Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTQW2KGJB65BWQF6CXAD730

Puddles split under boots as Detective Harlow Quinn thundered down Berwick Street. Her breath clouded in the mist, her jaw clenched so tightly it throbbed, eyes sharp on the huddled figure vanishing around a corner. Somewhere back the siren’s wail got swallowed by the city’s night noises: taxis hissing past, a bus juddering to a halt, umbrellas snapping open in tired hands. Rain soaked through her trousers and plastered her salt-and-pepper hair against her scalp, but she didn't break stride. Quinn rounded the kerb and swore under her breath. The street forked—one alley, brickwork slick with rain, veered downhill; the other arched under a construction awning, shadowed and empty. She paused. Her quarry—a man, sharp-jacketed, white trainers—half-glanced back, a glint from a wet collar, before darting left. She sprinted. The alley stank of rot and old takeaway. Litter clung to locked bike frames, puddles shimmered with the oily reflection of the city’s neon. Quinn tuned out the ache in her thigh, the old injury that always made itself known in a chase, and focused instead on the rhythm of his footsteps ahead. He reached a battered set of stair rails, slipped over them with an ease born of desperation, then vanished down into the darkness below the street. Quinn dropped onto the slick tarmac by the rails, squinting into the black. A flicker of movement below. Her breath slowed—a deliberate, soldier’s inhale—and she edged toward the stairway. Faded lettering arched over the entrance: Camden Town—Closed For Maintenance. Quinn swept the beam of her torch down wide steps. Water thread the black ironwork and silvered discarded cans. The city above grew muffled, swallowed by concrete and the hiss of the underground. The suspect’s ragged breathing echoed ahead, faint but clear. She thumbed the radio at her belt. Static. Down here, nothing carried. Every instinct in her bones itched—don’t go in alone, wait for backup, think of Morris—but the shock of rain in her eyes, the burn of memory, the white-hot certainty that this man mattered, propelled her down. Footsteps closed. Her quarry hurtled through a gap in a splintered wooden door to what must have once been a passenger tunnel. Quinn flattened herself into the wall’s shadow and watched him fumble inside his jacket, producing something—round, bone-pale, strung on a chain. He pressed it against the wall, muttered words she couldn’t catch. The brickwork shimmered. Light—sickly yellow—spun in ripples, and a slice of wall slid open to reveal a jagged gap just wide enough for a man to slip through. “Shit.” Quinn weighed her choices. A drip traced the scar at her wrist, her watch ticking against her skin. He hadn’t seen her. She moved—quick, silent. The wall seemed to pulse, a paint-thin illusion. Closer now, she could make out the shape of the bone token dangling from a nail beside the aperture. Something was carved along its edge, runes she’d half-glimpsed in Morris’ old notebooks, once tossed aside with a scoff. The air on the other side of the wall stank of incense and electricity. Quinn gritted her teeth and ducked through. Inside, pressure changed—heavier, laced with the pulse of dozens of bodies. Lamps swung overhead, jerry-rigged to bare wires. The platform sprawled, stripped of trains but filled with backs bent over shrouded crates, neon-lit stalls, a hum of bargaining that never rose above a certain pitch. A vendor flicked a knife in the dark, counting out vials glowing dimly blue. Someone else, eyes too large, skin sliced with clever scars, hawked book-sized parcels wrapped in silk. The suspect had slowed, his confidence returned as he blended into the tide. He cut through a group passing a cage of snapping rats, exchanged words with a figure in a cloak, then ducked toward a stall heavy with bottled thunderclouds and teeth. Quinn’s pulse pounded at her neck. If she moved in now, this den would eat her alive. She pressed herself behind a rotting column, fingers brushing the edge of a map stuck to the tile—veins of tunnels, all false except for the chalk mark someone had slashed in the upper corner. The Raven’s Nest. Soho. A sigil in place of a street name. She checked her watch. Past midnight. No squad car in range, no backup. Only her badge and the glint of her worn leather watch flashing off the torchlight. Mind whirring, she weighed her options. Go loud—arrest and chaos—or shadow him deeper, trusting in the edge that had always saved her before. “Detective.” Voice low, wrapped in a Seville accent, softer than the Market’s rough current. Quinn’s head snapped up. Tomás Herrera leaned against a support pillar, eyes warm brown even in the fluorescent half-light, his dark curls rain-mussed, the scar on his forearm just visible below a rolled sleeve. He glanced toward the suspect, then met her gaze with the weight of someone who’d stitched up too many bullet wounds to be surprised by a little blood. “You don’t want to lose him, but you don’t know these stalls. Bad trade.” “You offering a guided tour, Herrera?” Quinn didn’t flinch, didn’t shift her boots from where she’d rooted herself. Her eyes tracked the suspect past a cluster of shrieking children. “I’m offering you don’t end up in a crate,” Herrera shrugged, sliding his Saint Christopher medallion beneath his shirt with a deft motion. “Trouble’s cheaper than luck down here.” Quinn scoffed under her breath, hands tucked behind her back. Rainwater pooled beneath their feet. “You sure you’re not working for him?” Her eyes narrowed. “You stitched up his arm last week at the Nest.” “If I worked for him, you’d be bleeding already.” He nodded, subtle, toward the path the suspect now threaded—toward a heavy iron door manned by three ducked heads, faces blank as new paper. “You going?” Every muscle in her body screamed to move, but years of discipline held her. Beyond that door, she knew, lurked things she’d only half believed—the sort of secrets that twisted simple murder into something else. She forced herself to look away from the gleam of Herrera’s medallion, from the door, back toward the swirl of Market crowds. “If I wanted to walk away,” she muttered, not caring if Herrera caught the edge in her voice, “I’d have already climbed those bloody stairs again.” Herrera’s mouth quirked, but his eyes stayed serious. “Follow him through, they'll want a token. Don’t show your badge. That buys you a world of trouble, not trust.” His shoulders shifted. “Keep your hands empty. Don’t talk unless you’re buying.” Quinn glanced down at her holster, weighing her options. The worn grip comforted her, even if bullets meant less here than secrets. The suspect passed through the iron door, flashing his bone token at the guards. One of them flicked his gaze over the crowd, lingering on Quinn. He lifted a hand, tapping the hilt of a blade tucked against his belt—a warning, sharp as glass. “I know what I’m doing.” Quinn didn’t believe the words, but she wore them like armour. Herrera slipped his hand into a coat pocket, then pressed a cold circle into her palm—a bone token, old, carved with a pattern she recognised only from nightmares. “Don’t lose it. Or me.” She wrapped her fingers around the token and pushed into the press of bodies, keeping Herrera at her side, the Market swallowing them both as the city’s night ebbed and thunder rolled above.