Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TKBSEGRQXFEEJGVFBPWX5

The rain hit the pavement in sheets, turning Chalk Farm Road into a river of reflected neon and brake lights. Quinn's boots slapped through a puddle that swallowed her ankle, cold water flooding the leather, but she didn't slow down. Thirty meters ahead, the man in the dark jacket cut left between a kebab shop and a shuttered tattoo parlour, his silhouette there and gone in the strobe of a passing bus. She keyed her radio. Nothing but static. Had been nothing but static since Camden High Street. Quinn wiped rain from her eyes with the back of her hand and pushed harder, her lungs burning with each breath of wet London air. Eighteen years on the force and she could still run a seven-minute mile when the situation demanded it. The situation demanded it. Tomás Herrera had bolted the moment she'd stepped into The Raven's Nest, knocked a table of drinks into her path, and vanished through a fire exit before she could get the cuffs free from her belt. Innocent men didn't run. Not like that. Not with that kind of practiced speed. She rounded the corner into the alley. Brick walls rose on both sides, slick with rain, plastered with peeling gig posters and tags she couldn't read. A fire escape ladder hung overhead, its lowest rung six feet off the ground. She checked it—no water dripping from disturbed rungs, no wet handprints on the metal. He hadn't gone up. Deeper into the alley, then. Past overflowing bins and a stack of sodden cardboard boxes. The passage narrowed and doglegged right, then opened into a service yard behind a row of Camden shops. Quinn slowed, pressing her back against the wall, scanning the yard. Loading dock. Two skips. A white transit van with flat tyres. Movement. Far corner. A shape dropping through what looked like a hole in the ground—legs disappearing, then nothing. She sprinted across the yard, rain hammering her shoulders, and found a rusted metal hatch set into the concrete, propped open with a brick. Stone steps descended into darkness. The smell that rose from below hit her like a wall: incense, copper, something chemical she couldn't name. And beneath all of it, the ancient damp of deep underground spaces. She peered down the steps. Dim light somewhere at the bottom, amber and flickering. The sound of voices, muffled by stone, carried up like echoes from a well. Quinn pulled her phone from her jacket pocket. No signal. The screen showed 11:47 PM and a battery at thirty-one percent. She switched on the torch function and aimed it down the stairwell. The steps were old—Victorian, she guessed, worn smooth in the centre from decades of foot traffic. This was Tube infrastructure. Abandoned Tube infrastructure. She knew the stories. Everyone in Camden CID knew the stories about the market that moved locations every full moon, the one the informants whispered about but could never pin down. Fairy tales, she'd always thought. Useful fiction that drug dealers and fences hid behind to make themselves seem more interesting than they were. The steps waited. Quinn glanced back across the service yard. Rain fell straight down, no wind now, just the relentless vertical pour. She could radio for backup from the street. Could flag a patrol car. Could go back to the station, write up what she had, and try to pick up Herrera at his flat in the morning. She thought about DS Morris. Three years dead. The case file still open on her desk at home, not the official one—that had been closed, stamped with "accidental death during pursuit," sealed and shelved. Her own file. The one with the photographs no one else had seen. The wounds that didn't match any weapon in the forensic database. The look frozen on Morris's face that she saw every time she closed her eyes. Herrera had been there that night. His name sat in the margins of the case like a ghost. Not a suspect. Not a witness. A paramedic who'd responded to the call and whose report contained exactly nothing useful. She'd read it forty times. Quinn pulled her jacket tighter, felt the weight of her warrant card in the inside pocket and the reassuring press of her extendable baton against her hip. No firearm. This was London. She had a torch, a baton, and the authority of the Metropolitan Police, for whatever that was worth underground. She went down. The steps turned twice, a tight spiral that her torch barely illuminated one revolution at a time. The walls changed from Victorian brick to something older—rough-hewn stone blocks fitted without mortar, sweating moisture. The voices grew louder. She caught fragments: laughter, the clink of glass, someone haggling in a language she didn't recognize. At the bottom of the stairs, a short corridor ended in an archway hung with strips of dark fabric. Light leaked around the edges, warm and amber, and shadows moved behind the cloth. Quinn killed her torch and let her eyes adjust. She pushed through the fabric with one hand and stepped into the Veil Market. The space opened before her like a cathedral turned sideways. The old platform of the abandoned station stretched in both directions, its tiled walls still bearing the faded roundel of the Underground, though someone had painted over the station name with symbols she didn't recognize. Stalls lined both sides—wooden tables, canvas awnings, makeshift shelving units crammed with bottles and boxes and things that caught the lamplight in ways that seemed wrong. Oil lamps and strings of mismatched bulbs provided the amber glow she'd seen from above. Dozens of people moved between the stalls, browsing, bargaining, carrying packages wrapped in cloth and paper. Quinn stood very still. She scanned the crowd for Herrera's dark jacket, his curly hair. There—forty meters along the platform, moving with purpose toward a cluster of stalls draped in deep red fabric. He wasn't running anymore. He walked with the ease of someone who belonged here, nodding to a vendor, sidestepping a woman carrying a crate of glass vials that clinked with every step. Nobody had noticed Quinn yet. Or if they had, they hadn't reacted. She was wearing plain clothes—dark trousers, a rain-soaked grey jacket, boots that could pass for civilian. Nothing that screamed police. She smoothed her salt-and-pepper hair flat against her skull and stepped forward, keeping to the edge of the crowd, using the stalls as cover. The goods on display made her slow despite herself. One table held rows of small bones arranged in patterns on black velvet. Another displayed jars of liquid in colours she'd never seen outside a chemical lab—vivid, shifting, alive. A man behind a table of old books watched her pass with eyes that reflected the lamplight like a cat's and she looked away, kept moving. The smell was thicker down here. Incense, yes, but also herbs she couldn't identify, something metallic and bright, and an undercurrent of ozone as though lightning had just struck nearby. The air itself felt heavy, charged, pressing against her skin. She closed the distance. Twenty meters. Herrera had stopped at one of the red-draped stalls and was leaning across the table, speaking in low, rapid Spanish to someone Quinn couldn't see behind a curtain of hanging charms. His left hand rested on the table, and even from this distance she could make out the scar that ran the length of his forearm—the one from his file. Knife attack, 2019, circumstances unclear. The Saint Christopher medallion at his throat caught a glint of lamplight as he turned his head. Quinn drifted closer. Fifteen meters. She positioned herself behind a stall selling what appeared to be antique maps—hand-drawn, depicting coastlines and cities she couldn't place—and watched. Herrera received something from behind the curtain. Small, wrapped in dark cloth. He tucked it into his jacket with a practiced motion and turned. His eyes found hers across the crowded platform. For a full second, neither of them moved. The market noise continued around them—the haggling, the laughter, the clink and murmur of commerce—but between Quinn and Herrera, the air went rigid. She watched his expression cycle through recognition, surprise, and something harder to read. Not fear. Something closer to resignation, or pity. He shook his head. A small, definite gesture. Go back. Quinn stepped out from behind the map stall. She squared her shoulders, planted her feet, and held up her warrant card. "Tomás Herrera." The market didn't go silent. It went absent. Conversations didn't trail off—they stopped, mid-syllable, as though someone had pressed a mute button on the entire platform. Every face turned toward her. Every pair of eyes—and some of those eyes were wrong, shaped wrong, coloured wrong, lit from within—fixed on the small leather wallet in her raised hand. "Metropolitan Police. I need to speak with you." Her voice carried in the sudden silence, bouncing off the tiled walls, the vaulted ceiling. It sounded thin down here. Insufficient. Herrera moved first. He walked toward her, hands visible, palms out, the universal gesture of no threat. But his face carried something urgent, a tension in his olive skin that pulled his features tight. "Put that away." His accent was soft, Andalusian vowels rounded by years in London. "Right now. Put it away." "You ran from me, Herrera. From a lawful attempt to—" "I ran to keep you out of here." He was close now, close enough that she could see the rain still beaded on his jacket, the rapid pulse at his throat. "You don't understand what you've done." Quinn held the warrant card steady. "I understand you're connected to an open investigation. I understand you fled a police officer. And I understand that whatever this place is, it doesn't operate outside the law." Herrera's mouth pressed into a line. He glanced over his shoulder. The vendors and customers hadn't resumed their business. They watched, dozens of them, in that unified stillness that made Quinn's skin prickle. Some had moved closer. She couldn't tell when, or how—they simply occupied space they hadn't occupied seconds ago. "The law." Herrera's voice dropped to barely above a breath. His brown eyes held hers with an intensity that burned through the bravado she was projecting like armour. "Detective Quinn. The law has no weight here. The only thing keeping you alive right now is that they don't know if you came alone." The worn leather of her watch strap was damp against her wrist. She felt her pulse against it, fast and steady. She didn't lower the warrant card. "Did you come alone?" Herrera asked. The silence pressed in. The wrong-shaped eyes watched. Somewhere deeper in the market, in the old tunnel beyond the platform, something scraped against stone with a sound like a whisper made physical. Quinn's fingers tightened on the leather wallet. She thought of Morris. The wounds that didn't match. The report Herrera had written that said nothing at all. "Yes," she said. Herrera closed his eyes. When he opened them, he reached out and gently, firmly, folded her fingers over the warrant card and pushed her hand down to her side. "Then stay close to me. Don't speak to anyone. Don't look at anything for longer than a second. And whatever happens in the next ten minutes, do not reach for that baton." He turned and walked deeper into the market. The crowd parted for him like water around a stone, then began—slowly, reluctantly—to resume its murmur and motion, though Quinn felt the attention cling to her like oil on wet skin. She followed.