Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0AJM8J5ZVPX8AME6XCYZF

The smell hit her first—copper and ozone, with something underneath like burned sage. Detective Harlow Quinn descended the rusted stairs into the abandoned Camden Town tube station, her torch cutting through darkness that seemed thicker than natural shadows. Eighteen years on the force had taught her to trust her nose before her eyes. This smell meant something had happened here that defied easy explanation. "Detective Quinn!" A uniformed constable appeared at the bottom of the stairs, his face pale in the beam of his own torch. "We weren't expecting—you specifically, I mean." "Who found the body?" "Street cleaner, about five this morning. Called it in at five-forty." The constable swallowed. "We've got CID on scene, but DI Markham said you'd want to see this personally. Given the, ah, circumstances." Quinn didn't bother asking what circumstances. She'd received the call at three a.m., an unusual courtesy from her superintendent that had raised her hackles immediately. The fact that they'd summoned her to an abandoned tube station rather than a proper crime scene told her everything she needed to know about what they expected her to find. She moved past the constable into the main tunnel. The old platform stretched before her, tiles cracked and blackened, original wood paneling rotted to gray lace. Someone had strung battery-powered lanterns along the platform edge, casting pools of sickly yellow light. Two figures stood near the far wall, one hunched over something on the ground, the other pacing. "Harlow." DI Markham looked up as she approached, his mustache twitching with poorly concealed relief. "I was hoping you'd get here before the forensics team finished their initial sweep." "What's wrong with the scene?" Markham exchanged a glance with the other figure—a young woman Quinn didn't recognize, her red hair escaping from a hasty ponytail, round glasses perched on her nose. The woman carried a leather satchel that looked too worn to belong to any police officer Quinn knew. "Everything," Markham said. "Or nothing. That's the bloody problem." Quinn knelt beside the body. Male, she estimated, mid-thirties. Expensive suit, Italian leather shoes, watches on both wrists—a Submariner and something antique she couldn't identify. His face was frozen in an expression of profound surprise, eyes open, mouth slack. No visible wounds. No blood. "Heart?" she asked. "No signs of struggle, no trauma we can find. ME will need to confirm, but initial assessment suggests natural causes." Markham paused. "Except he was found in an abandoned tube station at four in the morning in a part of London that's been condemned for six years. And his pockets were full of these." He handed her an evidence bag. Inside were several objects: a small bone token, carved with symbols she didn't recognize, a brass compass with an emerald-green patina covering its face, and a slip of paper covered in what looked likecoordinates. "What's this place?" Quinn asked, though some part of her already knew. The smell, the strangeness, the way the shadows fell wrong even in the lamplight. "We were hoping you could tell us." The red-haired woman spoke for the first time, her voice steady despite the dark circles under her eyes. "I'm Dr. Kowalski. British Museum. I was asked to consult." "On what grounds?" "The items in his possession." Kowalski pointed to the evidence bag. "That bone token—I've only seen one like it in the restricted archives. It would have granted access to a very specific location. And that compass..." She trailed off, adjusting her glasses with a nervous gesture that involved tucking hair behind her left ear. "I've never seen one in person, but the description matches a Veil Compass. Attuned to supernatural rifts." Quinn stood slowly. "You're telling me this is a supernatural crime scene." "I'm telling you the victim was involved with something beyond conventional investigation." Kowalski met her gaze without flinching. "The question is whether he died here, or whether he died somewhere else and was moved." Markham cleared his throat. "That's actually what I wanted your eye on, Harlow. The scene doesn't make sense. Uniform says there were no tracks, no drag marks, no sign of entry or exit except the stairs we came down. But there's no way he walked here on his own in that state. And the ME can't explain it." Quinn walked the perimeter of the platform, her boots crunching on decades of accumulated debris. The walls were streaked with old water damage and newer graffiti, but there—half-hidden behind a collapsed ticket booth—she stopped. Scuff marks. Fresh. "Someone came through here recently." She crouched, tracing the pattern with her fingers. "Dragged something heavy. Or carried it." "That's what I thought." Markham appeared beside her. "But there's nothing else. No footprints, no fibres, nothing for forensics to work with. It's like the killer walked through and the floor just... forgot." "The floor didn't forget." Quinn stood, brushing dust from her knees. She walked back toward the body, her eyes fixed on something Markham had overlooked. "The position's wrong." "What do you mean?" "He's lying flat on his back, arms at his sides, legs straight. If he'd collapsed naturally, he'd be crumpled. If he'd been dumped, there would be disturbance." She gestured to the ground around the body. "Look at the dust. It's undisturbed except for one set of footprints leading to where he fell. The killer put him here. Carefully. Then walked back out the way they came." "So it was staged," Markham said. "Makes sense. Hiding the body in a place like this—" "No." Quinn pointed toward the far end of the platform, where darkness swallowed the tunnel. "The footprint trail ends there. At the edge of the light. Someone walked into the black and didn't come back." Kowalski stepped forward, her face pale. "The rifts. The compass—it would have pointed toward—" "A portal." Quinn's voice was flat. "You're saying someone opened a door and walked through? With a body?" "Or sent the body through. And then sealed it behind them." Kowalski's hand trembled slightly as she adjusted her glasses again. "It's possible. Some of the old texts describe translocation rituals. They require a... payment. A sacrifice." Quinn looked down at the dead man's face, that frozen expression of surprise. Not fear, she realized now. Recognition. He'd known what was coming. "He wasn't killed," she said slowly. "He was collected. Called here, given a reason to come alone, and then taken." "By who?" Quinn turned back to the darkness at the end of the platform. Something in her chest tightened, a memory she couldn't quite grasp—the smell of copper and ozone, the weight of a gun she hadn't fired in three years, Morris's voice saying something about the shadows in the old district. "That's what we need to find out." She pulled out her phone, already thinking about who she could call, what favours she could call in. The Veil Market. She'd heard whispers about it in the past, dismissed them as urban legend. But Morris had believed. Morris had gone looking. And Morris had ended up in the ground with a story about a case gone wrong that no one believed. "Detective?" Kowalski's voice pulled her back. "What do we do now?" Quinn looked at the evidence bag still clutched in her hand. The compass inside seemed to catch the lantern light strangely, as if the verdigris was trying to spread. "Now we follow the trail." She tucked the bag into her coat pocket. "Someone went to a lot of trouble to make this look like an accident, to make the evidence disappear. That means there's something to find. Someone made a mistake." She walked toward the edge of the light, toward the darkness where the tunnel disappeared into black. The others called after her, but she didn't stop. Three years of questions pressed against her skull like a physical weight. Morris had been looking into something. Something that led to this underground market, this world of rifts and portals and rituals. She would find the door. And whoever had walked through it would answer for what they'd done. The darkness swallowed her torch whole, and Detective Harlow Quinn stepped into the unknown.