Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXJYSREZ6HXF29MVH60JDQ

The stairwell smelled of damp concrete and old smoke. Quinn kept her steps light and measured, heels finding the worn grooves in the landing tiles the way a drill sergeant expected you to move—purposeful, efficient. The taped-off mouth of the abandoned station opened into a low vault of light and shadow. Flashbulbs flared like cheap fireworks, making white islands on the tracks. Somewhere down the platform a radio hissed static between voices. She stopped at the line of officers and let them part. Her watch, old leather worn smooth at the strap, caught the camera light. She glanced at it the way soldiers checked compasses. The body lay half-curled at the base of a mosaic of a swimmer—an old Oyster card mosaic, tiles missing like loose teeth. A battered market stall had been pushed aside. Books and bottles had spilled from crates; a brass compass sat on the concrete with its face scratched and full of dust, its needle trembling toward the dark recess where the service tunnel narrowed. Eva crouched at the edge of the pool of light, glasses catching the glare, one freckled hand tucking a curl behind her ear the way she did when she read a bad line in a book. She kept her satchel close, the leather bulging with notebooks and thin, ribbon-marked volumes. The charge in the air that hummed along the station walls felt natural to her—her shoulders softened the way they did when she smelled old paper. "Do you see the sigils?" Eva asked, voice tight as a wire. She tapped a chalk ring struck into the concrete near the body. The chalk gleamed pale and new. Quinn crouched with knees square, military. Her fingers hovered above the victim's shirt, not touching. The man was mid-thirties, market stall apron smeared with something that read red from a distance. His left hand had a sliver of bone-white at the nail bed where the skin had split. No obvious blunt trauma. No host of knife wounds. No blackened edges that belonged to gate burns. Someone had moved as though the man would get up and then didn't. "He sells trinkets," a constable offered. "Name's Tomas Varek. Stall's on the east side—used to sell compasses, oddities. People saw him two hours ago." Eva's fingers found the compass. She nudged it. The face had sigils etched shallow and precise around the edge, tiny crescents that curled at the points. The brass casing had verdigris in the crevices, the green a soft beard along the seam. The needle quivered and pointed away from the platform, aiming toward the narrow iron of the old service tunnel. "That's a Veil Compass," Eva breathed. Her voice dropped. "Someone took it out to find a rift." Quinn let the word hang. Her jaw tightened, old gears of suspicion grinding. "Rift would take you clean," she said. "No body left behind, no blood pooling like this. Rifts don't leave burn-free leaves." A young officer found the blue chalk ring nearby and cut a ragged line through it. "We found this circle. People said—voices. There's scorch in one place. Smells like ozone." "Then why's there a pocket ripped open?" Quinn said. She gestured to the man's apron where the fabric near the seam had jagged cuts and the lining clung with a thread of oil. "Why'd someone cut him out of his apron? Why'd they leave a half-eaten sandwich in his stall, and why is his ledger folded into his satchel when it's usually zipped and tucked under the counter?" Eva's glasses flashed. "Could be he opened a portal and something grabbed him. They can leave things behind, can't they? Not everything goes through. The sigil—" "Sigils can be painted afterward," Quinn interrupted. Her voice didn't rise. It clipped the air, small and clean. "It fits a narrative. But narratives can be staged." A camera flashed. Officers murmured. Quinn looked at each mark like she could read the person as a page. The compass's needle did not point at the centre of the chalk ring, but toward a seam in the platform wall where old tiles met metal. Someone had pried at that seam. She ran her thumb along it, felt the grit. At one spot the concrete had a smear of oil, a grimy brush stroke that ended where a bolt head sat dark with recent file marks. "You saw that?" she asked. "Could be maintenance," the constable said. "Service doors have been tampered with before." "Maintenance didn't show up at midnight with a hacksaw," Quinn said. She drew the fossil-like edge of a line in the dust with a fingertip. The dust around where the man's boots had rested was undisturbed in arcs—like someone had been lifted vertically and then set down. She pointed to the scuffing on the back of the knee of his jeans, a pattern like a strap. Eva's eyes widened. "Lifted? Like hoisted." "Or carried through an aperture." Quinn rubbed the pad of her thumb over the tile. "Not through anything natural." A small crowd had gathered beyond the cordon, whispering. Someone joked about ghosts. Someone else whispered of dealers and vengeance. Quinn listened to the hum of voices the way she had once listened for changes in a suspect's breath. She tuned them out. "Why leave the compass?" Eva said. "If someone knew... they'd hide it. Unless they wanted someone to find it." Quinn watched the compass close. The needle still trembled, pointing into the service gap. Tiny flecks of something black had dried along the edge of the casing. She lifted the compass with fingers she kept steady and tested it; the needle swung before it settled back toward the tunnel. The motion betrayed a magnetism that wasn't normal for compass needles in a chain of underground pipes. "Someone brought a Veil Compass here to make it look like a rift," Quinn said. "Or someone used it as a homing beacon to find the tunnel. Both put an inside hand on the scene." "Or Tomas used it to find a rift himself," Eva said. "Maybe he followed something that shouldn't have had a human trail." Quinn set the compass down on a clean square of evidence paper. She didn't like leaving items on the ground. Evidence might speak in small languages; she didn't want to ruin a sentence. She had been a detective long enough to know the smell of staging. The ledger tucked into the satchel had neat lines of transactions written with a careful hand. But the scrawl elsewhere—on a scrap of paper jammed into a box of bottle caps—was quick, panicked. Two hands had written in two different scripts. That meant company. Someone had helped. "Why the half-eaten sandwich?" she asked. "Why not take lunch? Why cut the apron? Where's the bone token?" The mention of tokens made the station fall quieter; all eyes scraped toward the vendors' stalls. The Veil Market required a bone token to enter, a crude rite that even ordinary thieves respected. Vendors kept extras out of sight, always. The stall's cashbox lay open. No tokens. "What if the token was removed after?" Eva said. "Maybe whoever took him pocketed it as proof. Or—" Quinn looked at the man's hands. No token. No necklace. The knuckles bore rings of grime; the nails had been clipped neat. He had kept no talismans. A stall owner, she had thought, would have kept tokens handy above the counter, not sewn into their lining. She closed her fingers into a fist. "Whoever did this knew the Market's rules," Quinn said. "They know where tokens are stored. They know when the vendors sleep. They know how to open the service way without bringing the whole station down." She pointed to the bolt marks again. Small, deliberate, notched with a file like someone had ground down the edges so the bolt would turn under pressure. The seam met a cast-iron lip where the hatch used to sit. A maintenance hatch. Maintenance for the old Tube service tunnels that ran like veins under Camden—dark, damp, easy to forget. A uniformed man in gloves frowned. "We booked a maintenance team for repairs last week. Records show them here this afternoon. They left at five." "Who signed for them?" Quinn asked. "Can't see on tape. It's blurred." She walked the platform edge slowly, eyes the way she had been taught to hold a room—top to bottom, corner to corner. The pattern of dust told a simple truth. A footprint started at the stall and led to the seam where the hatch sat. Another set started from the other side of the seam and ended mid-platform. Between them the dust had been brushed like a hand across a table. She knelt and scraped a thumbnail along the edge of a groove; it came away with a sliver of black gum. "Rope fibres," she said. "And something else." Eva leaned in, the curl tucked behind her ear again, lips pressed thin. "Ash?" "Not ash." Quinn let the word settle where it fell. "Lubricant. Grease. Industrial, not oil from the stalls. Somebody used a winch. Hoisted him. Brought him through the maintenance hatch—either into the service tunnel or out of it." "You think they removed him and came back?" the constable asked, confused. Quinn's eyes flicked to the ledger in Eva's satchel. She uncurled a corner and read silently. There had been an odd payment two days ago—large for a stall that only sold trinkets. A name she didn't recognise. A delivery scheduled for night. A note scribbled in a sharp hand: 'Keep closed. For Shade.' Someone had circled the word 'Shade'. "Shade artisans don't need tokens," Eva murmured. "They make things. They move things. They can—" "They make tools," Quinn said. "And they make doors." Her voice narrowed. "This is not a random abduction by a stray, hungry rift. This feels curated." Eva reached for the compass again and turned it toward the seam. She held it like a book, reverent and small. "The needle points there," she whispered. "If it's a homing beacon, someone used it like a key." "Or it's a bait," Quinn said. "You plant an item associated with a market, you create a story. People who want to believe in rifts and markets will run with it. You get the community to police itself while the real work happens under the floor." An officer handed Quinn a bundle of photographs taken earlier—wide shots, close-ups, angles that tried to trap the truth like a net. She traced the pattern of the blood across the tiles. Not a blow that would knock someone immediately unconscious. No skull fracture, no broken wrist. The blood spread in a way that suggested an extended tidal drift—not the sudden crimson ring of a lethal wound, but the slow smear of someone who bled while being moved. "They tried to stage panic," she said. "They tried to make it look like the man vanished. They left traces of what they'd expect a rift to leave. Char smell. Sigil chalk. A compass pointed in the right direction. But forgeries are messy. They don't consider the small things." "Like token storage," Eva said. "Like a ledger tucked wrong. Like a strap mark on the back of a jean knee. Like the dented brass hinge along the service seam that had fresh file marks." Quinn stood and faced the mouth of the tunnel, where shadow pooled like quiet water. Her breath fogged in the cool air, steady and shallow. Officers shuffled their feet. "If someone with a winch or a harness wanted to take him, they came through the hatch," she said. "They removed token evidence, they moved his body to look half-rich in narrative, and they left the compass. They wanted somebody to find it and call the market, make people think an otherworldly crime had happened. That tells me two things. One: the perpetrator is someone who knows the Market and knows the Vendor's routines. Two: they wanted to distract." Eva's hand went to a notebook, fingers tracing the ribbon. "To distract from what?" Quinn looked at the crowd, at the stalls where bottled charms lay like fossils, at the mosaic swimmer whose tiles were cracked. She thought of the maintenance team that had a blurred signature and the suddenly missing bone token. "From whatever they did in the tunnel," she said. "Not everything that moves in this city wanted to be seen. But some of it likes to be read. Whoever moved Tomas moved him with tools and timing. They wanted a rift narrative to cover the track they opened under this station." She folded her arms for a second as officers stared. She found a man in business attire at the edge of the crowd—a nervous little man rubbing his palms. He had been seen arguing with Tomas earlier, the officers said. A purveyor of old watches, they'd claimed. Quinn studied the man's shoes; the soles had new mud caked with the same black gum she had scraped from the seam. "Get him here," she ordered. "Bring the maintenance logs. Pull the camera closer. Wipe the civilian perimeter. We need to know who signed for the hatch." She turned to Eva. "Stay with the compass. Keep it in sight. Bag the ledger. Someone move his satchel into evidence." Eva nodded, hands moving quick now, efficient, fingers tucking pages into evidence bags with the deftness of a librarian used to cataloguing dangerous knowledge. Quinn looked down at the compass one last time. The needle stood at the seam, precise as a finger. The verdigris on its casing told her someone had owned it long enough to wear it like a memory. She touched her mouth once, tasting cold. "Don't let anyone scrub the hatch," she said. "And tell your market people to stay away until we pull the tunnel." Eva's mouth pressed into a line. "You think—" "I think they staged a rift," Quinn said. "I think they used a tool that points toward portals because it sold the story more quickly than a camera or a lie would. I think this is not about Tomas being taken by something that slips between worlds. It's about someone using the idea of the Veil Market to hide better crimes." Footsteps sounded down the platform as an officer led the watch-seller into the cordon. The man's palms were damp, the mud on his soles drying into cracked webbing. He protested; his voice sounded small against the vault. Quinn kept watching the seam, where the bolt had been tampered with. The station's air hummed in the same note it had when she first stepped into the light. The needle kept pointing, unuttering for now where it aimed. She had put together a shape the others had missed, but shapes invited questions that could rupture easy judgments. She pulled her jacket tighter and reached for the radio clipped to her shoulder.