Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNFNJB8GSSW3W09ZZVT28HW

The rain had been falling for three hours, turning London's streets into rivers of reflected neon. Detective Harlow Quinn ran through the slick pavement of Camden High Street, her breath burning in her chest, her footsteps splashing through puddles that soaked through the thin soles of her shoes. Eighteen years on the force had taught her that the bad guys always ran. What they never seemed to understand was that she always followed. The suspect—a wiry man in a dark jacket she'd been tailing for two weeks—cut hard left down an alley, disappearing into the shadowed mouth between a vintage record shop and a building whose windows had been boarded since the eighties. Quinn didn't slow. Her hand found her weapon out of habit, though she kept it lowered, swept low along her thigh. She wasn't firing into a crowd of civilians. Not tonight. Not ever if she could help it. The alley stank of wet cardboard and urine. Her shoes skidded on the wet cobblestones as she rounded the corner, and for a moment she lost sight of him—a gap of three seconds that felt like an eternity. Then she heard it: the rhythmic clatter of someone descending stairs at speed. There. A narrow staircase leading down, the iron railing slick with rain, the walls covered in graffiti that seemed to absorb what little light filtered from the street behind her. The suspect's footsteps echoed downward, growing distant. Quinn hesitated at the top of the stairs. Three years ago, her partner had gone down stairs like these. Different part of the city. Different dark. DS Morris had been chasing a lead on their case—a string of disappearances that the brass kept trying to bury—and he'd gone into a building alone. They found him two days later in the Thames, what was left of him. The official report said accident. The unofficial whispers said something else entirely. Quinn had spent eighteen months trying to find the truth, and what she'd found instead was a door that kept opening onto rooms she didn't have the keys to. She descended. The stairs wound down past street level, past what had once been the basement of some long-gone establishment, into darkness that the beam of her torch couldn't fully penetrate. The air changed—cool and stale, carrying a smell she couldn't name. Mineral, almost. Like the inside of a cave. The walls transitioned from brick to something older, stone worn smooth by decades or centuries, she couldn't tell. At the bottom, a corridor stretched ahead, lit by what looked like candles set into niches in the wall—dozens of them, maybe hundreds, their flames burning in colors that didn't belong to any fire she'd ever seen. Blue. Green. A pale gold that seemed to shift as she watched. The sound of voices drifted up from somewhere ahead, and the clatter of the suspect's footsteps had stopped. Quinn moved forward, her weapon now raised, her breath steady despite the hammering of her heart. She'd learned to control that. To push the fear down into a small, manageable box and lock it away where it couldn't affect her judgment. Morris's face flashed in her mind—his easy smile, the way he'd called her Harlow when no one else dared, the gap in the official timeline between his going into that building and his body turning up in the river. Forty-seven hours. No one had ever explained what happened in those forty-seven hours. The corridor opened into a cavern. It was vast—far larger than any basement she'd seen in London, larger than any underground space she knew existed beneath the city. Stalls and tents and makeshift tables spread across the uneven floor, dozens of them, maybe more, arranged in something that might have been a market layout if markets were designed by people who had never seen daylight. People moved between the stalls, and Quinn's trained eye catalogued them in fragments: a woman with silver hair and eyes that caught the candlelight at an impossible angle; a man whose shadow seemed to move independently of his body; a child—or something that looked like a child—browsing through a table of bottles filled with liquids that glowed from within. The Veil Market. She'd heard rumors. Three years of chasing shadows and half-truths, of whispers in interview rooms and bodies that didn't stay dead, had led her to the edges of this place. She'd never found the door. And now she'd stumbled through it by accident, chasing a suspect who apparently knew exactly where he was going. She spotted him. Twenty meters ahead, speaking urgently to a figure in a hooded cloak whose face she couldn't see. The suspect gestured toward the far end of the market, and the hooded figure shook their head slowly. Then the suspect turned, and his eyes found Quinn across the crowded space. For a moment, neither of them moved. Quinn was aware of the weight of her weapon. The futility of it. These people—these things—they weren't criminals she could arrest. They weren't suspects who would run and give her cause to fire. They were something else entirely, something she'd spent her career trying not to see because seeing meant admitting that the world was stranger and darker and more dangerous than she'd ever allowed herself to believe. The suspect bolted. He ran toward the far end of the market, shoving past a vendor whose wares looked like preserved organs in glass jars, ducking beneath a banner that seemed to be written in a language Quinn didn't recognize. She followed—because that was what she did, because she'd spent three years not knowing what had happened to Morris and this was the first real thread she'd had, because running was easier than thinking. The crowd parted around her. Some of them watched with expressions she couldn't read. Others turned away as if they couldn't bear to see what came next. The air grew colder as she ran, and the candlelight seemed to dim, and the voices faded until all she could hear was her own breathing and the wet slap of her shoes on the stone floor. The suspect reached the far wall—a sheer face of rock that shouldn't have existed beneath Camden, that looked like something carved by water over millennia—and pressed his palm to a spot near the floor. A section of the wall swung inward, revealing a passage that breathed wind from somewhere deep and dark. He glanced back at her. Just for a moment. And in that moment, Quinn saw something in his face that looked almost like pity. Then he was gone, and the wall was closing, and Quinn was standing alone at the edge of an abyss she didn't have a map for. Her watch ticked on her wrist. The leather strap, worn soft from years of twisting when she was thinking, had gone wet and cold. She could feel the rain still falling somewhere above her, through layers of stone and earth and whatever else separated this place from the world she knew. She could go back. Climb the stairs, walk back through the corridor, find her way to the surface and file a report that would go in a drawer and be forgotten. She could call it a night, go home to her flat, drink a beer and watch the rain streak down her windows and pretend she'd never seen any of this. Or she could follow. The wall was almost closed now, a sliver of darkness remaining, the passage beyond barely visible. Quinn thought of Morris. Of the forty-seven hours no one had explained. Of the look on his face the last time she'd seen him, when he'd said he was close to something big, that he could feel it, that this was the one that would make sense of everything. She stepped forward.