Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT102HQ2TEJH0DZRPDR3N92

The abandoned Tube station smelled of copper and decay, though Detective Harlow Quinn couldn't determine which scent belonged to the body and which to the century-old infrastructure. She ducked beneath the police tape strung across the entrance—a rusted maintenance door that shouldn't have been accessible at all—and descended the iron staircase into darkness. Her torch cut a pale wedge through the black. Somewhere below, the crime scene unit had already set up their lights, and she could see the glow bleeding up from the platform level like something alive trying to crawl free. "Mind the third step from the bottom," called a voice from below. "Rust's eaten clean through." Quinn skipped the step without looking, her worn leather watch catching the light as she gripped the railing. Eighteen years on the force had taught her feet to remember warnings her conscious mind might forget. The platform opened up before her, and she stopped. It wasn't the body that gave her pause—she'd seen plenty of those. It was everything else. Market stalls. Dozens of them, arranged in neat rows across what should have been an empty abandoned platform. Wooden tables draped with cloth, glass display cases, a fortune-teller's booth with velvet curtains now stained with something dark. The crime scene lights cast harsh shadows through the skeletal frames, turning the whole space into a forest of strange silhouettes. "Guv." DS Chen approached, tablet in hand, looking as unsettled as Quinn felt. "Glad you could make it. This one's... different." "What is all this?" "Some kind of underground market, far as we can tell. Transport Police got an anonymous tip three hours ago. Came down expecting rough sleepers, found—" He gestured toward the center of the platform, where a white tent had been erected over the body. Quinn walked the perimeter first, ignoring the tent. The body would keep. The scene wouldn't—not once the brass decided this was too strange for standard procedure and called in whoever they called in for things like this. The stalls held merchandise that made no sense. Glass vials filled with liquids that seemed to shift color when she looked away. Books bound in materials she couldn't identify. A display case full of what appeared to be teeth—human, animal, and something else entirely. She reached for one of the vials, then stopped herself. "Forensics touch any of this yet?" "They're being careful. Half of them think it's some kind of drug operation. The other half—" Chen shrugged. "You know how rumors spread." Quinn knew. She also knew that rumors, in her experience, often carried more truth than official reports. She approached the tent. The victim was female, mid-thirties, dressed in clothes that looked Victorian but felt wrong somehow. Too clean. Too well-preserved. She lay in the center of a stall that appeared to have sold small brass instruments—compasses, astrolabes, devices Quinn couldn't name. Her eyes were open, fixed on the vaulted ceiling above with an expression of profound surprise. No visible wounds. No blood except for a small trickle from her left ear. "Cause of death?" "Medical examiner's saying heart attack pending autopsy. But..." Chen crouched beside the body, pointing his torch at her left hand. "Look at this." The woman's fingers were curled around something. Quinn pulled on a fresh glove and gently pried the hand open. A small brass compass sat in the dead woman's palm. Its face was etched with symbols Quinn didn't recognize, and the casing had a patina of verdigris that suggested age. The needle was spinning wildly, despite the compass lying perfectly still. "That's been doing that since we found her," Chen said. "Haven't touched it. Figured you'd want to see it in situ." Quinn stared at the spinning needle. Something tugged at the back of her mind—a memory of another case, another scene that didn't add up. Three years ago. Morris lying on cold concrete with his eyes open and that same expression of profound surprise. She pushed the thought away. "What's the theory?" she asked, straightening up. Chen checked his tablet. "Anonymous tip suggests this market operates on a rotating schedule. Moves locations every month or so. Vendors sell to a specific clientele—collectors, antiquarians, that sort of thing. We're thinking the victim was either a vendor who got robbed or a customer who saw something she shouldn't have." "Heart attack during a robbery?" "Drugs, maybe. Something that causes cardiac arrest. Forensics found traces of powders at several stalls that don't match any known substance." Quinn walked away from the body, toward the edge of the platform where the tunnel mouth gaped like an open wound. The rails were rusted solid, hadn't seen a train in decades. But there were footprints in the dust—dozens of them, overlapping, leading in both directions. "How many people were here when this happened?" "Based on the footprint analysis? Could be thirty, forty individuals. Maybe more." "And they all vanished before the police arrived." "Three-hour gap between the anonymous tip and our arrival. Plenty of time to clear out." Quinn shook her head. Something didn't fit. The stalls were still here. The merchandise was still here. If this was a criminal operation—drugs or stolen goods or something else—why leave all of it behind? Why not take the evidence? Unless the evidence wasn't evidence at all. Unless it was a message. She returned to the body, crouched again, studied the victim's face. The surprise etched there wasn't fear. It was recognition. This woman had seen something she knew—something familiar—and it had stopped her heart. "I don't think this was a robbery," Quinn said. Chen looked up from his tablet. "Guv?" "The merchandise is worthless to anyone who doesn't know what it is. Look at these stalls—no price tags, no signage, nothing to indicate what's being sold. This market operated on reputation. Word of mouth. The vendors knew their customers, and the customers knew what they were buying." "So?" "So if you wanted to rob this place, you'd need to be part of that world. An insider. And if you were an insider, you'd know better than to kill a vendor in the middle of the market floor. Too many witnesses. Too much risk." Quinn stood, pacing now, her mind working through the problem like a puzzle. "The tip that brought us here—it came in three hours after the estimated time of death. Long enough for the market to clear out, but not long enough for the body to be moved. Someone wanted us to find her exactly like this." "A setup?" "A statement." Quinn gestured at the spinning compass still clutched in the dead woman's hand. "She was selling something. Something specific. And someone wanted to make sure everyone who shops at this market knows what happens when you sell to the wrong buyer." Chen frowned. "That's a lot of speculation, guv. The ME says heart attack. Could be natural causes." "A healthy woman in her mid-thirties drops dead of a heart attack while clutching a compass that won't stop spinning, in the middle of an underground market that officially doesn't exist, and your theory is natural causes?" "I'm saying we follow the evidence. The evidence says heart attack." Quinn looked at her colleague—young, earnest, following procedure exactly as he'd been trained. She couldn't fault him for it. She'd been the same way once, before Morris, before she'd learned that some cases had answers that couldn't be found in evidence bags and autopsy reports. "Pull the CCTV from the surrounding streets," she said. "I want to know everyone who entered this area in the twenty-four hours before the tip came in." "Already running it. But guv—this station's been sealed for seventy years. The only entrance we've found is that maintenance door, and the lock had to be cut to get inside." "Then how did forty people get in and out without anyone noticing?" Chen had no answer for that. Quinn walked back toward the body, past the stalls with their impossible merchandise. A glint of light caught her eye—something beneath one of the tables, half-hidden by a fallen cloth. She crouched, pulled back the fabric. A small wooden box, ornately carved, sitting in a pool of what looked like black ink. Except ink didn't smoke. This did—thin wisps of dark vapor rising from the liquid and dissipating into the air. "Chen. Get forensics over here." He came at a jog, then stopped short when he saw what she'd found. "What the hell is that?" "Evidence." Quinn pulled out her phone, took photographs from multiple angles. The smoke was already thinning, the pool shrinking as whatever substance it was evaporated or absorbed into the stone floor. "Something was in this box. Something that needed to be contained. And now it's not." "You think that's what killed her?" Quinn didn't answer. She was looking past the box, past the stalls, toward the far end of the platform where the shadows seemed deeper than they should be. For just a moment, she could have sworn she saw movement—a shape that was there and then wasn't. She blinked, and it was gone. "Canvas the area again," she said, her voice steady despite the cold settling into her bones. "Every stall, every inch of floor. I want to know what was in that box and where it went." "And the body?" Quinn looked back at the dead woman with her spinning compass and her surprised eyes. Three years of unexplained cases. Three years of evidence that didn't add up. Three years since Morris died with that same expression on his face, and she'd been told it was an accident, a fall, bad luck. She'd stopped believing in bad luck a long time ago. "The body goes to Dr. Patel. Tell her I want a full toxicology screen and I want it fast. And Chen—" She waited until he met her eyes. "This case stays off the shared database for now. Everything goes through me." "Guv, that's not—" "Not protocol. I know." Quinn stepped over the remnants of the smoking pool, already little more than a dark stain on ancient concrete. "Neither is any of this." She climbed the iron staircase alone, the crime scene unit's lights fading behind her until she was back in darkness with only her torch for company. At the top of the stairs, she paused before stepping through the maintenance door. The market had moved locations every full moon, Chen's notes said. Which meant someone knew when and where it would appear. Someone with access to information the Metropolitan Police didn't have. Quinn thought about the dead woman's hand, clutched so tightly around that brass compass. She thought about the symbols etched into its face—protective sigils, if you believed in that sort of thing. And she thought about what kind of person needed protection from the needle of a compass. Someone who didn't want to be found. She stepped through the door into the grey London morning, already planning her next move. Somewhere in this city was a researcher who specialized in impossible things. Someone who might be able to tell her what kind of market sold smoking boxes and spinning compasses. Someone who knew about the spaces between what was real and what the evidence could prove.