Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNFN5YE6DBER9MCA7FTDE0Q

The flashlight beam cut through the darkness like a surgical knife, illuminating the tiled walls of what had once been a functioning station on the Northern Line. Water dripped somewhere in the distance, the sound echoing off curved arches that hadn't seen a passenger in decades. Detective Harlow Quinn swept the beam across the platform, noting the scattered debris, the grafittied pillars, the particular silence that settled in underground spaces far below the city. She'd been on the force for eighteen years. She'd seen bodies in alleyways, in flats, in the Thames. But this was different. This was wrong in a way she couldn't yet articulate. "Jesus Christ," muttered Constable Davies behind her, his voice bouncing oddly in the cavernous space. "They really found him down here?" Quinn didn't answer. She was studying the ground beneath her feet—the platform edge where yellow crime scene tape fluttered in some unfelt draft. The body lay on the tracks below, a dark shape she couldn't make out clearly from this angle. But it wasn't the body that had stopped her cold. It was everything else. "The ambulance can't get down the access tunnel," Davies continued, apparently mistaking her silence for approval to fill it. "We're going to have to carry him out. If he's... if he's still..." "His name was Thomas Whitmore," Quinn said. "Forty-seven. Works—worked—at the British Museum." "According to his ID, yeah. Wallet's pretty much intact. No signs of robbery." "No," Quinn agreed. She crouched, resting her weight on the balls of her feet, and held the flashlight closer to the platform surface. "No signs of robbery." Davies shifted. She could feel his confusion radiating off him like heat. He was a good officer, solid instincts, but he was young. Twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven. The kind of young copper who still believed that crime scenes told linear stories if you just looked hard enough. "DI Quinn? Is something wrong?" She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she stood and walked to the nearest pillar, running her gloved fingers along the tiled surface. The grime was thick, decades of it, but there—half-hidden beneath a layer of dust and something that might have been soot—she saw the marks. "Get me photographs of these pillars. All of them." "Ma'am?" "The scratches." She pointed. "Someone carved something into the tiles here. And there." She moved the flashlight, catching similar marks on the adjacent pillar. "And there. Every six feet, like a pattern." Davies leaned in, squinting. "Looks like... I don't know. Vandalism? Some kids messing around?" Quinn shook her head slowly. The carvings were too precise, too uniform. Each one was roughly the size of her palm, and while she couldn't make out the exact shape from this angle, something about them tugged at a memory she couldn't quite reach. A shape she'd seen before. A shape that had been haunting the edges of her dreams for three years, ever since she'd found Morris's badge in an abandoned warehouse with no body, no explanation, no nothing except a smell like burning copper and a single carved symbol on the wall that the forensic team had dismissed as无关紧要. "Davies. Tell me about the body." "Multiple trauma to the head, looks like. Blunt force. But we won't know more until the ME—" "Any ID on the weapon?" "That's the thing." Davies rubbed the back of his neck. "There's no weapon. No weapon found, anyway. But the wound pattern is... weird. Like something curved. And there's something else." "Show me." They walked to the edge of the platform, and Quinn finally allowed herself to look down. Thomas Whitmore lay face-up on the gravel between the tracks, his arms spread, his eyes open. The wound she'd been told about was obvious now—the crown of his head caved in with a violence that made her jaw tighten. But it was what lay beside him that drew her attention. A compass. The brass was green with age, the face etched with symbols she didn't recognize. The needle was frozen, pointing toward the tunnel that led deeper into the dark. "What is that?" "We think it's his," Davies said. "It's in his jacket pocket, partially. Must have fallen out when he... you know. The lab will want to—" "Leave it." "Ma'am?" Quinn descended into the tracks, her boots crunching on the gravel. She crouched beside the body, not touching it, just studying. The compass lay within arm's reach, its face turned up toward the flickering emergency lights they'd set up. The symbols weren't random, she realized now. They weren't decoration. They were protection wards—the kind she'd seen in that warehouse three years ago, the kind that Morris had tried to explain to her in the weeks before he disappeared, talking about a world that existed alongside their own, just out of sight. "His hands," she said quietly. "What?" "His hands. Look at his hands." Davies leaned over the edge, frowning. "They're... covered in something. Ash? Soil?" "Not soil." Quinn stood, brushing off her knees. "It's residue from the alchemical compounds used in certain... certain processes." Davies stared at her. "Ma'am, how do you—" "I read." She didn't elaborate. She'd spent three years reading everything she could get her hands on—occult journals, fringe science publications, accounts so fantastical they'd been dismissed as fiction. Everything that might help her understand what had happened to Morris. What had happened in that warehouse. What was happening now. "His hands were in the dirt," she continued, "but not from falling. Not from struggling. Look at the angle. He was kneeling. He was kneeling here, on the tracks, and he put his hands in the gravel like he was—" "Like he was what?" "Like he was waiting." The words hung in the stale air. Somewhere in the darkness, water dripped. A rat squeaked and scuttled away. "That's..." Davies paused. "That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it? I mean, maybe he fell and—" "Show me the photos of his shoes." It took a moment, but Davies flipped through his tablet, finding the images. He enlarged one, holding it up. The soles of Thomas Whitmore's shoes were coated in a thick layer of grey dust. "From the tracks," Davies said. "Probably." "No." Quinn pointed to a spot near the heel of the left shoe. "That's not track dust. That's something else. That's bone powder. And that—" she tapped another spot "—is iron filings. Someone treated this location. Prepared it." "Prepared it for what?" Quinn looked back at the compass, still lying beside the body, still pointing into the darkness of the tunnel. She thought about Morris. About his final case, the one that had pulled him into this world she was only now beginning to see. About the patterns he'd noticed, the connections he'd traced, the warning he'd tried to give her before he'd vanished into nothing. "Prepare the body for transport," she said. "And get me everything we have on Thomas Whitmore. His work history, his contacts, everywhere he's been for the past six months." "There's going to be questions," Davies said carefully. "About why we're pursuing this as anything other than a straightforward—" "There is no straightforward." Quinn climbed back onto the platform, her joints protesting slightly—she was forty-one, and these old bones were starting to feel every damp corner of the city. "Thomas Whitmore worked in the restricted archives of the British Museum. He had a compass in his pocket covered in symbols that I can guarantee you nobody in our forensics department can identify. He was found in an abandoned Tube station that has no business being used by anyone, let alone as a crime scene, with his hands covered in compounds that shouldn't exist outside of a century-old alchemy text." She turned to face him fully, her jaw setting in the hard line that had become her signature over the years. "Something else is going on here, Davies. Something that doesn't fit the picture. And I'm going to find out what it is." Even as she said it, she could feel the familiar weight settling onto her shoulders—the same weight she'd carried since Morris disappeared, the weight of knowledge that the world was larger and stranger and more dangerous than she'd ever been allowed to believe. The weight of knowing that somewhere, in the shadows she'd never noticed, something was watching. The compass needle trembled in the darkness of the tunnel, and for a moment, Quinn could have sworn she saw it shift.