Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TZJR6KX7CRKYVCTHHZSCC

The rain came down in curtains, the kind that soaked through a coat collar in thirty seconds and didn't apologize for it. Quinn kept moving. She had picked up Herrera's trail outside the Raven's Nest twenty minutes ago — spotted him through the amber fog of the bar's green neon sign as he'd slipped out the side door with his collar turned up and his hands doing something she couldn't quite see. She'd been watching the place for three nights. She'd been watching him for two weeks. When he walked fast, she walked faster. When he broke into a run at the corner of Dean Street, so did she. Now she was losing him. He had a good stride for his height, controlled and economic, the kind of movement that didn't waste energy — someone trained to think about his body. The Saint Christopher medallion she'd clocked earlier caught a flash of headlight as he cut across Shaftesbury Avenue against the red, weaving between a black cab and a night bus without breaking pace. Quinn followed, one hand briefly on the bonnet of the cab to orient herself, and the driver laid on the horn hard enough to rattle her back teeth. "Police," she said to no one in particular, and kept running. She was fit — she had always been fit, even after Morris, even after the months of sitting very still in her flat watching the walls change color in the dark — but Herrera was younger and he knew these streets differently than she did. Not better. Differently. He moved like someone who had mapped the city through service entrances and alley shortcuts and the unlit spaces between streetlamps, which told her something. The NHS didn't teach you that. Something else did. He turned north on Charing Cross Road and she gained on him by thirty feet, close enough to see the wet curl of his dark hair plastered against the back of his neck, close enough that she thought about calling out. She decided against it. Let him run. Let him lead. She watched him reach into his jacket pocket without slowing down. His right hand closed on something she couldn't identify from this distance, and when he made his next turn — sharp left, cutting through a narrow pedestrian alley that smelled of old cardboard and chip oil — she counted to three before following. Turned the corner ready. He was gone. Quinn stopped. She stood in the alley with rain hammering her shoulders and scanned the length of it — a dumpster against the left wall, a broken bicycle frame, a fire exit door painted shut so many seasons ago the hinges had rusted into decoration. No Herrera. She pressed herself against the brickwork and listened. Street noise, rain, a distant siren. The particular silence of a space that someone has just vacated. Then, below all of it, something else. A low mechanical sound, like an old ventilation system drawing breath, coming up through the grate at her feet. She crouched. The grate was iron, old London infrastructure, the kind of thing that had been in the ground since before the Jubilee line was built. Heavy. Except it hadn't been opened recently — or it had, and recently was relative, because the disturbed rust along its near edge caught the orange light from the alley mouth in a way that told her someone had lifted it within the last few minutes. Quinn sat back on her heels and let the rain run down her face. She checked her watch — the worn strap, the scratched crystal, her left wrist. Twenty past eleven. She had her radio, her badge, her service weapon. She had approximately zero backup, because backup required paperwork and paperwork required explanations she wasn't equipped to give anyone in her chain of command yet. Not without evidence. Not without something that made sense in a report. She thought about Morris. DS Morris who had followed a lead into a basement in Whitechapel three years ago and come out wrong. Who had sat across from her in the car afterward and looked at her with his own eyes but hadn't been entirely himself behind them, not anymore, and who had died six weeks later of causes she still could not make fit into any box the inquest provided. She had spent three years trying to work out what kind of box it required. She was beginning to understand the shape of it. Quinn gripped the grate with both hands and pulled. The drop was eight feet onto a concrete shelf, which she handled badly — rolled her left ankle on the landing and bit down on the sound that wanted to come out of her mouth. She stood, tested the ankle, bore weight on it. Manageable. Below the shelf, a corroded staircase descended into darkness and warm air that smelled of something she had no clean reference for. Something mineral and old, like river water through limestone, with underneath it something almost chemical. Almost sweet. She had a torch in her inside pocket. She turned it on and followed the stairs down. The staircase opened into what had obviously once been a Tube platform — curved tile ceiling, the ghost of signage half-scraped from the walls, track beds filled with rubble and decades of sediment. But the platform itself had been transformed into something that bore no relationship to any decommissioned station she had ever seen. Quinn stopped at the bottom step and simply looked. Stalls. Dozens of them, draped in dark cloth, lit by lanterns that produced light in colors she couldn't name precisely — amber that was too red, white that was too blue, a greenish luminescence that came from no visible source. People moved between them, some ordinary-looking in overcoats and trainers, some in garments that had no obvious era or origin. From the nearest stall, glass jars were arranged in rows, each containing something suspended in liquid that shifted when nobody touched them. From another, what appeared to be maps — but maps of places with coastlines she didn't recognize, topographies that couldn't correspond to anywhere she had ever been. Nobody had noticed her. Or nobody had reacted to her. She wasn't certain they were the same thing. Herrera was forty feet ahead, moving through the crowd with his shoulders down, speaking quietly to a figure at one of the stalls — a woman, older, with her grey hair pinned severely and her back to Quinn. He hadn't seen her come down. His hand was still closed around whatever he'd taken from his pocket, and as Quinn watched, he opened it briefly and showed the contents to the woman. A small white object, smooth, the size of a large coin. The woman nodded once and the transaction changed shape — names, or something functionally similar, exchanged in low tones, and then a package that the woman retrieved from beneath her table. Quinn put her back against the curved tile wall and kept her torch off. She catalogued: exits she could identify, which were two — the stairs she'd come down, and something at the far end of the platform that might be a passage or might be a dead end. She catalogued: the people nearest to her, who were three, none of them looking her way. She catalogued: Herrera, who was completing whatever it was he'd come here to do, who was sliding the package inside his jacket, who would turn in approximately ten seconds and might see her. She catalogued, finally: the feeling in her chest that was not quite fear and not quite recognition but something that lived in the narrow country between them. She had felt this before. Once, in a Whitechapel basement. Once, six weeks later, sitting in a hospital corridor alone. The feeling that the world was larger and stranger and more structurally unsound than anything she had been trained to navigate. Quinn touched her badge through her coat. Solid. Real. Eighteen years of service made material in a piece of metal that meant nothing, probably, to anyone in this room. She stepped off the staircase and moved into the market. Whatever this was, she had come too far to stand at the edge of it.