Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX8MVRJYX5DYDK60VFSH98

Boots hammered the slick pavement as he slammed into the tight alley, a shadow shedding rain in a spray of neon reflections. I twisted after him, catching the blur of a hood, the tremor of breath. He spun, foot catching a puddle, and went down into a knee-bend slide that could have mislaid a man twice his size. I lunged, caught the back of his jacket, yanked him upright, and pressed him into the rain-slick brick. “Not today,” I said, voice low, body closing the gap. The city hissed around us, rain bead-music on the metal of fire escapes, but no one else moved. Not yet. He twisted free, hard eyes glinting under hood and shadow. “Quinn.” The word came out soft, almost a dare. “Too late to give up now.” I read him in a heartbeat: someone slick and prepared, the kind who knows he’s being hunted and enjoys the chase more than the outcome. He darted left, the way a fish darts through a current, and I followed. The trench between us filled with the rhythm of rain, the slap of our boots, the murmur of distant traffic. A streetlight blinked; the green neon of a doorway coughed to life somewhere ahead—the Raven’s Nest. The Nest wasn’t just a bar; it was a maze, a memory, a doorway. We hit the street edge where the city’s noise peeled off into narrow lanes. The Nest’s distinctive green neon sign above the entrance seemed to glow brighter as if it hadn’t slept in years. He shoved through the door like a bolt of shadow, and I followed, slipping into the kind of chase that knows every stone, every smell, every sound the city is hiding. Inside, the air changed. Damp and tobacco-sweet, with a scent of old wood and new fears. The Nest held maps on the walls, black-and-white photographs that watched you as you moved, and a silence that waited for someone to break it. The suspect pressed into the back room first, a doorway hidden behind a bookshelf, not a door at all so much as a suggestion of one. Stay sharp. He wants to trap you in a memory, not a room. I knocked the edges of the shelf with a gloved knuckle; a soft click answered, and the shelf shivered, sliding aside to reveal a narrow stair that dropped into darkness. The stairs smelled of damp and something coppery, a hint of old blood or old secrets. The air grew cooler, heavier, as if we’d left a party and entered a private chamber where the clock’s hands are turned backward. Down, down, down. The city’s noise dimmed to a distant drum, the only sound a distant drip, drip, drip. The pulse of the chase sharpened. My wristwatch felt heavier than usual, the leather worn from years of duty; it had taught me to measure time by the rhythm of lungs and footsteps, not minutes on a face. The stair ended in a basement corridor, that same scent of rain-soaked stone seeping through a weak lamp’s halo. He paused, listening for the world above, then pushed forward with a practiced calm. We moved through the Nest’s lower workings—pipes, a maintenance door painted black, a ledger fluttering open on a wooden crate like a mouth trying to tell me something it wasn’t allowed to say. “Not your usual haunt, Quinn,” the suspect whispered, glancing back with that sly, smug smile of his. He knew I’d come. He always did. “Seems your taste for danger matches mine.” “Not a fucking game,” I snapped, though the edge of fear kept skimming my nerves. I was a detective with eighteen years’ decorated service and a partner I’d never properly learned to grieve. I didn’t chase to play; I chased because someone had to stop the drift into the dark. He pivoted into a wider shaft, a tunnel that ran beneath the city’s ribs. A draft breathed through the bricks, carrying a faint metallic tang. He moved fast, the kind of speed that belonged to a man who’d trained in the dark and never blinked. The Nest’s echoing rooms fell away; we pressed into a corridor that felt engineered for constant passage, as if the building itself leaned into the secret. The air grew cooler, then cooler still, until the ceiling arched in a rough curve, like a tunnel carved by the city’s long, careful hands. “Think you’re clever, Harlow?” his voice came from somewhere ahead, a dry rasp that made the air between us feel thinner. “You’re chasing the wrong truths.” I didn’t answer with bravado. I moved, using walls as cover, letting the space tell me more than he did. A cold draft swirled from a vent in the floor, coins of dust dancing in the pale light as I pressed on. The city’s pulse had changed here; it wasn’t a market yet, just a labyrinth of service corridors feeding into something bigger. The sound of our shoes—one heavy boot, one steady sneaker—hammered in a quiet rhythm that could wake the dead in a cellar like this. Then the faintest scent found me: something spicy, something medicinal, something that reminded me of Tomás Herrera—Tomás. The name prickled at the back of my neck, a reminder of the clique’s quiet network of care and complicity. He was a former paramedic who’d moved to London’s shadows after he’d lost his license, after he’d given unauthorized treatments to supernatural patients. He wore a Saint Christopher medallion around his neck, a talisman that once drew him to the light and now clung to the darkness. If the suspect had cornered him here, I wouldn’t pretend innocence would win the day. We turned a corner into a low-ceilinged alcove, a space that wasn’t meant to be seen by eyes that didn’t belong to the right kind of person. The air tasted of iron and rain. In the middle of the corridor stood a heavy door. It wasn’t a door so much as a barrier, a line drawn in the sand. Beyond it lay a world that had learned to survive on whispers and boldness—an underground market where enchanted goods and forbidden alchemical substances moved like breath through a body. I slowed, calculating. The Veil Market sat beneath Camden, moving each full moon from one abandoned tube tunnel to another. The rules were severe: to enter, you needed a bone token, a whispered contract with the city’s hidden economy. The token itself was a thing of bone-white grain, carved with sigils that looked ancient and wise and dangerous all at once. I’d heard of those tokens in rumours and fear and the kind of talk that never saw daylight again. The suspect stepped toward the door, and for a moment I considered nailing him there, in the hallway, where the stale air tasted of damp and fear. Then the glint of metal at his belt caught my eye and I did something I’d learned in the force years ago but hoped never to need again: I studied his feet, the way his knees stayed loose, his breathing kept even. The thing about a chase in unfamiliar territory was not just following but deciding whether to risk the unknown. The shoes on his feet—well worn, reliable—told me he’d done this dance before; the lack of fear in his eyes told me he’d done worse. “Turn the corner with me, Quinn. See what you’re really made of,” he hissed, not daring to look back as he reached for a small, hidden door that had been welded into the wall, a secondary escape that wasn’t visible unless you knew where to look. I caught his ankle, felt his weight teeter, and he slammed a knee into my shin, a skirmish move you don’t forget once you’ve learned it in bad weather and worse streets. He tumbled forward, sprawling into a crouch and pistol in hand, the metal catching the pale light in a glimmer that felt like a promise of blood and blame. But before he could press the trigger, the corridor seemed to tilt, a sign that the gate to the Market might have opened its mouth. “Not there,” I said, grabbing the arm with the gun, flipping him onto his back so his shot would hit the ceiling and ricochet somewhere far from him and me. The weapon clattered away, skittering across damp concrete. He rolled again, and for a moment the look on his face was pure calculation, as if he’d sized me up and found me wanting. Then he scrambled to his feet and bolted toward the door. He didn’t make it. Not before I slammed a shoulder into him, corkscrewing him toward the wall. The door behind the door—if that makes sense—shuddered and slid just enough to reveal a crack of yellowish light, then disappeared into the wall entirely as if the building itself had decided this chase wasn’t for show. “The Veil Market,” I muttered, tasting the word like iron on my tongue. Beneath Camden, the air tasted different—more ancient, older than the bricks, older than the rain. The market wasn’t a place you simply walked into; you learned to listen to the rumours whispering between stalls, to the tremor that ran through the air the moment a new oath was spoken, to the way a token glowed faintly in the dark when danger was near. The suspect hesitated only a heartbeat, eyes darting toward a hidden staircase behind a crate, a path toward a deeper, more dangerous world. A world that moved in time with the full moon, a world where the price of secrets was paid in blood and paper-thin trust. He looked back, as if to measure my resolve, then drew a breath that seemed to pull the cold into his lungs. “This is your last chance, Quinn,” he said, voice tight with edge, a blade of sound. “The Market chooses who walks out in one piece.” I stepped forward, not to threaten but to test, to see if he’d break and tell me what I needed to know. The secretive atmosphere pressed in, and for the first time in a long while I felt the weight of every choice I’d made in the line of duty settle on my shoulders like a cloak that would never come off. “Who are you really running from?” I asked, keeping my voice steady, letting the question ride the air between us like a blade. His response came as a shrug, not a confession. “Not running from you, detective. Running toward something you’ll never understand.” The line of dialogue fell away into a swirl of market noise, the kind that makes you strain to hear the whisper behind a scream. A vendor shouted in a language I almost recognized, the clang of a trinket hitting a wooden counter answering the cry. The market’s walls were lined with stalls selling all manner of enchanted items, a smell of resin, spice, and something sharp and dangerous. The crowd around us moved like a swarm, faceless in the shadows; eyes watched through the plumes of steam and smoke. The market breathed. Behind a curtain of pipework, a narrow corridor opened into a dim parlor of sorts—the kind of intimate ceremony where the clique did its illegal business, where medical care and black market cures finessed into a single dangerous art. A figure dressed in a stained coat leaned over a table, needles and vials arranged with meticulous care, the room perfumed with something antiseptic and metallic. A Saint Christopher medallion flashed against a chest that had learned to lie very still. The name registered in a single flash—Tomás Herrera. He looked up as we entered. The room fell quiet as a church during confession, and then resumed its murmur of whispers, the kind you hear when you’re looking at something you’re not supposed to be looking at. “Detective,” Tomás said softly, a hint of a smile on his lips that didn’t reach his eyes. “I didn’t expect you to follow this far.” He spoke with a quiet certainty, the calm of a man who’d learned to tread through danger without letting it bruise him. “He’s a courier for the clique,” I said, nodding toward the suspect, who stood near the door, eyes flicking between Tomás and me as if the room might dissolve into a trap at any moment. “Where did you get the token?” Tomás’s gaze didn’t waver. “Tokens aren’t handed out; they’re earned. He earned one because he did the thing you’d expect a person to do—protect something you can’t see.” He paused, measuring his next words. “And you? Do you protect what you can’t see, Detective, or do you pretend it isn’t there until it bites you?” The suspect moved again, a quick duck toward the back room beyond the curtain; a scream muffled by a door. Tomás rose, his hands calm, eyes clear as if the rain had washed over him and left him with a bright, clean truth he clung to. “Tomás, what are you doing here?” I asked, keeping the question simple, avoiding any hint of accusation that could shatter the delicate balance in this room. “Helping,” he said, the word heavy with implication. The Saint Christopher medallion glinted under the lamp. “If you’re chasing him into the Market, I’d suggest you be careful which hole you choose to poke. The Market feeds on fear as much as gold.” The suspect lunged again, this time toward a side corridor where crates were stacked like a labyrinth. A cry rose from somewhere in the back, a sound that wasn’t just fear but a plea for mercy, a call to someone who might not answer in time. The suspect disappeared behind a curtain of steam, and the Market seemed to lean closer, listening to the chase as if the entire underground economy held its breath. “Call it in,” I said, but the words came out as a breath held tight in the throat. “Lock down the exits. I’ll handle him.” Tomás stepped closer, a careful, almost affectionate precision in his movements. His voice lowered, a soft rasp that still carried authority. “You’re not a killer, Detective. You’re a hunter. It’s different.” The words pried at me, but I refused to let that truth loosen my grip. I moved through the market with a purpose that felt like a weapon in itself, a steady, unrelenting pace that knew where it was going even when the lights flickered and a vendor’s bells clanged in the distance. The Market’s denizens paid us no mind and everyone paid a price. The air hummed with a quiet electricity, the kind that prickles at the back of the neck and makes your skin crawl with the memory of danger you’ve yet to face. I caught a glint of something metallic—the suspect’s bootheel tapping in a hollow rhythm at the threshold of another door. A whisper of a new doorway behind crates suggested an exit, but it wasn’t an exit in the sense a normal person might understand. It was a breach, a passage of sorts that led to a deeper, darker tunnel than the one we had left behind—a route that would take us to a place where the Market’s rules were written in blood, not in ink. “Quinn,” Tomás murmured, stepping closer. He didn’t sound like a man who was about to offer help. He sounded like a man who understood how fragile the balance could be in a place like this. “This world—he’s not just selling things. He’s selling a future, a piece of the city you won’t be able to reclaim if you chase him where you’ll only get lost.” The words settled in me with a cold weight. The Market was a living thing, a creature with teeth made of bone and scales of glass and whispers; it didn’t care about the police or the rules of the surface. It moved where it pleased, crossing into the light when it wished and retreating to the dark when it needed to hide its secrets. The suspect paused at a narrow gate, a place where wind curled like a cat through a corridor that smelled of resin and something older, something almost primed with ritual. He peered over his shoulder, meeting my eyes with a challenge that didn’t pretend to be anything other than a warning. “Time’s up, Quinn,” he breathed, that same hard edge returning to his voice. “You’ve walked into a living thing you don’t understand, and now you’re going to learn what it can do to you.” The gate behind him hummed, a low, tired sound that reminded me of the city’s heartbeat during a long night when a storm is about to break. The token wasn’t just a key; it was a symbol of choice—the choice to step beyond knowledge into something else entirely. My hand found the bone token in my pocket—the thing I’d never imagined using, the thing I’d hoped would stay where it belonged, in the hands of the people who understood its power. It wasn’t mine, not originally. It was the Market’s currency, its way of sealing an oath in a world where oaths held meaning only when fear kept them honest. Tomás moved with the quiet grace of someone who had spent years navigating a maze of miracles and misdemeanours. He touched the Saint Christopher medallion with a thumb, then looked up at me with eyes that had seen far more than a city deserves. “Use what you have,” he said, his voice soft but clear. “Not for vengeance, detective. For protection. For them.” He gestured toward a shadowed corner where a narrow stair led up into the darkness, a cradle of secrets. It was a reckless choice, to chase through a place that could swallow you whole, but I’d spent eighteen years chasing the truth through doors that were kept shut for a reason. The Market wouldn’t reveal its worst secrets if I stood outside and talked about how brave I was. I stepped toward the gate, eyes locked on the suspect. The crowd pressed closer, their whispers turning into a chorus. A vendor’s laugh, sharp as a knife, cut through the murmur, and the suspect’s shoulders tensed as if accepting the final push from a world that would not let him go. “Show me what you’re willing to lose,” I said, not shouting but letting the words land where they would. The Market didn’t sparkle with glamour here; it breathed with something darker, more intimate. The bone token’s runes warmed against my skin, a small flame in a storm. The suspect started to slip through the gate, the bone token’s sigils leaning toward him as if approving his pass. The barrier glowed a pale, sickly green, the colour of old things waking. The crowd’s breath caught; the room smelled of fear and money and something else—the possibility of power slipping from people’s hands into the world’s claws. The moment stretched, a thread about to snap. I moved, not with the desperate rush of the chase but with the measured, efficient violence that made up the long hours of my career. A side door opened, a shaft of light spilling across crates, and a figure stepped into view behind the suspect—Tomás, his medallion catching a glimmer of whatever provided a friend in this shadowed quarter. “Not him,” Tomás said, voice calm but edged with a warning that meant more than words could spell out. The suspect glanced back and realised he wasn’t alone; the game had changed. The Market’s whispers swelled into a chorus and then a scream, a sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. I didn’t hesitate. The token hum grew louder, a pulse racing through my bones, and I moved to intercept. The suspect twisted, a practiced grace, and went for a feint past a stall that sold chimerical trinkets, a place where a girl could sell her dreams and a man might buy them back with interest. The Market’s denizens circled like fish, watching, waiting, counting on the moment when fear would become currency. “Quinn,” the suspect hissed as I closed the distance, his breath rancid with fear and bravado. “You can keep your badge, but you’ll never leave this place clean.” “Keep talking,” I said, every fibre taut, every sense straining for a crack in the Market’s armor. The chase surged into a tunnel deeper than any street known to daylight; a corridor where crates leaned against walls like lean, patient sentinels and the air hummed with a low, vibrating sound—like a heart trying to keep a cruel secret beating. The tunnel opened into a vast space that was part auction house, part sanctuary, part trap. The Market breathed again here, alive with the soft glow of enchantments and the cold gleam of copper coins stacked in a pyramid of guilt and desire. The suspect stumbled into a half-light chamber where a row of stalls faced a makeshift stage, the kind of place where a whispered deal might become a permanent scar. The Market’s power was in its ability to test one’s courage, to show you what you would do when the price of your choice rose with every breath. “Hide,” Tomás said, not to me but to the other people in the room, the ones who would be forced to take sides the moment the chimes of the full moon began to ring in the air beyond. He touched the Saint Christopher medallion again, and the air in the room shifted, cooled, softened, as if a part of the Market obeyed him in this moment and not the one who was chasing. The suspect turned toward me with a cold grin, a weapon of some sort clutched in his right hand. He stepped back, and a door—the Market’s trap—slid shut behind him with a dry, decisive sound. The room flickered, the lights strobing as if the building itself were considering whether to collapse this night or spare us for the moment. “Give it up, you little ghost,” he said, the words slurring with fear and pride in equal measure. His finger trembled on the trigger; the hammer clicked harmlessly, a warning shot that spoke of intention rather than consequence. I stepped closer, my own breath steady, my heart a steady drum that refused to surrender. The bone token I carried felt heavier, more insistent, a reminder of the line between law and the Market’s savage justice. The suspect lunged, and I moved, a practiced fork of steel and sinew, catching his arm in a tight grip, twisting him toward me with a clinician’s precision, squeezing the weapon from his fingers and sending it clattering across the crate-strewn floor. Tomás watched from the shadows, calm as a man who understood the tide’s turn but did not fear the flood. The Market hissed, then settled, as if satisfied by the small taste of violence it had just witnessed and ready to deal again with any who dared to meddle with its chemistry. “Drop it,” I said, not shouting but letting the words carry the force of experience. “You’re done here.” The suspect’s eyes flickered, a final defiance that said more than a confession could. He dropped to his knees, defeated, eyes adjusting to the dim glow of the Market’s lamplight, the shadows around us stretching like dark, obedient animals. Behind me, the Market’s crowd shifted; a couple of vendors wove through the stalls, their faces half-lit by the glow of talismans and the shimmer of charms that blurred the line between magic and memory. The air tasted of wet stone and copper, of rain and risk, of lives bought with lies and paid for in fear. Tomás stepped forward, his hands up, palms open as if to show he carried no weapon but truth. “It ends here,” he said softly, with that quiet certainty that had kept him alive in this city’s many shadows. “You’re not the first to think you could outpace the Market, Detective. You won’t be the last. But you can walk away from this room with your head intact.” “I don’t walk away from the truth,” I replied, keeping my tone low, controlled, careful. The truth, in this case, was that the Market’s power wasn’t something I could simply erase with a badge or a heavy boot. It would outlive me and outlive the suspect. It would endure long after we left this chamber with the record of tonight’s violence tucked away in a drawer of the city’s memory. The suspect’s body remained rigid in its surrender, a shell of a man who’d learned to harness fear and wield it as if fear were a weapon and he its master. The crowd around us exhaled as if relieved, or as if they’d merely found a new anchor to cling to in this world of shifting loyalties and hidden doors. The gate behind us hummed again, a warning and a whisper that we were not done. The Market wasn’t finished with us; it was merely pausing, sorting its next choices, waiting for a new moon to tilt the balance in its favour. I stepped closer to Tomás, closer to the suspect, closer still to the Market’s breath of ancient magic and modern greed. The token’s glow pulsed against my palm, a slow heartbeat that reminded me of someone else’s life out there somewhere—the partner I’d lost, the life I’d saved, the line I still walked. “Leverage the truth, not the fear,” Tomás said, lower now, more intimate, as if he hoped I’d hear him through the Market’s murmur. “And if you must choose, choose to protect those who can’t protect themselves.” The suspect’s eyes flicked toward the door that had sealed us in, toward the passage that would lead back up into the rain and the city’s indifferent glare. He swallowed, a sound almost obscene in the calm that followed violence. “Turn the tide, Harlow,” he whispered, a last blade of intent. “Turn it now, or the Market will turn you into a story you tell yourself to sleep at night.” I looked from his pale, determined face to Tomás’s calm mask, to the glow of the token in my hand, to the crowd that watched us like a jury. The street’s rain had cooled, the neon lights flickered like a heartbeat, and somewhere above us the city kept breathing—uno, dos, tres—counting the seconds until the full moon would push the Market into a new chamber of its labyrinth. I knew the decision I would make would sting forever, but it would be mine to own. I stepped away from the suspect, keeping him within arm’s reach but now clearly on the wrong side of the Market’s gravity. The moment stretched thin and taut, every edge sharpened by danger, every shadow a potential ally or a trap. The Bone Token’s faint glow thrummed in my hand, a sly, patient beacon. “Quinn,” the suspect breathed, voice flatter, almost bored with the end of the chase. “This isn’t over.” I didn’t dignify him with a reply. I raised the token and pressed it toward the gate’s sigils, watching as the runes blurred and then sharpened, as if the token itself was singing a quiet, dangerous note that only this place could hear. The barrier wavered, a shimmer of light, and then solidified again, the gate a stubborn, silent wall between us. Tomás stepped into the light, eyes meeting mine with a clear, practical ruthlessness. “If you follow him, you enter a room where the rules aren’t yours. If you pull him back, you might pull your world apart in the process.” The crowd shifted, the Market’s pulse intensifying as it absorbed the moment like heat takes to metal. The suspect raised his head, a half-smile edged with bitterness, and then he lunged again, not at me but toward the passage that promised a way out, a pathway deeper into the Market’s sanctuaries where the clique’s power—its medicine, its lies, its bargains—thrived. The floor trembled beneath us, a distant rumble like a train’s long sigh through tunnels of stone. A shaft of light lanced from the ceiling, a sign perhaps of the Market’s own interest in this confrontation. And suddenly, with the crowd’s collective breath held, something within the Market shifted—whether by intention or accident I couldn’t tell—and the room’s quiet erupted into a chorus of startled yells, clattering crates, and the obscene clink of metal as weapons found new hands. The suspect’s final move came in a surge of desperate speed, his form ghosting through the crowd toward the back of the chamber, toward a passage that would spit him out into the chaos of a different night. I lunged, catching him at the shoulder, drawing him back into the middle of the space where Tomás stood, where the Market’s lights flickered and the token’s glow grew stronger, not weaker, as if feeding on his fear and mine. The moment felt suspended, a thread pulling tight between two fates. Then the lights failed with a thunderous pop, plunging us into a darkness so absolute I could sense every breath, every heartbeat, every plan I’d made since I first put on my badge. The Market’s cry rose around us, a thousand whispered bargains seeking a new owner, a new victim, a new witness. Somewhere above, a window into the rain’s night closed with a soft, final thud. The suspect’s shape vanished behind the cascade of crates, and Tomás’s voice came again, steady and close. “Choose now, Detective. Before the Market makes your choice for you.” I inched closer to the gate, the token’s glow burning through my glove, the air prickling with something ancient and hungry. The Market’s breath pressed against me, cold and intimate, as if it wanted to keep me, to claim me, to teach me a lesson in fear and power that would go far beyond this chase. The last thing I saw before the world exploded into a storm of sparks and sound was the suspect’s eyes, bright with triumph or terror I couldn’t tell which, and the green glow of the Market’s sigils, a living thing lighting up the hollow of this night. Then the crate fell, the tunnel shook, and the subterranean city shifted its weight like a colossal creature waking up from a centuries-long sleep. We were in the middle of a decision that mattered more than the matter of a single chase. The Market wasn’t a backdrop anymore; it was a participant, a collaborator, a judge. And I was about to learn what it would demand from me when the rain finally, finally began to fall in earnest again, washing away the chalky dust of a room soaked in secrets. A scream ripped through the chamber, not from the suspect but from somewhere beyond the crates, somewhere roped into a different story within the Market’s many rooms. It didn’t belong to me or Tomás or the suspect. It belonged to the Market’s own ledger of lives—an accounting of fear, of debts owed, of fates exchanged. And just as I steadied my breath, just as I prepared to decide whether to push forward or retreat into the familiar shadows of the surface, the ground gave a final, brutal sigh, and the scene collapsed into chaos. I tightened my grip on the bone token, stepped into the glimmering fog that now filled the tunnel, and moved toward the sound of the struggling cry. The Market’s world swept closer, its many doors creaking open as if inviting me to test a new boundary. Shouts, the rattle of metal, a boot slipping on slick stone, and then, suddenly, a heavy silence that felt like a trap closing. The aftertaste of rain, copper, and old wood filled my mouth. Tomás’s voice spoke again, but softer, closer, as if he stood at my shoulder and not in the dark: “Harlow, the Market has answers, but they aren’t answers you want to hear.” I did not glance back. I stepped forward, deeper into the Market, toward whatever its next move would demand of us all. The gate’s light pulsed once, twice, and then stuttered into a feeble glow as if the Market itself was drawing breath, preparing to exhale a future none of us could predict. The chase ended not with a confession but with a choice—follow into the unknown, or hold, and risk losing him to a place where the Rules were written in bone and the truth wore a veil you could never lift. Tonight, the rain would not provide mercy. Tonight, we would have to learn what mercy cost. And as the Market girded itself for what came next, I stepped through the glow and into the uncertain night, ready to see what the world would demand of me when the Market decided who deserved to walk out alive.