Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ9364K4V149AQ0GWTPNZ6H

The rain came down in sheets, turning the Soho pavement into a mirror that threw back the red and amber of traffic lights in long, smeared ribbons. Detective Harlow Quinn moved fast, her boots splitting puddles, her eyes fixed on the figure thirty metres ahead who had just made the mistake of looking back. He'd broken when she'd shown her warrant card at the bar. One second he was nursing a whiskey at the counter of the Raven's Nest, the next he was through the side door and into the alley before she'd finished saying his name. "Herrera. Tomás Herrera. Stop — Metropolitan Police." He didn't stop. They never did. Quinn cut right around a cluster of tourists huddled under a restaurant awning, their confused faces a pale blur as she passed. She clocked Herrera at the end of the alley turning north onto a side street, his dark jacket soaked through, the Saint Christopher medallion she'd seen flash under the bar's light now lost to shadow and rain. She'd been watching him for three weeks. She'd built the profile carefully: former paramedic, NHS-struck-off, known associate of at least four people connected to the cluster of incidents she couldn't yet name properly in any official report. Incidents that left no forensic trail. Incidents that left her lying awake at night thinking about Morris. She pushed that thought down and ran harder. Herrera was fit. She'd noted that too. No excess weight, economical movement — he ran like someone who had needed to run before and had learned not to waste energy on panic. But Quinn had eighteen years of footwork on London streets and she knew the maze of Soho the way she knew her own handwriting. She cut through a narrow passage between two restaurants, emerged onto the parallel street, and had closed the gap to fifteen metres before he heard her behind him and broke into a full sprint. They went north. The crowds thinned. The neon advertising gave way to shuttered shop fronts and the occasional sick yellow of a streetlamp. Herrera vaulted a low bollard without breaking stride and Quinn went around it, the worn leather of her watch strap catching on her coat cuff, her left hand automatically pressing it flat — a habit, not a distraction. He was heading for Camden. She could feel it in the geography of his choices, always bearing north-northwest when he had options, never doubling back toward the busier streets where CCTV would be dense and helpful. He knew about cameras. Another note in the profile. Her radio crackled. Backup was six minutes out. Six minutes was nothing and everything. Herrera dropped suddenly, almost disappearing, and it took her half a second to understand he'd taken a staircase — concrete steps leading down into the forecourt of what looked like a derelict entrance, the kind of Victorian mouth the old Underground left scattered across the city like forgotten teeth. There was no active Tube line beneath this stretch. She knew that. She had maps in her head. Quinn hit the top of the stairs without slowing, her hand finding the iron railing, and descended into dark. At the bottom, a corridor. The emergency lighting here was wrong — not TfL yellow, not municipal anything, but a series of small paper lanterns strung along the ceiling, each one burning amber and casting the kind of light that made depth judgement difficult. She drew her extendable baton. Torch. She wanted her torch. She unclipped it with her left hand and swept the beam ahead. Herrera was twenty metres down the corridor and he'd stopped running. He stood with his back to her, breathing hard, hands at his sides. The corridor opened beyond him into something her torch beam couldn't fully reach. Sound reached her before her eyes made sense of it. Voices — dozens of them, overlapping, speaking languages she could identify and some she couldn't — and under that a smell: woodsmoke, something chemical she associated with hospital dispensaries, and something else, older, mineral, like wet stone and copper. Quinn moved forward slowly, baton extended. "Herrera. Hands where I can see them." He turned. In the torchlight his face was younger than his file suggested and older in the eyes, which were dark and exhausted and not, she noted, afraid of her. He raised both hands to chest height. The scar along his left forearm caught the light. "Detective," he said, his accent blurring the word softly. "You need to stop here." "I need you to turn around and put your hands behind your back." "I can't let you go in there." He nodded over his shoulder at the space she couldn't yet see properly. "Not without preparation. Not without a token." "I'll take my chances." "You won't, though." His voice carried no threat. That was what made her hesitate — the complete absence of threat in it, only a tired, careful certainty. "You'll go in there and you'll see things that will end your career and possibly your mind if you don't have context for them, and then I'll have done you worse harm than anything you think I've done." Quinn kept the torch on his face and listened to the sounds beyond him and felt the hairs on her forearms rise. She thought about the incident reports she'd been reading for three years. The ones she kept in a separate folder, not on the system. The ones that started with DS Morris. "What is that place?" she said. Herrera lowered his hands by a fraction. He seemed to read something in her face and chose his next words as carefully as sutures. "A market. It's underground. It moves — it won't be here by next full moon." He paused. "The people in there are not all people, Detective Quinn. That's not a threat, that's a fact, and I think some part of you already knows that facts like that are possible." The rain was a distant sound above them now. Her backup was four minutes out, maybe three. She thought about calling it in and immediately understood that she wouldn't. Calling it in meant explaining the paper lanterns and the copper smell and a former paramedic who spoke to her like she was a patient being told the diagnosis was serious but survivable. She looked past him into the amber dark, at the shapes moving through it, at the stalls draped in cloth that wasn't quite any colour she had a name for, at the figures bent over things she couldn't make out. "If I go in there," she said, "I want to go in standing up with my eyes open." Herrera was quiet for a moment. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and produced a small object which he held out on his open palm. Bone. Shaped and worn smooth. Small enough to close a fist around. "That's what it takes," he said. Quinn looked at it. She looked at him. She thought about Morris — about the way the file had been quietly closed, the way her superintendent had looked at her when she'd pushed, the way every rational explanation had worn thin and given way to something she'd refused to name for three years because naming it meant she'd been standing on uncertain ground all along. She reached out and took the token. It was warm in her hand in a way that had nothing to do with Herrera's body heat, and she registered that wrongness and filed it precisely, the way she filed everything — methodical, honest, without flinching. "You're still under caution," she said. Tomás Herrera almost smiled. "Understood, Detective." He turned and led her forward. "Stay close. Don't touch anything on the stalls without asking first. And don't accept any drink." Quinn followed him into the market, her torch still lit, her eyes moving the way they'd been trained to move — systematically, missing nothing — and her notebook already open in her mind, filling with things she didn't yet have language for.