Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX9T1S6HN5Y58XF54WG56G

The rain hammered London's pavements in sheets, turning the sodium glow of street lamps into hazy coronas that barely penetrated the downpour. Detective Harlow Quinn's boots slapped against wet concrete as she sprinted down Old Compton Street, her breath coming in controlled bursts that spoke of military conditioning. Twenty metres ahead, the figure in the dark jacket cut left into a side alley. "Metropolitan Police! Stop!" The shout died in the rain. Quinn's hand instinctively went to her hip, fingers brushing the reassuring weight of her baton. She'd lost her taste for firearms three years ago, after Morris. After the thing that had killed Morris, which the official report had called a "structural collapse" but which she'd seen with her own eyes—impossible geometry, shadows that moved wrong, Morris's scream cutting off mid-syllable. The suspect vaulted over a rubbish bin with practiced ease. Quinn followed, her leather watch catching rainwater as she planted one hand on the metal rim and launched herself over. The alley stank of piss and rotting food. Ahead, the figure—male, judging by the build, maybe five-ten, wearing what looked like a Saint Christopher medallion that caught the light—glanced back. His face registered surprise, then something else. Recognition? "Tomás Herrera!" She knew him from the file. Former paramedic, struck off the register eighteen months ago. The superintendent had flagged him as a person of interest in what she privately called "the weird cases." The ones that didn't add up. The ones that reminded her of Morris's death. "I just want to talk!" "Talking's what got me into this mess." His accent carried the warmth of southern Spain even through the rain's roar. He hit Shaftesbury Avenue at a dead run, dodging between taxis that blared horns into the wet night. Quinn followed, her sharp jaw set. A black cab's wing mirror clipped her shoulder—she barely felt it. Herrera was heading north. Toward Camden. Quinn's mind catalogued the route as her legs pumped: past the neon-lit shopfronts of Chinatown, through the darker residential streets where curtains glowed with television light, along the canal path where the rain stippled black water. He wasn't trying to lose her in crowds or duck into buildings. He was leading her somewhere. That thought should have made her stop. Should have made her call for backup, wait for uniform to seal the area. But Morris's case file was still open on her desk, and Herrera's name had appeared in the margins of her notes too many times. Three witnesses who'd all visited him for medical treatment off the books. Two of them now missing. One dead in circumstances the coroner had labeled "unexplained." The rain plastered her salt-and-pepper hair to her skull. Water ran down her collar, soaked through her jacket. Herrera cut down a narrow lane between Victorian terraces, and Quinn registered the shift in atmosphere—the way the streetlights seemed dimmer here, the shadows deeper. Her skin prickled. The lane terminated at what looked like a dead end. Brick wall, eight feet high, slick with rain and moss. Herrera didn't slow. He hit the wall at full speed, found handholds Quinn couldn't see in the darkness, and hauled himself up and over. "Bloody hell." She reached the wall seconds later, fingers searching the wet brick. There—a groove, barely visible. Another above it. Someone had carved holds into the mortar. She climbed. On the other side, the lane continued, but the paving stones were older here. Victorian cobbles, uneven and treacherous in the rain. The buildings pressed closer, their windows dark and empty. Not abandoned—something worse. Deliberately unoccupied. Quinn's instincts screamed at her, the same instincts that had kept her alive through eighteen years of police work and a tour in Afghanistan before that. Herrera had stopped twenty metres ahead. He stood in the rain, chest heaving, the scar on his left forearm visible where his sleeve had ridden up. Behind him, the lane ended at a rusted metal gate set into a brick archway. The gate bore a symbol Quinn didn't recognize—three interlocking circles surrounding what might have been a bird or a flame. "You shouldn't have followed me, Detective." "I'll decide what I should and shouldn't do." Quinn approached slowly, hands visible. Not threatening. "You've been treating people. People involved in cases I'm investigating. I need to know what they told you." "Patient confidentiality." But his voice wavered. "You're not a licensed paramedic anymore. That privilege doesn't apply." Rain ran down her face. She blinked it away, keeping her eyes locked on his. "Talk to me here, Tommy. Before this goes somewhere neither of us can walk back from." Herrera's hand moved to his medallion. Not a threatening gesture—more like a prayer. "The things you're investigating. The cases that don't make sense. You think I'm involved." "Are you?" "I keep them alive. That's all. When they come to me bleeding from wounds that shouldn't exist, when they're poisoned by substances that aren't in any medical textbook, I keep them alive." His eyes—warm brown, too young for the exhaustion they carried—met hers. "And I don't ask questions because the answers would make me complicit." "Complicit in what?" "In knowing. In seeing. In being unable to unsee." Herrera backed toward the gate. "Go home, Detective Quinn. Tell your superintendent you lost me in the rain. Write it off as one more unsolved puzzle. Trust me when I say that's the better outcome." "I lost my partner three years ago." The words came out harder than Quinn intended. "He died in front of me, and the official explanation was bullshit. I watched something kill him, Tommy. Something that shouldn't exist. So don't tell me to go home and forget." Herrera's expression shifted. Recognition again, but deeper this time. Understanding. "Morris. Your partner was Morris." Quinn's hand went to her baton. "How do you know that name?" "Because I treated one of the people who was there that night. Who saw what you saw." He pulled something from his pocket—small, white, the size and shape of a domino. In the rain-diffused light, it looked like bone. "This is a bad idea, Detective. Possibly the worst idea either of us will ever have." "Tell me something I don't know." Herrera turned and pressed the bone token against the gate's lock. The metal shuddered. The three interlocking circles began to glow with a dull green phosphorescence that pushed back the darkness. The gate swung inward on hinges that shouldn't have been able to move after years of rust and weather. Beyond the gate, stairs descended into earth. Not modern concrete steps, but stone worn smooth by centuries of feet. The air that rose from below carried scents that didn't belong in London—incense and copper, ozone and something organic Quinn couldn't name. Voices echoed up, speaking languages she didn't recognize. Light flickered, not electric but flame, casting dancing shadows on tunnel walls. "The Veil Market." Herrera's voice was barely audible over the rain. "It moves every full moon, but Camden's rotation is tonight. You wanted answers about what happened to Morris? They're down there. Along with a thousand other things you'll wish you'd never learned." Quinn stared down the stairs. Her training, her experience, every ounce of professional judgment told her to call for backup. To document the location, secure the entrance, approach this with procedure and protocol and proper police work. But Morris's face surfaced in her memory—the expression of absolute terror in his final seconds, the way his body had simply come apart under forces that defied physics. And the case file on her desk, growing thicker every month with incidents that made no sense, that followed patterns she could feel but not prove, that all somehow connected to people and places that existed in the gaps between official records. "You're going down there regardless of what I do." Herrera nodded. "I have someone who needs treatment. A woman who was poisoned with something called widow's breath. I have maybe two hours to find the antidote before her heart stops." "And if I follow you?" "Then you'll see things that'll crack your understanding of how the world works. But you'll also see the truth about Morris. About what killed him." He started down the stairs. "Your choice, Detective." The rain continued its relentless assault on London's streets. Somewhere in the normal city above, patrol cars circled their beats and dispatch crackled with routine calls. Quinn looked back once at the lane, at the ordinary darkness of a rainy November night. Then she followed Herrera through the gate and down into the earth, the bone-token's green glow fading behind them as the entrance sealed itself against the rain.