Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMSZPCY5AJKMMH73E5N

The rain came sideways, driven by a wind that cut through Soho like something with a grudge. Quinn turned up her collar and kept moving, her boots finding the wet pavement with each stride, eyes fixed on the figure forty metres ahead. He was quick, whoever he was. Short, compact, moving with the kind of purpose that told her he knew exactly where he was going. He'd bolted the moment she'd stepped into the Raven's Nest and clocked her warrant card on the bar—hadn't even finished his drink. The green neon of the bar's sign had painted him in sickly light as he'd shouldered through the door, and she'd been after him before the frame had stopped swinging. Now she was losing ground. "Stop. Metropolitan Police." He ducked left around a bin lorry idling outside a restaurant, vanished briefly between two parked vans, then reappeared further up the street at a full sprint. A couple pressed themselves against a wall as he blew past. Quinn flashed her badge at them out of habit and kept running. Her radio crackled. "Backup's five minutes out, Quinn. What's your twenty?" "Camden direction, heading north on Wardour." She vaulted a fold-up table someone had left on the pavement, sending menus scattering into the rain. "He's moving fast. I'm not waiting five minutes." She cut the radio before dispatch could argue. The man glanced back once, and that single look told her something. Not fear, exactly. Calculation. He was measuring the gap between them, running some kind of equation in his head, and whatever the answer was it made him turn sharply right, off the main road and into a narrower street, the kind that hadn't been widened since the Victorian era. Quinn rounded the corner and the rain hit her full in the face. She blinked it away. He was at the far end of the alley, crouching at a set of old iron railings set into the ground. A hatch. He hauled it open and dropped through without a second's hesitation, pulling it shut above him. The clang of it rang off the alley walls and dissolved into the noise of the city. She reached the hatch in under ten seconds, went to her knee beside it, hand braced against the wet brick of the adjacent wall. Up close, the iron was old and pitted with rust, but the hinges had been recently oiled—they moved without protest when she tested them, lifting the hatch an inch, and a smell rolled up out of the dark below. Candle wax, sawdust, something herbal and dry and faintly chemical underneath it all. Not a maintenance shaft. Not a utility access. Something else entirely. She'd worked enough of this city to know what its guts looked like. This was different. Quinn sat on her heels for a moment, rain driving against the back of her neck, listening. Somewhere below, she could hear movement. Footsteps, and beneath them, much further down, a low and indistinct sound, almost like conversation, almost like a market floor heard through several walls. Three years ago she'd have gone in immediately, no hesitation, because that was what you did when you had a suspect on the run. Three years ago Morris had been beside her and the world had made a certain logical shape. Then Morris was gone—gone in a way the inquest report hadn't come close to explaining, in circumstances that Quinn had turned over in her mind so many times that the edges were worn smooth—and she'd learned to pause where she'd once moved. She lifted the hatch fully and shone her torch into the gap. A ladder, iron, descending into dark. Below it, the ladder met a platform, and from the platform a passage ran at an angle, strung with lights she couldn't quite identify, orange and amber and uneven. She went down. The hatch closed above her with a sound like a full stop, and the noise of the rain and the city vanished. The air changed. Warmer than it had any right to be underground, and carrying those layered smells more strongly now—the wax and herbs, something sharper beneath, something she associated with chemistry sets and hospital corridors. The passage sloped and curved, and the lights along the walls were not electric. They were small glass vessels containing a slow amber burn, mounted at intervals, and they threw a warmth that torchlight cut through without quite displacing. She kept her torch high anyway and her free hand near her hip. The sound grew. Voices, not conversation but commerce—the specific rhythm of haggling, of transactions being negotiated, of a dozen separate exchanges happening in parallel. And beneath that, music from no instrument she could identify, a low and modal sound that settled into the bones differently than sound usually did. She came around a final bend and stopped. The old tube station opened before her like a cathedral turned inside out. The platform was still there, still wearing its tiles and its curved ceiling, but the space had been consumed by something else entirely. Stalls ran the length of the platform and spilled onto the track bed, covered with objects she had no immediate category for. She registered glass jars and leather parcels, racks of clothing and stacked crates, items behind glass cases that caught the amber light strangely. The people moving between stalls were dressed in no consistent register—some in ordinary street clothes, some in things that suggested other eras or other sensibilities. The crowd was not large but it was dense with intention. Nobody had noticed her yet. She scanned for her suspect, found nothing. He was in there, somewhere. Then a hand closed around her elbow, and she spun, coming around with her torch raised. Tomás Herrera looked at it the way a man looks at something that could hurt him but probably won't. "Detective." His accent carried its Sevillian origin softly. He released her arm and took a deliberate step back, hands open and away from his body. The Saint Christopher at his throat caught the light. "You cannot be here."