Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTZ0S45VNRM1NC3JEMBTWTV

The rain came down in sheets, turning Soho into a smear of reflected neon and black water. Quinn's boots struck the pavement in a rhythm she hadn't broken since Camden High Street, each impact sending a jolt through her knees that reminded her she wasn't twenty-five anymore. Ahead, Tomás Herrera ducked left off Parkway, his olive jacket a dark blur against the glow of a kebab shop window. She keyed her radio. Static answered. Had been answering for the last four blocks. Herrera moved fast for someone who wasn't supposed to be running from anything. She'd only wanted to talk—had positioned herself at the mouth of the alley behind The Raven's Nest, warrant card in hand, questions about the unlicensed medical supplies stacked in that hidden back room she wasn't supposed to know about. He'd taken one look at her face and bolted before she could open her mouth. Innocent people don't run. She rounded the corner and nearly lost her footing on a slick of takeaway grease. Caught herself on a bollard. Her fingers stung from the cold metal. Herrera was already fifty metres ahead, weaving between two drunk women stumbling out of a pub, his curly hair plastered flat against his skull. The Saint Christopher medallion caught a streetlight as it bounced against his chest. "Herrera! Metropolitan Police!" He didn't slow. Didn't even flinch. Quinn pushed harder, her lungs raw with the taste of rain and exhaust. She was gaining—she could see the scar on his left forearm as his sleeve rode up, the pale line of tissue unmistakable even from distance. He cut across the road. A black cab leaned on its horn. Quinn followed, the cab's headlights washing her vision white for half a second. Then he vanished. Not gradually, not around a corner. One moment he was there, running toward the boarded-up entrance of an old Tube station, and the next the darkness at the bottom of the steps swallowed him whole. Quinn stopped at the top of the stairs. Rain streamed down the bridge of her nose and dripped off her chin. The entrance was supposed to be sealed—she could see the plywood boards that should have covered it, pulled aside and leaning against the tiled wall like someone had opened a door. Beyond them, nothing. Just a throat of blackness leading down. She wiped water from her eyes with the back of her hand and checked her watch. The worn leather band was soaked through. Twenty-three minutes since she'd started the pursuit. Twenty-three minutes with no radio contact, no backup, in a part of Camden she hadn't planned to be in tonight. Procedure said stop. Call it in. Wait. She looked down the stairs again. Thought about DS Morris. Three years gone. An investigation that had led him into a basement in Whitechapel, into something the coroner's report couldn't explain and the department wouldn't discuss. She still had the crime scene photographs in her desk drawer, the ones that showed Morris's expression—not fear, but bewilderment, as though he'd walked into a room and found the walls breathing. She'd spent three years collecting threads. The Raven's Nest. The people who passed through its back room. The deliveries at odd hours, the substances that didn't match anything in the Met's drug database. Herrera was one of those threads. If she let him disappear underground, she might never pick it up again. Quinn drew her torch from her belt and started down. The stairs were original Victorian tile, cracked and scummed with something that wasn't quite moss. Her torch beam cut a white corridor through the dark, picking out a ticket hall that hadn't seen a commuter in decades. Puddles on the floor reflected her light back in wobbling coins. The air smelled wrong—not the stale, mineral smell of an abandoned tunnel but something richer, like woodsmoke and copper and crushed herbs. A sound reached her from deeper in. Not footsteps. Voices. Dozens of them, layered and echoing, the murmur of a crowd. She moved through the ticket hall, past turnstiles rusted into permanent open positions, and found herself at the top of a motionless escalator. The steps descended into amber light. Warm light, flickering, as though someone had lit a hundred candles at the bottom. Quinn killed her torch and let her eyes adjust. The sound clarified. Bartering. The clink of glass. Someone laughing. Someone arguing in a language she couldn't place. It was the sound of a market—a living, functioning marketplace operating beneath a dead Tube station in the middle of the night. She pressed her back against the wall and edged down the escalator sideways, keeping her right hand free near her hip. The light grew stronger. The smell intensified—incense now, and something acrid, and underneath it all, the unmistakable iron note of blood. The escalator deposited her onto a platform that had been transformed beyond recognition. Stalls lined both sides of what had once been the tracks, constructed from salvaged wood and draped fabric and, in some cases, what appeared to be bone. Actual bone—pale, curved, lashed together with wire into frames that held up canopies of dark cloth. Lanterns hung from the tunnel ceiling on chains, their light amber and unsteady, and in that light moved a crowd unlike anything Quinn had encountered in eighteen years of policing London. Most of them looked human. Most. A woman at the nearest stall had skin the colour of birch bark, and it wasn't makeup—the texture was wrong, fissured and layered, with something dark and wet gleaming in the cracks. A man browsing jars of iridescent powder turned his head as Quinn passed and she counted too many teeth in his smile. Far too many. She kept walking. Her hand found the familiar weight of her warrant card in her jacket pocket and she left it there. Whatever authority it carried on the streets above, she sensed it would be meaningless down here. Possibly dangerous. The stalls sold things she couldn't name. Bottles of liquid that moved against gravity, swirling upward inside their containers. Bundles of dried plants that whispered when she got close. Blades that seemed to drink the light rather than reflect it. A rack of small tokens—bone tokens, she realized, each one carved with a symbol she didn't recognize—hung beside a sign that read ENTRY PASSES: 3 MOONS VALID. Bone tokens. Entry requirement. This was the place she'd been hearing whispers about for months—fragments from informants who wouldn't elaborate, references in case files that went nowhere. The underground market. The Veil Market. It moved every full moon, and she'd stumbled into its current location by chasing a man who knew exactly where it was. She scanned the crowd for Herrera. The tunnel stretched in both directions, branching where the tracks once split, and the market filled every available space. She caught a glimpse of an olive jacket turning into a side passage between two stalls selling what looked like preserved eyes floating in green fluid. Quinn followed. The side passage narrowed into a maintenance corridor, the market sounds muffling behind her. Cables snaked along the floor. A single lantern hung at the far end, and beneath it, Herrera stood with his back against the wall, breathing hard, one hand pressed to his ribs. He'd stopped running. "You shouldn't be here." His accent was heavier than it sounded on the surveillance recordings—the Seville roots showing through the London overlay. He watched her approach with the expression of a man calculating odds. "Funny. I was about to say the same to you." Quinn kept her distance. Five metres. Close enough to read the fear in his warm brown eyes, far enough to react. "You ran from a police officer, Herrera. That's not a great look for someone who claims he's just a barman." "I'm not a barman." "No. You're a paramedic who lost his license. Which makes the medical supplies in the back room of The Raven's Nest a more interesting conversation, doesn't it?" His hand went to the medallion at his throat. Squeezed it. "You don't understand what you've walked into." "Then explain it." "I can't. Not here." His eyes flicked past her, back toward the market. "You came in without a token. People will have noticed. They always notice." "People. Right." Quinn glanced back. The corridor behind her was empty, but the shadows at its edges seemed to lean inward, attentive. "The people out there with the wrong number of teeth." Herrera's mouth tightened. "You saw." "I'm a detective. It's the seeing part I'm good at." "Then see this." He pulled his sleeve up. Not the scarred arm—the other one. On his right forearm, a mark she initially took for a tattoo resolved into something else under the lantern light. The skin was raised, branded rather than inked, and the symbol matched the ones carved into the bone tokens at the stall. "I have passage. You don't. The people who run this market—they don't call the police when they find trespassers. They don't need to." Quinn studied the brand. The skin around it had a faint luminescence that no ink she'd ever seen could produce. Her jaw tightened, the muscles in her face pulling her expression into something she'd practiced across hundreds of interrogation rooms: controlled neutrality, the refusal to show surprise. "What happened to DS Morris?" The question landed like a slap. Herrera's grip on the medallion went white-knuckled. "I don't know that name." "Yes you do. You were working out of a clinic in Whitechapel three years ago. Off the books, same as now. He went into a basement on your street and never came out the same way he went in. The official report says cardiac arrest. The unofficial photographs say something else entirely." Herrera closed his eyes. Rain from his hair ran down his temples. "We can't do this here." "We're doing it here." "Detective." His eyes opened. Something shifted in them—not hostility, but urgency, a desperate need for her to understand something she didn't have the framework for. "There are things in this market that can hear a lie from fifty metres. There are things that can smell police on your skin. I ran because I was trying to keep you away from this place, not because I had something to hide from you." Quinn held his gaze. Rain still dripped from both of them, pooling on the concrete floor between their feet. From the market behind her came the sound of a bell—a single, clear note that rang through the tunnels and silenced the crowd for one long, held breath. Then the murmuring started again, different now. Sharper. Directed. Herrera's face went pale beneath his olive skin. "They know you're here." He pushed off the wall and grabbed her arm. "We need to move. Now."