Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ9210TDESTAYS9PV0GBEY1

The call had come at half past two in the morning, and Quinn had driven through Camden's rain-slicked streets with the particular alertness of someone who had never fully learned to sleep. Now she stood at the top of the access shaft, flashlight in hand, looking down into the dark. "Crime scene's about forty metres in," said Constable Marsh, who was young enough that this qualified as an adventure. He had a torch strapped to his forehead like a coal miner. "Station's been decommissioned since the seventies. Council's been meaning to seal it up properly for years." "Evidently they didn't." Quinn descended the ladder one-handed, her leather watch catching the light as she gripped each rung. The walls sweated moisture. Below, the abandoned platform opened up in fragments of torchlight — curved Victorian brickwork, the ghost of a station name still visible beneath decades of grime, broken tiles arranged on the ground like fallen teeth. The body was at the far end. She pulled on nitrile gloves without looking away from the scene. The forensics officer, Sharma, was crouched near the victim, and he glanced up when Quinn's boots crunched on the platform. "Detective Quinn. You'll want to see this." She wanted to see all of it. She made herself walk the perimeter first, flashlight playing across every surface with methodical patience — the military bearing her old training officer had drilled into her, and that she'd never quite shaken. The platform was sealed off from the rest of the tunnel system at both ends, thick with a silence that wasn't just the absence of sound but felt like something denser. Pressure. The kind you felt in your ears. She'd felt something like it once before, three years ago. She didn't let herself follow that thought. The victim was male, early forties, wearing a well-made coat that had seen better days. No wallet, no phone. His right hand was curled loosely around something, and whatever it was had already been logged and bagged by Sharma — a small object, brass-coloured, sitting in an evidence bag near his knee. "What is that?" Quinn crouched beside Sharma. "Compass. Old one, by the look of it. Bit unusual." She reached for the bag and held it up. Even through the plastic, she could see the verdigris patina on the casing, and the faint markings on the face — not compass points, not numbers. Something else. Geometric. Etched with a precision that looked less like decoration than instruction. "Unusual," she agreed, setting it down carefully. "Theory so far," said Marsh from behind her, "is that someone lured him down here, killed him, and left through the access shaft. Door up top had the padlock cut. Clean cut, probably bolt cutters." Quinn looked at the body again. She looked at the platform. She looked at the two ends of the station, both sealed with heavy brick and board, both entirely undisturbed — no disturbed mortar, no fresh marks, no other ingress. "One way in," she said. "One way out," Marsh confirmed. "And we found no one when we came down." "The shaft was the only—" "Then who left?" Marsh opened his mouth and closed it again. Quinn straightened and swept her light across the platform ceiling, then the walls, then the floor in a slow grid pattern. The dust was the thing. The dust was wrong. It lay thickly everywhere except for a patch near the north end of the platform — not scraped away, not foot-trafficked, but absent. A circle of clean floor approximately two metres across, as though the air above it had been scoured. The brickwork at the boundary of that circle had a faint discolouration, the kind that brick took on when subjected to heat, or something very like heat. She was still staring at it when she heard the access shaft rattle. The figure who descended moved with a careful, deliberate urgency that Quinn recognised as the gait of someone trying very hard not to look frightened. Small, red-haired, wearing a coat two sizes too large and carrying a worn leather satchel that sagged with the weight of its contents. The woman pushed round glasses up her nose as she reached the platform floor and blinked in the torchlight. Quinn had her warrant card out before the woman took another step. "This is a crime scene. How did you get past the perimeter?" "I — the officers at the top let me through, actually. I work for the British Museum." The woman produced a lanyard with slightly more composure than her entrance had suggested she possessed. "Eva Kowalski. Research assistant, restricted archives. Someone called me." "Someone called you." "Yes." Kowalski glanced at the body, and something moved through her face — not the ordinary shock of a civilian confronted with death, but recognition. A kind of grim, resigned recognition. "I was asked to consult." Quinn looked at Marsh. Marsh looked at the ceiling. The ceiling offered nothing. "By whom?" Quinn asked. "A colleague of mine. Someone who studies — unusual circumstances." Kowalski set her satchel down and crouched near the evidence bag with the compass, studying it without touching it. Her curly red hair fell forward and she tucked it behind her left ear without seeming to notice she'd done it. "This is a Veil compass. Shade-made, by the sigils. It's attuned to supernatural rifts." She said it the way someone said a difficult word in a foreign language — careful, braced for disbelief. "Supernatural," Quinn said. "I know how that sounds." "Walk me through your interpretation." Kowalski looked up. Something in Quinn's tone had apparently surprised her — the absence of dismissal. She stood and turned toward the north end of the platform, toward the clean circle of floor, and pointed. "That's an ingress point. A rift. It opens and closes, and it's been active recently — probably within the last twelve hours. The compass would have led him to it." Quinn said nothing for a moment. She looked at the circle. She looked at the compass. She thought about a back alley in Whitechapel three years ago, and a sound like air tearing, and DS Morris stepping toward something that should not have been there, and then not stepping anywhere ever again. "The killer came through," Quinn said carefully. "And left the same way." Kowalski straightened and met her eyes. "That's why there's no one in the shaft, Detective. There's no one to find." Quinn looked at the compass a moment longer, at the sigils etched into its face. Then she picked up the evidence bag, turned it over in her hand, and felt the particular, settled weight of a case that had just become far more complicated than anyone upstairs was prepared to hear about. "Start from the beginning," she said. "Tell me everything you know about these rifts." Marsh made a sound of protest. Quinn silenced it with a glance. Kowalski opened her satchel, and the sound of books and papers filled the cold underground air.