Run: 2026-02-20-01KHY8DSCKX9F69T3FWYNV1KQ7

The bone token’s porous surface bit into Harlow’s right palm as she pried open the rusted service door of the abandoned Camden Tube station. Salt-and-pepper hair cropped tight to her sharp jaw, she moved with the military precision that had defined her 18 years with the Met, her worn leather watch ticking steady on her left wrist—until she stepped over the threshold. The ticking stuttered, then surged, a frantic staccato that made her frown. She’d seized the token from the victim’s coat pocket hours earlier, not knowing its purpose until a confidential tip had led her to the Veil Market’s current lair: this damp, graffiti-scrawled hollow beneath Camden’s bustle, where the air smelled of burnt sage and rusted iron, and the distant rumble of active Tube lines above made the concrete pillars tremble. Crime scene tape strung between concrete pillars fluttered in a draft that had no business in a sealed station. Harlow’s boots crunched over broken glass—discarded vials of banned alchemical substances, she’d later learn—and a tattered silk scarf embroidered with glowing runes that flickered when she stepped too close. Leo Voss, a known black market fence she’d been tailing for weeks, slumped against pillar 7, his throat slit by a dull kitchen knife that lay discarded at his side. The first oddity had hit her at the scene’s initial sweep: no blood spatter. Not a single drop on the pillar, his wool coat, or the rusted tracks at his feet. A mundane murder couldn’t explain that—she’d seen enough slit throats to know the spray was unavoidable, even with a dull blade. She’d tracked Eva Kowalski by dawn. The Met’s database had flagged the British Museum research assistant’s Oxford master’s in Ancient History and access to restricted occult archives, a lead she’d chased after finding a dog-eared copy of *Mesopotamian Warding Sigils* in DS Morris’s old case file—Morris, whose unexplained death three years prior had left her with a gnawing, unspoken fear of things she couldn’t name. Now Eva stood at the edge of the tape, curly red hair tumbling over her round glasses, a worn leather satchel bulging with books slung over one shoulder. Every few seconds, she tucked a strand behind her left ear, a nervous habit Harlow had noted from her interview transcript when she’d banged on Eva’s Bloomsbury flat door at 5 a.m., her badge pressed to the peephole. “Temporary colleague,” Harlow had called her then, her voice sharp with urgency. “I need your eyes on something you can’t find in the museum’s public stacks. Refuse, and I’ll leak your access to restricted archives to the press.” Eva’s freckled complexion paled at the sight of Voss’s body, and she tucked hair behind her ear again. “This is the Veil Market,” she said, her voice tight. “I told the museum I wouldn’t meddle with their trade. Entry’s by bone token—you have one. You must have gotten it from him.” It wasn’t a question. Harlow nodded, tapping the token in her pocket. “I seized it from his coat. But his other pocket’s torn—frayed fabric, like someone wrenched it open. I think they took a second token. Do they carry two?” Eva stepped closer, her satchel brushing the crime scene tape. She knelt, her fingers hovering over the knife without touching it, as if afraid to contaminate something invisible. “The Market’s entry requirement is one bone token per person, but traders carry two: one for entry, one for securing deals. The second token has a trace of the Market’s next location—they move every full moon. Tomorrow’s the full moon. The killer took it to follow them.” Harlow’s watch ticked faster, a frantic beat that made her clench her left fist until her knuckles whitened. “Ridiculous. Voss was a fence. He dealt in stolen art, not fairy tale tokens. Explain the blood.” Eva’s green eyes narrowed, and she gestured to the pillar above Voss. “That’s not a fairy tale. Look at the sigil.” Harlow’s gaze snapped up. Carved into the concrete, faint but distinct, was a twisted circle with three prongs curving toward its center. She’d seen similar marks in Morris’s case file—scratched into the dashboard of his crashed car, but she’d dismissed them as graffiti. “What is it?” “Mesopotamian warding sigil,” Eva said, tucking hair behind her ear again. She unslung her satchel, pulling out a leather-bound book emblazoned with the Oxford crest, its pages frayed at the edges from constant use. Flipping to a marked page, she pointed to a matching diagram, its margins filled with her scrawled notes. “It’s supposed to block supernatural rifts—portals between our world and the realms beyond. But this one’s damaged—someone scratched the central prong with a sharp object. That’s why the rift it was supposed to contain is leaking.” Harlow’s jaw tightened. She’d spent 18 years trusting concrete evidence: fingerprints, motive, opportunity. This was nonsense—until she noticed the runes on the tattered silk scarf glowing brighter when she held her hand near it. Her watch’s ticking stopped entirely, a dead silence that made her skin crawl, as if the air itself had stopped moving. “Rifts,” she said, her voice quieter than she intended. “Morris’s car crashed into a wall, but the brakes were fine. The dashboard had a mark—like this sigil. I thought it was a prank.” Eva’s expression softened, and she closed her book for a second. “I’ve read about unsolved cases linked to the Veil Market. The rifts can disrupt mundane objects—watches, cars, phones. Your watch was ticking erratically, right? That’s the rift’s energy affecting it.” Harlow didn’t answer. She pulled out the item she’d tucked into her own coat pocket: a small brass compass, its casing faded with a patina of verdigris, its face etched with the same warding sigils as the pillar. The needle spun wildly, never settling on a direction. “I found this in Voss’s coat. A compass. Broken.” Eva’s breath caught, and she leaned in, her fingers brushing the compass’s edge as if it were a live wire. “That’s not a broken compass. That’s a Veil Compass. Crafted by a Shade artisan—they’re sold only in the Market. It points to the nearest supernatural rift. The spinning means the rift it was tracking was disrupted. Or someone tampered with the sigils on its face.” Harlow’s gaze flicked between the compass and the pillar. She’d assumed the lack of blood spatter was a trick of the station’s damp air, but Eva’s words made her re-examine the scene with new eyes. The broken sigil, the spinning compass, the missing trading token—all pieces that didn’t fit a mundane murder. She knelt beside Voss, her boots crunching over a discarded alchemical vial that fizzed when she stepped on it, and brushed his neck with her fingers. Beneath the slit, she felt a faint, cold patch of skin, a mark she’d missed earlier: a tiny, twisted rune, the same as the one etched on the compass’s face. “Someone didn’t just slit his throat,” she said, connecting the dots slowly, as if afraid to voice the truth. “They drained his life force. The knife was a decoy to make us look for a mundane killer. The sigil was supposed to trap him here, but he damaged it trying to escape. The compass was his way out—he was trying to find a rift to run through.” Eva tucked hair behind her ear, a small nod of approval that made Harlow’s jaw clench. “The rift’s at the tunnel mouth,” she said, gesturing to the dark hollow at the end of the platform, where the air glowed with a faint, purple hue she’d dismissed as a trick of the light. “He was trying to reach it when the killer stopped him. The rift’s energy is what’s making your watch act up.” Harlow stood, her military bearing sharpening as she tucked the compass back into her pocket. She’d spent three years blaming herself for Morris’s death, for missing a mundane clue that would have saved him. Now she realized she’d been looking at the wrong evidence entirely. The Veil Market, the sigils, the compass—these were the clues she’d ignored, the pieces that tied Morris’s death to Voss’s. “How do we find the next Market location?” she asked, her voice steady now, the fear replaced by a cold determination. Eva closed her book, slipping it back into her satchel, and gestured to the missing token. “The trading token has a trace of the next location’s magic. But we need to find the killer first. And you need to accept that this isn’t a mundane case. Morris’s death wasn’t either.” Harlow’s gaze lingered on the tunnel mouth, where the purple glow flickered brighter. Her watch started ticking again, slow and steady this time, as if the supernatural disruption had ebbed, but she knew it was only a reprieve. She’d spent 18 years as a detective, but today she was starting over—chasing a killer who used bone tokens and rifts, not guns and knives, and a truth that would force her to confront the supernatural forces she’d spent so long denying. She glanced at Eva, whose green eyes held a mix of wariness and resolve, and realized that for the first time since Morris’s death, she might have a chance to uncover the answers she’d been craving. Even if it meant diving into the dark heart of a market that didn’t exist on any official map.