Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX6HDKYD8PZRT9S0BBKJN7

Footsteps hammered in my ears as he swerved through the back alley and jerked open a door that creaked with a reluctance it didn’t deserve. I cut the corner, a radius of wet bricks and neon glare closing behind me. He vanished into a corridor that stank of spilled beer and old secrets, and I followed without thinking twice. He sprinted into The Raven’s Nest, the distinctive green neon sign above the entrance throwing a hungry glow across the cobbles. The bar breathed a green hush, old maps and black-and-white photographs crowding the walls, the hum of conversations thinning as I crossed the threshold. The door thudded behind me, muffled by the weight of a world built on shadows and second chances. The suspect wasn’t here to drink; he was here to disappear. I moved in a line, shoulder first, scanning the room. A slim figure pressed against a pillar, eyes narrow, hands taut at his sides. He didn’t look back. The kind of man who believed a crowd couldn’t stop him when he’d already planned the exits. He took a step toward a shadowed stairwell that crawled down beside a shelf of nautical charts. The shelf looked innocent enough, a mosaic of putty-hearted maps and dusty labels. But I’d learned the room wasn’t what it pretended to be. “Not tonight,” I muttered, and for a heartbeat the thought of DS Morris brushed the back of my mind—two lives tangled in a single moment, the supernatural history I didn’t fully understand gnawing at the corners of it all. The suspect hit the shelf with his shoulder, as if to test whether space itself would yield. The shelf shifted. A tiny cough of dust rose, and a narrow door yawned open behind it, revealing a hidden back room. A bookcase facade designed to hide what people preferred not to see. I didn’t hesitate. I shoved forward, shoulder to the door, and the room swallowed me whole. The back room hummed with a different light, pale and precise, like someone had peeled the ribs of the night and laid them out in order. Maps hung with patient care, a thin film of mould along the edges of crates, the air carrying something metallic and old—gun oil, velvet, something unnameable. He was already in motion again, slipping into a narrow corridor that ran behind the bar and down a spiral stair that disappeared into something lower and more intimate than a pub should ever need. I counted steps, felt the wooden stairs grow slick under my boots, and a whisper of wind tell me the door behind me would not hold forever. The staircase opened into something that wasn’t exactly a tunnel and wasn’t exactly a memory. It was an old service artery beneath the city, a throat between aboveground echo and whatever truth lurked below. The air tasted of damp stone and citron wax, the kind of smell that clings to a man’s tongue when he realises he’s walked into something he can’t quite name. The passage opened into the Veil Market’s current cradle. A faint, almost-warm glow threaded between stalls; the air hummed with whispered bargains and half-spoken curses. The Market did not sleep. It moved. It breathed. Every full moon it changed its location, like a beast waking from a dream to remind the city who owned it. A bone token could pass a guard, a bone token could seal a deal, a bone token could kill a knight of the night if the bearer wasn’t careful. The suspect paused at a stall where a gaunt vendor hawked something that looked like a melted candle and called it “clarity in glass.” He pressed a finger to his lips, then slid deeper into the market’s throat, the crowd at his back parting as if the space itself understood the chase. I kept him in sight, across a maze of stalls where enchantments glittered in jars and banned alchemical substances glowed with a pale ferocity. Copper and incense and something else—old rain on iron, if you’ll permit a memory to tag along with a description. I didn’t rely on luck or instinct alone. I moved with a detective’s caution and a hunter’s patience, keeping the suspect in my peripheral like a prey animal knows to watch the feet of its predator. A stall seller crooned about a healing salve that would fix a broken vow, a woman with a shawl of feathers whispered promises into the ear of a boy who didn’t quite know what he wanted, and a hulking man in a hood watched the corridor mouths for traffic. “Keep moving,” I whispered to myself, the words almost a vow. The Market’s scent changed as we threaded through it—the copper tang of iron, the waxy sweetness of candles, and something else that prickled the back of my neck, the feathery sense that something ancient watched us and deemed us worth a closer look. The suspect swung into a tunnel that opened into a broader chamber, where stalls grew closer and the ceiling sagged with age. There, at the far end, a figure stood. The figure wore a Saint Christopher medallion, a glint of metal at the throat, and his eyes held a patient, almost ritual calm. It wasn’t a miracle to see Tomás Herrera here, but it did nothing to ease the tension that knotted my shoulders. Herrera’s gaze flicked to me for a moment, then settled back on the man in front of him. The air between them carried a different weight, a calculation I’d learned to distrust in the price of doing what I did. Tomás spoke first, his voice a low, easy thing, language hovering between casual and dangerous. “Detective. You’re late to the ball.” The words carried the heat of a game being played on a board I wasn’t fully allowed to touch. The suspect—my quarry—glanced at Herrera, then at me, a flicker in his eyes that said he understood the stakes and didn’t care. He wasn’t here for a spectacle. He was here to vanish. “Let me pass,” he said, voice rough, like gravel ground under a boot. “We don’t have to do this the hard way.” Herrera’s smile folded into something more measured, as if he were watching a chess match and that board kitsched with pieces already moved. “The hard way tends to be efficient. You last week, you’re here today. Your luck ran out in Westminster. Don’t pretend you found a new rhythm.” The suspect breathed out, and for a moment he looked toward me as if to measure what he could get away with if he tried. He was not alone here; that much was obvious. The Market’s shadows shifted—faces came and went in the corner of my eye, and the hum thickened, as though the place itself was listening and weighing every move we made. “Quinn,” he said, and there was a half-smirk in it, as if the name was a badge he wore to remind me I’d failed a hundred times before in a dozen different ways. “You think you know the city, detective. You don’t know what lives beneath it.” I kept a steady pace, not answering his provocation, letting the tension write itself across the line of my shoulders. The suspect stepped closer to a stall that offered a glimmering shard of something that looked like ice but burned when touched. He reached for it and the Market flared, a chorus of warnings whispering through the stalls. I moved, blade drawn at my side with the careful speed I’d learned in eighteen years on the force, and the blade met the space where he’d just been. A body collapsed. Not his. Mine. A trap door under a dummy crate gave way, the air rushing through the gap with a sound like a whisper of wind through a hollow bone. The suspect disappeared for an instant, swallowed by the Market’s underbelly, the people in stalls turning with reflexive unease, as if a sudden misstep had pulled a thread from a coat and everyone tightened their elbows. I sprang, catching the edge of the crate with a gloved hand and pulling myself forward, slamming into the other side of a support wall that the Market designers had left too convenient for a chase like this. The chase slowed as I found old pipes and a maintenance ladder that seemed more fit for a ghost than a detective of the modern age. The tunnel was narrow, the walls slick with something slicker than water, and the distance between the upstairs hustle and this subterranean beast felt like a confession. Tomás’s voice rang out again, calm but edged with something like fear disguised as concern. “Cuidado, Quinn. The Veil Market isn’t a place, it’s a mechanism. It takes, and it gives, and it forgets.” The suspect surged into the lower chamber, where a gateway door shimmered as if lit from within. The bone token gleamed on a string around his neck, a small pale bone turning in the light with each breath he took. He touched it, and the door’s shimmer intensified, as if the token unlocked a living truth rather than a mere entrance. “Stop,” I said, not loud, but the command slid through the space with a certainty that pricked at his skin. “This is the moment you ride or you fall. You don’t get to vanish into a market that swallows mercy.” He whirled on me and produced a blade, the blade's edge catching false light in the Market’s glow. He came at me with the practiced economy of a man who had learned to turn fear into weaponry. I stepped back, felt the damp air tug at the edges of my jacket, heard the soft creak of the timber beneath. The blade flashed; I shifted, deflecting with a precise parry, a spark of metal shorting the air as the blade scraped the bone token against the floor and sent a shard skittering across the stones. Herrera appeared at my shoulder, a breath of danger wrapped in civility. “He’s not the worst thing in here,” he said, eyes narrowing as he watched the token glow, not with warmth but with an almost surgical glow. “The Market is a patient thing. It keeps its secrets in the safest places, and it comes with a price.” The suspect lunged again, fury shaping his movements, and I felt the weight of the decision pressing down on me with a cold, indifferent hand. Do I follow him deeper into this living labyrinth, knowing the Market would swallow me as surely as it did those who underestimated it? Or do I retreat, call for reinforcements, wait until they can be brought to the surface and we can pull him back into a world that pretends to function? He pressed, and I pivoted, the sense of danger sharpening into a single, clear image: the Market’s walls were listening, and they were listening to the only language they understood—survival of the clever. If I stepped into the next chamber, I would not simply be chasing a suspect. I would be stepping into a furnace where every choice burned. “Quinn, you’re staring at the exit sign when you should be looking at the door you’ve got to shut behind you,” Herrera said, voice too calm, as if the Market’s breath didn’t reach him and the rain didn’t fall in the city above their heads. “If you go down there, you become part of the mechanism. It doesn’t stop for you.” I studied the bone token again, the pale bone catching the light with a cold honesty. The Market’s current location was Camden’s underworld, yes, but the token could be the city’s way of telling you to enter with a clean purpose—or to walk straight into a trap that would rewrite you in the same moment it rewrites the city. I could feel the weight of the decision, the clockwork loosened in my chest as the Market began to glow with a deeper intention, a readiness to consume. The suspect tailed the glow with his eyes, moving toward a corridor lined with stalls that had an almost ceremonial feel—incense, candles, jars of unknown substances whose lids rattled faintly as he passed. A voice rose from one stall, a whisper like a nail drag across wood, and the Market latched onto it, the whisper traveling through the space as if every item in the place wore the same ear. I stepped after him, not with bravado but with a careful, creeping determination. The Market’s pulse quickened, and the crowd’s murmur grew into a chorus of bargaining winds. The suspect glanced over his shoulder, a flicker of fear crossing his features before resolve returned, raw and sharp, ready to cut through whatever lay ahead. Tomás moved closer, his steps easy, his medallion catching the semi-glow of the room. “If you go in, you’re not hunting him anymore. He hunts you. That’s how this place works.” He paused, the weight of his own past hanging in the air between us. “I’ve seen what the Market does to the unwary. I’ve fed it too many times to pretend it won’t taste me again.” I did not answer. My eyes fixed on the suspect as he threaded between stalls, ducking beneath a low arch that opened into a wider corridor. The air grew cooler, a trick of the Market’s engine that suggested a depth beyond a simple underground. The bone token on his neck vibrated against his chest as if it remembered every time it had opened a door, every time it had bound someone to a choice—return to where they began, or step deeper into something they could not recognise. A stallkeeper leaned out of a corner, the scent of burning wax on his hands. He spoke in a low, careful rhythm, as if negotiating with a partner who might flick a switch and plunge them all into ruin. “Be careful what you wish for, friend. Every bargain here carries a price.” The suspect didn’t slow. He pressed forward until the corridor opened into a vaulted chamber where the Market’s ceiling arched high, ribs of old stone curving above like the belly of a sleeping creature. The glow grew stronger here, and the sounds—the clink of coin, the soft hiss of a dozen whispered deals, the scrape of metal on metal—felt intimate, almost familial, as if the place invited you to forget your old life and become someone new. I moved through the crowd, heat rising in my chest, a desperate need to catch him mingling with a professional curiosity I never admitted to in daylight. The Market’s tenants watched with a quiet patience, as if they’d waited a long time for this moment and would wait longer if they needed to. A woman in a velvet coat offered me a vial that promised “clarity for those with too much to forget.” I declined with a calm shake of my head; I’d learned to accept risk, not surrender to it. The suspect paused near a stall where a man dealt in bones—artfully carved, polished to a gleam, each one carved to resemble a different creature, each one attracting a small crowd with whispered novelties and subtle promises. He touched the nearest token with a finger, and the entire stall dimmed as if the room itself had drawn a breath. The suspect looked back at me, his eyes readable as an open book—he was considering the one route I would not take, the route that could deliver him into the heart of the Market’s deeper workings. “Don’t,” I said, forcing the delicate edge into my voice to cut through the chorus of voices. “You don’t know what you’re bargaining for.” He did not answer in words. He stepped closer to me, a dangerous proximity that told me he’d invite a fight so long as it kept him moving. Then, out of the murmur, a single sound rose above the rest—something heavy landing somewhere beyond the stalls, a thud that reminded me the Market wasn’t just a stage for whispered deals; it was a trapdoor for people who thought they could outrun it. The suspect shrugged off the distraction and pressed on, drawing his blade with a practiced ease that spoke of years spent in rooms far darker than this. I moved faster, the weapon in my hand settling along my thigh with the tremor of a weapon ready for action. Herrera watched us both with an expression that was almost paternal and almost predatory at the same time. “Quinn,” he said, avoiding the direct address, “the Market isn’t a place for a fight that ends with a body. It’s a place for a choice that ends with a lie or a revelation.” He spoke softly, almost as if speaking to himself as much as to me. “If you want him, you must be prepared to listen to what the Market is telling you about yourself.” The suspect lunged, and I caught his wrist with a controlled brace, turning the attack into a leg sweep that hurled him toward a row of iron cages containing artefacts that looked too valuable to be safe in such a place. He managed to grab the edge of one cage and pulled himself upright, the blade sliding free with a clean rasp that sent a shiver through the crowd. “Enough games,” I said, stepping forward. The Market's walls seemed to lean closer, listening to the exchange as if a chorus of unseen witnesses leaned in to hear the outcome. My breath hitched. In here, a single misstep could turn a chase into a permanent loss of self. The suspect’s gaze shifted toward a narrow passage that led into a tunnel beyond the cages. A token clinked against the man’s chest as he moved, and the edge of the token caught a stray beam of light, turning it into a pale, bone-white beacon. The beam revealed a form at the far end of the tunnel—someone waiting with a calm, almost ceremonial air. It wasn’t a guard in the usual sense; it was someone who understood how the Market really worked, a facilitator or perhaps something more. Tomás stepped into the beam’s circle, his presence a steadying force and a threat all at once. “I can hear your heart,” he said to the suspect. “It’s loud enough to tell me when you’re lying. The Market will not protect you from what you’ve done, not here, not now.” The suspect swallowed, eyes flicking from Tomás to me, and back again. He knew that contrary to what the Market might promise, this space did not forget. It remembered. It kept track of everything—every choice, every drop of blood, every whispered deal that went too far. I considered the risk. The Market’s guard, the unknown behind the bone token, the distinct possibility we were about to walk into a den of the supernatural in a city that pretended not to notice the monsters underneath its feet. The decision pressed hard: follow the suspect deeper into this living labyrinth or pull back, call for backup, and contain him at the threshold so the Market wouldn’t consume us both. The suspect moved again, and I stepped into his line of pursuit, letting discipline guide my steps as much as any instinct. The tunnel narrowed; the walls pressed in; the Market’s pulse grew louder, a tremor of energy that pushed at my ribs like wind trying to press through a too-thin wall. The suspect slowed, perhaps sensing the consequence of the decision he had already made in his head—the decision to trust an entrance to the Market more than the world above it. A sudden scream—a sharp, brittle sound—split the air from behind us. The crowd surged, then froze, a living wave of faces and teeth and glimmering eyes. Herrera, always a step ahead of danger, moved with a speed that suggested he’d spent long hours in smaller, darker rooms than this. He reached out, catching the suspect by the shoulder and spinning him away from a hidden crease in the tunnel wall. “Not yet,” Herrera hissed, the warning not directed at the suspect alone, but at the Market that seemed to relish a good chase as though it fed on it. He seized the man’s blade and tucked it into a hidden sheath at his own hip, a practised motion that spoke of long training and old habits of control. The suspect yanked free and whipped toward the tunnel’s exit, a desperate leap that would have carried him into the next chamber if not for my hand sliding around his forearm, pinning it to his side in a moment of steady force. The crowd roared with the kind of collective breath you hear in theatres when the villain makes a fatal misstep, and the Market itself seemed to lean closer, listening for the crack in his resolve. “Give it up, mate,” I said, my voice kept low, professional, a thread of steel. “You’re not getting out of this by bleeding into a crowd you don’t know how to read.” He spat near my boot, the saliva warm and accusing against the cold stone. The corner of his mouth twisted, a nasty smirk that told me he’d learned to survive the long game by reading people the way a hunter reads a map. Then his eyes flicked to a darker corridor, one I hadn’t yet dared to follow. The Market’s glow there was deeper, more sinister, and the door to that passage seemed to hum with a life that wasn’t mine to command. Herrera gave a soft, almost fond exhale. “If you go there, you won’t be able to walk back out and pretend nothing happened. The Market will remember your face.” The suspect jerked his head toward the deeper corridor and, for a heartbeat, looked as if he might sprint into the unknown. The glow flickered, casting long, pale shadows that stretched across the floor like fingers. A thin wail of wind teased at the edge of the passage, and a low hum rose up, a chorus of voices that didn’t belong to any living thing I’d ever known. It wasn’t the sound of fear so much as the sound of a city choosing its next memory. I tightened my grip, the weight of the decision pressing down on me with a brutal clarity. If I followed him, I would enter a chamber where the Market’s rules would apply to me as much as to him. I would have to confront things I did not fully understand and, worst of all, risk losing myself to a place that could rewrite my purpose in a single, merciless breath. “Quinn,” Tomás called softly, a warning and a suggestion rolled into one. “If you go in, you do not come back the same. And you might not bring him out either.” The moment stretched, a thin thread of possibility and danger, and I allowed it to unspool in the space between action and consequence. The suspect’s breath grew ragged, the blade at his side catching a shard of reflected glow as he prepared to make a run for it. The Market’s doors hummed with a language only those who had bargained here could hear, and I found myself listening, listening for a rhythm I could trust. Then, a sound like a shallow bell, a bell that announced a new cycle in a place that never slept, clanged somewhere above us. The bone token around the suspect’s neck gave a final, patient tinkle and then stilled as if listening to the Market’s next instruction. The choice lay before me in stark, brutal clarity: go deeper into this living maze and risk becoming a piece of the Market’s own machinery, or step back and seal this entrance, let the Market live on in its hidden world without dragging me into its shadows. I did not hesitate long. The decision landed with a decisive thump in my chest and a hard resolve in my voice. “Down there,” I said, jerking my chin toward the tunnel, and I saw a flash of relief and a flash of fear in the suspect’s eyes at the same moment. He understood the choice I had made. The suspect moved, and I followed, the Market’s hum rising to a fever pitch as if it anticipated the moment we’d learn something important about ourselves. Herrera’s hand brushed the air near my sleeve, a quiet, almost protective gesture that still managed to feel dangerous. Tomás spoke again, low and purposeful. “Remember your purpose,” he warned, not entirely to me, but to the space we now occupied. “You’re not chasing him. You’re chasing what lives inside him.” We threaded through the Market’s heart, where the walls breathed with a rhythmic sigh and the crowd’s murmurs settled into a single, ominous note. The suspect reached a final, narrow archway that opened into a courtyard-like space within the subterranean market—an area lit by a ring of weak lamps, each one throwing a pale halos onto stalls cluttered with charms, talismans, and relics that felt almost sacred in their juxtaposition with the violence of the chase. There, at the centre, a platform rose above a shallow pit, and the suspect paused, eyes locked on a figure who waited with quiet, inexorable patience. The figure wore a cloak that seemed woven from night itself and carried the weight of a centuries-long secret. On the figure’s chest hung a second token, identical in its pale bone glow to the one around the suspect’s neck. The crowd pressed closer, and I could feel the Market’s power coiling tighter around us, a living thing that fed on fear, hunger, and glory. The suspect took a breath and spoke, the words clipped, calculated, and almost ceremonial. “You wanted in,” he said, eyes never leaving the cloaked figure. “Now you’ve got a price to pay.” The cloaked figure inclined the head, not a nod, but a sentence delivered with the gravity of a verdict. “The price is the truth you carry. We do not pretend it does not exist merely because you fear it.” I stepped between the suspect and the platform, the blade in his hand catching the light of the lamps and throwing a short, sharp glimmer across the crowd. The Market thickened, a living fog of aroma and possibility, and the bone token on the suspect’s neck gave a soft, warning chime, a sound that said: doors will open and doors will close, and you will be judged by the doors you chose to walk through. Herrera moved closer still, almost merging with the shadows. His voice rose, controlled and intimate. “Quinn, think,” he whispered, as if not to be overheard by the Market itself. “You came here to catch him. You’ll leave with what you brought to catch him, or you’ll leave with nothing but a memory.” The suspect met my gaze, thin-lipped and taut, and the crowd’s murmur grew into a whip-whirr of voices. He raised the blade, a last, violent impulse to seize the thread of his fate and snap it for good. And then the ground answered, not with a voice, but with a noise—metal on stone, a long sigh of rock giving way—and the floor beneath us shuddered. A trapdoor opened with a stubborn creak above the pit, revealing a rough steel ladder that dropped down into a deeper, darker world below. The suspect lunged, but a second of hesitation betrayed him; he glanced at the ladder with a calculated risk and took the leap into the pit, vanishing into the black. The platform doors snapped shut in a heartbeat, and the Market roared. The bone token around the suspect’s neck wrung with a final, silver chime as it slid along his skin, his scream carried away by the Market’s phonetic wind and swallowed by the plummet into the darkness. I shot forward, breaking from the circle of onlookers, and reached for the ladder just as Herrera’s hand closed around my wrist, gripping with a force that told me he’d known this would happen and this was the moment he’d warned me about years ago. “Always a price to pay,” he said in a low, iron voice, his eyes gleaming with something like approval and fear in equal measure. “And you chose the cost.” The ladder turned to slick iron under our hands as we descended into the lower depths. The Market’s glow faded into the indifferent shadow that clung to the stone like a second skin. The echo of the crowd above us thinned, replaced by the drip of water and the whisper of unseen currents. We moved as a single unit, a pair of shadows with a shared purpose and a stubborn reluctance to be swallowed by a world we hadn’t chosen but now could not escape. The corridor opened into a cavernous, damp hall where the Market’s true machinery lay in wait: crates stacked like a city’s dark skyline, pulsating jars, charms in a hundred shapes, and a central chamber that seemed to breathe with a living pressure, the sound of air moving through a throat. The suspect lay on the floor in front of a door that looked like a mouth, the bone token still clutched in his hand, shining with a pale intensity. A moment later a pair of figures moved from the shadows—two enforcers of the Market, their faces obscured by hoods, their fingers stained with something dark and unnameable. They halted, not daring to cross the threshold into the central chamber without the Market’s express permission. The suspect squirmed, eyes wild with fear and relief in equal measure—relief that someone else had arrived, fear that someone would take him from the place he’d finally believed he could own. Tomás’s arm slid in beside me, a calm blade of restraint. “This is where it ends for now,” he said softly, as if to cool the heat of a world that burned too bright for ordinary men. “We can take him above ground, if you want. Or we can let the Market decide what happens next.” I felt the weight of the decision again—deep, heavy, inevitable. The Market’s breath pressed into my skin, a cold whisper that promised revelations if I dared to listen. The suspect turned his head, meeting my eyes with a desperate plea that required no words to convey: spare me the long, slow unraveling of a life that had finally come to its reckoning. “No,” I said, the word crisp and final. “You’ll tell me what I want to know, here, now, or we’ll do this the hard way, and you’ll tell me after.” The Market trembled in response, a low thrumming that sounded in my bones more than my ears. The suspect’s mouth opened, but no sound came out at first; then he exhaled, a shuddering breath that carried the exhaustion of someone who had fought the wrong battle for far too long. “Ask,” he said at last, the word torn from him as if the truth were a blade he could no longer keep sheathed. The Market warmed a fraction, and the two hooded enforcers shifted, their heads tilting toward the suspected answer that hung in the air like smoke. The central chamber’s door slid open with a sound like a sigh, and the space beyond glowed with a mad, green light that suggested the Market was about to reveal its most intimate secrets. The moment stretched. Then, from somewhere deep within the Market, a thing moved—the thing that existed between an ally and a weapon, between a memory and a consequence. A figure stepped into the glow, tall and patient, a presence that felt older than the city’s bones. It was not the kind of figure you’d call a guard or a boss; it was the Market’s own personification, the part of the space that decided who lived and who did not through the quiet arithmetic of fear and desire. The suspect’s eyes widened with dawning understanding as the figure approached. Herrera’s breath pressed against my ear, a reminder of the stakes and the costs, the promises and the betrayals we’d signed up for when we chose to chase a man through the depths of a city that refused to stay quiet. “Quinn,” Herrera murmured, and the word carried a weight that wasn’t simply concern. It was a warning, a reminder of what this chase might demand of us, and what it might cost the city we wore like a badge. I moved a step closer to the central chamber, the Market’s glow tracing the lines of my own fear and resolve. The suspect lay still, listening to the Market’s heartbeat, ready to use whatever truth the space would give him if we pressed harder. Then the figure in the glow spoke, a voice that sounded like the turning of pages in a book you shouldn’t be reading aloud. “The truth you seek is not a weapon, Detective. It’s a door. Step through, and you’ll see where the real danger lives—the danger that built the city and feeds on its fear.” The Market’s breath grew warmer, the glow turning almost iron-like in its intensity. The suspect jerked his head toward me as if begging for rescue, then looked back toward the figure with a tremor of realization and fear that this moment had already decided the course of his life. I took a breath, felt the weight of the decision settle into my bones and spine. The Market wasn’t a place you could outthink. It wasn’t a place you could outrun. It was a thing you could only survive by choosing your truth and paying its price. “Tell me what you did,” I said, voice as steel-edged as the blade at my hip. The suspect opened his mouth, but at that moment the central chamber’s doors shifted again, and the glow intensified. A crowd of shadows gathered behind the hooded enforcers, their faces indistinct, their voices a low whisper that rose into a chorus of names I did not recognise, a litany of the Market’s long memory. Everything blurred for a moment—the Market’s hum, the ache in my knees, Herrera’s quiet, the suspect’s breath, and the green glow that seemed to drink in the city’s fear as if it were a draught. Then a force, strong and inexorable, moved through the room, a wind of decision that would not be denied. The last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed us was the suspect’s face, a mask of relief and horror in equal measure, and Herrera steadying himself against the wall, eyes fixed on a future that was about to be rewritten. And then we were gone, swallowed by the Market’s private machinery, the bone token’s pale light fading as if someone had turned off a lamp in the middle of a room that refused to sleep. The door behind us snapped shut with a sound like a lock sliding into place, and the Market’s breath steadied, as if waiting for the next move in a game only it could fully understand. We disappeared into the deep, the kind of pursuit that did not end with a single gesture or a neat arrest. It ended with the city learning something it hadn’t wanted to know and with a detective who would live with that knowledge for years, every memory of that chase etched into her flesh and her resolve. The Market would remember us, and we would remember it, the moment we decided to walk into its heart and face whatever lay waiting there, knowing that the truth we found would demand yet another price to be paid.