Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYMZ1T5ZK95W9VBJYWRR1J

The rain hit Soho in sheets, turning the gutters into rivers that swallowed cigarette butts and takeaway wrappers whole. Harlow Quinn pressed her back against the brick wall of a kebab shop and watched the green neon sign of The Raven's Nest bleed its reflection across the wet pavement. Her leather watch strap had gone dark with moisture. She didn't bother wiping it. Herrera emerged from the bar's front door at 11:47. She clocked the Saint Christopher medallion catching the neon light before she registered anything else — the way he held his left arm close to his body, the messenger bag slung tight across his chest, the quick birdlike sweep of his head as he checked the street in both directions. Not the movements of a man stepping out for a smoke. The movements of a man carrying something he shouldn't be. She gave him a twenty-metre lead before stepping off the wall. His pace was brisk but not panicked. North up Dean Street, cutting left onto Bateman, his trainers slapping the wet pavement in a steady rhythm. Quinn matched it, keeping her stride even, her black jacket zipped to her throat. The rain was a gift — it kept heads down, hoods up, eyes on the ground. Nobody looked at anybody in weather like this. She was just another shape moving through the downpour. He turned right onto Frith Street and she almost lost him behind a group of students spilling out of a pub. She sidestepped, caught the flash of his dark curly hair under a streetlamp, and kept moving. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She ignored it. Three years she'd been circling this group. Three years since Morris went into that warehouse in Deptford and came out in a body bag with a coroner's report that read "cardiac arrest" despite the fact that his eyes had been completely white when they found him. No capillaries burst, no medical explanation. Just white, like someone had poured milk into his skull. She'd pushed for a second autopsy. Denied. Pushed for an investigation into the people he'd been surveilling. Denied. Filed her own reports, gathered her own evidence, burned through two therapists and what remained of her marriage. And now Tomás Herrera was half-running through the rain with a bag full of something, and she was going to find out what. He crossed Charing Cross Road against the light, forcing a black cab to lean on its horn. Quinn waited for a gap in traffic and followed. He was heading north now, the pace quickening. She could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hand kept drifting to the bag's strap. He knew. Somehow he knew, or at least suspected. She shortened the gap to fifteen metres. Camden. He was heading toward Camden. The streets narrowed and the crowds thinned as they moved past the shuttered market stalls, their corrugated fronts slick with rain. A fox darted across the road ahead, its eyes two coins of reflected light. Herrera turned down a side street she didn't recognize — no, she did recognize it. She'd walked past it a dozen times during her surveillance runs. A dead end. Chain-link fence at the back, loading dock for a restaurant that had closed six months ago. She slowed. Dead end meant confrontation, and she hadn't called for backup. Her hand found the extendable baton in her jacket pocket, fingers wrapping around the cold metal cylinder. But Herrera didn't stop at the fence. He veered left, ducked behind a dumpster, and disappeared. Quinn broke into a run. Her boots hammered the wet concrete, puddles detonating under her feet. She rounded the dumpster and found a metal door set into the wall at knee height — an old service entrance, the kind that led down to utility tunnels or forgotten basements. It hung open an inch, pale light leaking from below. She crouched. Listened. Heard the fading echo of footsteps descending, and beneath that, something else — a hum, like the murmur of a crowd, rising from underground. The sensible thing was to call it in, wait for support, file the location in her report and come back with a warrant. The sensible thing was what the Met had trained into her over eighteen years of service. Procedure. Chain of command. Documentation. Morris had followed procedure. Morris was dead. She pulled the door open and went through. The staircase was industrial — riveted iron steps, a handrail crusted with rust that she didn't trust enough to touch. The light came from somewhere below, warm and amber, nothing like the fluorescent flicker she'd expected. The air changed as she descended, growing warmer, carrying scents that didn't belong together: sandalwood, copper, ozone, something floral she couldn't name. The hum resolved into distinct sounds — voices, the clink of glass, a low persistent drumming that might have been music or might have been a machine. At the bottom of the stairs she found a corridor tiled in the old London Underground style — cream ceramic with a green border, chipped and stained but unmistakable. An abandoned Tube station. She'd read about them in the files she kept locked in her desk at home, the ones that would end her career if anyone found them. The Veil Market. A black market for things that shouldn't exist, things that moved every full moon to a new location beneath the city. A figure sat on a wooden stool beside a heavy curtain that blocked the corridor ahead. Old woman, face like a dried riverbed, fingers busy with a piece of string that she was knotting into shapes. She looked up at Quinn with eyes that were too bright, too aware. "Token." Quinn stopped. "Sorry?" "Bone token, love. Can't come through without one." Quinn pulled out her warrant card and held it up. The old woman examined it with the enthusiasm of someone being shown a child's drawing. "That's very nice. Bone token." "Metropolitan Police. I'm in pursuit of a suspect who—" "I don't care if you're in pursuit of the Holy Ghost." The woman returned to her knotting. "No token, no entry. That's the rule." Quinn looked past her at the curtain. The sounds from beyond it were louder here — a dozen conversations tangled together, laughter, the sharp crack of something that could have been wood splitting or a small explosion. The scent of copper had grown stronger, thick enough to taste. "The man who came through here thirty seconds ago. Dark hair, olive skin, messenger bag. Where did he go?" The old woman's fingers paused on the string. Something shifted in her expression — not fear, but a recalculation, the look of a woman reassessing the cost of a particular interaction. "Lots of people come through here. I don't keep a guest book." Quinn crouched to bring herself level with the woman's gaze. The sharp line of her jaw caught the amber light. She held the eye contact for a long five seconds. "Three years ago, a detective sergeant named Morris came looking into places like this. He died. Nobody could explain how. I think you know what kind of people do business behind that curtain, and I think you know that some of them are dangerous enough to kill a police officer and make it look like his heart just stopped. So I'm going to ask you one more time. The man with the bag. Where?" The old woman studied her. The string had gone still between her fingers. "You don't have a token." "No." "You don't know what's in there." "No." "And you want to go in anyway." Quinn straightened. Her clothes were soaked through, water still dripping from the hem of her jacket onto the tiled floor. The baton sat heavy in her pocket. Everything she'd been trained to do screamed at her to go back up those stairs, call for backup, follow the book. The book had gotten Morris killed. The book had covered up whatever happened to his eyes. "I want answers." The old woman held her gaze for another moment, then reached into the folds of her shawl and produced a small object — a disc the color of old ivory, roughly the size of a two-pound coin, carved with symbols Quinn didn't recognize. Bone. Actual bone. "One-time use. Gets you in, doesn't get you out. You want to leave, you find your own way." Quinn took the token. It was warm, warmer than it should have been from sitting in an old woman's pocket. The carved symbols seemed to shift under her thumb, though she told herself that was the poor lighting. "Why are you helping me?" The woman picked up her string again. "I'm not helping you. I'm letting you make your own mistake. Big difference." Quinn turned the token over in her palm. It weighed almost nothing. She thought about Morris — the way he'd called her that last night, voice tight, saying he'd found something, something wrong, that he needed to see it for himself before he could explain. She'd told him to wait. He hadn't. She pushed through the curtain. The abandoned station opened before her like the split belly of a whale. The old platform stretched out in both directions, its edges crowded with stalls made from salvaged wood, draped fabric, and what looked like animal hide. Strings of lights crisscrossed overhead — not electric bulbs but glass spheres filled with something luminous and faintly alive, pulsing with their own slow rhythm. The crowd was dense but moved with a strange courtesy, bodies never quite touching, everyone maintaining a precise buffer of personal space as though the consequences of accidental contact were severe. She couldn't see Herrera. The messenger bag, the medallion, the dark curly hair — all swallowed by the Market's throat. The stalls sold things she couldn't categorize. Jars of liquid that changed color when she looked at them directly. Bundles of dried herbs that whispered. A taxidermied crow with three eyes, all of which blinked. A man at a table dealt cards made of what appeared to be thin sheets of hammered silver, each one reflecting a different face back at whoever held it. Quinn's hand found the baton in her pocket again. Her warrant card was a joke down here — she'd understood that from the old woman's reaction. Whatever authority she carried on the streets above meant nothing in this place. She was alone, unarmed except for a metal stick and eighteen years of stubbornness, in a market that traded in things she didn't have names for. A vendor caught her eye — a tall figure wrapped in dark linen, their stall a table covered in small glass vials. One of the vials contained something that glowed the exact white of Morris's dead eyes. Quinn stopped walking. "What is that?" The vendor tilted their head. "Depends on your need." "That one. The white one. What's in it?" "Extracted sight. Very rare, very expensive. Taken from a dying man with strong vision. Strong will." The vendor's mouth curled. "Police officer, I think the harvester said." Quinn's fingers went numb around the baton. The rain above was a distant memory. The Market hummed and pulsed around her, indifferent to the fact that her partner's stolen sight sat in a vial on a folding table beneath Camden, priced and labeled like a bottle of wine. She released the baton. Reached for the vial instead. "Price," she said. The vendor's smile widened.