Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT08M080S8M73PV5RE1V96K

The ambulance lights painted the tunnel walls in alternating red and white, but Detective Harlow Quinn had stopped seeing them ten minutes ago. She stood at the edge of the crime scene—if you could call it that—her hands clasped behind her back, her posture rigid enough to drill through concrete. The body lay sprawled between two abandoned ticket barriers, the man's face turned toward the arched ceiling as though he'd been watching something fall. "Detective?" DC Marcus Webb appeared at her elbow, his notebook already open. "Forensics are almost done with photos. They're waiting on your call." "What have we got?" "Victim is males, mid-thirties. No ID, no wallet. Multiple contusions to the head, consistent with a fall—or being struck. There's a gash on the back of his skull that went through to the bone." Webb flipped a page. "No visible weapon at the scene. No witnesses yet, though there were apparently vendors operating here until about nine. They cleared out fast when the body was found." Quinn finally moved, stepping closer to the body without crossing the evidence markers. The man's clothes were ordinary—jeans, a grey hoodie, trainers that had seen better days. Nothing that marked him as anything other than another anonymous figure in London. But his hands told a different story. She crouched, ignoring the protest from her knees, and studied his fingers. "His hands," she said. Webb leaned in. "What about them?" "Calluses. Here, and here." She pointed without touching. "Friction marks consistent with climbing. Rope work, possibly. And there's residue under his nails—dark, powdery." "Could be from a fall. Concrete dust." "Could be." Quinn stood, her gaze moving past the body to the far wall of the tunnel. Her eyes narrowed. "Who found him?" "A street sweeper. Apparently she comes through this section every morning at five to clear the trash. She called it in at five-fifteen." "What time did the market close?" "The—" Webb stopped, his brow furrowing. "Market?" "The Veil Market." Quinn said the words carefully, tasting them. She'd heard the name three times in the past month, always in connection with cases that didn't quite close, always from witnesses who clammed up the moment she pushed. "This tunnel. It's not just abandoned. There's a black market operates here. Supernatural goods, enchanted items, information that shouldn't exist." Webb's expression flickered—skepticism held in careful check. "I'm not familiar with—" "No. You're not." Quinn turned back to the body. "Neither was I, six months ago. But I've been collecting reports. Unusual purchases. People who vanish for hours and return changed. Deaths that get classified as accidents or natural causes because no one thinks to look deeper." She gestured at the tunnel around them. "Until now." "Detective Quinn." Webb's voice had gone careful, the tone officers used when they thought someone had crossed a line. "Are you suggesting this is connected to... what, exactly?" "I'm not suggesting anything yet." She walked toward the far wall, her footsteps echoing in the empty space. The red and white lights still pulsed, but they'd become background noise. She was looking at the wall—really looking—at the decades of grime and older stains, the water damage and the graffiti that had been painted over twice. There. She stopped. The graffiti was fresh. Not fresh in the way of days or weeks, but fresh compared to everything else around it. Someone had sprayed a symbol in black—a circle bisected by a vertical line, with smaller markings clustered at the top and bottom. It looked almost like a rune, or a sigil, or— "A ward," she murmured. "What?" Quinn pulled out her phone and took several photographs, angling the shots to capture the symbol along with the surrounding area. Her mind raced through the fragments she'd gathered over months of quiet investigation. Protective circles. Binding marks. The kind of things that existed in mythology books and, increasingly, in case files that got buried in the system. "Get CSU back over here," she said. "I need this wall processed. The paint, the surface beneath it, everything." " we've already—" "We didn't process the wall. We processed the body." Quinn turned back to her colleague, and for the first time that morning, something like emotion crossed her face. It wasn't quite anger. It wasn't quite grief. It was older than both. "This man didn't fall, Webb. He was trying to escape something. And that something is in this tunnel." She moved past him, back toward the crime scene, but her thoughts had already leapt forward. The calluses on his hands suggested he'd descended on a rope—not the action of a man who'd simply wandered into an abandoned station. The fresh ward suggested someone had been preparing for something, or sealing something away. The absence of a weapon didn't mean there hadn't been one; it meant the weapon had been taken, or had never been meant to stay. And the vendors who'd cleared out so quickly—their speed spoke of fear, not just discretion. "Run the victim's prints," she said. "I want to know who he is. And I want a list of everyone who had a stall or a pitch at this location on market nights for the past three months." "Detective Quinn—" "I know what I'm asking." She met his gaze steadily. "I know how it sounds. But I've spent three years chasing ghosts, Webb. Three years watching cases close with explanations that didn't hold up, watching witnesses disappear, watching my partner—" Her voice caught. She buried it. "I know what's out there. And I know that ignoring it doesn't make it go away." The ambulance lights continued their patient rhythm. Somewhere above them, London stirred toward morning, oblivious to what lay beneath its streets. But Quinn had stopped looking at the surface a long time ago. She knelt beside the body once more, studying the man's face—the slack features, the half-closed eyes that had seen their last moment. In his pocket, her flashlight caught a glint of something small and pale. She pulled out a bone token. The size of a coin, carved with symbols she couldn't read, warm to the touch in a way that stone should never be. She turned it over, and theambulance lights caught on the surface, and for a moment, she could have sworn the markings shifted. "Webb." Her voice was quiet now, almost reverent. "Call for backup. Full backup. And find me someone who knows about this market—who knows the people who run it." She closed her fingers around the token, feeling its impossible warmth against her palm. "Because I have a feeling we're not done here." Above them, the first grey light of dawn began to seep down the station's stairs. But in the tunnel, the shadows remained deep and undisturbed, and Quinn knew, with the certainty that had settled into her bones over three years of unanswered questions, that they had only just begun to scratch the surface. The evidence, at last, was beginning to add up. And what it added up to was something she wasn't sure the Metropolitan Police was ready to face.