Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXG49TZF3ZAKMWMEXC08R5

Quinn climbed down into the station with the same economy of motion that had carried her through three tours abroad and two decades of policing. The light from Bowen's torch cut a hard wedge through the dim. It bounced off tiles stained with old grime and new dust. Her watch face caught the shaft and glinted; she checked it without thinking. The seconds were small and honest. She liked that. A shifting of boots. Eva stood beneath the arch where the market booths had been yesterday: a knot of tarpaulin hung like a dead sail. Her hair would not stay behind her ear; she kept tucking it and then tugging it free. She held a clipboard that read like a student’s list—chain of custody, samples, witness statements—handwriting neat enough to make Quinn bristle. "You're late," Quinn said. Eva tightened her grip on the clipboard. "I took the Victoria line," she answered, voice pitched too high for the space. She tucked hair past her left ear with a finger that trembled a fraction. "Transport delays. Also, the constable at the mouth insisted on a proper bone token. Thought you might appreciate the irony." Quinn let her eyes sweep the scene instead of answering. The stalls had been stripped to frames. Lanterns hung from hooks, their flames guttering as if the air was trying to breathe through a wound. A body lay near platform three, half under a collapsed lattice. No splatter. No pool. Just a swath of dark cloth and a shape that had gone too rigid to hold secrets. "Who found him?" Quinn asked. "A vendor named Marek. He came in to open; saw the frame and shouted. He said it smelled like burnt paper. He called it in." Eva's voice flattened with recital. Quinn crouched. The face was turned away. The collar had been torn in a jagged line, as if clawed by something with keener nails than a human’s. The palms were pale where they lay splayed on the tile. No bruising. No weapon. No fibres. Her fingers hovered above the collar like a machine making allowance for heat. She smelled ozone and something sweet and metallic, the sort of tang that sat on tongues after lightning. "Fingerprints?" Quinn asked. "Partials on the lattice. No prints on the body. Marek said he stepped back the minute he saw the—" Eva closed her mouth, chewed the inside of her cheek. "He said he didn't touch him. Witness is clean." Quinn's eyes drifted to the lattice. Someone had scrawled symbols in chalk across the metal. At first they looked like graffiti. Then the pattern shifted under her gaze, the arcs aligning into an imperfect circle. That meant intention. It meant someone had traced a shape without the steadiness of ritual training. Sloppiness that tried to be precise. "Ritual?" Eva pressed. Quinn's mouth thinned. "Either that, or someone faked a ritual to make people look away from the common things." "You mean a struggle? A mugging?" Eva's head tilted. Her green eyes searched Quinn's for assent. "This area moves with the market. Lots of petty crimes. Someone could have been set upon." Quinn inspected the feet. Shoe prints ran around the body like a clock without hours. Sizes varied, but most prints showed a heel-toe drag. Yet the drag began and stopped cleanly at odd intervals. The pattern suggested handling rather than flight. Someone had choreographed the movement. "How does a body end up with no blood?" Quinn asked more to herself. She cupped her hands and breathed against the cold air as if coaxing the scene to speak. "How does a collar tear without contact marks?" Eva answered before the silence could warp into accusation. "Marek said the victim's watch stopped at twenty-three forty-three. He thought it was broken. Forensic says it froze from heat, not an impact." Quinn's fingers found the edge of the fabric and drew back. The edges of the tear were crisp but not burnt. Tiny white crystals dusted the weave—ashes with the consistency of ground bone. She scraped a sliver between her thumbnail; it flaked and smelled of old earth and iron. Not soot. Not household fire. Something older. "Does the name match the missing persons feed?" Quinn asked, rising to her knees. Her voice flattened into work. Eva prodded the clipboard. "Yes. Tomasz Voss. Forty-two. Eastern European. No known associates. No criminal record." "He sold things?" Quinn nodded toward the frames. "Trinkets? Curios?" "Occult supplies," Eva said. She pressed a thumb into her temple when Quinn stared. "The Veil Market sells that. He traded—muscovite, bones, charms. Marek called him careful." Quinn looked at the hand again. The skin between Tomasz's knuckles bore a faint line of scar as if from a knife. She had seen that before. It marked someone who had cut himself out of danger once and kept the lesson as a brand. "Where's the Compass?" she asked. Eva blinked. "Compass?" "The Veil Compass," Quinn said. "Vendor page said he handled shipping. If someone moved in on a regular seller, they'd take the Compass first. Without it the rifts get messy." She wasn't sure why she said that, only that the name fit the knot in her stomach. Her partner, Morris, had once named items like that as if they were people. Quinn had told herself to stop letting his vocabulary creep back into her life, but the compass was a thing she recognised now in the way a second heart recognised rhythm. Eva's hand dove into Tomasz's satchel. Leather creaked. She drew out a small brass compass that had been wrapped in oilcloth. Its casing had a verdigris that made it look older than it had any right to be. The face was etched with lines that tried to be protection sigils. The needle spun like a trapped bird and then slammed North toward a place where the track did not run. "It points to the platform wall," Eva observed. "To where the tile is chipped. I thought—" Quinn moved to the wall. At eye level, the tiles bulged. Someone had pushed a palm through plaster and left the plaster to heal like a scar. The compass needle wavered when close; its motion was quick and then decisive. It would do that when a rift was close, Morris used to say. Quinn had dismissed him when he talked about it. The dismissal tasted like guilt in her mouth now. "Take it," she said. "Chain it and mark it." Eva hesitated, thumb on the glass, then wrapped the Compass in evidence paper. "If it's a relic, the Market's guilds will come looking," she murmured. "They'll want it." "Not if we keep it." Quinn's jaw tightened. She looked past the compass at the lattice. The chalk circle caught the torchlight. The arcs were uneven because someone had tried to draw them while flinching. The pattern suggested rehearsal and haste. Someone had practiced the shape and then bungled the real thing. "Why would someone fake a ritual?" Eva asked, voice small now. "To cover a theft? To frighten people away from the stalls?" Quinn knelt by the body again. Her hands moved with the sort of precision she had asked for in teams, in operations. She checked the throat for rare traces—no crushed trachea, no ligature. She rolled the wrist. The veins had collapsed in a way blood didn't when life bled out. The chest was not bruised from a struggle. There were no hair fragments lodged between fingers. A smoked ring, a residue in concentric lines, sat on the tile around the torso as if someone had burnt a wreath and left it for a year. "It wasn't death from outside force," Quinn said. "It wasn't blunt trauma. He wasn't run through or shot. He wasn't suffocated. He wasn't stabbed cleanly." "Exsanguination?" Eva suggested. "No." Quinn's breath fogged in the cooler air of the platform. Her eyes caught on a faint sheen on Tomasz's tongue. A metallic film. She had seen copper touches before—not enough to dissolve someone, but enough to make a body behave like it had been present in a storm. "He left. Or the thing that took him didn't remove matter so much as it displaced it. The collar's torn because whatever moved through his clothes moved faster than fabric could follow." "Like a portal?" Eva's voice sounded higher now, a string snapping toward disbelief. Quinn didn't answer. She rubbed the pad of her thumb across the inside of her wrist where a shallow scar threaded like a map. She had written off the supernatural in public a long time ago. In private she kept a ledger of oddities. Her ledger had an empty page next to Morris's name. She hated that emptiness. She stood and walked the prints again, counting them like a man checking rations. Seven different shoes. Two of them didn't belong—impractical soles, a pattern that made no sense for London streets. Someone had left boot prints that sank like a clock spring. Someone had pressed pads of something into the tile in a pattern that mimicked life. "Why fake it?" Eva persisted. "Why stage a ritual and then take a man?" Quinn looked at the collapsed lattice. She imagined hands moving through air, careful hands pulling the lattice aside like curtains. She imagined a compass needle jerking. She imagined a seller with a satchel of objects that opened like promises and then closed forever. "What if the staging was to make us look the other way?" she said finally. "To send the story toward the familiar. Rituals draw attention and superstition. They make people assign cause to old, safe things—mystic snares, curses. That keeps investigators busy with symbols while the real work goes on. A diversion." "Someone who knew the Market," Eva said slowly. "Someone who knew who would look where." Quinn tapped a finger against her watch. "Time matters. If the Compass pointed at the wall when it spun, and then the needle locked, it meant a rift pulsed open there. Those pulses don't happen without a catalyst. They don't happen with a simple theft." A constable leaned in, breath cold. "Detective Quinn? Forensics want to know if to bag the lattice or to leave it. It's covered in chalk." Quinn glanced at the marks. The chalk had been pressed with fingers, not a piece of chalk drawn on a whim. There were prints in the powder—small prints like fingertips. She nodded. "Bag it," she said. "Bag everything that holds the line." As the constable moved to obey, Quinn crouched and lifted a scrap of tarpaulin caught on the lattice. Underneath, a row of small teeth—real, bleached and drilled—had been woven into the fabric like a fringe. They chimed faintly as she shook them. Not human teeth all. Animal, maybe smaller things. They were worn in a way that suggested long use. Someone had assembled that fringe slowly. Someone who kept time in hands like that. "An offering?" Eva mouthed. Quinn let the words sit. Offerings could be protective, they could be forsale, they could be bait. "Or a signature," she said. "Signature for a group?" Eva's eyes shone in the thin light. "Something like that." Quinn's voice tightened. "The Market's guilds mark wares. But this was left as a mark in the open. A message to someone who would know how to read it." She crouched by Tomasz again and spread the man's hands. An indentation in one palm suggested he had held something small—a coin, a bone, a compass—right before the end. Dust packed the indentation. She ran a gloved fingertip across it. The pattern was scorch-like: concentric rings, not unlike the ones that had formed on the tile around the torso. "The compass," Eva said, then stopped, because it sounded like a plea. Quinn stared at the brass casing in the evidence bag. The needle did not point to any of them. It lay idle, as if exhausted, and then quivered toward the bulge in the wall. "Seal the perimeter tighter," Quinn ordered. "No vendors. No curiosity seekers. Lock the station entrances. Call the Guild liaison and tell him we found a Compass. Tell him it's been moved. Tell him politely that we have it. Thread the message with patience." Eva wrote it down with hands that steadied a fraction. "And the body?" Quinn looked up. The platform hummed with small, professional movements. Forensics collected swabs, a student from the Museum snapped photographs. The market smelled of old spice and soap, the kind of smell people clung to when they wanted to remember yesterday's comfort. Tomasz's chest rose in a slow, indifferent rhythm only in the way a body could be still and speak. "Hold him," Quinn said. "Don't let anyone take him to the mortuary until we know. Check for the vendors on the ledger. Find Marek's statement on timing. See if anyone else reported the compass missing in the last forty-eight hours. Cross-check." Eva nodded and tucked a curl behind her ear as she moved away. She stepped lightly, almost as if the tile itself might crack underfoot. Quinn stayed where she was until the crowd thickened with the professional hum. She watched the compass in the bag. The patina on the brass matched a photograph she'd seen once in Morris's case notes: a small object pinned in a vendor's collection. The same tiny loop at the hinge. The same etching of protective lines that tried not to be pretty. She had believed in simple explanations for years. A man fell prey to another man. A thief took a watch and ran. The world answered in loud, human noise. Tonight it whispered and expected her to mishear. She checked the platform clock. Twenty-three fifty-one. The wall's bulge swallowed the light like a mouth. The needle had moved. It now pointed not at the wall but at the tunnel, where darkness pooled like spilled ink. "Someone knew exactly where to put the bait," she said aloud, low enough for only her and the floor to hear. Eva paused in the doorway, the clipboard clutched to her chest. "Who?" Quinn exhaled through her teeth and let the answer live as a thought between them. She did not know. But she saw the seams. She saw the staging. She saw the compass as both tool and trap. She saw the market as a theatre where someone had rearranged the set. And she knew what the missing evidence really meant: not that a man had been murdered by a human hand, but that an absence had been engineered to look like a presence. "Find the vendors with the same teeth," she said. "Find anyone who bought the Compass in the last week. And check our missing feed for others who left without blood." Eva's mouth opened, closed. "Do you think the Market did this?" Quinn did not look at her. She looked at the compass. She let the thought stay blunt and raw. "I think someone used the Market," she said. "And I think the Compass was the lure."