Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0V3H3EWW4P976RGWDWHSC

Detective Harlow Quinn dropped the service hatch behind her and let the metal settle without a clang. The air under Camden carried its own weather—wet stone, old brake dust, a tang like burnt pennies that clung to the back of her throat. Her torch beam cut a straight line along tiled walls where Victorian adverts peeled in curls. A low murmur rolled up the tunnel ahead. Not commuters. Bargaining. Laughter that hit the tiles and came back wrong. Her worn leather watch pressed cold against her pulse as she checked the time by habit. The second hand moved. That, at least, behaved. She walked with clipped steps, boots finding the dry patches between puddles. The tunnel widened. The abandoned station opened out like a ribcage. Platform edges crumbled. The old roundel sign hung crooked, and beneath it the Veil Market spread across the tracks—stalls built from pallet wood and bent scaffolding, lanterns floating with no chains, shelves stacked with jars that twitched when people passed. Two figures stood near a cordoned-off section where someone had strung crime scene tape between a pillar and a rusted bench. The tape looked like it had come from a police supply cupboard; the way it sagged suggested it had been set up in a hurry. Eva Kowalski hovered at the edge, curly red hair shoved back behind her left ear so often that the motion looked stitched into her. Her round glasses caught lantern-light, turning her eyes into pale coins. Her worn leather satchel hung from her shoulder, heavy enough to drag her jacket collar askew. Beside her, a uniformed transport copper—too clean for this place—held a notebook against his chest and stared at the shadows like they might bite. Quinn kept her torch down and approached without giving the crowd the satisfaction of seeing her blink. Eva spotted her and stepped forward, voice low. “You brought actual police tape.” Quinn’s sharp jaw tightened as she looked past her. “You brought your books.” Eva’s hand closed around the strap of her satchel. “Your officer’s about to throw up.” The uniformed man swallowed hard, eyes fixed on something behind the tape. Quinn ducked under the sagging strip. The air changed the instant she crossed it—cooler, as if the space held its own breath. A dead man lay on the ballast between the rails, positioned with a neatness that didn’t match the mess around him. He wore a long coat that had once been expensive. The coat spread like a dark spill, but the stones under his torso stayed pale. No blood. His throat showed a cut, clean and confident, wide enough that Quinn’s fingers itched to measure it. The skin around it looked… sealed. Not scabbed. Seamed, like melted wax. The copper made a sound and turned away, pressing his knuckles to his mouth. Eva came in behind Quinn and stopped short. She didn’t flinch, but she went still, as if her bones had listened to a different set of rules down here. “That’s not how that wound behaves,” Eva muttered. Quinn crouched, the joints in her knees clicking under the strain of old training. She aimed her torch along the throat. The cut edges gleamed faintly, not wet, not dry. “You saw plenty of throats in your books?” Quinn kept her voice flat. Eva’s freckles stood out as her face drained. “I saw diagrams. This… looks like someone closed it after. Like they didn’t want the mess.” Quinn swept the beam over the man’s hands. No defensive cuts. Fingers relaxed, nails clean. A signet ring on the right hand: a black stone that swallowed light. Quinn didn’t touch it. Not yet. She glanced at the coat lapel. Fine grit clung there, pale as flour. Not Tube dust. Not plaster. It looked like ground bone. Quinn leaned closer and let the torch catch the stones around the body. The ballast held a shallow groove, a drag mark that ran for a metre and stopped at a point where the stones shifted as if they’d been disturbed and then pressed back into place by someone who wanted order. She looked up. “Where’s the blood?” The copper, still facing away, rasped, “Could’ve drained out somewhere else. Body moved.” Quinn traced the drag groove with the torch. “Then the stones would scatter. They didn’t.” Eva crouched opposite her, careful not to let her knee touch anything. “You’re assuming it follows physics.” Quinn’s gaze flicked to Eva’s glasses. “I’m assuming someone tried to make it look like it did.” Eva’s mouth tightened. She reached into her satchel and pulled out a small packet of nitrile gloves, already creased from being opened and closed too many times. “Gloves. If you’re going to touch anything down here, use them.” Quinn took the gloves and slipped them on, the snap loud in the quiet pocket the tape created. Beyond it, the market kept moving. A vendor’s voice sang out prices that sounded like insults. Somewhere, something in a cage hissed. Quinn leaned in and sniffed. The dead man smelled of iron and cold mint. The mint didn’t belong. She checked his eyelids. Pupils fixed. No visible petechiae in the whites. She pressed two fingers to his jaw where the pulse point used to matter more than paperwork. Nothing. Skin temperature felt wrong—cool, but not morgue-cool. Like stone that hadn’t seen sun in weeks. Her watch ticked on. “What time did they find him?” Quinn asked. The copper shifted his weight, still refusing the sight. “Market security. About twenty minutes ago. We came in through the staff access in the tunnel. They… they called it in, like it’s normal.” Quinn looked at the tape again, at the way it tied off around the pillar. Someone had used a reef knot. Clean. Familiar. “Who put this up?” The copper finally glanced over, eyes flicking to the corpse and away. “I did.” Quinn held his gaze until he stopped blinking. “Name.” “PC Renshaw.” He stood straighter as he gave it, posture snapping into place out of habit. Quinn nodded once and returned to the body. She reached into the dead man’s coat pocket with two fingers and pulled the lining out. Empty. His other pocket bulged. Quinn pinched the fabric and eased something out without scraping it against the stones. A small brass compass rested in her palm, its casing filmed with verdigris. Protective sigils etched the face in tight loops that made her eyes want to slide away. The needle quivered as if it had its own heartbeat. Eva’s breath caught. “That’s a Veil Compass.” Quinn turned it so the light hit the markings. Someone had scratched at the sigils with a sharp point, worrying the metal in two places near the hinge. “Your market sells tracking tools.” Eva’s voice sharpened. “Not to you lot.” Quinn tilted the compass toward Eva. “It belonged to the victim. You know him?” Eva’s gaze moved over the dead man’s face, then the ring, then the coat. Recognition hit her like a taste. “I saw him once in the archives. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He spoke to the curator like he owned the place.” Quinn watched the needle. It didn’t settle to north. It twitched toward the dark mouth of a tunnel, then swung away, then back again, like it argued with itself. PC Renshaw edged closer despite himself. “That thing broken?” Eva shook her head without looking away. “It didn’t break. It panicked.” Quinn rotated her wrist slowly, testing if the needle followed a magnetic field. It didn’t. It kept tugging toward the same tunnel, then jerking aside at the last instant. She looked at the dead man’s boots. Polished leather, too clean for ballast. No stone dust on the soles. No grit. That didn’t happen in a place where the floor ate shoes. She nudged the coat hem with a gloved fingertip. Something flashed beneath. A bone token lay near the man’s hip, half-buried in stones, carved with a pattern like knotted rope. It didn’t belong there by accident. Quinn hooked it out carefully and held it up. Eva’s eyes narrowed behind her glasses. “That’s entry. Someone dropped it, or someone planted it.” Quinn rolled the token between finger and thumb. Warm. Warmer than it should have been. “You need one to get in,” Quinn said. Eva pushed hair behind her left ear again, quick, tense. “Or you need one to make it look like you got in properly. That’s a difference.” Quinn shifted her torch beam to the pillar beside the body. A smear marked the tile at shoulder height: greenish, like oxidised metal. Verdigris. Same as the compass casing. She held the compass up to the smear, aligning height and angle. Her gloved thumb traced a scuffed spot on the compass edge where the patina wore thin. The copper watched, confused. “You think he hit the wall?” Quinn didn’t look away. “Someone swung it. Hard.” Eva leaned forward, peering. “Why swing a compass?” Quinn shifted her light to the throat wound again. “To disrupt something. Or to trigger it.” Eva’s face held steady, but her voice carried a strain. “A compass like that pointed to rifts. It didn’t open them.” Quinn brought the compass close to the wound without touching the body. The needle jerked toward the cut, then snapped away toward the tunnel mouth and trembled. Eva drew in a sharp breath through her teeth. “It reacted to him.” Quinn’s throat tightened. The lanterns beyond the tape flickered in a slow ripple, like a wave passing under a sheet. PC Renshaw backed up a step, boots scraping stone. “I don’t like this.” Quinn stood, joints protesting. She looked over the dead man again, taking inventory: clean boots, sealed cut, no blood, compass with scratched sigils, bone dust on lapel, bone token warm in her hand. She pointed her torch at the stones at the end of the drag groove. Someone had pressed them back into place, but Quinn caught the difference now—a thin line where ballast met something smoother underneath, a seam. Eva followed her beam and scooted closer on her haunches. “That’s not track bed.” Quinn crouched and brushed stones aside with two fingers. They slid away too easily, like someone had laid them as a cover. Beneath, a metal plate lay flush with the ground, its edges etched with the same looping patterns as the compass face. The markings looked older than the station. Eva’s voice went tight. “That’s warding.” Quinn ran her gloved fingertip along the plate edge. The lines held a faint residue, pale and gritty. “Bone.” Eva’s eyes flicked to the token in Quinn’s hand. “They used it to seal something. Or to keep something shut.” PC Renshaw hovered just outside the tape, cheeks grey. “This is above my pay grade. Can we call it in?” Quinn stood again and looked down the tunnel where the compass needle kept tugging. The darkness there didn’t look empty. It looked filled, like water in a pipe. Quinn slipped the compass into an evidence bag from her coat pocket, sealing it with a practiced press. She kept the bone token in her palm and closed her fist around it. Eva rose, satchel bumping her hip. “You can’t take that plate out. You’ll break it.” Quinn turned her head a fraction, letting Eva see the set of her jaw. “I didn’t come for the plate.” Eva’s hand tightened on her satchel strap. “Then what did you come for?” Quinn lifted her torch and aimed it down the tunnel. The beam hit moisture on the walls, turning it into slick black scales. The compass needle thudded against the inside of the evidence bag, desperate for direction. Quinn stepped toward the tunnel entrance, the bone token warming further in her fist. “Whatever that compass kept pointing at.”