Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYXDYWE7RSYN94F3HENBW3

Rain slashed across Soho in hard sheets that turned the street into a smear of light and shadow. Harlow Quinn leaned against the cold brick across from The Raven’s Nest and watched the bar’s green neon sign buzz over the door. Her jacket soaked through an hour ago. Water slid down the back of her neck. Her leather watch strap stuck to her skin. The door swung open. A tall man in a dark hood stepped out, shoulders hunched, head down. He checked the street with quick, darting glances, then angled north. Harlow’s jaw tightened. "There you are." She pushed off the wall, tugged her hood up, and crossed after him, weaving between a cluster of smokers under the awning. "Oi, love, you’ll drown out there." A skinny man waved a cigarette near her sleeve. "Move." Her shoulder caught him in the chest. The cigarette dropped into a puddle with a faint hiss. She tracked the hooded man by the way he moved. Long stride, no wasted motion, those small checks over the shoulder, not enough to be obvious to a drunk crowd, just enough to tell her he knew someone sat on his trail. Traffic crawled along the slick road. Headlights smeared across the wet tarmac. Somewhere a siren wailed, then faded toward Oxford Street. Harlow kept twenty paces between them. Her radio crackled at her hip. "Quinn, status on your nest-watcher?" "Still mobile." She spoke low, kept her eyes on the hood. "Heading north from Old Compton. Alone. I’ll update." "Control wants you—" She killed the volume and let the rest die in static. No room for a lecture in her ear. The man picked up pace past Tottenham Court Road, cut left, then right, threading a path that shed the late-night drinkers. Neon gave way to shuttered shops and closed grills. Puddles grew deeper along the cracked pavements. The rain hammered harder. He glanced back. Harlow swung her gaze toward a parked car and pretended to shield her phone. On the reflection in the dark window she watched his face. Just a slice of jaw under the hood, a scruff of beard, the line of his mouth tighten. He broke into a run. Her muscles fired before thought formed. "Police! Stop!" Her boots splashed through standing water. Cold hit her legs up to the calves. The air burned in her lungs. He swerved into a side alley, feet slamming on scattered bottles and rubbish. Harlow followed, hand brushing the grip of her service pistol under her jacket, other hand swinging for balance as she vaulted a low chain at the alley mouth. A bin rolled across her path. "Come on—" Her knee clipped metal. Pain flashed along her thigh, but she kept her feet under her, kicked the bin aside, and drove forward. He hit a tall mesh fence at the alley’s end and went up it with practiced ease. Harlow’s momentum carried her into the metal. It rattled. She grabbed the wire, hauled herself up, boots finding purchase on cross-struts. He dropped on the far side and ran. She went over, landed hard, ankles screaming for a moment, then steadied herself and pushed on. The alley spat them onto a wider road near Camden. The sky over the rooftops glowed dirty orange from distant lights. Fewer cars here. Fewer people. His hood slipped for a moment. Wet hair clung to his skull. He looked back again, eyes wide and pale in the street glow. He cut left at a sagging iron gate that guarded a staircase sinking under the road. Harlow skidded to a halt. A cracked enamel sign on the wall bore the faded Underground roundel. The station name had peeled to ghost letters. The gate lock hung broken. He vanished down the stairs. Her pulse pounded against her throat. She stood at the top of the steps and stared into the throat of the old Tube station. Fluorescent light pulsed down there. Not standard platform lights. A warmer, golden wash, broken by movement. "Quinn, where the hell are you?" Her radio spat into the rain. She lifted it. "Disused station off Camden High. Suspect has gone underground. I’m in pursuit." "Negative, Quinn. Hold perimeter. ARV is—" She dropped the radio volume again. The rain drowned the dispatcher’s protest. "Too late." She drew her pistol, kept it low by her thigh, and started down the stairs. Water poured along the steps in thin streams. Moss glistened on the edges, slick under her boots. Halfway down, a smell hit her. Not the usual stale damp of the Underground. Smoke of some sort, mixed with spices she could not place, hot metal, animal musk. Voices rose under the hiss of water, hundreds of them, a steady growl of trade and argument. She reached the bottom. The old ticket hall stretched ahead, but someone had torn out the machines. A row of wooden stalls filled the space instead, lit by hanging lanterns and strings of naked bulbs. Colors flared against the old tiled walls. Fabric draped down from lines overhead, striped and patterned. Curtains hid doorways that never existed when this place held commuters. Her mind stuttered. "What is this." A figure stepped into her path. "Toll." The voice came flat and bored. The man who owned it wore a leather coat too long for him and a ragged scarf around his neck. His skin had a yellowish tint, and his eyes glimmered like old coins. He blocked the stair mouth with a lazy slouch that read as deliberate. Harlow’s grip on her pistol tightened. "Metropolitan Police. Move." He didn’t. His gaze flicked to the weapon, then to her face, then to the worn watch strap on her wrist. "Market rules. No token, no step." "What market?" "The Veil Market." He rolled the words across his tongue. They tasted wrong to Harlow’s ear, like a phrase heard in a half-remembered dream. "I’m in the middle of a pursuit. Stand aside or I arrest you for obstructing." Laughter carried from the hall. Not from him. From somewhere deeper in. A quick burst of amusement, then the drone of voices rolled over it. The gatekeeper tilted his head. "Got a warrant for the dead places too, copper?" She moved closer so the barrel of her gun lined with his chest. "You want to find out?" His smile came thin. "You won’t fire that here." "Try me." He nodded toward the hall. "You’ll bring thirty knives and worse down on you before the shell hits floor." The words settled cold in her gut. Her eyes flicked past him. The hall sprawled bigger than the surface entrance suggested. Stalls stacked with jars that gave off faint inner light. Tables spread with weapons that looked both ancient and new. A woman in a feathered coat held up something that crawled like a centipede but bristled with glassy quills. Coins clinked in odd rhythms. Nothing about this matched the London she knew. Her heartbeat kicked harder. "We’re under Camden." "We are under what Camden built over." The gatekeeper sniffed. "Token." "I don’t have your token." "You carry bone." He tapped his chest. "Just not in a way the Market respects." Her mind flashed to the case three years ago. Morris on the warehouse floor, eyes round, mouth working around a word he never forced out. The air there had smelled like this. Smoke and spice and copper. She swallowed. "What counts as a token." He swept his hand toward a woman who just passed through a curtain of hanging beads. She flicked a white chip at him without looking. It bounced off his palm. He snatched it from the air and showed it to Harlow between two dirty fingers. Something shaped like a tooth. Bleached clean, smooth from handling. Tiny notches carved along the edge. "Bone. Marked by the brokers. Earned or bought." "And if I don’t have one?" "Then you stay on your side of the stairs." Footsteps scraped behind Harlow. "That your problem, officer, is it." The voice came with a trace of Andalusian heat. Calm, but edged. She pivoted, gun still down but ready. A man stood two steps up from her, water dripping off the hood of an old paramedic jacket. Olive skin, dark curls pressed flat against his skull, a thin scar along his left forearm. A Saint Christopher medallion hung on a chain at his throat, resting above a damp grey T-shirt. His gaze dropped to her gun, then lifted to her eyes. "You’re not supposed to point that at the doorman." "He’s not supposed to obstruct a police chase." "Whole lot of people downstairs not supposed to exist. We all adapt." He moved past her, not close enough to touch, but close enough that she caught the clean bite of alcohol wipes mixed with cigarette smoke on him. The gatekeeper’s eyes lit. "Herrera." "Yeah." Tomás Herrera reached into his jacket and pulled out a small pouch. He thumbed it open, shook something into his hand, and flicked it toward the gatekeeper. Another bone token. This one darker, stained along one edge. "For me and the tourist." "No cops," the gatekeeper snapped. Tomás’s smile creased at one corner. "You stop her, not me." The gatekeeper stared at Harlow, then at Tomás, then at the token in his hand. "The brokers won’t like it." "They can take it from my tab." Tomás brushed past the gatekeeper into the hall. Lantern light carved planes into his face. Harlow blocked him with a sharp step to the side. "You know what this is." "Yeah." "You’re a medic." "Not in any way you’d put in a report." "You treated victims that came out of places like this." "Sometimes I treat the ones who go in and don’t come out right." The gatekeeper snapped the bone chip between his fingers. "Time’s wasting, copper. Your rabbit went straight to the brokers’ row. Once he cuts his deal, you’ll never find him in this warren." Tomás watched her over the gatekeeper’s shoulder. "You go down there with that badge on your face, you cause a riot." "Who is he," Harlow asked. Tomás shrugged. "You’re chasing him." "He’s linked to three dead bodies in the last month." Her voice came out flat. The pictures flashed behind her eyes. Blood spread across tile. Limbs twisted at wrong angles. Something on the wall that no forensic tech could match to paint or ink. Tomás’s gaze sharpened. "Then he found friends very fast." "Herrera," the gatekeeper grunted. "Take your pet or don’t. I’ve got a queue." Two figures waited higher up the stairs. A woman with a shaved head, eyes flint-hard, and a thickset man in a hoodie with a bulge under his arm. Both watched Harlow and the gatekeeper, then glanced away as if the conversation had no interest, but their shoulders tensed. On the radio at her hip, a faint voice bled through the static. "Quinn, units are three minutes out. Hold your position. Do not enter the structure." Her thumb hovered over the volume knob. She pictured blue uniforms spilling down these stairs, weapons drawn, eyes full of the same blank refusal she had seen on the sergeant's face three years ago outside that warehouse. Nothing here, Quinn. Just a bad trip, some dodgy chemicals, kid had a seizure. Go home. Morris’s blood had still dried under her nails. Tomás watched her choose. His expression gave away little, just a hint of strain at the corners of his mouth. "You wait," he murmured, "the Market will melt like smoke. They move it every full moon. They feel heavy boots on the floor, they’ll move earlier." The gatekeeper sniffed. "You hear nothing," he told Harlow. "You see a crack in old brick, an empty hall, dust, rats. Your rabbit gone. Story closed." "Or," Tomás added, "you step in, lower that gun, keep your questions quiet, and you breathe." "And get my throat cut." Tomás lifted his scarred arm. "You follow me, you’re under my token. That’s how this place works. I break, you break." Her breath shortened. The hall beyond the gatekeeper throbbed with life. A man walked past with a cage on his shoulder. Something inside flared red, then dimmed. A woman adjusted rows of glass vials that caught and bent the light in weird angles, so the reflections twisted like faces underwater. Above all of it, the memory of Morris’s last look pressed at her ribs. The way his hand had clawed at her sleeve as if to drag her through the same unseen door that took him. Three minutes for backup. Three seconds to lose the suspect. And if she waited, the station would stand here, empty, mocking her with blank tile and dust. Her thumb rolled the radio volume off. She holstered her pistol, the movement smooth and precise. "Rule one," she said to Tomás. "You don’t walk away and leave me in there alone." He let out a short breath that might have been a curse, might have been relief. "You’ll stick out whatever you do, but fine. Stay close, don’t stare, don’t flash that badge, and for the love of all saints, don’t try and cuff anyone." The gatekeeper slid aside, gave them a narrow path through. "Welcome to the Veil, copper. Remember who vouched for you." Harlow moved past him. Lantern heat brushed her damp face. The roar of the Market rolled over her, thick and strange. Her foot crossed from the cracked, familiar stairs to the worn stone of the hall. For the first time in a long while, she stepped somewhere without any map in her head.