Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V9MBWX10P86MMM2ZA29TQ

The platform still had its original tiles. That was the first thing Quinn noticed — white ceramic rectangles edging toward cream with age, stamped with the old Underground roundel and a station name that had been scraped away decades ago. Someone had gone at the lettering with a chisel or a flathead screwdriver, leaving gouges in the glaze. The fluorescent strips that her forensics team had rigged along the ceiling threw the damage into sharp relief, every crack and chip casting its own little shadow. Quinn ducked under the cordon tape that DC Avery had strung between two rusted stanchions and stepped onto the platform proper. The air was heavy and mineral, the particular staleness of a place that hadn't drawn a natural breath in half a century. Beneath that, something else — sweet and acrid at once, like burned rosemary. "Victim is over here, ma'am." Avery led her along the platform edge. The old track bed below was dry, which surprised her. She'd expected standing water, the usual London Underground seepage. Instead the gravel between the rails looked almost swept, and someone had laid down wooden pallets at regular intervals all the way into the tunnel mouth. She filed that away. The body was at the far end of the platform, past a row of market stalls. That was the second thing that didn't belong. Not stalls in the conventional sense — no Perspex sneeze guards, no handwritten price tags — but proper structures built from salvaged wood and draped in dark fabric. She counted eleven of them in two uneven rows, creating a narrow aisle. Whatever had been on their shelves was gone. The shelves themselves remained, along with hooks screwed into crossbeams, leather loops meant to display hanging merchandise, and — in one stall near the middle — a glass case that someone had locked and apparently forgotten about, or abandoned in haste. Inside the case, arranged on black velvet, sat a row of small bottles filled with liquid that shifted color when Quinn passed her torch over them. Blue to violet to something that didn't have a name she could reach for. She kept walking. The victim lay face-up beside the last stall, arms at his sides, legs together. He might have been sleeping except for the expression frozen on his face — not pain, exactly, but bewilderment. Mid-fifties, heavyset, wearing a waxed canvas jacket and work boots. No visible wounds. No blood. The forensic pathologist, Dr. Sato, was crouched beside the body with her bag open, and she looked up when Quinn's shadow fell across the dead man's chest. "Preliminary?" "No obvious cause of death," Sato said. "No trauma, no ligature marks, no sign of asphyxiation. Petechial hemorrhaging in both eyes, but nothing to explain what caused it. Liver temp puts time of death between midnight and two a.m." "Who found him?" "Anonymous tip," Avery said from behind her. "Called into the Camden nick at half four this morning. Caller gave the location of the access tunnel." Quinn turned that over. An abandoned Tube station, clearly in use for purposes she hadn't yet identified, and someone had rung the police and drawn them straight to it. Either the caller wanted the body found or they wanted the market found, and those were very different motivations. She crouched beside the body and studied the man's hands. Workman's hands, thick-fingered, callused. Under the nails of his right hand, a greenish residue. Not biological — too uniform, too metallic. She leaned closer. Verdigris. The particular blue-green patina of oxidized brass. "Bag his hands separately," she told Sato. "I want that residue analyzed." She stood and surveyed the area immediately around the body. The platform floor was dusty — decades of accumulated grime — and the forensic team had already flagged a confusion of footprints with yellow markers. Dozens of prints, overlapping, different sizes and treads. This place had seen heavy traffic, and recently. But within a two-foot radius of the body, the dust was undisturbed except for the dead man's own outline. No drag marks. No scuff of a struggle. It was as though everyone who'd walked this platform had given this particular spot a wide berth, or as though the man had materialized exactly where he lay. "Detective Quinn?" The voice came from behind the cordon line. Quinn straightened and turned. A young woman stood at the edge of the platform, leather satchel strap cutting a diagonal across her chest, her curly red hair bright as a struck match under the forensic lighting. Round glasses. Freckled face. She had her left hand raised in an uncertain half-wave, and even as Quinn watched, she reached up and tucked a loose curl behind her left ear. "Eva Kowalski," Avery said, appearing at Quinn's elbow. "The consultant DCI Fraser authorized. British Museum, restricted archives." Quinn's jaw tightened. Fraser had mentioned bringing in outside expertise on what he'd called the "unusual elements" of recent cases, and she'd told him exactly what she thought of that idea. Apparently he'd gone ahead anyway. "Ms. Kowalski." Quinn walked back along the platform, stopping a full arm's length from the cordon. "You have credentials?" "I do." Eva fumbled with her satchel — the thing was stuffed to bursting with books, their spines cracked and pages flagged with colored tape — and produced a laminated ID badge. Quinn took it, examined it with more care than was strictly necessary, and handed it back. The authorization was Fraser's signature, clear enough. "Don't touch anything. Stay beside me. If I tell you to stop, you stop." Eva nodded quickly and ducked under the tape. She was small — Quinn had six inches on her easily — and she moved with the particular caution of someone accustomed to navigating rooms full of irreplaceable objects. Her eyes, green behind those round lenses, were already working over the stalls, and Quinn watched her watching. "You know what this place is," Quinn said. It wasn't a question. Eva's hesitation lasted two seconds too long. "I've read about locations like this. In the archives, there are references to — markets. Unlicensed, unregistered. They move on a lunar cycle. Every full moon, new location." She tucked a curl behind her ear again. "They call them veil markets." "And the merchandise?" "Things you can't buy anywhere else. Or shouldn't be able to." Eva stopped beside the glass case Quinn had noticed earlier. She leaned close but kept her hands laced together behind her back. "These bottles — do you see how the liquid changes? That's not a trick of the light. That's alchemical. Banned substances, most likely. There's a whole taxonomy of —" "I need facts, Ms. Kowalski. Not taxonomy." Eva straightened, chastened but not cowed. There was a steadiness beneath the nervous habits that Quinn recognized — the stubbornness of the deeply academic, the refusal to be hurried past a point that mattered. "The fact," Eva said carefully, "is that this market shouldn't exist. The fact is that someone set up eleven stalls in an abandoned Tube station and sold materials drawn from a tradition that most people would call fictional. And the fact is that your victim is lying there with no cause of death and no sign of a struggle, and I think I might know why." Quinn held her gaze for a long moment, then gestured for her to continue. Eva moved toward the body, skirting the footprint markers. She stopped at the edge of the undisturbed dust — that strange, clean circle — and pushed her glasses up her nose. "The floor," she said. "Around him. You see it?" "Clean zone. No other footprints within two feet. Already noted." "It's not just clean. Look at the dust at the boundary." Eva pointed without touching. "See how the particles are oriented? They're not just undisturbed — they're pushed outward. Radiating from the body. Something displaced the air around him. An outward force, concentric. Like a shockwave, but on a very small scale." Quinn crouched again. She hadn't seen it before, but now that Eva had pointed it out, the pattern was there — the fine grey dust at the edge of the clean zone wasn't simply settled. It was heaped, minutely, like sand swept to the edges of a circle. "An explosion would leave residue," Quinn said. "Accelerant. Chemical signature." "Not that kind of force." Quinn looked up. "Then what kind?" Eva pulled open her satchel and retrieved a book — not one of the modern ones, but a slim volume bound in cloth that had gone dark with handling. She opened it to a page marked with green tape and held it out. The text was in Latin, but the illustration needed no translation: a human figure lying supine, surrounded by concentric rings of displaced matter, with lines radiating outward from the chest like diagrammatic lightning. "The historical sources call it a rift discharge," Eva said, her voice dropping. "It's what happens when a portal — a doorway between layers of reality — opens inside a person instead of beside them. The energy has to go somewhere. It radiates outward. The person at the center..." She trailed off. Quinn stood slowly. "You're telling me this man was killed by a portal opening inside his body." "I'm telling you that's what the evidence pattern matches. I'm telling you that the petechial hemorrhaging in his eyes is consistent with a massive, instantaneous internal pressure event. And I'm telling you that the residue under his fingernails — that green oxidation — I think I know what left it." Quinn waited. "There's an object. A compass. Brass casing, etched with protective sigils, needle that points toward supernatural rifts. They're made here, in markets like this one. The casing develops a specific verdigris over time — it's distinctive because the brass is alloyed with something that doesn't appear on the periodic table. If your victim was holding one of those compasses when the rift opened —" "Then he knew what was coming," Quinn said. "He was tracking it. Or trying to track it." "Or trying to get away from it." They stood in silence. The forensic lights hummed. Somewhere deep in the tunnel, water dripped — a sound that shouldn't have carried but did, the acoustics of the empty station bending the noise toward them like a whispered confidence. Quinn looked at the body again. The bewilderment on his face. Not the expression of a man attacked. The expression of a man who'd realized, in the last half-second of his life, that the thing he'd been looking for had found him first. She turned to Avery. "I want a full inventory of every stall on this platform. Photograph everything. Get specialists for those bottles — full hazmat protocol until we know what we're dealing with." She paused, then looked at Eva Kowalski, who was already tucking hair behind her ear again, her green eyes bright with the particular anxiety of someone who has just said too much and knows it. "And Ms. Kowalski stays. We're not done." Quinn pulled back her sleeve and checked the worn leather watch on her left wrist. Six-fourteen a.m. Three years ago, almost to the week, she'd stood over another body that didn't make sense — DS Morris, her partner, lying in a Docklands warehouse with the same bewildered expression and no cause of death the pathologist could name. She'd written the case into a box and the box into a shelf in the back of her mind, where it sat and gathered its own kind of dust. She looked at the concentric rings on the floor. The displaced dust. The pattern she'd missed then because she hadn't known to look. She knew now.