Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0HGHZ54AV6BR6CBD2H1YM

The bone token felt heavier than it should have in the evidence bag. Quinn held it up to the emergency lighting that her team had strung along the tiled walls of the abandoned station, turning the small disc between her latex-gloved fingers. Carved from what looked like human rib—she'd need forensics to confirm—it bore a symbol she didn't recognize. A circle bisected by a wavy line, almost like a horizon over water. "Guv, over here." DC Priya Mehta stood at the base of a stairwell that descended from the sealed station entrance into what had once been a platform. Quinn pocketed the evidence bag and picked her way across the tracks, stepping over a rail that hadn't carried current in decades. The air smelled of damp stone and something else, something sweet and faintly chemical, like burnt sugar mixed with ozone. The body lay on the platform itself, positioned between two market stalls that hadn't been cleared away. That in itself was wrong. Quinn's gaze swept the space as she climbed up. The abandoned station—she'd pulled up the Transport for London decommission records on her phone during the drive over, Camden deep level shelter, sealed 1952—had been converted into something out of a fever dream. Wooden stalls and draped canvas formed narrow alleys. Glass jars lined shelves, their contents murky. Bundles of dried plants hung from hooks. A table near the body held rows of small bottles filled with liquids in colors she'd never seen in nature: a violet so deep it seemed to pull light into itself, a gold that shifted to green when she changed her angle. None of it was in any database she had access to. None of it made sense. "Male, IC1, early thirties," Mehta read from her notes. "No ID. No wallet. No phone. Couple of the Camden uniforms found the entrance blown open when they were doing rounds—someone had taken a sledgehammer to the bricked-up doorway on Hawley Crescent." Quinn crouched beside the body. He lay on his back, arms at his sides, legs straight. Arranged. Not the sprawl of someone who'd fallen or been dumped. His eyes were closed, his expression almost peaceful, but the skin around his mouth and nostrils had a faint grey discoloration, and his fingertips—she lifted his right hand gently—were blackened, as if dipped in ink. Or burned from the inside. She checked the worn leather watch on her left wrist. Half past two in the morning. She'd been in bed forty minutes ago. "What's the pathologist saying?" "Not here yet. Stuck on the M4. But the paramedics called it at the scene—said it looked cardiac, potentially drug-related, given the..." Mehta gestured at the stalls, the bottles, the whole improbable underground bazaar. "Whatever all this is." Quinn said nothing. She studied the body's position relative to the surrounding stalls. He lay in a clear space, almost like an aisle. The stall to his left sold—or had sold, or displayed—what appeared to be compasses. A wooden tray held six of them, each different. Brass, silver, one that looked carved from stone. The nearest brass one caught her attention. Small, its casing covered in a green patina of verdigris, its face etched with symbols that reminded her of the bone token's markings. The needle didn't point north. It pointed at the body. She stood, knees protesting, and circled the dead man slowly. The stalls on either side showed no signs of struggle. No knocked-over merchandise, no scuff marks, no broken glass. The dust on the platform—and there was a thick layer of it everywhere except the walkways between stalls—showed foot traffic in the aisles but nothing chaotic. Whoever had been here had left in an orderly fashion. "So someone calls in an anonymous tip, and Camden division finds a hidden market under a decommissioned Tube station, complete with a dead body and what looks like a chemist's shop from the 1600s." Quinn straightened. "And we're meant to believe this is a drug death." "The blackened fingers could indicate contact with a caustic substance. Some of these bottles—" "Look at his hands, Mehta." The DC crouched where Quinn had been. Looked closer. "The discoloration starts at the fingertips and fades toward the wrists. Uniform gradient. No splash pattern, no chemical burn marks on the surrounding skin, no blistering. If he'd handled something caustic, we'd see irregular contact marks, and the palms would be worse than the fingertips." Quinn pointed without touching. "And the grey around his mouth. No residue. No foam. No signs of ingestion or inhalation injury. No vomit." "So what killed him?" Quinn didn't answer that. She moved to the compass stall and leaned over the wooden tray. Six compasses, six different materials, all with needles pointing in roughly the same direction—toward the body. She took out her phone and snapped photos. The brass one with the verdigris patina drew her back. Its face markings were more intricate than the others, fine lines that formed interlocking geometric patterns. Sigils, some part of her brain supplied, though she didn't know where that word came from in this context. She photographed the compass from multiple angles, then straightened and looked down the length of the platform. The market stalls stretched in both directions, disappearing into darkness beyond the emergency lights. Dozens of stalls. Possibly a hundred. And every vendor had vanished, leaving their merchandise behind. "Who abandons their stock?" Mehta looked up. "Guv?" "This market—whatever it is—these people left everything. Tables, inventory, the lot. That's not how you close up shop when the police show up. You grab what's valuable and run." Quinn walked to the nearest stall and examined the items on display. Bundles of dried herbs, labelled in a script she couldn't read. Small cloth pouches cinched with cord. A leather-bound ledger. "Unless you left in a hurry before the police arrived. Before the tip was even called in. Because something happened here that scared everyone out." "The death scared them." "The death might have. But scared vendors still grab their cashbox." Quinn pointed to a metal tin sitting open on the counter, half-full of currency she didn't immediately recognize—coins of irregular shape, dull metal, stamped with symbols. Mixed in with those were genuine pound coins and a few crumpled twenties. "Nobody took the money, Mehta. Whatever happened here, it cleared this place out so fast that people left cash on the table." She continued down the row of stalls, her torch cutting through the dark. A stall selling candles in black glass jars. Another with what appeared to be taxidermied animals, though the specimens didn't match any species she could name. A third stall—larger than the others, more like a permanent kiosk—had its canvas front pulled down and tied shut. Quinn crouched and shone her torch under the gap at the bottom. Inside, she could see the legs of a chair, a table, scattered papers. "I want this whole station treated as a crime scene. Full forensic sweep. Photograph everything before anyone touches it. And get someone from the university down here—anthropology, history, I don't care—someone who can tell me what language those labels are written in." "You think this is more than a drug death." Quinn returned to the body and crouched again, this time examining the platform surface around him. The dust. She'd noticed the foot traffic patterns before—clear pathways between stalls where dozens of feet had worn the dust thin. But immediately around the body, in a rough circle perhaps two meters in diameter, the dust was undisturbed. No footprints. No drag marks. No prints from shoes, knees, or hands belonging to someone who might have checked on a collapsed man. "He didn't walk here," Quinn said quietly. She pointed her torch at a low angle across the platform surface. The beam picked up the texture of the dust, every scuff and print casting long shadows. The walkway's foot traffic ended a meter from the body in every direction. A clean perimeter of untouched dust. "No one approached this body. No one stood over him. No one checked his pulse. And he didn't walk to this spot, collapse, and die, because there are no footprints leading to where he's lying." Mehta stared at the dust. Then at the body. Then back at the dust. "That's impossible." "That's what the evidence shows." Quinn stood. Her knees ached. Her jaw ached from clenching it. Three years of sleepless nights pressed at the back of her skull—Morris's face, Morris lying in a different impossible position, Morris with the same grey discoloration around his mouth that pathology had waved away as inconclusive, Morris whose case file sat in her desk drawer because she couldn't let it go and couldn't explain it either. She pulled the evidence bag from her pocket and held up the bone token again. "I found this by the entrance. Dropped, I think—someone in a hurry." She turned it in the light. "Carved bone, handmade, with a symbol that matches markings on at least three items I've seen in these stalls. This place has a system, Mehta. Tokens, currency, vendors, regular foot traffic patterns in the dust. This isn't someone's one-off drug lab. This is an organized, recurring operation." "Recurring?" "The dust patterns. Heavy in some places, light in others. Multiple layers of foot traffic built up over weeks or months, not one night. People have been coming here regularly." She sealed the evidence bag and placed it carefully in her coat pocket. "And now a man is dead in the middle of it, in a spot no one walked to, with injuries no chemical in those bottles would explain, and every single person who might have seen something is gone." Mehta's radio crackled. The pathologist's car had pulled up on Hawley Crescent. Quinn nodded and Mehta went to meet them at the entrance. Alone on the platform, Quinn turned back to the compass stall. She studied the brass compass with its verdigris patina, its needle still locked in its impossible orientation. She thought about Morris. She thought about the grey around this dead man's mouth, and the grey that had been around Morris's mouth, and the three years she'd spent telling herself there had to be a rational explanation. The compass needle twitched. It swung thirty degrees left, then slowly, as if dragged through mud, crept back to point at the body. Quinn watched it for a long time, her face still, her brown eyes unblinking. Then she took out a fresh evidence bag and, with steady hands, collected the compass.