Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYDZ8377YD0DR3DKTVHGEB

Quinn's boots hammered against wet pavement, the sound swallowed by rain that fell in sheets across Soho's labyrinth of side streets. Twenty meters ahead, the suspect's dark jacket disappeared around another corner, weaving through knots of Friday night revelers who scattered with curses as both runner and pursuer barreled past. She'd been tailing the contact for three hours, ever since he'd emerged from The Raven's Nest with something wrapped in brown paper tucked under his arm. The same bar where her partner Morris had tracked a lead before everything went wrong. Before the crime scene photos showed nothing but ash and Morris's service weapon melted into slag. The suspect vaulted over a newspaper stand, landing in a spray of puddle water. Quinn followed, her hand instinctively checking for the weighted grip of her baton. The Metropolitan Police didn't authorize weapons for standard pursuits, but eighteen years on the force had taught her when regulations could take a backseat to survival. They crossed into Camden, the neon bleeding into rain-slicked streets like watercolors. The suspect glanced back once, hood falling away to reveal a pale face marked with something that caught the streetlight wrong—tattoos or scars that seemed to shift in the darkness. Then he dove into an alley between a shuttered kebab shop and a vintage record store with boarded windows. Quinn hit the alley three seconds behind him, her breath coming hard and controlled. Military training from her early twenties still held—the body remembered what the mind wanted to forget. The alley terminated in a brick wall covered in layers of graffiti, new tags bleeding through old ones in archaeological strata of urban art. Empty. She turned in place, scanning high and low. No fire escapes. No doors. Just brick and bins and the drumming rain that had soaked through her jacket to the shoulder holster beneath. "Bollocks." Then she saw it—the bin pulled away from the wall, just enough to reveal a gap in the brickwork. Not natural damage but a deliberate opening, perhaps two feet wide, descending into darkness. The kind of entrance that screamed bad decision to every functioning instinct she possessed. Quinn crouched beside the opening, pulling her torch from her belt. The beam cut through darkness to reveal stairs, old London brick giving way to older stone. Victorian era maybe, or earlier. The city had layers like an onion, each century building atop the last until the ground level bore no resemblance to what lay beneath. She pressed her radio. "Control, this is Quinn. In pursuit of suspect, Camden Market area. Going underground, coordinates..." She rattled off the street names, knowing even as she did that backup wouldn't arrive in time. Friday night had the Met stretched thin across London's entertainment districts, breaking up fights and processing drunks. Static answered, then a bored voice. "Copy that, Quinn. Nearest unit is fifteen minutes out." Fifteen minutes. The suspect would vanish in five. She thought about Morris, about the official report that called it an accident despite the melted gun and the witness statements describing lights that shouldn't exist and sounds that made grown men weep. She thought about the three other cases since then, each connected to that same bar, each closed with explanations that satisfied brass but rang hollow to anyone who looked deeper than the paperwork. The opening waited, patient as a predator's mouth. Quinn descended. The stairs spiraled down through London's fossil record, electric torch beam dancing across surfaces that predated the Tube by centuries. Water seeped through cracks overhead, and the air grew thick with earth and something else—incense maybe, or herbs burning somewhere in the darkness ahead. The stairs terminated in a tunnel that stretched both directions into black. Fresh footprints marked the dust, heading left. Quinn followed, her free hand trailing the wall for balance as the passage narrowed then opened into something impossible. The market spread before her like a fever dream carved from an abandoned station platform. The old Tube tiles remained on the walls, but stalls and tents crowded the space between rusty tracks, lit by lanterns that burned without flame—cold light in colors that hurt to look at directly. The crowd numbered perhaps forty people, moving between vendors with the casual purpose of shoppers anywhere, except these shoppers wore everything from business suits to robes that belonged in museums. A woman in a hijab haggled over bottles filled with liquid that moved independent of the containers. A man in a Chelsea football kit examined what looked like animal skulls arranged on black velvet. Two teenagers passed a cigarette back and forth, smoke coiling into shapes that resembled words in languages Quinn didn't recognize. She'd found it. The underground market that kept appearing in witness statements from the supernatural-adjacent cases, always dismissed as drug-addled fantasy or attention-seeking lies. Quinn stepped onto the platform, and every head turned. The crowd didn't react with fear or flight. They simply noticed her the way one notices a wrong note in familiar music—with interest and faint disappointment. Her plainclothes meant nothing here; she wore authority like cologne, unmistakable and unwelcome. A vendor closest to her—ancient enough that gender became academic, wrapped in layers of wool despite the underground warmth—smiled with too many teeth. "Lost, Detective?" The sound of her title echoed across the market, and conversations died. Even the unnatural lantern light seemed to dim, shadows pressing closer. Quinn's hand moved to her baton, then stopped. Forty witnesses minimum, in an environment she didn't understand, pursuing a suspect she couldn't properly identify for a crime she hadn't technically witnessed. Every tactical assessment screamed retreat, call for backup, establish perimeter. But Morris had retreated. Had followed protocol. And protocol had left nothing but ash and unanswered questions. Her suspect stood three stalls down, watching her with those marked features that seemed to crawl in the strange light. He made no move to run, simply waited to see what she would choose. The vendor's smile widened.