Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0NF1X58AT7X6M4JDJYZ64

The stairs descended into darkness, each step swallowing another degree of warmth. Detective Harlow Quinn kept one hand on the damp brick wall and the other near her service weapon, her boots echoing against stone that had no business existing beneath Camden Town. The Metropolitan Police liaison had given her the address twenty minutes ago—a disused entrance to an abandoned Tube station, they said. Nothing about the bone token pressed into her palm by the constable at the barrier, nothing about the way the air tasted of copper and old magic. She found the scene three levels down. Crime scenes possessed their own language, a vocabulary written in blood and displacement. Eighteen years had taught Quinn to read the stories carved into walls, the testimonies whispered by furniture pushed aside or glass shattered in particular patterns. This one spoke in riddles. The body lay near what had once been a ticket hall, sprawled across cobblestones that belonged to no London she knew. Brass fixtures lined the walls—sconces, brackets, gears meshed into the architecture like the skeleton of some vast mechanical creature. Stalls lined the perimeter, their wooden backs carved with symbols that made her eyes ache when she tried to focus on them. The place smelled of jasmine and rust and something else, something that tickled the back of her throat like a forgotten name. "Single victim," said a voice from her left. "Male, approximately forty. No identification, no wallet. Strange wounds on the torso." Quinn turned. A woman in round glasses stood from where she'd been crouching near the body, tucking a strand of red hair behind her left ear. The gesture was nervous, practiced, and her satchel—worn leather bulging with books—hung at her hip like an anchor. "You are?" "Eva Kowalski. British Museum, restricted archives." She held up a badge that looked official enough, though Quinn had learned not to trust anything that smelled this strongly of incense. "Consulting on the supernatural elements. I was already in the area when the call came through." "The call came through to us." Quinn stepped closer to the body, her shoes crunching on something granular. She looked down. Salt. Someone had salted the area around the victim in a rough circle, breaking the pattern in two places. "Who called it in?" "Anonymous tip. We don't know the caller. That's not unusual for this location." "This location." Quinn tasted the words. "Which is?" "The Veil Market. You didn't know?" She let the silence answer. Kowalski's green eyes widened slightly behind her glasses—a recalculation, Quinn noted, the same look she'd seen on suspects caught in their own web. "You're not a regular," Kowalski said slowly. "You're not one of us." "Metropolitan Police. I was sent to investigate a death." Quinn crouched beside the body, ignoring the way the salt scraped against her knees through her trousers. The victim's face was peaceful, almost serene, which never matched the chaos of actual violence. His hands were clean. His shoes were polished. "What are the wounds you mentioned?" Kowalski produced a small torch and angled it toward the torso. The wounds were precise—three clean incisions arranged in a triangle, each precisely two inches long. No ragged tearing, no bruising around the edges. The blood had pooled beneath him in a way that suggested he'd lain here for hours, undisturbed. "Clean cuts," Quinn murmured. "Like surgery." "Like ritual." "Ritual." She wrote nothing down—she never did, not at first. Memory served her better than notes, at least until the details had time to settle. "You said you were already in the area. Why?" "I work here. Research purposes." Kowalski gestured vaguely at the stalls, the brass fixtures, the whole impossible space. "This market trades in items that don't exist in the normal world. Antiquities. Artifacts. Things that have passed through..." She paused, searching for words. "Rifts. Portals. The boundaries between here and elsewhere." "And you investigate murders for them?" "I investigate anything that threatens the Veil Market's existence. This place exists because of fragile agreements. When someone dies here—especially someone from outside—it threatens those agreements." Kowalski's voice hardened. "My entire life is built around accessing knowledge that the world doesn't know exists. The Market is a part of that." Quinn stood. Her knees protested the cold dampness seeping through her trousers—she'd need to see a doctor about that later, the damp always worsened the old injury from her service years. The watch on her left wrist had slipped, and she adjusted it automatically, feeling the worn leather catch on her skin. "What do you know about the victim?" "His name was Gabriel Ashworth. He was a collector—high-end, well-funded, specialized in pre-Socratic artifacts. He had a reputation for acquiring things that should never have been sold." "Should never have been sold." Quinn turned the phrase over. "And someone killed him for that?" "Perhaps. Or perhaps he stole something and couldn't pay his debts. Or perhaps he violated the Market's laws in some other way." Kowalski shrugged. "The Market doesn't operate under your jurisdiction, Detective. We have our own justice." "Your own justice." Quinn walked the perimeter of the scene, noting where the salt circle broke. Two gaps, both on the eastern edge. Both aligned with something—she tilted her head, following the angle, and found it pointed toward a particular stall near the far wall. "This salt. Who placed it?" "I don't know. It was here when I arrived." "Likely the killer, then." "Perhaps. Or perhaps someone who wanted to contain whatever was released when he died." She stopped walking. "Released?" Kowalski hesitated. The nervous habit returned—hair tucked behind the left ear, fingers trembling slightly. "The wounds aren't just ritual. They're a gateway. A triangle carved into flesh creates an opening, and the salt..." She trailed off. "You're not supposed to know about this." "I'm standing in a Tube station that shouldn't exist, looking at a body with holes in its chest, and you're telling me I'm not supposed to know about it." Quinn's voice remained flat, level, the way it had been since she'd learned that emotion served no purpose in interrogation. "Talk to me about the gateways." "There's no time—" "There's no time for you to withhold evidence in a murder investigation, Ms. Kowalski. Not when I've got a body and a market full of people who clearly don't want the regular police here." She stepped closer, close enough to see the freckles standing out against Kowalski's suddenly pale complexion. "I lost a partner three years ago. Circumstances nobody would explain to me, because I wasn't supposed to know about whatever world he walked into. I'm not making that mistake again." Something shifted in Kowalski's expression. Recognition, perhaps—the weight of a similar loss. "The gateways connect spaces that shouldn't touch," Kowalski said quietly. "The Veil Market exists in the gap between our world and another. This body—these wounds—they opened a door. The salt was meant to keep whatever comes through the door contained." "And someone broke the salt circle." "Two people broke it. The gaps align with that stall." Kowalski turned, following Quinn's earlier gaze. "The stall of a dealer named Sorel. He trades in Shade-crafted items." "Shade?" "Beings made of shadow. Artisan-crafted, your codex would say. They make things that help navigate the spaces between worlds." Kowalski's voice dropped. "Your compass, Detective. The one you've been holding since you arrived." Quinn looked down. In her right hand, turned unconsciously toward the light, sat a small brass compass. Its face was etched with protective sigils she somehow knew she'd never seen before. Its needle spun lazily, listing toward the eastern stall. She hadn't picked it up. She looked back at the body, at the precise triangular wounds, at the broken salt circle. At the peaceful expression that had never made sense. "It wasn't a murder," Quinn said slowly. "It was an offering. Someone opened a door, and he was the price." "And someone took what came through." Kowalski's face had gone pale. "Someone broke the circle on purpose, after the gateway opened. They took what was on the other side and left him here to die." "Where?" "The compass will point us to them. It's attuned to rifts, to portals, to gaps between worlds. If something came through—" "It already is." The needle spun, steadied, pointed directly at the eastern stall. At the dealer named Sorel. At whatever waited behind the counter, wearing a human face and holding something it shouldn't possess. Quinn checked her watch. Two minutes had passed since she'd descended the stairs. She had time. She started walking.