Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ94N33HDVHRQAWWFSS9XC1

The call had come in at half two in the morning — a body in an abandoned Tube station beneath Camden, discovered by a drunk who'd stumbled through a rusted service door looking for somewhere to sleep. Quinn had been awake anyway, sitting at her kitchen table with cold tea and a folder she couldn't bring herself to close, so she'd taken the call herself rather than passing it down the chain. She ducked under the police tape at 3:17 a.m., according to her watch, and the smell hit her before she'd made it ten steps into the tunnel: old stone, old water, something else beneath it — sweet and sharp, like overripe fruit cut with ammonia. Her torch beam swept the curved walls. The tile work was Victorian, cream and oxblood, most of it cracked. Decommissioned signage still clung to brackets along the platform edge, ghost lettering for a station that didn't appear on any current map she'd ever seen. Her DS, Reeves, was already there, crouched near the body with his own torch and a notepad, his breath clouding in the cold air. "Thought you were off tonight," he said without looking up. "Evidently not." Quinn moved along the platform edge, scanning the space before she let herself look at the body. She'd learned that from Morris, years ago. Look at the room before you look at the dead. The dead will keep. The station was large. A proper terminus layout — two platform tracks running parallel, the far rail beds sunk below platform level, choked with a generation's worth of debris. But the platform itself had been cleared. Not cleaned, not maintained — cleared, deliberately, recently. The grime on the tiles stopped in a rough rectangle roughly eight meters long and four wide, as if someone had dragged things away from the center rather than simply neglecting the edges. Around the perimeter of that cleared space, Quinn's torchlight caught faint marks on the tile. She stepped closer to one. A sigil. Something carved directly into the tile with a sharp instrument, shallow but deliberate. She straightened and moved toward Reeves. Now she looked at the body. Male, late thirties, well-dressed — wool overcoat, decent shoes, no wallet in the exterior pockets. He was lying on his back with his arms at his sides in an arrangement that didn't match any fall she'd ever seen. People who died suddenly didn't lay themselves out. His face was slack, undamaged. No visible wounds. "Forensics?" Quinn asked. "En route. Uniform found him twenty minutes before they rang you." Reeves stood, tucking his pen behind his ear. He was ten years younger than Quinn and carried a cheerful confidence she'd never fully trusted. "Looks like a handover gone wrong. Drug deal, maybe. Someone stripped the wallet and left him." Quinn crouched where Reeves had been and studied the man's hands. His nails were unbroken. No defensive scraping, no bruising on the knuckles. She tilted his chin gently to one side with a gloved finger and checked his neck. Nothing. She checked his wrists. On the inside of his left forearm, half-hidden by his cuff, was a mark. Not a bruise. A shape burned cleanly into the skin, the edges precise as a brand, but without the surrounding tissue damage heat should have caused. The same sigil she'd seen on the tile. She stood up. "Drug deal," she repeated. "Fits the location. These old service tunnels get used for all sorts." Reeves shrugged. "Stripped his ID, left him here. Probably panicked." "Then where's the struggle?" Quinn moved her torch slowly across the cleared tile. "No blood. No overturned merchandise. Nothing knocked over, nothing dropped. If someone panicked badly enough to leave the body, they didn't have time to police the scene." She gestured at the deliberate clearing. "And this wasn't them doing it in a hurry." Reeves frowned. "Could've been done beforehand." "Why? For a drug handover, you clear eight square meters of tile and light out a pattern on it?" He opened his mouth, then closed it. Quinn walked the perimeter of the cleared space slowly, counting the sigils. Seven of them, evenly spaced. The spacing was too precise for a person to have paced it out without measuring. She photographed each one with her phone before forensics arrived to contaminate everything with good intentions. At the far end of the platform, near the mouth of the old tunnel, her torch caught something half-tucked behind a rusted support beam. She crossed to it, crouched, and didn't touch it immediately — just looked. A small brass compass, roughly the size of a pocket watch, its casing covered in a fine bloom of green verdigris. The face was etched with fine markings that weren't navigational — the same style as the sigils on the tile, compressed and layered. She angled her torch and watched the needle. It wasn't pointing north. It was pointing back down the platform, directly toward the body. Her jaw tightened. She'd seen something like this once before. Not the object itself but the principle of it — a tool that oriented to something other than what tools were supposed to orient to. Morris had tried to explain it to her the week before he died, in the parking structure on Aldgate, laughing at himself as he said it because he hadn't believed it either, not quite. She'd told him he was working too hard. She'd been wrong about that. Quinn straightened and looked back down the platform. Reeves was on his phone now, turned away, explaining something to someone with the careful patience of a man managing up. The forensics van would arrive within the hour. After that, this scene would become evidence in a case that would be filed under something it wasn't. She photographed the compass without touching it and noted the exact position against the beam in her own book, not the official log. Then she pulled out her phone and scrolled to a number she'd added six months ago and never used. Eva Kowalski answered on the fourth ring, her voice thick with sleep and then, as Quinn identified herself, abruptly alert. "The Tube station under Camden," Quinn said quietly, her eyes still on the compass needle as it trembled, still pointing. "I need to know what I'm looking at. Get here before my forensics team does, and bring whatever you keep in that bag of yours." She paused. "And don't tell me this is nothing. I'm past that." A silence on the line. Then the soft sound of a lamp clicking on.