Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMN279177R4VS2T3YBH

The rain came sideways off the Thames, carrying with it the smell of diesel and wet stone. Quinn turned her collar up against it and kept moving. She'd been watching the Raven's Nest for forty minutes from the doorway of a closed newsagent across the street, its green neon sign bleeding colour into the puddles below. Her leather watch pressed cold against her wrist. Twenty past eleven. She'd told herself she'd give it until midnight, but then the side door had swung open and the man she'd been looking for slipped out into the rain at a pace that wasn't quite running but wanted to be. Tomás Herrera. Twenty-nine. Former paramedic. Lost his licence three years back under circumstances that her superintendent had described as irregular and Quinn had decided meant something else entirely. She'd been building a file on him for six weeks. Blurry CCTV stills. A mobile number that went to a burner. Witness statements from people who described a man matching his description arriving at addresses where, an hour later, someone would be dead or gone or inexplicably recovered from injuries that should have killed them. She pushed off the doorframe and crossed the street. Herrera moved north through Soho, ducking under scaffolding, cutting through a narrow alley that smelled of bins and old fat from the kitchen extraction fans overhead. Quinn kept thirty metres between them. He hadn't looked back yet. His dark curly hair was plastered flat by the rain and the Saint Christopher medallion at his throat caught the amber of a streetlamp as he turned. He looked back. Their eyes met for half a second. He ran. Quinn was already moving. She took the alley at full stride, her boots finding the least waterlogged parts of the cobblestones by instinct, years of night foot-chases in this city written into her muscle memory. Herrera was quick for someone who hadn't expected to be running. He vaulted a fallen wheelie bin without breaking stride, cut right onto a broader street, and made for the Tube station entrance on the corner. She reached the top of the stairs just as his head disappeared below street level. The station was closed. Had been for thirty years, judging by the state of the hoarding she'd clocked earlier that week when she'd done a preliminary walk of the area. Camden decommission. The entrance had been boarded with corrugated sheeting but somebody had worked one panel loose at the bottom, folding it back just enough for a person to drop through. There was a fresh scuff in the rust where Herrera's boot had caught it. Quinn stopped at the top of the stairs and looked at it. The rain hammered the back of her neck. Down in the dark, she heard his footsteps receding on the old tile. Going deeper. She was off-duty. No backup. She'd called in a favour to access the surveillance records that had led her here tonight, which meant this wasn't logged anywhere. She pressed her hand against her side and felt the reassuring mass of her Glock in its holster. She'd pulled the board and dropped through before she'd finished thinking about it. The air changed immediately. Cooler. Damp in a different way than the street, the moisture clinging rather than striking. The old station smelled of mould and iron and something she couldn't place, something almost organic, like soil turned over in a forest after dark. The tiled walls were intact, the paint peeling in long strips that curled down toward a floor thick with old leaf debris and grit. Emergency lighting that should not have been functioning cast a thin orange wash across the passage, the fixtures far too new for an abandoned station. Someone maintained this. She moved fast down the corridor, hand on the Glock but not drawing. Herrera's footsteps ahead, closer than she'd expected. He'd slowed. The passage opened out. Quinn stopped in the archway and stared. The old station platform had been entirely transformed. The space ran perhaps sixty metres, the vaulted ceiling hung with lanterns that gave off a yellow-green light too steady to be flame and too warm to be electric. Stalls lined both edges of the platform, constructed from reclaimed wood and iron, draped with canvas. Behind them stood people — and things that were not quite people — selling from arrangements that Quinn's brain kept trying to rationalise and kept failing to. Glass bottles containing liquids in colours she had no names for. Bundles of dried material that moved despite the still air. Cages of something small and dark. Documents, stacked and bound, some with covers that appeared to be writing in no alphabet she recognised. The crowd between the stalls was perhaps forty strong. Mixed. Some in ordinary clothes, some in things that weren't. Conversations in low voices and at least three languages she couldn't identify. Nobody shouted, nobody pushed. The whole thing had the specific atmosphere of a place where everyone present understood that drawing attention was its own kind of danger. Three people near the edge of the platform had already noticed her. They weren't alarmed. They were watching, the way you watch something that you're deciding what to do about. Herrera stood ten metres ahead on the platform, turned to face her, chest still heaving from the run. His left forearm was crossed over his body, thumb hooked in the strap of his bag. The scar along the forearm caught the lantern light, pale against his olive skin. "Detective." He'd steadied his breathing faster than she expected. His warm brown eyes moved from her face to her gun hand and back. "You shouldn't be down here." Quinn scanned the room in three clean sweeps. Two exits she could see. One she couldn't locate but suspected existed somewhere past the furthest stalls. The people watching her hadn't moved, but the quality of their stillness had changed. Anticipatory, rather than merely curious. "Tomás Herrera." Her voice carried the same flat authority it always did, regardless of what her body was doing. "I've got questions." "I know." He didn't step back. "That's not the problem." He glanced over her shoulder toward the archway she'd come through, a quick but deliberate movement. She didn't turn.