Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT08CFT2NK2H3N95A3TC4ZD

Rain had driven the station into a glassy hush. Fluorescent tubes hummed over the deserted platform, throwing a sickly light that made the symbols on the tiles look wet. Detective Harlow Quinn stepped over the cordon with the same measure she had used to step into barracks, field hospitals and interrogation rooms. Her boots didn’t hesitate. Her watch, worn leather, ticked against the bones of her wrist as though it kept time for other people’s panic. A body lay in the center of a circle of chalk and salt. The chalk line had been written in a hand that shook with purpose, letters jagged and deliberate. A brass compass sat on a cloth at the victim’s elbow. Its casing had a verdigris bloom. The needle held steady, pointing not to the body but down the tunnel. Quinn crouched and spread her fingers an inch from the tile without touching it. The circle had a dark smudge at one side where the chalk had been rubbed; someone had walked through it after it was drawn. Eva Kowalski leaned close, the satchel sliding from her shoulder to the floor like a second shadow. She pushed her glasses up with a freckled fingertip and tucked a curl behind her left ear. "This was done in a hurry," Eva said. Her voice went low, the way she spoke when she worked through a thought. "The sigils are crooked because whoever drew them didn’t work from the center. A proper ritual—" She straightened and picked up the compass with delicate fingers, thumb and forefinger like tools. "It’s a Veil Compass," she said. "Shade work. They use the brass and the sigils to anchor it. Whoever placed it meant this to read as…authentic." Quinn let the word 'authentic' hover and then cut it with a breath. "Meaning staged." Eva’s mouth tightened. "Staged to look like a breach. The needle points to the nearest rift. If that’s true—" She hesitated, eyes flicking back to Quinn. A uniformed officer handed over a thin evidence bag. Inside lay a small bone token, broken clean in two. Quinn turned it over under the light. Someone had filed the edges. It was not from the Veil Market’s entrance stock. It was a copy. "Who found the body?" Quinn asked. "A vendor," the officer answered. "Name's Pryce. He said he was closing up a stall and found him. He called it in." Quinn rose and walked the circle’s perimeter, boots whispering on damp tile. The chalk had been scuffed on one side as though someone had crawled away. Blood had pooled in a way that suggested the victim had been upright when it began and had been shoved or fallen forward. The wounds were clean, surgical in their placement. No ritualistic lacerations. No decorative gore. She stopped at a smear of ash. The ash came from a fine, fine burn—tobacco perhaps, or something pressed into a pipe. She cupped it and let the wind take a few flakes. The scent under the fluorescent light was sharp, chemical, not the resinous tang of altar incense. Eva peered at the ash and then at the compass still in her hand. "Shades often used pipe-burn mixtures. But this—" She tilted the compass so the needle faced the tunnel. "Look. The needle points down the line toward the service exit. It didn’t point to a breach in this chamber." Quinn’s jaw set. She knelt and examined the compass’s face. The protective sigils etched into the brass were neat, as if stamped by a machine rather than hand-scribed. Someone had cleaned away the verdigris along the rim where a thumb would rest. A narrow line of black lacquer clung beneath a glyph. "The needle’s stuck," she said. She nudged the compass with the pad of her finger. A sliver of matchwood protruded beneath the needle, holding it from turning. Eva’s hand froze midair. "They made it point where they wanted," she said. A forensic tech in a navy jacket hovered, rubbing gloved fingers together. "You’re sure? Could be—" Quinn turned to him. Her voice cut without warmth. "You let me know when your 'could be' becomes something concrete." He stepped back and folded his hands. He looked younger than Quinn’s partner had been when Quinn lost him—younger than the last case had let her keep. "DS Morris," Quinn said aloud, and the word dropped into the station like a stone. Memory slid through her: Morris's laugh in the rain, his last statement scrawled on the back of a photograph, a case file with corners gone soft. She had watched Morris vanish from a doorway that smelled like sulphur and old iron. The thought tasted like rust again. Eva put the compass on the ground in front of the body and crouched. "If they wanted to fake a breach, they'd plant a compass. They’d stage candles, lay out salt and draw glyphs. They’d make a corpse into a sacrifice. But the pattern of wounds—stab through the base of the neck, two at the heart, an injection site in the forearm—these suggest a different motive. Quick immobilisation, then lethal dose." Quinn bent over the forearm. The puncture marks were neat, close together. A dark stain ringed the area. Someone had used a hypodermic. Not ritual. Efficiency. A uniform on the platform gestured toward the stalls stacked along the wall. "Pryce said someone was extras—selling charms. Said a woman walked off with a tray of bells and then came back shouting about something glowing in the tunnel." Eva’s eyebrows rose. "Glows were probably phosphor-laced pigments. Popular with certain vendors for 'otherworldy' wares." Quinn’s eyes didn’t leave the body. She had looked at many deaths; she decoded them like maps. The chalk was key. The circle amateurs drew for theatre did not contain a second ring. Professional ritualists layered. This had only one layer. It was for show. She crouched and ran a finger along the chalk. Under her nail the chalk felt gritty, and beneath the grit the tile held a faint smear of shoe tread. A heavy tread. Not a vendor’s light sole. A boot. "Did anyone see boots?" she asked. "A couple of people claimed they saw a figure," the uniform said. "Tall, hunched in a coat." Quinn’s eyes moved from the chalk to a stall pushed back against the wall. Someone had used a tarp to hide a space behind it. The tarp’s edges had been dampened and folded as though it had been unfastened recently. A smear of soot-trace led from the stall into the shadowed service passage. She stood and walked the trace, following the soot like a sentence. The tunnel smelled of exhaust and wet earth, but beneath that there was something metallic and old—like the inside of an instrument box. Eva kept pace. "You're thinking they staged it to look like a breach to distract us from—" "Taking something," Quinn finished. She stopped at a service door that had been pried and stepped aside. The latch had fresh scrape marks, the metal filings scattered like gray confetti. The bolt had not been forced open from inside. Someone had slipped in and out with a purpose. A light beyond the door sketched the silhouette of a figure moving: Pryce, the vendor, arms raised, talking. He saw Quinn and lifted a hand. "You the detective?" he called. His voice broke like loose freight. Quinn walked toward him, pulling her coat tighter. She listened before she answered. Men’s voices clustered near the stalls, low and nervous. Someone was counting coins. Another muttered a list of names. Pryce reached for his cap and pushed it back. "Found 'im like that. Came to close, there he was. Looked like an altar and all. Thought maybe the Market's back. That’s why I called—" Eva cut in. "You touched anything?" Pryce’s eyes darted to the chalk. "I put the shop tarp over 'im. Didn't want the police to be—" "You were preserving evidence," Quinn said. "I was preserving decency," Pryce muttered. He swallowed. "Look, the woman with the bells—she ran off toward the passage, shouting about light. I thought she took one of my trays but she didn't come back." Quinn had Pryce describe the woman. He described her coat, her boots with a scuff on the left heel, the way she had kept her head down. The description matched no one Quinn had on file, but as he spoke, Quinn studied the footprints pressed into a thin layer of dust near the service door. There, toward the far end of the platform where the tiles changed tone, two prints overlapped—one smaller, one larger. The small print had a tread pattern stamped with a decorative brand. The larger print’s scuff on the left heel matched Pryce’s account of the woman’s shoe. She knelt and traced the line of prints. Someone had tried to walk on tiptoe but the pressure reversed their steps, making the prints heavier at the heel. The prints moved away from the body and then doubled back, as if someone had returned to see if the scene held. Quinn turned back to the compass. The matchwood lay under its needle like a lie. Someone had fastened it. The needle was forced to point down the tunnel, pointing accusation at a rift that wasn’t there. "You staged it to give you a window, to get into the service area while everyone looked at a breach," she said to no one in particular. Her voice was flat and precise. "The compass and the chalk were props." Eva’s face thinned. "So where did they go? If not through a rift—" "They went where rifts weren't," Quinn said. "They went where people would look for a rift. They passed through the service doors and disappeared into modern London: drains, sewers, a route that wouldn't show up on any occult map because it never needed to." A forensic tech came up with a photo print of the compass. Quinn took it and held it to the light. The matchwood’s grain was stamped with a manufacturer's mark she half-recognised from kit at army surplus stores. She had seen those before in the kit bag of a petty thief who liked his props neat. "Who benefits from this?" she murmured. Eva sat back on her heels and crossed her arms. The satchel slipped behind her like a second heart. "Someone who wanted to make the death look supernatural. To cloud the motive. To hide the removal of a...thing." Quinn’s eyes wandered to the stalls. One of them had been left gutted. Empty display cases lay on their sides like open mouths. A steel case under a counter had its lock sheared clean. The way the bolt bent suggested the thief had used a motive force, not a crowbar. Professional. "Someone took an item, used a compass to point everyone at a fake rift, and left a body to sell the story," Quinn said. "Whoever dragged the victim here wanted a spectacle. Not a ritual." A young uniform approached with a slip of paper. "We bagged the bone token," he said. "Found it near the platform edge. It’s a copy of the Market token." "Copy means access," Quinn said sharply. "The Market moves every full moon and requires tokens to enter. To fake a Market entrance they needed an insider. Or someone who knew the Market's methods." Eva unwrapped a small notebook and flipped a page. "The glyphs are off," she said, voice low. "Someone used the visual vocabulary without the grammar. A lot of collectors know the look. That would fool the untrained eye. But any Shade could tell the difference in a breath." Quinn looked at Eva, then at the compass. "You think a Shade planted it?" she asked. Eva pinched the bridge of her nose and looked at the blocked service door as if it were a locked page in a book. "Either them or someone who deals with them. Shade artisans were the only ones who made compasses like this. But anyone could steal one." "Who runs the Market now?" Quinn asked. Eva’s lips pressed together. "It moves with the moon. The vendors change. Pryce is new; he only started selling here last year. The old network broke up after the raid, but someone kept pieces. If someone wanted to clear the Market’s name—if they wanted to take a particular object without the Market watching—this would be the easiest way. Stage a breach and watch forty pairs of eyes point the wrong way." Quinn stood and looked down the line of stalls where crates leaned like tired people. She felt the same tightness at the base of her skull she had felt the night Morris disappeared. In that tightness lived a reluctance she kept locked behind protocol and sleep. She ignored it. "Photograph everything," she told the techs. She turned to Eva. "Keep the compass. Secure it. Don’t let them show it around." Eva’s hand closed on the brass with a practiced grip. "I'll bag it. We should run the metal for prints." "Run it for prints and for the matchwood." Quinn’s words were short, intended to be instructions not conversation. "Find out where that match stuck to the needle came from." "Could be traceable," Eva said. Quinn followed the path their suspects had used—toward the service doors, to the pry marks, to the asphalt outside the exit where rain had washed away half the trail. The platform's flood of commuters would come back within hours; the scene would fill with a thousand casual eyes. She wanted the thread that unspooled this to be clean before other hands knotted it. A uniform asked, "You think it’s the Market? That they did it? That they set a bone token as bait?" Quinn didn’t answer at first. She watched Eva slip the compass into an evidence bag and seal it with practiced care. The gesture said more than any theory. Eva had been born to collect the world’s fragments and fold them into meaning. Quinn had been born to read how people misled. "Someone wanted us to look at a breach," Quinn said. "They planted the props. They staged the ritual. They picked a market that could be blamed. The truth is in the technique. Whoever did this used tools to make us look the wrong way. We start by figuring out who could get into the Market without a token and who wanted a single object gone." She crouched, touching the chalk, feeling the bite of the grains. "And whoever left the bone token—find out who had access to counterfeit tokens. Start there." Pryce shuffled his feet and swallowed. "If it was to steal, what could they want? We don't sell real relics here, just trinkets." Quinn’s jaw tightened. "Sometimes a trinket is something someone else would sell their next life for." She took a breath. Her voice hitched over the wet tiles, calm and precise. "Bag the broken token, tag it. Check CCTV on Camden approaches for anyone matching the woman's boots. Get me prints from the lock and the matchwood. Call for a warrant to pull the Market’s entry lists for the last three months. And put a watch on the exits. If they come back for anything, they’ll take the same route." Eva stood and looked down at the body, then at the compass in its bag. She slid her fingers over the brass through the plastic like a reader touching type. "They tried to make us believe ghosts," she said softly. Quinn kept her eyes on the service door as it sat lip-open to the undercity. "They tried to make us handcuff shadows," she said. "We won’t." The distant rumble of a train threaded the station, a living vein beneath the night. Lights blinked and someone clattered keys. Quinn readied herself the way she had readied before interrogations and raids. Her watch caught a sliver of light, old leather gleaming. "Keep me posted," she ordered. "Every scrap." Eva nodded and shoved the satchel higher on her shoulder. "I'll check the Museum leads. If there’s a pattern to these forgeries, it's probably in an accession note or a ledger. These people always leave a signature." Quinn glanced at the veil of officers, the vendors, the empty stalls, the compass sealed like a dying heart in an evidence bag. She mapped risk and motive the way others mapped streets. The pieces had not yet formed a whole, but she could see the seam where someone had tried to sew the truth shut with a bright, theatrical stitch. She rose and walked the length of the circle and out into the tunnel’s mouth. The darkness beyond chewed at the light. The rain made the tiles slick and black. footsteps echoed as everyone resumed the choreography of work. Someone had placed a stage in the station and called for an audience. The audience had come. Quinn’ s shoulders felt like armour and like a weight. She pulled up her collar against the rain and started back toward the platform, to evidence notes, to fingerprints and to the files that would show what a copy of a Market token could cost and who could afford such lies. She did not look for ghosts. She looked for people who used them.