Run: 2026-02-19-01KHSZ14C47534DNXEF3MSK16J

The air in the abandoned Tube station was cold and thick with the scent of damp concrete and something else—ozone, maybe, or rust. Detective Harlow Quinn descended the cracked tile steps, her footsteps echoing against the curved walls. The emergency lights strung along the tunnel flickered, casting long, jumping shadows. The scene was cordoned off at platform level with police tape. Uniformed officers stood at attention. A forensics team in white suits moved through the space like ghosts, their headlamps slicing the gloom. A figure separated from the cluster of white suits and approached. Detective Sergeant Greaves, a man with a perpetually concerned expression and a bad knee that made him list to one side. “Quinn. Glad you’re here. It’s a strange one.” “They’re all strange down here, Greaves.” Quinn’s voice was flat. She scanned the platform. It was the Camden branch, closed since the seventies. Graffiti covered the vintage advertising tiles—faded exhortations to drink Bovril faded between modern tags. The Veil Market used this place. She’d tracked rumors of it for months. Entry required a bone token. She didn’t have one, but a murder gave her a warrant. “Victim’s over here.” Greaves led her past a forensics photographer documenting a spill of dark liquid on the tiles. Not blood. Too black, with a faint iridescent sheen under the lights. The body lay near the tunnel mouth, half in shadow. Male, late thirties, dressed in expensive but practical dark wool. No visible wounds. His face was slack, eyes open and staring at the curved ceiling. The expression wasn’t fear or pain. It was blank. Empty. “John Doe for now,” Greaves said. “No wallet, no phone. Prints aren’t in the system. Cause of death isn’t obvious. No blunt force, no stabbing, no ligature marks. Petechiae suggest asphyxiation, but there’s no bruising on the neck.” Quinn crouched, her knees protesting. She didn’t touch the body. Her eyes traced the lines of his clothing. The wool coat was unbuttoned. Beneath it, a dark sweater. His left hand was curled loosely. Something glinted between his fingers. “Bag that,” she said to a forensic tech nearby, pointing. The tech nodded, moved in with tweezers and a evidence pouch. Quinn stood, her gaze lifting to the tunnel beyond. The darkness there felt thick, resistant to the portable lights. “Who found him?” “Anonymous tip called into the station. Male voice, no caller ID. Said there was a body at the old Camden station, platform level. That was three hours ago.” “No witnesses down here? No marketeers?” Greaves shifted his weight off his bad leg. “Place was empty when uniforms arrived. Looks like it was cleared out in a hurry. Left some stuff behind.” He gestured to a stall further down the platform—a collapsed wooden framework, a scatter of strange items: brass scales, bundles of dried herbs, small vials containing liquids that seemed to move on their own. Quinn walked over. The items were evidence of the Market, but they felt staged. Too obvious. A deliberate scatter to explain the location. “What’s your read?” she asked. Greaves joined her, rubbing his chin. “Robbery gone wrong? The Market deals in shady goods. Maybe the victim was a buyer or seller, things turned violent. Killer took his identification, cleared out.” “Violent how? No wounds.” “Poison? Something quick-acting. We’ll know after the post-mortem.” Quinn moved back to the body. The forensic tech had bagged the item from the victim’s hand—a small brass compass. Through the clear plastic, Quinn could see the casing was tarnished with verdigris. The face was etched with intricate, spiraling sigils. The needle wasn’t pointing north. It was pointing straight into the dark tunnel. “That’s odd,” Greaves said, peering at it. “Compass is broken.” Quinn didn’t answer. She knew what it was. A Veil Compass. She’d read descriptions in the files she’d compiled after Morris’s death. It pointed to supernatural rifts. She looked from the compass to the tunnel. The needle was steady. “I want lights down that tunnel,” she said. “Quinn, it’s a crime scene here. The tunnel’s not relevant.” “It is if the killer went that way.” “There’s no evidence of that. No footprints, no disturbance past the platform edge. Forensics swept the first twenty meters. Nothing.” Quinn stared into the darkness. The air coming from the tunnel was colder than the platform air. It carried a faint, metallic hum, a vibration she felt in her teeth more than heard. She walked to the platform edge. The tracks were gone, ripped up long ago. The tunnel floor was a mess of debris—brick fragments, old newspapers, pooled water. She switched on her torch, sweeping the beam. No footprints. But near the wall, about five meters in, something reflected the light. A patch of the brickwork glistened, wet. Not water. It had the same iridescent sheen as the spill near the body. “There,” she said. Greaves limped over, squinting. “Oil? Some chemical?” “Same substance as by the body. He wasn’t killed on the platform. He was moved.” Greaves frowned. “Why move a body? And from where? That tunnel leads to a dead end—the line was sealed when they closed the station.” Quinn’s mind worked, pieces clicking. The anonymous tip. The cleared-out Market. The staged scatter of items. The body with no wounds, holding a compass that pointed into the tunnel. The spill of unknown substance here and there. “The tip came after the Market cleared out,” she said quietly. “After the body was placed. This isn’t a robbery scene. It’s a message. A taunt.” “A taunt from who?” “Someone who knows we’re looking for the Market. Someone who wanted us to find this.” She looked at the compass in the evidence bag. “And this.” The hum from the tunnel seemed to intensify. A draft of cold air sighed out, lifting the hairs on Quinn’s arms. Her worn leather watch felt tight on her wrist. “Greaves, I need a team to search that tunnel thoroughly. And I want spectral analysis on that fluid. Now.” “Quinn, this is a straightfor—” “It’s not.” Her voice cut through his protest, sharp with military precision. “Look at his eyes.” She pointed her torch beam at the victim’s face. Up close, the emptiness wasn’t just an expression. The irises were washed out, a pale, milky grey. Normal eyes didn’t look like that post-mortem, not this soon. “His soul’s gone,” she heard herself say, the words leaving her lips before she could filter them. Greaves stared at her. “What?” She didn’t elaborate. She couldn’t. Not without mentioning Morris, the way his body had been found with that same hollowed-out look. The official report called it a sudden catastrophic stroke. Quinn knew it was something else. Something that left the shell intact but scraped the person out. The compass needle quivered, then swung a few degrees to the left, pointing at a section of tunnel wall that looked no different from the rest. “There’s a rift,” Quinn muttered. “Close. Maybe it’s still open.” “A rift? Quinn, you’re not making sense.” She ignored him, stepping off the platform onto the tunnel floor. The debris crunched under her boots. She walked toward the glistening patch, her torch beam fixed on the wall the compass indicated. The bricks were old, mortar crumbling. But one section, about waist-high, looked wrong. The pattern was slightly off, the bricks set a fraction too neatly. A door. A concealed entrance. She pressed her gloved hand against the cold brick. A vibration thrummed through the material. The metallic hum was loudest here. “This isn’t a dead end,” she said, turning back to Greaves. His face was a mask of confusion and concern. “They moved the body from in there. Through a hidden door. The spill happened during transport. The victim died in there, wherever *there* is.” “You’re talking about a secret room? In a Tube tunnel?” “Not a room.” Quinn looked at the compass needle, unwavering. “A gateway.” The implications settled over her like a weight. The Market wasn’t just a black market. It was a front. A waypoint. This victim hadn’t been killed in a deal gone bad. He’d been killed by something that came through from the other side. And someone—the tipster—wanted the police to find the body, to find the compass, to maybe even find the door. Why? To expose the Market? To lure someone in? To lure *her* in? She thought of Morris again. His case was buried, classified. But someone knew. Someone who understood that she was looking, that she’d been piecing together the supernatural truths behind the city’s unexplained crimes. The cold air from the tunnel seemed to wrap around her. She took a step back from the wall. “Seal this area,” she ordered, her voice leaving no room for argument. “Full forensic quarantine. No one touches that wall. I want a patrol posted here 24/7 until we get a structural engineer and a… a specialist team down here.” “What kind of specialist team?” “I’ll make the calls.” She turned, walking back to the platform. Her mind was already racing ahead, through the chain of command, through the contacts she’d cultivated over the past three years. People who wouldn’t laugh at terms like “rift” or “soul theft.” She paused by the body, looking down at the empty face. “And get me everything you have on recent missing persons,” she said to Greaves. “Anyone reported vanished under unusual circumstances. Especially anyone with known connections to occult groups or fringe research.” “You think he’s one of them?” “I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She glanced once more at the dark tunnel, at the hidden door she couldn’t yet see. “Or he knew something he shouldn’t.”