Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMVJ9CSKRBYS502V9MT

The rain came sideways down Wardour Street, needling through the orange haze of the sodium lamps and turning the pavement into a black mirror. Quinn ran, her boots hammering the wet stone, her eyes locked on the figure sixty yards ahead of her. He was fast. She'd give him that. She'd spotted him outside the Raven's Nest twenty minutes ago, the olive-skinned man with the curly dark hair loitering near the green neon glow of the entrance sign. She'd seen him before — twice — at two separate scenes she couldn't explain. The same man, the same Saint Christopher medallion catching the light when he moved. When she'd stepped towards him he'd bolted without a word, which told her everything she needed to know about his conscience. "Herrera!" Her voice cracked against the buildings. "Metropolitan Police!" He glanced back once, just enough for her to catch his face — wide-eyed, jaw set — and then he cut left down a narrow passage between a boarded-up restaurant and a laundrette. Quinn followed, her shoulder clipping the corner of the building. The passage was barely wide enough for one person and stank of old bins and standing water. Her left foot punched through a puddle she'd mistaken for a shallow one, cold water flooding over her ankle, and she swore through her teeth and kept moving. She emerged onto a wider street and spotted him heading north, towards Camden. She pressed the radio on her shoulder. "Control, this is Quinn, DC badge four-seven-two. I'm in foot pursuit of a suspect, IC2 male, dark hair, heading north on"— she checked the street sign as she passed it —"Delancey Street. Requesting support." Static, then a woman's voice. "Received, Quinn. Nearest unit is eight minutes." Eight minutes. Herrera would be long gone in eight minutes. She pushed harder. He was fast but she was relentless, and relentlessness had always beaten fast over distance. She watched him tire in the slight forward drop of his shoulders, the way his stride started to shorten around the Camden High Street intersection. He knew it too, because he looked back again, properly this time, and she saw him calculating. Then he turned off the road entirely and vaulted a low iron railing. Quinn reached the railing four seconds later, gripped it and swung over without breaking pace. Ahead of her stretched a stretch of wasteland behind a shuttered civic building, the ground rutted and waterlogged. Herrera was picking his way across it towards what looked like a derelict service structure — a concrete box with a rusted steel door, the kind of utility housing the city had forgotten about for forty years. She called again. "There's nowhere to go, Tomás." He didn't answer. He reached the steel door, wrenched it open — it moved far too easily for a door that looked like that — and disappeared inside. Quinn stopped at the threshold. She hadn't radioed her new position. Eight minutes for backup to reach where she'd been; they'd have no idea she was here. Her torch was on her belt. She drew it and swept the beam through the doorway. Stairs. Concrete, old, leading down steeply. A smell came up from below — something she couldn't name immediately, something between woodsmoke and petrichor and burnt copper, layered over the cold mineral reek of deep underground air. Not a utility shaft. Something else. She thought of Morris. Three years ago Morris had followed something she didn't understand through a door she hadn't been able to explain, and they'd found him two days later in a way she still couldn't file in any category that made sense. She had spent three years trying to understand it and failing, and the only consistent thread she'd ever managed to pull was that the world had seams in it she hadn't known existed. She looked down the stairs. The torch beam caught movement below — Herrera, stopped at the bottom, looking up at her. "Detective." His accent was soft, Andalusian edges worn down by London years. "You don't want to come down here." "That's a first." She stepped onto the top stair. "People usually beg me not to arrest them. They don't usually try to talk me out of following them." "I'm not talking you out of anything. I'm telling you what's true." He moved his hands to show her they were empty. "You don't have jurisdiction down here. You don't have any kind of authority that means anything to anyone below that door." "What's below the door, Tomás?" He said nothing. The torchlight caught the Saint Christopher medallion swinging gently against his chest. She took another step down. Then another. The steel door stood open above her, rain-sound fading with each step until all she could hear was the concrete taking her weight and the distant, low murmur of what sounded — impossibly — like a crowd. Like a market. At the bottom of the stairs a tunnel stretched out before her, the walls old glazed tile, cream going yellow under light she couldn't source. Bare bulbs on a wire, some of them replaced with something that burned differently, a warmer and older colour than tungsten. The tunnel curved away and the crowd-sound grew. Quinn kept the torch up even though she didn't need it anymore. "Who are you buying from down here?" She watched his face. "What are you treating them for, and who are they?" He ran a hand through his wet curls and looked back down the tunnel, then at her. "You found one of them. Three years ago." A careful pause. "You didn't find all of him. I don't mean that cruelly. I mean it exactly how I said it." Quinn's jaw tightened. The worn leather of her watch strap felt suddenly cold against her wrist. "His name was Morris." "I know his name." The crowd-sound swelled around the curve of the tunnel. A bone token sat on a wooden shelf built into the wall at shoulder height, and below it, scratched into the tile in letters she shouldn't have been able to read, was a line of text that her brain translated before she could stop it, as though some part of her had always known the language: *leave what you are above ground or leave entirely.* Quinn stared at it for three seconds. Then she looked at Herrera, and Herrera looked back at her with something that wasn't quite pity and wasn't quite a warning, and she put the torch back on her belt and took the bone token off the shelf.