Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXA895KQ3K0ZDYPQFND23J

The rain hit the neon like someone had thrown pebbles at glass. Green from the Raven's Nest smeared along the pavement, painted the backs of umbrellas and the shoulders of passersby. Harlow Quinn kept her chin low, salt-and-pepper stubble catching drops, her leather watch slick with water. She moved with military precision, every footfall measured, every breath counted. A figure slipped out of the Nest’s doorway before the door shut. He moved like he wanted to be invisible but carried himself the way people did when they had something to lose. Harlow tightened her shoulders and went after him. "Stop!" she barked. The voice snagged attention. The figure didn't slow. He cut down a side street, elbows brushing coat sleeves, a smear of dark fabric and quick muscle memory. Harlow hauled herself after him, boots throwing up a spray, rain carving channels across her jaw. She counted windows, lamp posts, the rhythm of drainage grates. She wasn't fast, not like the kids who ran for buses, but she was relentless. That always worked. He darted between a delivery lorry and a café awning, slipping along a wall plastered with posters. Harlow hit the wall with a shoulder and kept going, breath burning, lungs digging for air that felt colder with every step. The city smelled of diesel and wet paper and something else under the rain—metal and old stones. He turned a corner; Harlow saw the flash of something in his hand. Bone. White in the dark, a small token, carved along a jagged edge. Her mind catalogued it like she catalogued evidence. Date. Make. Witness statements. But the bone lodged in memory like a splinter. Veil Market. Camden. Abandoned Tube. Entry by token. She'd heard whispers. The clique. Illegal trades. Supernaturals hidden behind storefronts that never closed. He reached a stair that plunged below street level, iron balustrades slick. A rusted sign read this way to local station—defunct. He dropped two steps, vanished. Harlow hit the first step like a battering ram. Rain sluiced down into her collar and soaked her shirt but the chill was a distant matter. Her left arm flexed; the watch strap creaked against her wrist. She didn't call for backup. The call home had always been a habit of cowards, and she couldn't die halfway across a platform because someone had decided to wait for another unit. A howl of wind funnelled down the stairs and smelled like old electricity. The walls were graffiti and damp, the tiles nicked away by time. He ran toward a turnstile that shouldn't have been there. He held the bone up. It glowed faintly, the way bone did sometimes under lamplight—like moonlight had seeped into it and stayed. He pressed it to the metal gate, and the air around it seemed to thin, like breath against a window. Harlow stopped at the top of the stairs and watched him through the rain, the token between two fingers. He looked back once without slowing. "You don't know this place," he called. He sounded younger up close, pitched with something sharp, almost a dare that could be the sound of many lifetimes wrapped tight. She stepped forward. "I know enough," she said. He shoved the token through. The turnstile accepted it with a sound that wasn't mechanical but organic, like a throat opening. A gap appeared in the air—an outline where the tile changed, the world folding in on itself. Cold rolled up like the breath of a tunnel. Harlow's fingers found the rail. The bones of her hands were mapped by scars and a tightness that had become a permanent condition after Morris. She hadn't meant to think of him—Morris used to tease her about discipline, the way she buttoned her jacket to the top and kept her hair too short—but the memory knifed up with the wind. "You're not letting them take you," she said, as if speaking to Morris could pull him back. She descended. The smells changed: oil and old steam and something sweet and rotten underneath, like sugar left to ferment. The stair ran deep, deeper than the borough line ought to have permitted. The rain didn't follow but left a promise of dampness on every surface. At the platform the lights were wrong. Bulbs burned with colour no bulb manufacturer had made. Stalls breathed out steam, paper lanterns bobbed like low organs, and people moved in clusters the way river fish did—fast and knowing. The market had the noise of a city in a dream: bargaining voices, clink of coin, the rustle of cloth and paper. The suspect moved through the crowd as if he'd belonged there for years. Harlow kept to the outer edge, scanning faces. Some had badges of leather and bone, some wore talismans that flashed when they laughed. A vendor leaned over a cart and sold contraband glass vials that rattled with something alive. The atmosphere pressed. Harlow felt the weight of being an obvious thing in a place built on secrecy. "Quinn," a voice said low at her shoulder. She turned. Tomás Herrera had a cloak pulled tight, water beading on his cheeks like blood. He had been here before—she'd banked on that when the case had gone sideways. He had the medallion at his throat, Saint Christopher catching the strange light. He tapped the scar along his forearm as if to remind her he was still in one piece. "You shouldn't be here," he said. Harlow smiled without humour. "Same to you. Where did he go?" Tomás jutted his chin toward a narrow corridor between two stalls. He didn't move. His face had the pale look of someone who had spent nights under bad fluorescent lights and done favours he had never billed. "He paid with a bone," he said. "You're not welcome without one." "I can buy one," she said. "I can get evidence. I can—" "You can't buy this," Tomás cut in. "Tokens aren't goods. They answer blood. They answer old debts. And you don't leave here the same. Not everyone leaves." Harlow's mouth flattened. "Then you'll walk me out." "I can't do that." He spoke like someone handing out a verdict. "You know I won't cross certain lines." "Then tell me the lines," she said. Her fingers curled on the strap of her watch, finding comfort in its worn leather. "Isn't this what you do, Tomás? Health, patching up what the city won't? Don't get sanctimonious with me." Tomás's face folded. "I patched up what the city wouldn't. I don't put bones into a turnstile with a badge in my pocket and pretend I'll still be a man when I come out. I told you that last winter." Harlow drew a breath and let it go in one thin line. "That man out there—he's tied to them. The clique. We have a pattern. Missing things. Disappearances. Evidence slipping out of precinct files. I lost Morris over something like this. I'm not walking away because the air smells bad." Tomás's jaw worked. He reached for the medallion and turned it in his fingers. "Last time you were that stubborn, you lost a partner." Rain from some internal drain drummed the roof. A vendor called a price in a language Harlow didn't know. A girl with ink under her nails laughed and held two teeth on a thread. Nothing was ordinary here. Harlow climbed into the crowd, elbows and intent. "I didn't lose him for nothing," she said. "You healed bodies, Tomás. Help me stop whatever's turning people into numbers on lists. Help me now." He exhaled slow. "There are ways inside without turning into something else. Ways someone with a badge won't think to look for. But they're dangerous. They'll take any promise and twist it. The market bites." She stepped closer to him, close enough to smell the coffee he'd been drinking and the copper of blood. "You have to be with me." Tomás stared at her for a long second. He swallowed and then shrugged hard, as if the motion would dislodge what he'd prepared to say. "I can stay at the edge. I can patch you through the back stair. If you go in—if you cross that line—you don't get to call the Met for a warrant and get your problems sorted. They have their own rules here." Harlow's hands found the inside pocket where a standard-issue flickknife lived. Her watch face flashed the time like the metronome of a mission. She thought of Morris in a foxhole of memory; his laugh over a pot of cold coffee, the way he'd pointed out tiny details like a man reading fingerprints on a river. She had promised him something once, after the funerals and the flat-lipped condolences: she would follow leads further than anyone else. The promise wasn't noble. It was wood, taut and used. Ahead the suspect turned into a dim alley where the lanterns were blue and the air tasted like petrol and cloves. People flowed around him. Harlow closed the gap and matched his pace, shoulder to shoulder. He looked up with a small, mocking smile. "You think you'll recognise the danger when it comes in?" he asked. His voice slid against the noise, small but clear. "You think you can hold your badge like a talisman? It doesn't matter here." She stepped in front of him without ceremony. "I don't expect to be safe. I expect to be right." His eyes flicked to her watch. "Morris was right to be afraid of people like you," he said. "You pull and you take, but you don't see what you break." Harlow's jaw tightened. "You don't get to lecture me in a place you bought with someone's remains." He paused—an infinitesimal hesitation where something moved behind his eyes. She couldn't tell if he regretted the words or if the shock was part of his game. "You can come," he said. "No token, no trouble. There are ways. They let the curious in sometimes. And they let the dangerous out." That sounded like a trap dressed as an invitation. Harlow flicked her knife open and closed it so the action was known and so he would know she was serious. "No games. Names. Why run?" He laughed, soft. "You always ask the worst questions. You chase and then ask why. It's a pattern. You could walk away now, Harlow. You could let it go. Make a report, file a complaint, get a transfer." She thought of paperwork, the slow tide of bureaucracy that had drowned more cases than she'd ever seen. She thought of Morris under his last light, of the weirdness in reports right before everyone stopped talking, of clients with desperate faces who paid in old coins and the hush that came over the room when they did. "I couldn't walk away," she said, and it wasn't a question. Tomás moved then, fast. He didn't step between them, he slid beside Harlow with his hand hovering over hers, steady but not smothering. "If you go," he said, "you go knowing what you'll give up. No badge here." She looked at the badge in her jacket. It felt heavy, like a coin in the bottom of a pocket. She pressed her fingers against the leather strap of her watch until it ached. Decision was a muscle she'd practised. This one hummed in her palms. She put the knife away, slow. "I'll come back," she told Tomás, the words both a promise and a lie. "If I don't, you tell—" "Don't give me instructions," he snapped, and the voice was suddenly ugly and very human. "Tell someone who can make it matter." Her mouth twitched. "I will." She turned to the suspect. "Show me," she said. He grinned, and the grin didn't reach his eyes. He threaded the crowd, pushing through like a blade through cloth, and Harlow followed, Tomás shadowing at her flank. The stall-lights bent around them. The air thickened. Sound turned into texture. The bones on the shelves of a vendor seemed to watch. At the base of a stair that hadn't been on any map Harlow had memorised the suspect paused, placed a palm on the stone, and hummed. The air rippled. The stone shifted like skin, drawing back to reveal another set of stairs leading down into the dark. A sign hung crookedly above, an old enamel plate with the words VEIL MARKET scrawled across in something that had been written with a hand that didn't intend to be read by ordinary eyes. Tomás tightened his shoulders. "You don't have a token," he said. Harlow looked at the opening, at the wet stone and the teeth of the dark beyond, at Tomás and the crowd and the slickness of the world. She stepped forward until the light from the market left the back of her neck cold. "I don't need one," she said. She let her left hand brush the worn leather of her watch. It anchored her. Then she went down.