message," she said, "that someone's been trying to send for a very long time." She turned back to the body, to the writing on the wall, to the impossible compass still vibrating in her pocket. And somewhere in the darkness beyond the tunnel mouth, something shifted—watching, waiting, as if it had been waiting for her to finally see.