Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0P1YMCD7GFR441BM02N21

The bone token felt wrong in Quinn's palm. Too light for its size, like holding a bird's skull filled with air. She'd taken it off the body upstairs — a John Doe sprawled in a Camden alleyway with no wallet, no phone, and a face so unremarkable the CCTV operators would probably lose him in a crowd of two. What the man did have was this token and a one-way ticket to somewhere underneath the Northern Line that shouldn't exist. Quinn ducked under the service hatch and dropped onto a platform that hadn't seen a scheduled train since 1924. The tile work was original — cream and oxblood diamonds, cracked but intact — and someone had strung fairy lights along the tunnel ceiling in long, swooping arcs. Beneath those lights, wooden stalls crowded the platform edge, most of them shuttered now, their canvas awnings pulled tight. The air smelled of copper and something botanical she couldn't name. Sweet, but with a rotten undertone. Like flowers left too long in standing water. "Detective Quinn?" Eva Kowalski was already there. Of course she was. The young woman sat cross-legged on an overturned crate near the far end of the platform, her worn leather satchel open beside her, books fanned out across the concrete like a paper garden. Her round glasses caught the fairy light and threw it back in twin circles. "Museum sent you?" Quinn stepped over a gutter that ran with something iridescent and oily. "British Museum's restricted archives don't technically have jurisdiction over crime scenes." Eva tucked a curl of red hair behind her left ear. "But DI Hargreaves thought I might be able to identify some of the materials down here. He called my supervisor." "Hargreaves." Quinn let the name sit in her mouth like a stone. She'd deal with Hargreaves later. The man had a habit of inviting consultants before the lead detective had even signed into the scene log. She pulled a pair of nitrile gloves from her coat pocket and snapped them on with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd done it ten thousand times before. "What have you identified so far?" "Enough to know this isn't a normal market." "I gathered that from the entrance requirements." Quinn held up the bone token between two gloved fingers. In the strange light down here, she could see markings etched into its surface. Tiny, deliberate grooves. Eva's eyes widened behind her lenses. She scrambled up from the crate, scattering a paperback copy of something with a Latin title. "Where did you get that?" "Our John Doe upstairs. Left coat pocket." Quinn turned the token slowly. "These markings match anything in your research?" Eva reached for the satchel and pulled out a clothbound journal, its spine broken from use. She flipped through pages dense with her own handwriting, paused, and held the open page beside the token. The symbols aligned. "Admission tokens for the Veil Market. They're carved from human bone — ethically sourced, supposedly, though I've never been clear on who's doing the ethics review." Eva's freckled face had gone pale beneath the fairy lights. "The market moves every full moon. If this is where it set up this cycle, then whoever died upstairs was either a buyer or a seller." Quinn said nothing. She was already walking the platform, her gaze sweeping the shuttered stalls with the same mechanical thoroughness she applied to any scene. Eighteen years had taught her to look before she theorized. The stalls on the left appeared undisturbed — padlocked, dusty, their goods packed away. But the third stall on the right told a different story. Its awning hung crooked, one support pole bent at a forty-degree angle. The wooden counter bore a long gouge, fresh enough that the exposed wood beneath was still pale and fragrant. She crouched. Glass on the ground. Not broken glass — intact vials, a dozen of them, scattered like spent cartridge casings. Each one contained a liquid so dark it looked black until she tilted a vial toward the light and caught the deep arterial red within. "Eva. Over here." The researcher picked her way across the platform, clutching her journal to her chest. She knelt beside Quinn and her breath caught. "Those are alchemical compounds. Banned ones." Eva pointed without touching. "See how the liquid doesn't settle? It stays in motion. That's a suspension of Shade-derived extract. It's incredibly rare, incredibly expensive, and incredibly illegal under every supernatural governance accord I've ever read about." "How illegal are we talking?" "Think weapons-grade plutonium, but for people who can do things that don't show up on physics exams." Quinn photographed the vials with her phone, then the gouge in the counter, then the bent support pole. She stood and followed the trajectory of damage with her eyes. The pole had been struck from the platform side, not the stall side. Someone standing where a customer would stand had swung at something — or been thrown against it. "Your reading of this scene." Quinn glanced at Eva. "Go." "Robbery gone wrong?" Eva pushed her glasses up. "Someone came for the compounds, things escalated, the seller or the buyer ended up in the alley. It fits. These extracts are worth a fortune." "It doesn't fit." Eva blinked. Quinn walked back to the scattered vials and pointed. "If this was a robbery, why are the goods still here? Twelve vials, all intact. Not one missing. Not one broken. A thief who kills for product doesn't leave the product behind." "Panic, maybe? Something interrupted—" "Look at the dust." Quinn swept her hand across the counter surface beside the gouge. A thin layer of grime coated everything except a clean rectangle, roughly eight inches by five. "Something sat here. Something that was taken. But it wasn't the vials." Eva stared at the clean outline. Her lips moved silently, and Quinn could almost see the mental catalog spinning behind those round glasses. "That's not the right shape for any of the standard alchemical containers." Eva opened her journal again and sketched the dimensions rapidly. "Eight by five, roughly. Shallow. Could be a display case, a document box—" "Or a case for something small that needed to be presented. Something you'd want to examine before buying." Quinn was moving again, her worn leather watch catching the light as she checked the time. Two hours since the body was found. The market's vendors would be scattering by now, assuming they hadn't already dissolved into whatever corners of London absorbed people who sold things in abandoned Tube stations. She reached the end of the platform where the tunnel mouth gaped, and stopped. Something glinted on the rail bed, four feet below platform level. Quinn pulled out her phone and activated the torch. A small brass object lay between the tracks. Even from this distance, she could see the green patina of verdigris creeping across its surface, and the delicate lines etched into what appeared to be a face — not a human face, but the face of a compass. She'd never seen markings quite like these. They looked deliberate, almost architectural in their precision, like the floor plan of a building that existed only in theory. "Can you get down there?" Quinn looked at Eva. "I'm not stepping on those tracks." "There's no current. This station's been decommissioned for a century." Eva peered over the platform edge, clearly unconvinced, then lowered herself down with the graceless determination of someone who spent more time in archives than in the field. She picked up the brass object and turned it over in her hands. The color drained from her face in a way that had nothing to do with the lighting. "Detective Quinn, this is a Veil Compass." "In English." "It's a navigational instrument crafted by Shades — beings that exist between planes of reality. The needle doesn't point north. It points toward the nearest supernatural rift or portal." Eva climbed back onto the platform, cradling the compass like it might detonate. "These are vanishingly rare. I've read about them. I've never seen one outside of a woodcut illustration from 1743." Quinn took the compass from her and held it flat on her palm. The needle trembled, then swung in a slow arc toward the tunnel behind them — not the direction of the entrance, not the direction of the stalls, but deeper into the disused network. It settled and held steady with a conviction that made Quinn's stomach tighten. "This is what was in the display case." Quinn turned back toward the damaged stall. "Not the vials. The vials were inventory — background product, the everyday stock. This compass was the special item. The thing the meeting was actually about." "So someone came to buy the compass, and—" "And the seller is dead in the alley upstairs." Quinn placed the compass on the counter, right on the clean rectangle. It fit the outline precisely. "The buyer took it, examined it, and something happened. The stall got wrecked. The buyer killed the seller and ran. But they dropped their purchase in the scuffle." "Then why was the body upstairs and not down here?" Quinn paused. That was the right question. She walked to where the tunnel mouth opened toward the service hatch they'd entered through and examined the floor. Scuff marks in the dust. Two sets of footprints leading out, one set leading in. She followed the outbound tracks and found what she was looking for six feet from the hatch: a spray of droplets, nearly black against the dark concrete, visible only because they'd dried with a slight sheen. "He was alive when he left the platform. Made it to the alley before he collapsed." She traced the trail with her torch beam. "No blood down here on the platform. The weapon — whatever it was — caused internal damage. Slow bleed. He had enough time to climb out and try to get help." "Or try to get away from whoever did this to him." "Two sets of prints leaving. One coming in." Quinn straightened. "The killer came in alone, left with the victim still on his feet. They walked out together." Eva's hand drifted to her left ear, tucking the same curl she'd already secured twice. "Together? You think the victim knew the attacker?" "I think the victim didn't know he was dying." Quinn stared at the compass on the counter. Its needle still pointed into the deep tunnel, steady and certain. "Whatever weapon was used, it wasn't obvious. No visible wound on the body. No blood at the point of initial contact. The victim walked out under his own power, probably thought the deal had simply gone badly. Reached the alley. Sat down. Never got up." "That's consistent with certain alchemical poisons. Contact agents that mimic natural causes." Eva was flipping through her journal with renewed urgency. "There's a class of Shade-derived toxins that attack the circulatory system from the inside. The victim feels fine for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, and then catastrophic vascular failure. The coroner would flag it as an aneurysm unless they knew exactly what to test for." Quinn pulled off her gloves with a snap. She looked at the fairy lights strung along the tunnel ceiling, at the shuttered stalls of a market that would relocate with the next full moon and leave nothing behind but dust and the memory of transactions no one would admit to witnessing. "Someone wanted that compass badly enough to kill for it." She picked the device up again and watched the needle hold its bearing. Unwavering. "And they used the seller's own product to do it. One of those banned compounds — a poison, not a drug. They came prepared." "But they didn't get what they came for," Eva said. "The compass is still here." "Which means they'll be back." Quinn slipped the compass into an evidence bag and sealed it. "Or they'll find another way to get where this thing points." Her phone buzzed. Scene of crime officers were five minutes out. She had five minutes to stand in this impossible place and think about the needle pointing into darkness, about a partner she lost three years ago in a case that smelled exactly like this one — copper and something sweet going rotten — and about the fact that for the first time in three years, she had a piece of evidence that didn't just suggest the impossible. It pointed directly at it.