Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNFX4S2AQP0NZSNEYD0BCM7

The rain had been falling for three hours, turning London's streets into rivers of reflected neon. Detective Harlow Quinn ran through slick pavement, her shoes slapping against asphalt, breath cutting sharp in her chest. Eighteen years on the force had taught her to gauge a chase—the suspect's stamina, the distance, the odds of losing them around the next corner. This one felt wrong. The man ahead of her moved too fast, too purposeful, like he knew exactly where he was going. She'd been watching The Raven's Nest for six nights. The bar in Soho with its distinctive green neon sign bleeding color onto the wet pavement. A place that appeared to be nothing more than a dimly lit establishment with old maps on the walls and black-and-white photographs. A place where men drank whiskey and talked too quietly. She'd clocked the regulars, noted the comings and goings, built a file that said nothing and everything about a group that called themselves the clique. The suspect had emerged at half past eleven,避开 her surveillance position with a practiced ease that told her everything. He'd known she was there. Had probably known for days. Now he ran. Quinn pumped her arms harder, closing the gap by three meters. The rain plastered her short salt-and-pepper hair to her skull, water streaming down her sharp jawline. Forty-one years old and she could still do this. Her worn leather watch jangled against her left wrist—the only piece of sentiment she allowed herself, an old habit from a partner who'd been dead for three years. Morris had believed in the job. He'd believed in the truth. The truth had gotten him killed, and the case remained officially unsolved, buried in files she still pulled at three in the morning, looking for what she'd missed. The suspect veered left onto a side street, disappearing around a corner. Quinn adjusted her trajectory, her bearing tight with military precision as she followed. The streets were emptier here, the tourists and late-night drinkers replaced by shuttered shops and the hum of infrastructure. She rounded the corner and found nothing. No. Not nothing. A set of stairs leading down, illuminated by a single flickering lamp. Old. Industrial. The kind of entrance that belonged to something forgotten. She paused, chest heaving, rain dripping from her chin. Her hand found her weapon without conscious thought. The Metropolitan Police didn't cover this territory. These stairs led somewhere that wasn't on any map she'd studied in her eighteen years of service. From somewhere below, she heard a door close. The echo traveled up through concrete and moisture, distant but unmistakable. Quinn descended. The stairs wound down past layers of London history—Victorian brick giving way to wartime concrete, then something older, stone worn smooth by decades of moisture. The air changed, growing cooler, thick with the smell of damp earth and something else. Something that burned at the edges. Incense, maybe. Or something chemical. At the bottom, a tunnel stretched forward into darkness. She could make out shapes—stalls, perhaps, or booths—arranged in a rough semicircle. The walls were covered in symbols she didn't recognize, faded and strange. This wasn't an abandoned Tube station. Or rather, it was, but it wasn't empty. The Veil Market. The name surfaced from a file she'd read months ago and dismissed as fantasy. A supernatural black market that moved every full moon, selling enchanted goods and information. She'd laughed at the time. A detective didn't have time for fairy tales. But here she was, standing in a place that defied every rational explanation, and her suspect had vanished into the crowd. People moved between the stalls. Not many—perhaps thirty, forty at most—but enough to create noise, enough to hide a single man. They wore clothes that belonged to different eras, different aesthetics, as if fashion had become irrelevant. Some glanced at her with eyes that reflected light wrong, pupils too large or irises that shifted color like oil on water. Others ignored her entirely, focused on transactions she couldn't quite see clearly. A woman at the nearest stall was selling what appeared to be bottled voices, each container labeled in languages Quinn couldn't read. A man nearby examined a compass that spun without stopping, its needle chasing something that wasn't north. No one had warned her about this. No training, no protocol, no backup. She was alone in a place where the rules of the world she'd spent her life enforcing simply didn't apply. The suspect emerged from behind a curtain of shadow on the far side of the market. He saw her. She saw him see her. And then he walked through a door that hadn't been there a moment ago and disappeared again. Quinn moved forward, pushing through the crowd. People stepped aside, but not quickly enough to seem respectful—more like she was something undesirable, something that didn't belong. The shadows pressed in. The symbols on the walls seemed to pulse with weak light. She reached the door. Wooden, old, unremarkable except for the fact that it shouldn't exist. Her hand touched the handle. Cold. So cold it burned. Beyond it, she knew, was territory she didn't understand. The suspect was more than a criminal. The clique was more than a gang. Everything she'd been investigating pointed to something that lived in the margins, in the spaces between what people believed and what was real. Morris had died in one of those spaces. She'd felt it in the hollow look in his eyes when he'd come home that last night, before he'd walked out the next morning and never walked back. Her watch ticked. The leather strap was cracked from years of use. Morris had given it to her, back when they were partners, back when they'd believed they were fighting the good fight against enemies that could be seen and understood. The door waited. Quinn had spent three years chasing shadows, and now she'd found them. The rational part of her mind screamed to go back, call in specialists, wait for daylight, do anything except walk through a door into darkness on the word of a woman who'd spent her adult life trusting evidence and procedure. But Morris had walked into darkness too. And she'd never learned what he'd found. She opened the door. The cold swallowed her whole.