Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT06BDG31PSHC3T0DQ79QT7

The air grew colder with each step down into the earth. Detective Harlow Quinn’s boots echoed on the grimy concrete stairs, a lonely percussion against the oppressive silence of the abandoned Tube station. Above, the rumble of Camden was a distant memory. Down here, the world was stale air, damp decay, and the faint, metallic tang of old electricity. Blue and white police tape stretched across the archway leading to the platform, a garish slash of modernity in the century-old rot. PC Davies, young enough that his uniform still looked stiff on him, stood beside it. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "Detective. Forensics are just finishing up." Quinn dipped under the tape, her gaze already sweeping the platform. The domed ceiling was layered with soot and grime, ceramic tiles cracked and missing like broken teeth. A single, powerful halogen lamp, set up by the SOCO team, bleached a wide circle of the platform, throwing everything else into sharp, monstrous shadow. In the centre of that light lay the body. "Talk to me, Davies." Quinn’s voice was low, cutting through the stillness. She stopped a few feet from the victim, hands tucked into the pockets of her long coat. "John Doe. No ID. Tramp, looks like, from the state of him. Medical Examiner puts time of death between ten and midnight last night. Found by a pair of urban explorers this morning." Davies gestured vaguely with a gloved hand. "No witnesses. No cameras down here that work, obviously. Looks like a deal gone sour. He got the short end of it." Quinn approached the body. The man wasn't a tramp. The clothes were worn, yes, but they were cut from a-heavy, dark wool that she didn't recognise. His boots were handmade, scuffed but of high quality. And the satchel at his side, though empty, was fine, tooled leather. He lay on his back, eyes open and fixed on the peeling advertisements for long-dead products on the far wall. There was no blood. Not a single drop on the dusty platform. She crouched, her knees protesting. Her gaze traced the man’s form. "Cause of death?" "That’s the thing." Davies shuffled closer. "ME’s stumped for now. No entry or exit wounds. No visible trauma, aside from... that." He pointed to the man’s chest. On the pale skin, visible through the parted shirt, was a mark. It wasn't a bruise or a burn. It was a perfect, intricate spiral of ruptured capillaries, a delicate, fractal pattern that seemed to bloom from just over his heart. It was a beautiful, horrifying purple-black. Quinn’s eyes narrowed. She had seen a lot of ways a person could be killed. This was not one of them. "What kind of weapon does that?" "Beats me. Some kind of custom job? A taser, maybe? One with a hell of a kick." "A taser stops the heart. It doesn't paint pictures on the skin." She looked around the platform, her eyes adjusting to the harsh shadows beyond the lamp. "No weapon found?" "Not a thing. Killer must've taken it with him. Along with whatever they were trading." Quinn stood, the worn leather of her watch creaking on her wrist. Her salt-and-pepper hair was a stark crown in the harsh light. She began to walk the perimeter of the scene, her movements precise. The dust was thick, a grey blanket over everything. Forensics had marked their own footprints with small plastic flags. There were the victim’s tracks, a scuffed trail leading from the dark tunnel entrance to the centre of the platform where he fell. And there were the urban explorers’ prints, chaotic and overlapping near the stairs. But there was nothing else. "Davies, how did the killer leave?" The PC shrugged. "Same way he came in, I suppose. Through the tunnels." "Show me the tracks." He pointed a thumb back towards the gaping maw of the tunnel. "We followed them a ways. They just... stop. About twenty yards in. Figured he knows the passages, found a service ladder or something." Quinn walked toward the tunnel, her own footsteps methodical in the dust. The halogen light didn't reach this far. She pulled a small, powerful torch from her coat. The beam cut a clean cone through the darkness. She saw the victim's footprints, the deep impressions made by the forensics team. She saw nothing else. No second set of tracks leading out. "The dust is undisturbed, Davies." Her voice was flat. "From here all the way back to the body. No one walked out this way." "Maybe he walked on the rails?" Davies offered, his voice lacking conviction. Quinn swung the beam onto the rails. They were coated in the same fine, grey powder. Virgin territory. She walked back to the body, her jaw tight. Her gaze fell on something metallic glinting just at the edge of the light, half-hidden under the lip of the platform. Davies and the forensics team had missed it. She crouched again, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. It was a small brass compass, its casing green with age. She picked it up. It felt heavy, solid. The face wasn't marked with North or South, but with a series of interlocking sigils etched into the glass. The needle wasn't still. It spun lazily, a slow, counter-clockwise rotation, pointing at nothing and everything. "What is that?" Davies peered over her shoulder. "I don't know. Junk, maybe." But she didn't believe it. She pocketed it, sealing the evidence bag with a sharp tug. Her eyes returned to the problem of the missing killer. No footprints leading away. No weapon. A victim with an impossible wound. It felt familiar. It felt like DS Morris’s last case. The memory was a cold shard of ice in her gut. That same sense of a puzzle with missing pieces, of a rulebook that everyone else was reading from while she had a different version entirely. "Look." Davies pointed towards the wall behind the body. "Forensics found this. It’s weird." Quinn walked over. Scrawled on the grimy tile in what looked like charcoal was a complex symbol, a circle containing a jagged, asymmetrical star. It wasn’t gang graffiti. The lines were too deliberate, too certain. "Occult nonsense," Davies said with a dismissive wave. "Probably part of the deal. Some weirdo drug thing." Quinn stared at the symbol. It wasn't just nonsense. It felt deliberate. Planned. A statement. Her mind raced. Undisturbed dust. An impossible wound. A spinning compass. A symbol on the wall. The pieces didn't fit. You couldn't just add them up. It was like trying to solve an equation where none of the numbers were real. "He didn't walk out of here, Davies." "What are you saying, Detective? He flew?" Quinn didn't answer. Her eyes scanned the entire scene one more time, from the stairs to the dark tunnel, to the body, to the wall. She was missing something. The most obvious thing. Morris had always told her that. *It's always right there, Harlow. You just have to change the way you're looking.* She looked at the wall again, not at the symbol, but at the wall itself. The brickwork was old, solid. No hidden doors, no loose panels she could see. But as she stared, her eyes playing tricks in the stark light and deep shadow, she saw it. A faint distortion in the air, right in front of the wall, about six feet wide. It was like the heat-haze rising from tarmac on a summer's day. A slight shimmering, a warping of the grimy tiles behind it. She took a slow step towards it. "Boss? What is it?" "Quiet." She lifted her gloved hand, reaching out to the empty space. The air grew colder, charged with a strange static that made the hairs on her arm stand on end. It felt like the moments before a lightning strike. The world seemed to narrow to the space between her fingertips and that invisible curtain. She remembered Morris, bleeding out on the floor of that warehouse three years ago, whispering about a door that wasn't there. Her fingers trembled, inches from the wall. inches from the shimmer.