Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNFSPVB725J74JHM5RX4P3B

The rain didn't fall so much as it attacked, a needle-sharp volley driven sideways by a Thames-born wind. Detective Harlow Quinn kept her shoulders hunched, the collar of her worn leather jacket turned up, but the water had already found the nape of her neck, a cold trickle tracing her spine. Her eyes, sharp and brown, never left the figure forty yards ahead, a dark smudge moving against the glittering smear of Soho’s neon. Tomás Herrera moved with a paramedic’s economy, but there was a tension in his stride that spoke of a man expecting a tail. He’d emerged from The Raven’s Nest ten minutes ago, the green neon of the sign bleeding color onto the wet pavement. Quinn had been leaning against a delivery van, sipping terrible coffee from a paper cup, her surveillance a study in boredom until he’d appeared. He hadn’t looked her way, but he’d checked his watch—the same worn leather watch she wore on her own left wrist, a habit she’d picked up from Morris—and then he’d started walking, fast. Not running. Running would have been an admission. She followed, her own pace measured, military-precision footfalls swallowed by the hiss of tires on wet tarmac and the drumming on countless awnings. Three years. For three years, since the night Morris’s radio had dissolved into a scream that was half static, half something else, she’d been picking at threads. Loose ends that led to places like The Raven’s Nest, to people like Herrera. A licensed medic turned back-alley sawbones for a crowd that never seemed to visit proper hospitals. His file said he’d lost his credentials for “ethical violations.” Her gut, and the coroner’s bizarre, unofficial notes on a certain John Doe with faint, impossible phosphorescence around his wounds, said otherwise. Herrera turned down a side street, then another, the commerce of Soho giving way to the grimy brick and industrial silence of the railway arches near Camden. The rain intensified, sheeting down in gusts. Quinn wiped water from her eyes, her salt-and-pepper hair plastered to her scalp. He was heading for the old Tube station. The disused one, its entrance a yawning mouth of black Victorian ironwork half-swallowed by scaffolding and safety fencing. He didn’t hesitate. He ducked under a frayed plastic barrier and vanished into the darkness. Quinn stopped at the mouth of the archway, the wind howling around its curve. This was it. The street ended here, both literally and procedurally. She had no warrant for this location. No backup. Her request for a surveillance team on Herrera had been denied, called a “fishing expedition” by a DCI who thought her obsession with Morris’s death was a grief-stricken liability. Going in alone, off-book, into an unsecured subterranean structure was career suicide. It was also, quite possibly, the kind of suicide that didn’t leave a body for an inquest. Morris’s face flashed in her mind, not as he was in life—laughing, a little rumpled—but as he was in the morgue: pale, confused, with a tiny, inexplicable burn mark on his palm in the shape of a spiraling rune. She ducked under the barrier. The darkness inside was absolute, smelling of damp brick, stale urine, and something older: ozone and cold stone. A flicker of movement ahead—Herrera’s silhouette against a faint, greenish light emanating from deeper within. She heard his footsteps echoing, then the distinctive scrape of a heavy metal door. The green light vanished, then reappeared as a thin line beneath the door. Quinn moved forward, one hand on the damp wall for guidance, the other resting on the grip of her service weapon. She reached the door. It was riveted iron, like something from a ship, set incongruously into the old station tilework. No handle. She pushed. It didn’t budge. Then she saw the slot. A narrow, dark opening at waist-height. Instinct made her reach into her pocket. Her fingers closed not around her warrant card, but around a small, smooth object she’d found tucked into the pages of Morris’s personal notebook after his death. She’d never understood what it was—a pale, lightweight disc, like polished bone, etched with minute, swirling lines. She’d kept it as a talisman, a piece of the puzzle. Almost without thought, she slid the bone token into the slot. There was a soft, clicking sound, like falling dominoes. The door swung inward silently. The noise hit her first. It was the low, bustling murmur of a marketplace, but layered with stranger sounds: a low, melodic humming that seemed to come from the air itself, the clink of glass on glass, the sizzle of something cooking that smelled of spices and burnt sugar. The green light she’d seen was from countless glass globes hanging from the curved, tiled ceiling of the abandoned Tube platform, each glowing with a captive, bioluminescent shimmer. The Veil Market stretched out before her, a scene from a hallucination taking root in London’s bedrock. Stalls constructed from old train parts and rich, dark fabrics lined the platform. Vendors haggled with customers whose forms seemed to shift at the edge of vision—a tall figure with an unnaturally graceful neck, a squat, bearded man whose shadow didn’t match his shape. The air was thick with the scent of exotic incense, pungent herbs, and the iron tang of ozone. And there, already blending into the crowd, was Tomás Herrera. He was talking to a woman whose hair seemed to be made of living ivy, accepting a small, clay jar from her. He tucked it into his coat, his Saint Christopher medallion glinting for a second in the green light. Quinn’s training screamed at her to retreat, to call for support, to categorize this as a mass hallucination or an elaborate trap. But her detective’s mind, the part that solved puzzles, was already cataloging. The goods on the stalls weren’t normal contraband. Vials of liquid that swirled with internal light. Books bound in what looked like scaled hide. Jagged crystals that pulsed with a slow rhythm. This was the source. This was where the threads led. The banned substances, the information, the tools of a hidden world that had taken Morris. Herrera began to move again, heading for the far end of the platform where a tunnel-mouth led into deeper darkness. To follow him was to leave the last vestige of the world she knew. The rules here were not her rules. The dangers were not named in any Metropolitan Police manual. She saw a stallkeeper with eyes like polished jet watching her, his gaze knowing and assessing. She was an intruder here, armed only with a badge that meant nothing and a grief that drove her forward. Her sharp jaw tightened. She thought of the scar on Herrera’s forearm, noted in his file as stemming from a “knife attack.” She looked at the strange, glowing goods around her. A different kind of knife, perhaps. Morris had followed a thread. It had gotten him killed, but it had also gotten him close to the truth. She could almost hear him. *Come on, Harlow. Since when do you wait for permission?* Harlow Quinn took a deep breath of the strange, spiced air, let her hand fall away from her gun, and stepped fully into the green glow of the Veil Market. She moved with purposeful stride, not hiding now, but not challenging anyone either. Her eyes remained locked on Herrera’s back as he slipped into the tunnel. The worn leather watch on her wrist felt heavy with cold rainwater and the weight of three years of questions. The chase was no longer on the rain-soaked streets of her city. It was here, in the belly of a different London altogether. And she would see it through.