Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TZPQP598M3Z5ZFGR0WN3C

Rain hammered the pavement in sheets, turning Chalk Farm Road into a river of reflected brake lights and smeared neon. Quinn's boots struck the asphalt in a rhythm she hadn't used since her days running infantry drills—heel, ball, push, repeat—each stride eating up the distance between her and the figure in the dark hooded jacket thirty meters ahead. He'd bolted the second she'd stepped into The Raven's Nest. Hadn't even let her get the words out. She'd pushed through the door under that green neon sign, clocked him sitting at the far end of the bar beneath a yellowed map of the Thames estuary, and he'd looked up at her with those warm brown eyes wide as communion wafers. Then his hand had gone to the Saint Christopher medallion at his throat—a reflex, like touching a talisman—and he'd vaulted the bar rail and crashed through the back exit before the bartender could do more than swear. Tomás Herrera. Former paramedic. Current person of interest in at least three cases she couldn't get anyone at the Met to take seriously. Quinn wiped rain from her eyes and cut left across the road, nearly clipping a night bus that blared its horn at her back. Herrera was fast, younger by twelve years, but he kept glancing over his shoulder and that cost him. She watched him stumble on the kerb outside the Camden Lock entrance, one knee hitting wet stone before he scrambled up and disappeared around a shuttered food stall. She followed. Her worn leather watch strap had soaked through, the band heavy and cold against her wrist. The stalls of Camden Market rose around her like the walls of a maze—corrugated metal shutters padlocked for the night, canvas awnings dumping pockets of collected rainwater onto the walkways below. The air stank of day-old frying oil and wet cardboard. No footsteps ahead. She stopped. Listened. Rain on tin roofing. A distant siren winding through Kentish Town. The drip and gurgle of overloaded gutters. Then—a scrape. Metal on metal, coming from below the pedestrian bridge near the canal. Quinn pressed herself against a shuttered storefront and peered around the corner. Herrera crouched beside what looked like a maintenance hatch in the pavement. Not a standard council access point. The cover was heavier, older, with markings along the rim that she couldn't read in the dark. He gripped the edge with both hands and hauled it aside, the sound grinding through the empty market like a coffin lid. He dropped through without hesitation. Quinn crossed the distance in six strides and stood over the open hatch. A narrow iron ladder descended into amber light. Warm air rose from the hole, carrying a smell she couldn't place—something between burnt cinnamon and ozone, with an undercurrent of old stone and earth. Sound drifted up too. Voices. Many of them. The murmur of a crowd. She knew what was down there. Not the specifics, not the layout, but the shape of it. Three years of pulling at loose threads since Morris had died in that warehouse in Bermondsey—three years of case files that didn't add up, witness statements that contradicted physics, evidence logs with items that vanished between booking and trial—had led her to the edges of something she didn't have a name for. An economy that operated below the surface of the city. Underground, in more ways than one. Her radio wouldn't work down there. She pulled it from her belt anyway and thumbed the channel. "Control, this is DI Quinn, badge four-four-one-six. I'm at Camden Market, north side near the canal bridge. In pursuit of suspect on foot. Going underground." Static. She repeated the call. More static, broken by a sound like someone dragging a nail across glass. She clipped the radio back to her belt. No backup. No comms. No authority that meant anything below that hatch. Quinn looked at the ladder. The rungs were damp with condensation and something that caught the amber light with an iridescent sheen, like motor oil but thinner. She could hear Herrera's footsteps below, rapid and fading. Every second she stood here, he put another ten meters between them. She thought about Morris. The way they'd found him in that Bermondsey warehouse, sitting upright against a support column with his eyes open and no marks on his body. The pathologist had written "cardiac event" on the death certificate, and Quinn had signed the paperwork because what else could she do. She hadn't believed it then. She didn't believe it now. Herrera had been a paramedic. Had treated people the NHS didn't know existed. Had lost his medical license for administering treatments that weren't in any pharmacopoeia she could find. If anyone knew what had really happened to Morris, it was someone like him. Someone connected to this hidden underworld. Quinn put her foot on the first rung and started down. The ladder dropped about four meters into what had once been a Tube station platform. She recognized the architecture immediately—the curved tiled walls, the arched ceiling—but every surface had been transformed. Where London Underground signage should have hung, there were banners of dark fabric stitched with symbols in silver thread. The original platform lighting had been replaced, or augmented, by hundreds of glass lanterns suspended from the ceiling on chains of varying lengths, each one casting that same amber glow she'd seen from above. The effect was like descending into a jar of honey. The platform opened into the old track bed, and here the crowd thickened. Dozens of stalls lined both sides of what would have been the railway tunnel, built from salvaged wood, draped cloth, and materials she couldn't identify at a glance. Vendors called out in languages she recognized—English, Arabic, Mandarin—and languages she didn't. The customers moved between stalls in no apparent hurry, browsing wares displayed on velvet-covered tables and in locked glass cases. The Veil Market. Quinn had heard the name whispered exactly once, by a confidential informant who'd turned up dead a week later in circumstances that remained, officially, unexplained. She'd found a carved disc of bone among his possessions—smooth, white, about the size of a fifty-pence piece. She'd kept it. It sat in her coat pocket now, and her fingers closed around it instinctively. A bone token. She stepped off the ladder's last rung onto the platform. Nobody stopped her. A few heads turned—a woman with skin the colour of polished obsidian and pupils shaped like keyholes gave her a long look, then turned back to the vials of luminous blue liquid she was arranging on her stall. A massive man with tusks protruding from his lower jaw glanced at Quinn's belt, where the outline of her radio and warrant card holder were visible, and let out a low grunt that might have been amusement. Quinn's hand moved to her hip. She carried no firearm—Met protocol for plain-clothes detectives didn't extend to that without special authorization. She had a collapsible baton in her right coat pocket and thirty years of institutional credibility that meant absolutely nothing in this tunnel. She spotted Herrera. He'd slowed to a walk fifty meters down the tunnel, weaving between stalls on the left side. The hood of his jacket had fallen back, revealing his short curly hair plastered to his skull with rain. His olive skin glowed amber in the lantern light. He moved like someone who knew this place, nodding to a vendor here, sidestepping a knot of customers there, angling toward the far end of the tunnel where the market thinned and the darkness deepened. Quinn followed. She kept three stalls between them and tried to move the way the other shoppers moved—unhurried, browsing. Her eyes swept the wares on display as she passed. One stall sold jars of something that writhed. Another offered stacks of paper covered in handwritten text, each page sealed with wax that pulsed with a faint internal light. A third stall, tended by an old man with milky white eyes, displayed nothing but a single black feather on a velvet cushion, yet a queue of customers stood waiting. She didn't look too long at any of it. Couldn't afford to process what she was seeing. Not yet. A hand caught her elbow. Quinn spun, weight dropping into her back foot. The woman who'd grabbed her was short, barely five feet, wrapped in layers of green silk that seemed to move independent of any breeze. Her face was young but her eyes were ancient, the irises a shade of gold that didn't exist in nature. "You're police." Not a question. Quinn didn't answer. "Your token got you in. It won't get you out if you cause trouble." The woman's grip tightened. Her fingers were stronger than they had any right to be. "Whatever you're chasing, consider whether it's worth catching." "Let go of my arm." The woman held on for one more second, then released her. She melted back into the crowd without another word. Quinn turned back toward where she'd last seen Herrera. Gone. She pushed forward, past a stall selling clockwork insects that crawled and clicked in a glass terrarium, past a vendor arguing in rapid French with a customer over a jar of what appeared to be teeth. The tunnel curved ahead, following the old track layout, and the crowd thinned. The lanterns grew sparser. Shadows pooled between them like standing water. At the curve's apex, a narrow archway had been cut into the tunnel wall—rough-edged, recent. Not part of the original station architecture. Beyond it, a corridor of bare brick stretched into darkness, lit at irregular intervals by candles set into niches in the wall. Wet footprints marked the floor, running into the corridor. Fresh. The treads matched a pair of trainers—Herrera's size, Herrera's gait pattern, the left foot striking slightly heavier than the right, a detail she'd noted when reviewing CCTV footage from the Bermondsey case. Quinn stood at the archway's threshold. Behind her, the amber hum of the market. Ahead, candlelight and silence and an answer that might be worth any cost. The scar on Tomás Herrera's forearm came from a knife attack. She'd read the medical report. Someone had tried to kill him for what he knew, and he'd survived. Whatever he was running from, it wasn't just her. Whatever he was running toward, down this dark brick corridor in a market that shouldn't exist beneath the streets of Camden—it was something that frightened him more than a detective with eighteen years of service and a dead partner she couldn't let go. Quinn checked her baton. Solid weight in her hand. She adjusted her grip, felt the rain-damp leather of her watch press against the heel of her palm. She stepped through the archway.