Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX4TE67MXZK8A9RX7NE9HS

The rain hammered Wardour Street in thick silver ropes, turning the pavement into a mirror of neon and brake lights. Quinn's boots cracked through a puddle as she rounded the corner, her eyes locked on the back of Tomás Herrera's jacket — olive drab, hood up, moving fast but not running. Not yet. He was still pretending he hadn't spotted her. She pressed her earpiece. Dead air. Comms had cut out two blocks back, right around the time she'd lost mobile signal near that strange little antiques shop on Brewer Street. Didn't matter. She'd called in her position before the static swallowed everything. Backup would come or it wouldn't. Eighteen years on the force had taught her that the window between spotting a suspect and losing them was measured in heartbeats, not dispatch response times. Herrera cut left onto Old Compton Street. She followed, keeping her distance at thirty metres, threading between a couple huddled under a single umbrella and a delivery cyclist who swore at her in Polish. The rain plastered her cropped hair to her skull and ran in cold fingers down the back of her collar. She ignored it. He glanced back. Their eyes met through the downpour — his warm brown, wide with recognition, hers steady and flat. The pretence died between them like a candle pinched out. He ran. Quinn exploded forward, her legs driving hard, arms pumping. She was forty-one and felt every year of it in her knees, but adrenaline had its own mathematics. The gap shrank. Twenty-five metres. Twenty. "Herrera! Metropolitan Police! Stop where you are!" He didn't stop. They never stopped. He vaulted a low railing outside a café, scattering chairs, sending a metal table spinning into the gutter with a clang that rang beneath the thunder. Quinn went around the railing — faster, cleaner — and closed another three metres. She could see the Saint Christopher medallion bouncing against his chest when his collar flapped open, the chain glinting wet. He cut down a side alley. She followed without hesitation, her worn leather watch catching on the brick wall as she banked the turn. The alley stank of grease and old beer. Her feet found broken glass, cardboard, something soft she didn't want to think about. At the far end, a fire escape ladder hung rusted and useless. Dead end. But Herrera wasn't slowing down. He dropped to his knees at the base of the alley's back wall and yanked at something — a grate, she realized, a ventilation grate that shouldn't have moved but came free in his hands as if the bolts were decorative. He slid through feet-first, his body disappearing into the dark below with a grunt and a splash. Quinn reached the opening four seconds later. She crouched, rain streaming off her jaw, and stared down into blackness. Warm air rose from the hole, carrying smells she couldn't catalogue — sandalwood, copper, something electrical and burnt, something alive. A metal ladder descended into the shaft, its rungs gleaming with condensation. She pulled her torch from her belt and aimed it down. The shaft dropped about four metres and opened into a horizontal tunnel — old brickwork, Victorian by the look of it. Somewhere far below, she heard Herrera's footsteps retreating, each one producing a wet echo that bounced and multiplied. Her hand went to her radio. Dead. Her phone — no signal, hadn't had one for ten minutes. She looked back up the alley. Rain. Empty. The distant honk of a taxi on some other, normal street. Three years ago, DS Morris had followed a lead underground. They'd found him four days later in a maintenance tunnel beneath King's Cross, sitting upright against the wall, eyes open, every hair on his head turned white. The pathologist listed the cause of death as cardiac arrest. Quinn had read the report six times. She'd read the unofficial notes the pathologist kept in a separate file — the ones that mentioned the expression on Morris's face, which the pathologist described, with uncharacteristic imprecision, as "sustained terror." The ones that noted his fingernails were worn to the quick, as if he'd been clawing at something for hours, though his hands showed no brick dust, no concrete residue. He'd been clawing at nothing. Or at something that left no trace. Quinn's hand found the top rung of the ladder. Cold iron. Solid. She knew what the smart play was. Wait. Call it in when comms came back. File the location. Return with a team, proper equipment, authorization. She also knew Herrera was connected to the network she'd been circling for eleven months. The clique. The ones who operated in the margins of the case files she couldn't close, the witness statements that contradicted physical evidence, the forensic anomalies that made her senior officers change the subject. Herrera was a thread. If she let him vanish into whatever this was, the thread would snap, and she'd be back to staring at dead ends and dead partners and dead air on the radio. She swung her legs into the shaft and descended. The rungs were slick. Her fingers ached where they gripped. The sounds of the city above — rain, traffic, the electric hum of being alive in London — faded with each step down until they became a memory, then a suggestion, then nothing. The tunnel at the bottom was wide enough for two abreast, lined with those dark Victorian bricks that sweated in the torchlight. The floor was damp but not flooded. Old rail tracks ran along the ground, half-buried in silt. An abandoned Tube station. She was somewhere beneath Camden, she reckoned, though the geography didn't quite make sense given where she'd entered. The distances were wrong. The direction was wrong. She filed that observation and kept moving. Herrera's wet footprints led forward. She followed them. The tunnel bent, then opened without warning into a cavernous space, and Quinn stopped walking. It was the size of a cathedral nave. The arched ceiling rose fifteen metres overhead, supported by iron columns wrapped in what she initially mistook for ivy but recognized, on second look, as something else entirely — tendrils of pale bioluminescence that pulsed with a rhythm uncomfortably close to breathing. The old platform stretched in both directions, and on it, arranged in tight rows and winding aisles, were stalls. Dozens of stalls. Scores of them. They were constructed from salvaged materials — old doors propped on oil drums, sheets of corrugated metal bent into canopies, silk curtains hung from ropes strung between the iron columns. Each one was lit from within by its own source: candles, lanterns, orbs of light that hovered with no visible support. The air was dense with competing scents — the sandalwood she'd caught from above, but also dried herbs, tallow, ozone, and something beneath it all that reminded her of the smell before a lightning strike. People moved between the stalls. Not many — perhaps fifty or sixty — but enough to create a low murmur of commerce that echoed off the tiled walls. She swept her torch across the nearest stall and saw glass jars arranged on a plank shelf, each containing a liquid of a different color, none of them labeled with any alphabet she recognized. The vendor, a gaunt woman with pupils that seemed too large for her face, looked up at Quinn's torchlight and went very still. Quinn killed the torch. She pressed herself against the tunnel mouth and steadied her breathing. Her pulse thudded in her ears. She catalogued what she was seeing with the mechanical precision of two decades of police work: illegal market, underground, no visible means of legitimate access, goods of indeterminate nature, multiple vendors, multiple customers, no emergency exits visible from current vantage point. Her hand drifted to her hip. Her sidearm was there — she was one of the authorized firearms officers in her unit, had been since the incident with Morris. The weight of it was a kind of grammar, a sentence she understood. But the other things she was seeing — the lights that floated, the tendrils that breathed, the jars of liquid that seemed to shift color when she wasn't looking directly at them — those didn't fit any grammar she'd been taught. She spotted Herrera. He'd stopped running. He stood forty metres ahead, near a stall draped in dark red fabric, speaking urgently to a heavyset man whose arms were covered in tattoos that moved. Quinn blinked. The tattoos moved. Ink serpents coiling around the man's wrists, reshuffling themselves in slow loops. Herrera pulled something from his pocket — small, pale, the size of a coin. A bone token. He pressed it into the man's palm. The man nodded and pointed deeper into the market. Quinn's jaw tightened. Eleven months of circumstantial evidence, of phone records that led nowhere, of witnesses who forgot her questions mid-sentence, of her DCI telling her to focus on cases with "prosecutorial traction." Eleven months, and here it was — the thing behind the curtain. The thing she hadn't been able to name but had felt in every dead-end case, every unexplained forensic result, every sleepless night spent re-reading Morris's autopsy report. The Veil Market. She'd heard the name once, in a pub, from a retired officer who'd drunk too much and said too little, who'd gripped her wrist across the table and told her some doors shouldn't be knocked on. She'd written it off as the ramblings of a burnout. She'd written down the name anyway. Herrera was moving again, weaving between stalls, heading toward the far end of the platform where the darkness thickened. If he reached whatever exit lay beyond, she'd lose him. Lose the thread. Go back to her desk and her dead radio and her files full of questions with no answers. She stepped out of the tunnel mouth and into the market. The murmur didn't stop, but it changed — a shift in pitch, a reorganization of attention. Heads turned. Eyes found her. She felt them like heat on her skin. She was wearing plain clothes, no warrant card visible, but she carried herself with the bearing of someone who'd spent years kicking in doors and reading rights, and in a place like this, that was its own kind of uniform. A vendor to her left — a young man with filed teeth and a necklace of small bones — leaned forward and sniffed the air near her as she passed. His lip curled. "Copper," he said, not to her but to the stall beside him. The word traveled. It passed from mouth to mouth in a whisper that rippled through the aisles like wind through grass. Quinn kept walking. She fixed her eyes on the olive drab jacket ahead and matched its pace. Her right hand rested on her hip, fingertips touching the grip of her weapon through her coat. The market pressed close on either side — stalls crammed with objects she refused to examine too closely, sellers who watched her with expressions ranging from contempt to curiosity to something that might have been hunger. A woman stepped into her path. Tall, wrapped in layers of grey linen, face half-hidden by a hood. "You don't have a token." Quinn didn't slow down. "Move." "You don't have a token, and you don't have jurisdiction. Not here. Not below." Quinn stopped. She looked at the woman — really looked. The visible half of her face was old, deeply lined, but her one visible eye was clear and sharp and ancient in a way that had nothing to do with age. "A man just passed through here. Olive jacket, scar on his left arm. Where did he go?" The woman tilted her head. A smile that wasn't a smile. "Everything has a price in the Market. Even answers. Especially answers." Quinn stepped around her and kept moving. Herrera's jacket flashed between two stalls thirty metres ahead. She was gaining. The copper-whisper followed her like a tide, and the market watched, and the luminescent tendrils on the ceiling pulsed, and Detective Harlow Quinn walked deeper into a world that had no place for badges or warrants or the comfortable certainty that the law was the sharpest thing in any room.