Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TVMRGAY860WYBJYF8P09P

The rain came down in sheets, turning the Soho pavement into a river of reflected neon. Harlow Quinn's boots hammered through a puddle as she rounded the corner onto Frith Street, her eyes locked on the figure thirty meters ahead—dark jacket, short curly hair plastered to his skull, moving fast but not quite running. Not yet. He was still pretending he didn't know she was there. Tomás Herrera. Twenty-nine. Former paramedic. Current person of extreme bloody interest. She'd been watching the Raven's Nest for six nights straight, parked in a borrowed Vauxhall with a thermos of burnt coffee and a camera with a telephoto lens. Six nights of photographing faces that came and went through the door beneath that sickly green neon sign. Faces that matched open case files. Faces that matched closed ones too—cases that had been shut down from above with the kind of quiet authority that made her teeth ache. She'd run the plates, cross-referenced the names, built a web on the corkboard in her flat that her cat kept trying to knock down. And tonight, Herrera had walked out the front door of that bar at twenty past eleven carrying a leather satchel he hadn't had when he'd gone in, and every instinct she'd honed in eighteen years of service told her that bag contained something she needed to see. She'd called out to him. Showed her warrant card. And instead of stopping, instead of smiling and asking how he could help like an innocent man would, he'd looked at her with those warm brown eyes gone wide with fear, and he'd bolted. Now she was chasing him through the rain, her lungs starting to burn, the worn leather watch on her left wrist slapping against the bone of her wrist with every stride. She was forty-one, and she felt every year of it in her knees. He was twelve years younger and he moved like someone who'd spent his life on his feet—which, she supposed, a paramedic would have. Herrera cut left onto Old Compton Street. A group of smokers huddled under an awning scattered as he blew past them. Quinn followed, badge out, shouting "Police!" more for the benefit of witnesses than for him. He wasn't going to stop. She could see it in the rigid set of his shoulders, the way his left arm clutched the satchel against his body. Whatever was in that bag scared him more than she did. That might have offended her, once. Now it just made her more curious. He crossed Charing Cross Road against the light, earning a blare of horns from a black cab that fishtailed on the wet tarmac. Quinn followed, feeling the heat of the cab's headlights on her hip as it missed her by inches. The driver's curses dissolved in the rain behind her. Herrera was pulling away, gaining ground, and she felt the chase slipping through her fingers like wet rope. She keyed her radio. "This is DI Quinn, I'm in foot pursuit of a suspect heading east on—" She checked the street sign as she ran. "Heading north on Cambridge Circus toward Shaftesbury Avenue. Male, five-ten, olive skin, dark jacket, carrying a brown leather satchel. Requesting backup." The radio crackled. Static. Then a voice, distant with interference: "Copy, DI Quinn. Units en route. ETA twelve minutes." Twelve minutes. She'd lose him in two. Herrera ducked into the mouth of an alley between a Thai restaurant and a shuttered bookmaker's. Quinn followed without hesitation, pulling up short at the entrance to scan for threats the way she'd been trained. Wheelie bins. A fire escape. No ambush. Just Herrera's silhouette at the far end, slipping through a gap in a chain-link fence. She went after him. On the other side of the fence, the alley opened onto a back street she didn't recognize, which bothered her. She knew Soho. She'd worked these streets for the better part of a decade. But Herrera seemed to know them better, because he moved without hesitation, cutting through passages and service corridors that shouldn't have connected the way they did, leading her further from the main roads, further from the light. The rain intensified. Her shirt was soaked through beneath her jacket, the cold seeping into her skin like a slow poison. She could taste the city in the water—exhaust, grease, something metallic she couldn't name. The buildings on either side grew older, the brickwork Victorian, the windows dark and shuttered. She was losing her bearings, and she hated it. Harlow Quinn did not get lost. She maintained situational awareness with the same military precision she brought to everything else—her case files, her morning runs, the sharp angles of her jawline that colleagues joked could cut glass. Herrera turned a final corner and stopped. Quinn pressed herself flat against a wall, peering around the edge. He stood at the top of a staircase that descended below street level—an old entrance, by the look of it, tiled in white ceramic that had yellowed with age. A Tube station. But not an active one. The signage had been stripped away and the entrance was barred by a wrought-iron gate that should have been locked. It wasn't. Herrera pulled it open, hinges groaning, and disappeared down the stairs. Quinn stood in the rain and did not move. She'd been here before. Not this specific place—she'd never seen this entrance in her life—but this moment. The threshold. The point where the known bled into something else. Three years ago, she'd followed her partner, DS Morris, through a door very much like this one. A warehouse in Deptford that shouldn't have been empty but was, that shouldn't have been cold but was freezing, that shouldn't have had symbols drawn on the walls in something that looked like blood but smelled like ozone. Morris had gone in first. Morris had always gone in first. And Morris had never come out. The official report said structural collapse. The official report was a lie, and everyone who'd signed off on it knew it, and everyone who'd signed off on it had been promoted since. Her hand went to the scar tissue on her memory, the wound that had never properly healed. She could still hear Morris's voice on the radio, calm and professional until it wasn't—until it cracked into something raw and bewildered and then just stopped, mid-syllable, like someone had cut the tape. She'd torn through that warehouse for forty minutes before backup arrived and pulled her out. They never found a body. Harlow Quinn stood at the top of a staircase in the rain and understood, with the cold clarity that had made her the youngest DI in her division's history, that this was the same kind of door. The kind you weren't supposed to open. The kind that opened onto the part of the world that had swallowed her partner whole. She should wait for backup. She should radio in coordinates, set up a perimeter, do this properly. That was the smart play. The professional play. The play that kept you alive long enough to collect your pension and bore your grandchildren with war stories. She checked her radio. Dead. Not static—dead. The screen had gone dark, and when she thumbed the power button, nothing happened. The rain shouldn't have killed it. These units were rated for weather. She tapped it against her palm, tried again. Nothing. Right. She looked down the staircase. The lights were on—a faint amber glow, like gaslight, wavering against the tile walls. She could hear something from below, barely audible under the hiss of rain. Voices. Not just a few. A crowd. The murmur of commerce, of transaction, of a market doing business. She thought about Morris. She thought about the way cases kept shutting down around her, files sealed, witnesses relocated, evidence vanishing from lockup. She thought about sixteen months of dead ends and brick walls and polite suggestions from her superintendent that she focus on cases that could actually be closed. She thought about the corkboard in her flat, the web of photographs and red string that her cat kept destroying, and how every thread led to places like this. Places that shouldn't exist. Places that the people above her didn't want found. She thought about the fear in Tomás Herrera's eyes when he'd seen her badge. Not guilt. Fear. The look of a man who believed something terrible would happen if he was caught, and not to him. Quinn pulled her jacket tighter, checked the extendable baton on her belt and the small canister of CS spray in her pocket. She didn't carry a firearm—few Met detectives did. What she carried was eighteen years of knowing when someone was lying and a stubbornness that three therapists had tried and failed to call pathological. She descended the stairs. The temperature dropped with each step. The amber light grew brighter and the sound resolved into something unmistakable—the dense, layered noise of a marketplace in full swing. Haggling. Laughter. The clink of glass and the rustle of paper. Music from somewhere, tinny and strange, a melody she almost recognized but couldn't place. At the bottom of the stairs, a short corridor opened into what had clearly once been a Tube platform. The tracks were still there, rusted and dead, but the platform itself had been transformed. Stalls lined both sides, draped in fabric and lit by lanterns that cast a warm, unsteady glow. The vaulted ceiling arched overhead, covered in a mosaic of old advertising tiles—Bovril, Pears Soap, destinations that no longer existed—now partially obscured by hanging banners and strings of small lights. The air smelled of incense, copper, and something vegetal and sharp, like crushed herbs. The Veil Market. She'd heard the name whispered in interrogation rooms, always by people who immediately wished they hadn't said it. An underground market that moved locations every full moon, she'd been told. Enchanted goods, banned substances, information. She'd never been able to confirm it existed. Looking at it now, she understood why. You had to see it to believe it, and nobody was meant to see it. There had to be a hundred people down here, maybe more, moving between stalls with the focused energy of regulars. Some looked entirely ordinary—market traders, students, city workers in rumpled suits. Others did not look ordinary at all. A woman with pupils like a cat's examined a collection of glass phials. A man whose shadow moved independently of his body haggled over a stack of yellowed parchment. Two children who couldn't have been older than twelve carried a birdcage between them containing something that glowed. Quinn pressed her back against the corridor wall and forced herself to breathe. Her pulse hammered in her ears. None of this was possible. All of it was real. She'd spent three years chasing the edges of this world and now she was standing inside it, alone, without backup, without a working radio, without any legal authority that would mean a damn thing to anyone down here. She spotted Herrera. He'd stopped at a stall near the far end of the platform, speaking urgently to a vendor—an older woman in a headscarf who was examining something Herrera had pulled from the satchel. Even from this distance, Quinn could see his hands shaking. She had a choice. Step out onto that platform, badge or no badge, and confront him in a place where she had no jurisdiction and no understanding of the rules. Or retreat up the stairs, mark the location, and try to build a case the proper way, knowing that by the next full moon this market would have moved and she'd have nothing but a story no one would believe. She thought about Morris. About the mid-syllable silence. About three years of nothing. Harlow Quinn straightened her jacket, set her jaw, and walked onto the platform. The crowd didn't part for her. She shouldered through, keeping her eyes on Herrera, moving with the deliberate stride of a woman who belonged wherever she chose to stand. A few heads turned. A few conversations paused. Someone hissed something in a language she didn't recognize. She ignored all of it. She was ten meters from Herrera when he looked up and saw her. The color drained from his olive skin. His hand went to the Saint Christopher medallion at his throat—an instinctive, desperate gesture, the kind of thing a man did when he was praying. "Herrera," she said, and her voice was steady, and the marketplace noise seemed to dim around her, and she did not look away. "We need to talk about what's in that bag."