Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYHBCEFHM763PP86PDHCAY

Rain hammered the pavement in sheets, turning Soho's narrow streets into black mirrors that reflected the amber glow of streetlamps and the fractured neon of shuttered shopfronts. Harlow Quinn's boots slapped through a puddle as she rounded the corner off Dean Street, her breath coming in sharp pulls that tasted of diesel and wet concrete. Thirty metres ahead, Tomás Herrera ducked under a scaffolding pole and cut left into an alley. She keyed her radio. Static hissed back. Dead zone. She'd been losing signal for the past two blocks, which shouldn't have been possible this close to central London. She stuffed the radio back into her jacket pocket and ran harder. He was quick for someone who wasn't supposed to be running. She'd only wanted to talk. Had stationed herself outside The Raven's Nest for three hours, watched the green neon sign bleed colour into the rain, waiting for him to emerge. When he did, collar up, that Saint Christopher medallion catching the light at his throat, she'd stepped out from the doorway of a kebab shop and called his name. And he bolted. Eighteen years on the force had taught her that innocent people didn't bolt. The alley narrowed. Brick walls climbed five stories on either side, slicked with rain and graffiti. A fire escape hung overhead, its iron skeleton groaning in the wind. Quinn's hand found the grip of her torch, clicked it on. The beam cut a pale wedge through the dark and found nothing — overturned bins, a mattress bloated with water, a rat the size of a terrier that regarded her with flat disinterest before sliding into a drainpipe. Dead end. Except Herrera had come this way. She'd watched him. She swept the torch along the base of the wall. There — a service door, painted the same dull brown as the brickwork, standing two inches ajar. Rain pooled on its threshold. A scuff mark in the grime where a shoe had recently pushed through. Quinn pulled the door open. Stone steps descended into a darkness so complete her torch beam seemed to shorten, the light swallowed after a few metres as if the air itself grew denser. A smell rose from below — old stone, ozone, something organic and sweet she couldn't place. Like incense mixed with spoiled fruit. She stood at the top of the stairs with rain drumming her shoulders and made a calculation. No backup. No radio. No idea what was down there. DS Morris flickered through her mind — not the sanitised version from the memorial service, but the real memory, the one she carried like a stone in her chest. His face in the torchlight of that Deptford warehouse three years ago. The way he'd walked through that door and never come back whole. The official report said structural collapse. The official report was a lie. She went down. The stairs spiralled tighter than any standard fire escape. The walls changed texture under her trailing hand — from brick to rough stone to something smooth and cool that felt like ceramic tile. The air warmed. The sound of rain above faded, replaced by something else. A hum. Voices, maybe, layered and indistinct, the way a crowded room sounds from behind a closed door. At the bottom, a short corridor ended at a turnstile. Old London Underground, she recognized — the rounded tunnel shape, the tile work. But no station she knew of existed beneath this part of Soho. She was looking at an abandoned Tube platform, or what had once been one. The turnstile had been modified. Where an Oyster card reader should have sat, a small dish waited, carved from bone or something that looked like bone, pale and polished by the passage of countless hands. A man stood beside it. Enormous. Polynesian, maybe, with traditional tattoos climbing his neck and disappearing into his hairline. He looked at Quinn the way a bouncer looks at someone wearing trainers to a black-tie event. "Token." "Metropolitan Police." She reached for her warrant card. "Don't care. Token." She held up the ID anyway, let the torchlight hit the badge. "I'm pursuing a suspect. Male, five-ten, olive skin, dark curly hair. Scar on his left forearm. He came through here in the last two minutes." The man's expression didn't change. Carved from the same stone as the walls. "You want in, you bring a bone token. No token, no Market." Market. The word landed. She'd heard it whispered in interview rooms over the past year — fragments, half-sentences from suspects who clammed up the moment they realized they'd said too much. The underground market. Something beneath Camden, they'd said, but she'd never been able to pin down a location, and every lead dissolved like sugar in water. Maybe it moved. Maybe Camden was last month, and this — this was now. "This the Veil Market?" For the first time, something shifted behind the big man's eyes. Not quite surprise. More like a recalibration. "Go home, detective." Quinn turned off her torch. In the sudden dark, she could see light bleeding around the edges of the platform — warm, flickering, the colour of firelight. And through the hum of voices, she caught individual notes. The clink of glass. A burst of laughter. The sing-song cadence of someone hawking wares. An entire world operating beneath the city she'd patrolled for nearly two decades. She turned the torch back on and pointed it at the floor. Studied the scuffed tiles. Wet footprints led past the turnstile and curved right onto the platform. Herrera's trail, still glistening. "He's a witness in a murder investigation." "Everyone down there's a witness to something. Doesn't change the rules." She considered forcing the issue. Climbing the turnstile. Flashing her badge at the crowd and shouting Herrera's name into whatever circus waited beyond the platform edge. Eighteen years of instinct told her exactly how that would end. Alone, underground, no communications, in a place that shouldn't exist, surrounded by people who had every reason to dislike the Metropolitan Police. She might as well handcuff herself to the turnstile and save everyone the trouble. But the alternative — walking back up those stairs, driving home, lying in bed while the rain battered her window — felt like the Deptford warehouse all over again. The door she should have followed Morris through and didn't. She pressed her lips together until the blood left them. "How do I get a token?" The big man almost smiled. Almost. "You don't find the token, detective. The token finds you. That's how it works." "That's not an answer." "Best one you're getting." She stared past him at the curve of the tunnel where Herrera's footprints disappeared into the warm light. Somewhere in there, a former paramedic from Seville with a scar on his arm and no current medical license was carrying information she needed. Information about the people who gathered in the back room of The Raven's Nest, behind that bookshelf she'd glimpsed once through the bar's rear window. Information that connected to whatever had really happened to Morris. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out, surprised to find she had a single bar of signal down here. A text from an unknown number: STOP LOOKING. Quinn read it twice, then locked the screen and put the phone away. She pulled a card from her wallet — not her warrant card, but a plain white business card with her mobile number and nothing else. She held it out to the man at the turnstile. "Give this to him. Tell him I'm not looking to arrest anyone. Tell him I just want to talk about what happened to DS James Morris, three years ago, Deptford." The man took the card between two fingers the width of sausages and examined it as if checking for forgery. Then he tucked it into his breast pocket without a word. "He's patching people up down there, isn't he?" Quinn said. "Your people, whoever they are. Off the books. That's what he does." Silence. "I don't care about that. I care about what happened to my partner." The big man held her gaze for a long time. Rain echoed down the stairwell behind her, a distant percussion that reminded her the real world waited at the top of those steps, with its rules and its reports and its carefully maintained fiction that places like this didn't exist. "Go home," he said again, but softer this time. "Come back when you're ready." Quinn took one last look at the warm light bleeding from the platform. She could hear music now — something stringed and old, a melody she didn't recognize. The sweet organic smell was stronger, layered with woodsmoke and copper. She memorised the door, the alley, the exact address on the street above. She photographed the stairwell with her phone. Then she climbed. At the top, the rain hit her like a wall. She pulled the service door shut and stood in the alley, water streaming down her face, and checked the photo she'd taken. The image showed the stairs clearly enough — stone, spiralling, disappearing into dark. But where the corridor at the bottom should have been, the photo showed only a blur. Not motion blur. Not low-light grain. Something else. As if the camera's sensor had encountered a thing it could not process and simply gave up. Quinn wiped rain from the screen, stared at the ruined image, and slid the phone back into her pocket. Her worn leather watch read 11:47 PM. She'd been in that stairwell for twenty minutes. It had felt like five. She walked back through the alley, past the swollen mattress and the drainpipe where the rat had vanished, and emerged onto the street. The green neon of The Raven's Nest pulsed three blocks away, painting the wet pavement in sickly light. Her radio crackled to life, dispatch requesting her position. She thumbed the button and gave her location, voice steady, betraying nothing. Just a detective on a walk through Soho on a rainy Tuesday night. Nothing to report. She crossed the street and headed for her car, but stopped at the kerb. Looked down. Sitting in the gutter, half-submerged in a stream of rainwater, was a small object. She crouched. Fished it out. A disc the size of a two-pound coin, carved from pale material, smooth on one side, etched with a symbol on the other — a circle bisected by a vertical line, radiating smaller marks like a compass rose. Bone. It was carved from bone. Quinn closed her fist around it and felt its weight. Heavier than it should have been. Warm despite the cold rain. She straightened, slipped it into the pocket opposite her phone, and stood there on the kerb, rain hammering her shoulders, staring at the empty alley she'd just walked out of.