Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ92V9DN88YWJEGCQ3GV25Y

The rain came down in sheets, turning the Soho gutters into small rivers and hazing the streetlights into smeared yellow blooms. Quinn had been watching the bar for forty minutes from the doorway of a closed chemist across the street, her collar turned up against the wet, when the door finally opened and spilled warm light onto the pavement. Tomás Herrera. She recognized him immediately — the olive skin, the short curly hair plastered now to his forehead, the way he moved with a kind of coiled watchfulness, scanning left and right before committing to a direction. The scar on his left forearm caught the green wash of the Raven's Nest sign as he pulled his jacket sleeve down. She had his photograph on her board at the station, tacked beside three others and a web of red string. She gave him five seconds, then moved. He was heading north, toward Oxford Street. Quinn fell into his wake at a distance of about thirty meters, keeping close to the shopfronts, letting the rain serve as cover. He had the gait of someone who expected to be followed — quick changes of pace, a casual glance into a darkened window that was really a mirror check. Former paramedic, her file said, but whoever trained him in counter-surveillance hadn't been any NHS orientation course. At the junction he turned east without signaling his intention, a sharp cut around a group of tourists sheltering under a pub awning. Quinn lengthened her stride and turned the corner in time to see his jacket — dark green, hood still down despite the downpour — disappearing into the mouth of a side street. She followed. He was moving faster now. Either he'd made her or he was simply in a hurry. The side street was narrow and dark, its single working lamp at the far end creating more shadow than light. Herrera's footsteps were audible over the rain, a quick slap against wet stone, and then he rounded a corner and the sound changed — less open, more enclosed, like a throat. Quinn's hand found the weight of her warrant card in her inside pocket. Her baton was on her hip. She had not called this in, which she knew, if pressed, she couldn't fully justify. The file on Herrera was thin and circumstantial: known associate of persons of interest, observed at three locations connected to an ongoing investigation, a former medical professional who had lost his license under documentation so vague it read like it had been deliberately obscured. She didn't have enough for an arrest. She barely had enough for a conversation. But three years ago, DS Morris had followed a thread that looked exactly like this one — thin, circumstantial, pulling toward something she didn't have a name for — and he hadn't come back from it. The coroner had ruled cardiac event. Quinn had read the file eleven times and never once believed it. She came around the corner and stopped. The street dead-ended at a blank brick wall. To her left, a rusted iron staircase descended below street level, bolted to the wall of a building that had been derelict for years. At its base, a door stood slightly open, leaking no light. She could see the scuff marks on the wet iron treads where someone had recently passed. She stood in the rain and looked at the door. Herrera was down there. Below that was whatever he'd been moving toward with that practiced, careful urgency. She thought about the bone token she'd found in Morris's personal effects, catalogued and then quietly removed from evidence before anyone senior could ask questions she couldn't answer. Smooth and pale, carved with a symbol she'd spent six months trying to identify before a curator at a small museum in Holborn had gone very still when she showed him a photograph and said, quietly, that he'd need her to leave before he said anything else. She had looked it up herself, eventually. Entry token. Markets that moved. Things sold and traded that had no business being sold and traded. The door at the bottom of the stairs was iron-grey and featureless. Around its edges, just visible in the ambient light from the street above, she could see a faint luminescence — not quite a color she had a name for. Quinn checked her watch. The worn leather strap was soaked through. Two forty-seven in the morning. She should call it in. File an observations report, request backup, run Herrera through the system again in the morning with fresh eyes and fresh authorization. That was the correct procedure. That was eighteen years of decorated service telling her to stand down. She thought about Morris. She thought about the way the coroner had not met her eyes. She put her foot on the top iron tread. It held. She put her weight on it, and the metal was solid and cold even through her shoe, and the rain hammered against her shoulders as she descended, one step and then another, and the street noise softened above her like a door closing on a crowded room. By the time she reached the bottom, the city felt very far away. The door had no handle on this side. Just a small depression in the iron, shaped in a way that was almost organic, almost like a cupped palm. She looked at it for a long moment. Then she reached into the inside pocket of her jacket, past her warrant card, past her phone. She found the small waxed paper envelope she'd taken from Morris's box of effects and had carried for three years without examining too closely why. She unfolded it. The bone token was cold in her fingers and lighter than it looked. She pressed it into the depression in the door. There was a sound that was not quite a click, not quite a tone, not quite either of those things. The door swung inward. Warm air rushed out carrying the smell of candle wax and something older, mineral and strange. Beyond the threshold she could hear voices, movement, the low murmur of commerce in a language that was only partly English. Somewhere in there, Herrera was moving through the crowd. She could see the flicker of firelight on old tile, the curved ceiling of what had once been a Tube station, stalls stretching away into amber shadow. She could see the back of a dark green jacket. Quinn put the bone token in her breast pocket. She squared her shoulders with something very close to military precision. She stepped through the door.