Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYF5SXR6V2AQG5RHXTR75P

Rain hammered Camden High Street, turning the pavement into a river of diesel rainbows and reflected neon. Detective Harlow Quinn’s boots struck the asphalt with the rhythm of a metronome, her shoulders squared, her salt-and-pepper hair plastered flat against her skull. The leather watch on her left wrist—DS Morris’s old watch, its face cracked, its band worn smooth—dug into her bone as she pumped her arms. Three years since Morris had died screaming in that warehouse in Brixton, three years of unexplained blood patterns and shadows that moved against the light, and tonight the same copper-sweet stink of ozone clung to this runner’s trail. The suspect—a wiry figure in a waxed Barbour, hood pulled low—vaulted a chain-link fence bordering the railway embankment. Quinn hit the barrier two seconds later. Her sharp jaw tightened. She grabbed the freezing metal, hauled herself up, felt the scar tissue in her shoulder protest, and dropped onto the gravelled slope beyond. Mud sucked at her boots. The runner didn’t look back, just plunged down a maintenance stairwell cut into the earth, a black rectangle swallowing the streetlight. She followed. The air turned to soup. Concrete walls dripped with condensation that smelled of wet stone and something older—myrrh, rotting orchids, the burnt-hair scent of shorted electronics. Her torch beam cut a jagged line down the steps. Fifty feet down. A hundred. The architecture shifted. The walls bowed outward, lined with ceramic tiles that should have been white but instead displayed an oil-slick iridescence, colours that had no names pulsing beneath the glaze. She emerged onto a platform that shouldn’t exist. The abandoned Tube station stretched into cathedral darkness. Vaulted arches soared overhead, dripping with bioluminescent fungus that painted the scene in shades of infected turquoise. Vendors crowded the tracks where trains had once run, their stalls constructed from driftwood and rusted scaffolding. A woman with skin like smoked glass weighed out powdered moonlight on brass scales. A man with too many fingers shuffled a deck of cards that screamed when he cut them. The runner was already twenty yards ahead, elbowing through a crowd of figures wearing plague masks and modern streetwear alike, moving toward a stall hung with bubbling alembics and jars of suspended organs. Quinn’s hand moved to her holster. The Metropolitan Police warrant card felt flimsy in this place. “Token.” The voice came from her left. A figure blocked the archway leading from the platform into the market proper—a gatekeeper seven feet tall, shoulders wrapped in a shawl of woven hair, face hidden behind a porcelain fox mask. “I’m pursuing a suspect.” Quinn held up her badge. Her voice carried the snap of command, eighteen years of service sharpening each syllable. “Metropolitan Police. Move aside.” “No bone token, no entry.” The gatekeeper’s hand rested on a lever connected to a portcullis of rusted iron teeth. “Police or no. Law of the Veil.” Behind the gate, the runner produced an ivory disk from his pocket—a bone token carved with spiralling sigils that seemed to spin when she looked directly at them. He pressed it to the gate. The mechanism groaned. The runner slipped through, merging with the throng, heading toward a section of the market where alchemical fires burned blue and green. Quinn’s heart hammered against her ribs. She stepped closer. The gatekeeper didn’t retreat. The proximity revealed details—etchings on the fox mask depicting scenes of pursuit, hunters becoming hunted, teeth growing from eyes. “Last chance, Detective.” A new voice, softer, accented. Spanish. Warm. Tomás Herrera leaned against the tunnel wall beside the gate, his olive skin grey in the fungal light, his short curly hair beaded with sweat. The scar on his left forearm—she remembered it from his NHS file, the knife attack that had preceded his dismissal—peeked from beneath his rolled sleeve. His Saint Christopher medallion caught a spark of green flame from a nearby brazier. He clutched a medical bag, its contents rattling with glass vials. “You shouldn’t be here, Harlow.” He used her first name like a warning. “This isn’t your jurisdiction. This isn’t even your physics.” “The runner’s carrying evidence from the Morris case.” Quinn’s fingers brushed the grip of her Glock. “Three years I’ve chased ghosts. Three years of reports gathering dust because the forensics came back impossible. That smell—” She inhaled sharply. “It’s the same as the warehouse. The same as where Morris died.” Tomás adjusted his grip on the bag. His warm brown eyes flicked toward the gate, then back to her face. He didn’t deny it. “Some doors open only one way. You step through, you don’t come back the same. Or at all.” Beyond the iron bars, the runner had reached the far wall of the station, where a temporary wooden door led deeper—into the Veil Market’s shifting heart, the place that moved every full moon according to whispers Quinn had always dismissed as junkie prophecy. He was purchasing something from a vendor wearing a hat made of living crows. He was getting away. Quinn looked at her watch. The cracked face showed 11:47. Morris had died at 11:47. The hands had stuck there for three years, the mechanism broken, but she wore it anyway. She looked at the gate. The bone token requirement. The supernatural marketplace. The end of her rational world. A scuffle erupted nearby. A pickpocket, skinny and trembling, stumbled against the gatekeeper, dropping three ivory disks that clattered on the tile like dice. The gatekeeper roared. The crowd surged. In the chaos, one bone token skittered across the floor, spinning in a circle of its own momentum, and came to rest against Quinn’s boot. She looked down. She looked up at the narrowing gap where the runner had vanished. Her sharp jaw set. Her military precision demanded closure. Her sanity screamed. Harlow Quinn bent, closed her fist around the cold ivory token, and stepped toward the gate.