Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXWE6GZBF6NKHVXX08GWY0

Rain spat against the neon. The Raven's Nest hummed like an ember, its green sign bleeding into the puddles on Brewer Street. Harlow kept her shoulders square against the downpour, coat soaked to the seams, hands pressed deep in her pockets as if she could fold the night into something manageable. The pavement reflected the bar’s light in broken shards. Feet slapped. A jacket hood vanished down an alley like a fish diving beneath a dock. "Stop!" she called, voice hard enough to split the rain. He glanced back. A flash of warm brown eyes. The hood shadowed most of his face, but the way he moved—surgical, quick—announced purpose. He sprinted, cutting through a cluster of bins, and an abandoned delivery door clanged behind him. "You coming to play?" he threw over his shoulder, breath boiling in the cold. The words hit her clean, light in the mix of rain and neon. Harlow didn't answer. She didn't need to. She fell into step, boots pounding, breath even. Her watch tugged at her wrist; the leather strap pressed into skin, an old habit for knowing time and the distance left to watch. A sharp jaw set, hair plastered to her skull. She kept to the centre of the street where the light was best and the footing sure. The chase threaded through backstreets with signs of the city laid raw—bottles like broken teeth, posters turned to pulp. The suspect took a left into Camden’s quieter veins, where the pavement sloped, and the air grew colder, as if the ground itself inhaled. Harlow followed, senses braced to every scrape and shadow. "You'll turn," she said, not a question. The word landed flat and certain. That was how she worked. Certainty first, answers later. Only one pair of footsteps answered now. The suspect darted toward a rusted grille half-hidden by graffiti. A stairwell yawed beyond it, concrete steps leading down into a dark mouth. He fumbled with the grille, palm finding something small at his neck. Bone. She saw it catch the neon—pale, knuckled, strung on a leather thong. Her stomach moved. Three years had taught her to notice tokens: the clumsy faith of crowbar thieves, the polished silver of career criminals, the obscene trinkets the clique left as signatures. This bone was neither cheap nor careless. "You'll bleed for that," he said, breath loud in the stairwell. A city phrase. A threat. He tapped the bone against the grille. A faint glow crawled along the metal, along the mortar, and the gate sighed open as if relieved. Harlow reached the foot of the steps. Cold air rose, carrying a smell that didn't belong to the surface: tobacco and citrus and something sour under both, like old bargains and older meat. Voices threaded up—noisy, insistent, trading in many voices at once. A dozen markets had a dozen tongues; this one spoke with a lilt that felt carved. "Police," she said, as much to see whether the word would mean anything down there. The sound curled and dampened into the stairwell, swallowed by tiles that had learned to keep secrets. Her feet slid a touch on the wet concrete. She kept going. Light changed as she descended. Neon gave way to hanging lanterns that threw coal-dark shadows. Vendors' stalls opened like secret palms. The air felt thicker, as if layered with a second city. Banners billowed though there was no wind. Signs hung with words she couldn't read and others that meant something sharper—bone tokens displayed as currency, jars that rattled with something alive, tin boxes labelled in alphabets older than the Tube map. "New face," someone called in a low amused tone. The voice tasted of cloves. "Keep your eyes closed for coin," another answered. Laughter folded into the commerce. Harlow moved like the hunt had taught her—slow where danger could be hidden, quick where sight gave her leave. People stepped aside. Some watched with interest, smiles thin and empty. She noticed a man with a Saint Christopher medallion, fingers worrying the chain as though it were a rosary. She kept sighting the suspect, a moving shadow between stalls, his hood up, the bone token appearing and disappearing with his hands. "You don't belong here," a woman said from a doorway lined with maps. Her voice rasped like paper edges. She didn't ask. The words landed like a hand on Harlow's arm. "I do when someone's breaking the law," Harlow replied, and she allowed a fraction of the cadence that had closed thousands of rooms: crisp, unyielding, designed to make people fold. "No law down here," the woman said. "Not the kind you carry." The suspect paused at a stall where light threw his profile into a hard silhouette. He tapped the bone again. A panel slid aside in the wall, revealing stairs deeper still, tiles gone dark with age. A brass plaque—untidy script—told a story Harlow didn't need to read. Veil Market, it whispered. Abandoned station beneath Camden. The name measured itself against something she had not named aloud in three years. Morris had once said the city had layers like an onion. He had joked about hiding places. The joke had curdled into a warning the night his car didn't start and the map they had been following stopped making sense. "Don't go down," she said without meaning to, the warning aimed at the faceless crowd, at the echo of Morris. She heard her voice and felt how small it sounded in the low-ceiling corridor. From a gap between crates, a man with dark hair and a scar along his forearm watched her. He kept his hand near the medallion at his throat. The flesh along his arm ran in a pale line like a river. He smelled like antiseptic and something sweet, like orange peel steeped in oil. "Not tonight," he said. The words met her like an offering and a reproach. "Tomás?" It came out thin, like testing a door to see if it opened. He tilted his head. "Tomás." He didn't say more. The name alone carried the weight of emergency rooms and late-night stitches, laughable paperwork and a quiet that had slid him out of the NHS. She could have turned away then, let the market take its man; call for back-up, wait for badge paperwork, wait until whatever this place offered bled into bureaucracy. That was the comfortable, lawful thing. The night had no patience for comfort. "You shouldn't be here," she said. "You shouldn't be below ground, Detective Quinn." His voice smoothed a tone like a bandage. He stepped out, enough light to read the lines at the corner of his eyes. He smelled human and immediate. "You look like someone who counts seconds." Harlow watched his hands. They didn't tremble. The scar along his forearm split under his sleeve when he turned; a white river running the length of him. Around his neck, the Saint Christopher medallion flashed, dull under the lanterns. An image hit her—ambulances, blood, a license revoked for an act that had healed in ways written nowhere on a form. Tomás had treated things that made normal files fray. "If I don't go after him," she said, and the sentence folded in on itself—if she didn't, who would? "He'll vanish." "He might," Tomás agreed. He had the look of someone who made odd bets and then paid them for reasons he would never explain. "Or he might take you to a place you can't leave the same." Harlow's jaw worked. Rain still ran down the collar of her coat, forming bright beads before spilling. She kept her palm where her watch lay. It was ritual, a small anchor. The leather strap felt like an old man’s hand. Her mind found Morris in a corner, the last thing he had said before the case collapsed into whatever had swallowed him. You watch for the things that don't belong, he'd told her. You don't look away from the ghosts. "You knew him?" Her question cut sharper than she intended. Tomás let out a short laugh. "Everyone knows someone who trades with the Market. Not everyone comes out with the same number of teeth. You know that." He leaned closer so his words could be private in a public place. "And even if you did follow him, you wouldn't get far without a bone." She had seen the bone at his throat at the grille. She had seen it glint in slanting light as he moved. She thought of evidence rooms, of chain-of-custody; she thought of a man she'd lost and the hollow in procedure that followed. The Market required tokens, commodities of access. Police never carried bone. "You got one?" she asked, because if Tomás could answer yes, the choice closed to a simple move. If he said no, the decision opened into a wider field. Tomás's fingers paused on the medallion. "I don't buy. I patch. Besides, if I have a thing, it's not a thing I bring out on the street," he said. He squinted, gauging her. "You're not asking me for a token. You're asking me if you should trade yourself." A laugh broke from a stall to the left—high, wilting like a latex glove. The market smelled of spice and old rain. Stalls had names that scraped the throat: Bone and Bargain, Third-Eyed Smith, The Whisperer. A woman in a coat of patched leather leaned out and tapped a jar that rattled; inside were teeth, little and white, suspended in syrup. The scene made Harlow's skin crawl in a way evidence rooms seldom did. "You came looking," Tomás said as if that settled the room, "or the room came looking for you. Either way—" He tapped her wrist lightly with a forefinger. The watch spoke again through the leather, a metronome she hadn't set. "—you keep time better than most." A shape slithered between stalls: the suspect, hands empty now, shoulders relaxed. He stopped and turned. Up close she could see the scar that trailed his temple and the way his eyes already calculated exits. He smiled with a mouth that did not reach those eyes. "You detectives and your choices," he said. "You take one and leave the other behind." His voice was polite enough to be cruel. "Does it matter what you say now, or what you decide then?" Harlow stepped forward until the lantern light braided with the rain on her shoulders. Her boots left dark prints in the dust of the underground. She kept the words short, sharp. "Stand still and raise your hands." He laughed again, small and bright. "That's not how bargains work." He brushed the bone between his fingers like a man cleaning a blade. The token pulsed, pale as a fingernail under skin. Around her, the Market hummed an interest that felt like teeth moving. Tomás watched, his expression indecipherable. He didn't cross the thin line that separated vendor from police, helper from herald. The woman at Bone and Bargain leaned out further, glimpsing the moment like a spectator at a race. "You could call for backup," Tomás said, quiet enough that she had to turn her head. "Even in here, the old radios crackle. But they'd come through doors that might not open once closed for them. They'd come with lights and badges and files. They'd carry law and leave other things uncounted." Harlow's jaw tightened. She thought of DS Morris, how his case had ended with lights that showed nothing and paperwork that pretended to explain absence. She thought of bone tokens, of markets that moved with the moon, of a world that bent around bargains and did not always thank those who bargained in good faith. She thought of the man at the grille, the smallness of a token between two fingers. She said, "If I let him go, he goes to ground. If he goes to ground, evidence dies with him." "You let him go, he takes the bone," Tomás replied. "You follow, you might buy answers with something you don't get back." Harlow had two hands on the risk. One was habit and oath—chasing a suspect, closing the case. The other was something older, unfiled and raw: the part of her that had watched Morris go and had found that some doors never opened the same after you shoved someone through. Her watch ticked. Rain tapped the lanterns. The Market watched. "Any chance you can cover me?" she asked. Not for backup. For a single voice, a single presence who knew stitches and secrets. Tomás smiled, a slow, crooked thing. "I can't be your badge." "Then I'll be enough," she said. The sentence fell like a decision. She didn't like how her thumb tightened against the leather. She knew, in the marrow, that once she moved beyond that grille and into the deeper stalls there would be smells she could not file neatly, transactions she could not label, and a market that did not answer to her badge. For a moment the suspect regarded her as if she were a curiosity in a museum. "Careful, detective," he murmured. "Some things don't want to be questioned." "Then they shouldn't have been sold," Harlow shot back. No room for metaphor. Rules. Papers. Her watch looked black against her skin. Tomás stepped back into shadow, medallion catching a lantern like a slow and modest star. He didn't hand anything over. He didn't need to. He watched as she squared her shoulders and moved toward the deeper staircase, toward the plaque that named the Market and the echo that followed it. "Come on," she said to the stairs more than to anyone else. Her boots hit the steps with a measured cadence, a metronome of intent. She kept her left hand near her watch and her right near the holster under her coat, making sure both were counted. She took the first step down. She took the second. The air closed above her in a damp pall, the street and the rain and the green neon of the Raven's Nest shrinking into a rectangle of light behind her. "You're sure you want this?" Tomás called after the third step, his voice muffled by the depth. "I've been sure of worse," she said. Her words slipped into the dark like a coin into a slot. Then she went deeper, the market swallowing her shape, the bone token glinting somewhere ahead.