Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ93Z94QPAN38E29GCYSNDC

The rain had been falling for three hours and showed no interest in stopping. Quinn turned up the collar of her jacket and pressed herself against the brick archway at the mouth of the alley, watching the man across the street. He hadn't seen her yet. He was doing that thing suspects always did when they thought they were clear — moving with a kind of deliberate casualness that screamed the opposite, shoulders hunched, eyes cutting left-right-left at every junction. The Saint Christopher medallion caught the amber of a streetlamp as he crossed, a brief gold flash against his dark coat. Tomás Herrera. Twenty-nine. Former paramedic. She'd had his file open on her desk for six days. She'd pulled him in connection with three separate incidents — a man found in Bermondsey with wounds that no attending physician could explain, a woman in Hackney who'd been declared dead and then wasn't, and a boy in his teens who'd turned up outside King's College Hospital with sutures so precise the registrar had said they looked like something out of a surgical textbook, except the technique was one nobody taught anymore. Herrera's name surfaced in the margins of all three cases. A witness here, a CCTV frame there. Never enough. Just enough to feel like something. She'd been sitting in a car outside The Raven's Nest for four hours this evening, watching the green neon bleed into the wet pavement. She'd seen him go in at nine. She'd expected to wait until midnight. He'd come back out at nine forty-seven, moving fast, no jacket despite the rain, and she'd known immediately that something had shifted inside that bar. She followed him north through Soho, staying half a block back, using the pedestrian traffic as cover even though the weather had thinned it considerably. He moved through Leicester Square without stopping, then up through the scattered late-night clusters of people near Tottenham Court Road, then northeast, the streets growing quieter and the architecture lower. By the time they reached Camden she'd been on her feet for forty minutes and her left knee was making its opinion known. He was heading somewhere specific. The zigzags and doublebacks of a man being careful rather than the loose wandering of a man who was lost. She checked her watch — the worn leather band soft against her wrist, the face scratched but functional. Quarter past eleven. She pulled out her phone, thought about calling it in, and put the phone away. Not yet. Not until she knew what she was calling in. She thought about Morris, briefly, the way she always did when a case started feeling strange around its edges. Three years ago and she still did it. A reflex. She refocused. Herrera turned down a side street she didn't recognize — that was unusual enough in itself, because she knew Camden the way she knew her own handwriting. The street wasn't on the mental map she'd built over eighteen years. It was narrow, running between a shuttered fishmonger and a building whose signage had been removed so thoroughly that only the ghost of adhesive remained on the brick. The street angled downward at a slope she felt in her thighs, and the rain ran along it in thin dark rivers. He stopped at a door. No — not a door. An old service entrance, the kind that opened onto maintenance stairs, the frame inset with iron. He produced something from his pocket. Something small. He pressed it against the frame, and she heard a sound she couldn't categorize — not quite a click, not quite a tone — and the door opened. He went through. The door swung shut behind him. Quinn held position for a count of ten. Then she crossed the street, moving quickly, and crouched at the iron frame. Up close she could see that the door was old but the mechanism was not — it had been retrofitted with something, a recessed fitting that gleamed dully even in the poor light. She examined the frame and found what she was looking for: a smear of condensation on the metal where Herrera's hand had rested, and beside it, a small carved impression in the iron shaped like a bone. Not a deadbolt. Not a keypad. Something she'd never seen at a door before. She straightened up and stood in the rain with water dripping from her cropped hair and thought clearly about her options. She could stand here and wait for him to come back out. She could call for backup without knowing what she was calling backup into. She could leave and come back in daylight. She could return to the station, write up what she'd observed, and do this properly. She thought about the boy outside King's College Hospital. Fourteen years old. Sutures nobody could explain. She thought about the way Morris had looked in the last week of his life — that particular expression she'd spent three years trying to name, the one she'd eventually decided was not fear exactly but something adjacent to it. The look of a man who had seen the edge of something enormous and was revising everything he thought he knew. She put her hand flat on the iron door. It was warmer than it should have been. She pushed. It opened. The stairs descended steeply into a darkness that wasn't quite total — there was a faint luminescence below, sourceless, the kind that seemed to come from the air itself, and with it came sound: voices layered on top of each other, the movement of people, something that might have been music if the intervals had been normal. The smell hit her next. Smoke and copper and something sweet she couldn't name. The smell of a market, unmistakably — commerce, bodies, transactions — but underneath it something older. She stood at the top of the stairs and looked down. Somewhere below her, Tomás Herrera was moving through whatever this was. And somewhere below her, beyond the reach of anything in her training or her case files or her eighteen years of decorated service, was the answer to the question she hadn't yet been able to properly formulate. The one that had started three years ago with Morris's face. Quinn descended. Each step took her further from the rain and the street and the city she thought she knew, and by the time she reached the bottom and the noise and the light broke over her in full, she understood that she had crossed some threshold that she would not be able to uncross. The Veil Market opened before her like a bruise in the dark.