Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY1K3RPBMVQ3AP049D088G

The green neon over the bar bled into the rain and turned the pavement the colour of an old bruise. Harlow watched from the shadow of a phone box, collar up, water tracking off the edge of her sharp jaw and down into the scarf. Her worn leather watch ticked under a sleeve, the face fogged at the edges. Twenty-three thirteen. She touched the inside pocket where the warrant card sat and kept her eyes on the bar’s door. The Raven’s Nest spilled laughter and the clink of glass each time it swung. The maps on the walls inside had started to curl. She’d stared at them on other nights and drawn routes with her eyes. Tonight wasn’t for drinking. A tall man ducked out under the glow, hood up, a messenger bag tight across his chest. He moved like he scanned for exits on reflex. The Saint Christopher medallion flashed and vanished back under his shirt with a tilt of his head. Tomás Herrera kept his face down and turned for the alley. "Herrera." He didn’t turn. His hands came up at his chest for a heartbeat, as if to placate a ghost, then he ran. Bouncers in black stepped off the wall as Harlow came out of her shadow. "You can pay your tab or you can—" "Police." Her shoulder hit the nearer one and he went a pace back. "Move." "You got a warrant, love?" She kept running. Rain made the cobbles shine. Herrera’s trainers struck water and threw it into fans. He cut left past bins and a stack of crates. His voice floated back, thin and breathless. "You’re on the wrong night." "Stop." "I patch them up, that’s all." "You stitch up bullet holes and send them back out." "They’d die without me." "Then stop running." He knocked a crate into the alley. It spun and smacked the bricks. Harlow leapt it and slid a palm off damp brick. The alley pinched, and then spat her into Greek Street. A bus grumbled past and sprayed a sheet over her knees. Horns. A cabbie leaned on his wheel. "You mad—" "Police, move." Herrera crossed behind the bus, cut between two delivery vans and a man smoking under a strip of awning. A white packet, gauze maybe, bounced, stuck to a tyre, then turned to mush. He looked back. Warm brown eyes went wide. He slipped on a patch of oil and caught himself on a wing mirror. He grinned without joy. "Call off whoever told you to watch me." "You were in the same room as Tinker when he bled out." "I was the only one trying to stop it." He kicked off the kerb and ran. Harlow’s breath stayed in the pocket of her ribs where she’d trained it to live. Footfalls, water, a city that didn’t care if you drowned standing up. She tracked the sway of his bag. Something hard inside, heavier than a scalpel kit. Under the hood, curls stuck to his neck. He veered past a woman dragging a yapping dog, dropped off the pavement and made for the entrance of Tottenham Court Road station. Lights on tiles burned white. He took the stairs three at a time. Harlow shouldered through the turnstiles. A TfL attendant leaned in the booth, eyes on a crossword. "Oi! Gate’s that way." "Police. Open it." "You can’t just—" She vaulted. Boots hit the far side with a slap that startled a boy with a skateboard. Herrera ran his card and the barrier opened like an obedient pet. He vanished into the Northern line’s tiled throat. Air moved, a dry wind under the city that smelled of iron and yesterdays. Her radio crackled at her belt, caught nothing. Signal wouldn’t reach. On the platform, he danced the line where yellow bled into tracks, eyes on the tunnel mouth. The train announced itself with a tremor in concrete, then lights. Doors blinked open. He flowed into the last carriage. Harlow counted bodies in fronts of doorways, shoved through shoulders. A man in a puffer tried to block with a glare. "Not tonight." She dropped her hip and slid past. Doors closed on the back of her coat. The train hummed and dragged them forward. Herrera stood three carriages down, separated by glass and the reflection of a woman’s face that looked older than the one in her passport. He stared at her through layers of commuters and safety slogans. "Go home, Quinn." Harlow’s lips moved and made his name, though the train chewed the words and didn’t carry them. He lifted his palm like a priest in a supermarket aisle. The Saint Christopher caught fluorescent and threw it back. He had a cut along his forearm, puckered scar tissue that didn’t care for the light. Hers sat under her sleeve in the dark, along with a memory of a man named Morris who had turned a corner and not returned. The train bulleted through stations. At Camden Town, the car shuddered and sighed. Doors snapped. Herrera slipped out. Harlow went with the flood of bodies like she’d rehearsed it. Elbows, shoulders, apologies she didn’t offer. On the escalator, a teenager with green hair slid down the banister and whooped. "Oi, hero." The kid pointed with a grin and then was gone. Herrera hit the barrier at street level and didn’t slow. Camden hit him with kebab smoke and damp brick and music that came from everywhere at once. Harlow closed and watched water run down his neck in a small river. He cut under the railway arch, into a warren of stalls shrouded by tarps. Shutters rattled as traders pulled them closed against the rain. A woman with a stall of antique cameras pulled a canvas over her wares and glared. "Shop’s shut." "Police. Saw a man—" "Plain clothes my arse." Herrera ducked behind a statue of a foot taller than he was and slid a hand along a seam in the bricks. A panel swung with a hiss like lungs inflating. He looked back. A fragment of wristbone on a cord clinked in his grip. He showed it to the dark beyond like a key and then melted into it. The panel started to swing shut. "Don’t." She slid an arm and a shoulder into the gap and wedged it. The rain drummed the top of the alley. Someone behind the panel judged, weighed, then yanked it wide. A man filled the hole. Forearms like tree trunks under tattoos that had been done under different lights by different hands. One eye had a cloud in it. The other had too much focus. "Bone." "Police." "This ain’t your jurisdiction." "You’re obstructing an officer." "Only law down there is trade. Token or you can stare at your boots." He held out a palm. It had a scar at the base of the thumb. The air beyond his shoulder smelled like incense gone wrong. Tallow and something sweet that had grown sour. Voices moved in there with the rhythm of coin clatter. Harlow looked past him and saw a strip of tiles, Victorian white, paint flaked. An old Tube platform. The sign for a station that didn’t show on any current map had letters missing. V IL. The rest had gone with time. Herrera’s voice came from deeper in the lightless. Calm. Tired. "Don’t come down, Quinn." She could hear him without strain. He was close enough to turn back. His breath shifted in that cave. He would’ve turned his body side-on, meant to present the smallest target. His work in A&E would have taught him to take hits off-centre. Her eyes dragged to the gatekeeper’s palm again. Bone. She put two fingers into her pocket and touched it. It had come out of his bag when she’d driven her hand under the strap down by Charing Cross Road. A small thing, light, notches cut into it like someone had wanted to leave a code in something that used to be alive. It had rolled toward the gutter and stopped against her boot. She’d put it away on reflex, evidence of something she couldn’t write in a report without someone in Professional Standards laughing until their coffee went down the wrong pipe. "You going to step back, officer?" "What is this place?" "You ask inside, you pay for an answer." A woman’s silhouette slid up beside the gatekeeper, draped in cloth that didn’t want to hold a colour under the arch’s shadow. Her voice came like she’d been chewing cloves. "Let the copper look if she’s got the fare. The Market’s mouth don’t care for handbags." "You let uniforms in, Deena, and we have trouble." "She’s not in uniform. She’s already trouble." Harlow watched a sobering thing happen in her own hands. The wet on her fingers ran down over the bone token and seemed to avoid its notches. She turned it once. Saint Christopher on Tomás’s chain had looked warm. This thing didn’t. Her watch ticked against her skin and pulled her to a moment years behind her. DS Morris with his tie askew and a grin that suggested doors opened because he wanted them to. A corridor that had swallowed him without a sound. Herrera again, close enough she imagined she could reach for the cuff of his coat, imagined he’d pull away but hesitate. He spoke like he sorted pulse rates in his head. "Not your world, Harlow." "You made it mine when you ran." "You kick it open, it’ll eat you first." "You think I scare." "You should." The rain made a new pool at Harlow’s boots. The green from the restaurants across the road skated over it and broke on a dropped chip and a cigarette butt. Somewhere above, a train crossed a bridge and sent grit down into her hair. Her scalp prickled. She looked up into the gatekeeper’s one good eye. It watched her like an animal at the far edge of a snare, measuring the coil, wondering how fast it snapped. "Trading what?" "Goods that don’t like daylight. Information that rots quick. Grief, sometimes, if you bring it fresh." "Sounds poetic." "It ain’t." She thought of her case log. Names like torn paper. Tinker with three bullets in his gut and a smile on his face even when the blood hit the tile. Spitalfields dealers buying powders that made you see a world that looked back. A ring of burglaries where front doors had been opened from the inside while occupants slept like death had held them, tight and kind. Tomás’s face in triage rooms, in back alleys, in front of pubs, passing a bag to someone who looked like a ghost trying to remember how to stand up. Every thread had a burr on it that scraped skin. Every time she pulled, something untrue gave way. The woman called Deena clicked her tongue. "Clock’s ticking, copper. Market isn’t a charity. You don’t get to window shop." Herrera exhaled fast. "Please." He’d never called her that before. The word pushed at the memory of Morris’s grin and warped it. Her jaw clenched. Her eyes left Tomás’s darkness and stopped on the bone token again. Her thumb found a groove. It fitted like someone had carved it for her hand. The city’s noise fell away enough for her to hear her own watch. She raised the token. "That thing won’t make you clean," the gatekeeper told her. "It’ll open the door." He didn’t answer. He moved his bulk back a step and held his hand under the token as if to weigh the choice for her. His palm stayed open. Harlow placed the bone in it. He didn’t snatch. He turned it in his fingers, held it to his tongue like a coin. His nostrils flared. He looked past her shoulder at the street and then behind him at the dark. The woman Deena held a glow-vial up and the bone flashed white-blue for a heartbeat and then went back to something meaner. "All right." The gatekeeper stood away. "You go down the steps. You don’t play copper. You don’t pull that badge out. You don’t ask for back-up. You pay where payment’s due. You keep your hands where eyes can see them. You speak soft. You swallow whatever comes up your throat. Or you don’t come back up." "If I see him—" "You won’t." Deena’s teeth showed. "Not if he doesn’t want you to." Herrera’s voice came again, too close and full of a tired affection she didn’t deserve. "Don’t do this." She brushed water off her brow with the heel of her hand. It left a clean streak and then the rain filled it. She looked past the hulks in the doorway and into the tunnel moving with figures and trades she had filed as rumours. A man in a coat of old pinned butterflies turned his head and they fluttered without wind. A stall hung with jars that held small storms that let off light when you breathed near them. A woman laid cards and the ink shifted, not optical trick, a thing with intent. Down there, someone sold grief fresh, as promised. A boy handed over coins and collected a jar with a name carved into the glass like a headstone. Her stomach went cold. Every file on her desk had a breath of this place on it and always would. She stood in a door and felt the weight that came with crossing. Tomás’s eyes waited in the dark. Morris waited in a corridor made of tile and wrong geometry. Her watch ticked. "You’re under arrest, Herrera." The words came and fell short of him. They didn’t touch him. "You step in, you’ll have to learn new cuffs." She put a hand to the jamb and felt where old paint had bubbled up and been scraped down, where fingernails had worried at it. The Market’s air reached for her in a way the street’s never had. "Token back," she told the gatekeeper. "You’ll get it when you come back up." "I’m not leaving without him." "You’ll leave with what the Market gives you." She lifted her chin, the way the instructors had taught before they told her to forget almost everything they’d taught. The world made a new shape. She stepped through the door.