Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VG69EWD40PZ795BA9NAA6

The rain came sideways off Shaftesbury Avenue, needling Quinn's face as she cut through the theatre crowd at a dead sprint. Ahead of her, maybe forty yards, Tomás Herrera dodged a black cab and vaulted the railing of the central median, his dark jacket flaring behind him like a wing. He was fast. Faster than she'd expected from someone who spent his nights stitching people up in back rooms. Quinn's boots hammered the wet pavement. She keyed her radio without slowing. "Suspect heading north on Charing Cross Road. IC1 male, five-ten, dark curly hair, olive jacket. Moving toward Cambridge Circus." Static hissed back. The rain was doing something to the signal, or maybe it was the neighborhood. Soho had dead spots that didn't show up on any coverage map. She'd been watching him for eleven days. Eleven days of cold coffee in unmarked cars, of cross-referencing CCTV footage until her eyes burned, of sifting through the debris of a life that didn't quite add up. Tomás Herrera, twenty-nine, born in Seville, former NHS paramedic. License revoked fourteen months ago for administering unauthorized treatments—the details of which had been sealed with a thoroughness that made her teeth itch. He'd surfaced on her radar because his name kept appearing in the margins of cases she couldn't close. Not as a suspect, never directly. As a ghost. A name whispered by informants who then stopped returning her calls. Tonight she'd spotted him leaving the Raven's Nest, that dingy Soho bar with its sickly green neon sign, and something about the way he'd clocked her—one sharp glance, immediate recognition, the kind of look that said he knew exactly who she was—had triggered the chase before she'd consciously decided to pursue. He cut left onto a side street. Quinn followed, nearly losing her footing on the slick cobblestones. The lane was narrow, barely wide enough for a delivery van, hemmed in by the windowless backs of buildings. Her hand went to the Glock at her hip, a reflex she didn't act on. He hadn't shown a weapon. But she'd read the file on that scar along his left forearm—knife attack, the details murky—and anyone who ran that hard from a police detective had reasons they didn't want examined. "Stop! Metropolitan Police!" The words ripped from her throat and scattered uselessly against the brick walls. Herrera didn't even flinch. He hit the end of the lane and turned right, and for a sickening moment she lost sight of him entirely. Quinn rounded the corner and found herself on Camden High Street, the storefronts dark, the market stalls shuttered under their tarpaulins. The rain had cleared the pavements of all but the most determined pedestrians. She scanned the street, breathing hard, the taste of diesel and wet stone in her mouth. There—a flash of movement near the old Underground entrance, the one that had been closed since the early nineties. The hoarding around it was rusted and graffitied, but a section of fence had been pulled back, and as she watched, Herrera slipped through the gap like water through a crack in a dam. She pulled up short at the fence. Rain slid down her face and pooled in the hollow of her collarbone. Through the gap she could see concrete steps descending into blackness, and from somewhere far below, a faint amber glow that had no business being there. Quinn checked her radio again. Dead air. She thumbed her phone—no signal, not even a single bar. The worn leather of her watch strap was soaked through, and when she glanced at the face, the second hand had stopped. She knew this feeling. This exact hollow sensation beneath her sternum, like standing at the edge of something that dropped away further than you could see. She'd felt it three years ago, the night Morris died. DS Richard Morris, her partner for six years, who'd followed a suspect into a Docklands warehouse and come out in a body bag with injuries the pathologist had described as "inconsistent with any known mechanism." The case had been sealed. The counselor they'd assigned her had used the phrase "traumatic ambiguity" with a soothing, practiced cadence that made Quinn want to put her fist through the wall. She'd spent three years trying to unseal that case. Three years of pulling threads that led nowhere, or worse, that led to locked doors and polite refusals and the quiet suggestion from her DCI that maybe it was time to let it go. She hadn't let it go. She'd let nearly everything else go instead—the flat in Putney, the Sunday dinners with her sister's family, the possibility of sleep that didn't involve two fingers of whiskey first—but not the case. Never the case. And now here she was, standing in the rain outside an abandoned Tube station, watching the darkness swallow a man whose file intersected with Morris's case in ways she couldn't yet prove but could feel in her gut like a bruise. She pulled the fence back further. The metal was cold and bit into her fingers. The steps were cracked, weeds pushing through the concrete, but the wear patterns told a different story—smooth channels where feet had passed, recently, in numbers. This wasn't an abandoned entrance. It was a door that wanted to look abandoned. Quinn drew her weapon. The Glock felt solid in her hand, an honest weight. She started down. The stairwell smelled of damp earth and something else, something sweet and faintly chemical that she couldn't place. The amber glow strengthened as she descended, resolving into the flicker of what looked like lantern light. The walls were tiled in the old Underground style, cream and burgundy, but someone had scratched symbols into the glaze—patterns that repeated and interlocked in ways that made her eyes slide off them if she looked too long. At the bottom of the stairs, a corridor stretched ahead. The floor was dry down here, the rain a distant memory. She could hear sounds now: the murmur of voices, the clink of glass or metal, a low thrumming that might have been music or might have been something else entirely. A figure materialized from a doorway to her left. A woman, heavyset, with tattooed hands and eyes that reflected the lantern light with a flat, animal quality. She held out her palm without speaking. Quinn stared at her. "Metropolitan Police. I'm in pursuit of a—" "Token," the woman said. Her voice was like gravel shifting. "No bone, no entry." "I don't know what that means. I'm a police officer and I'm pursuing a suspect into these premises. Stand aside." The woman didn't move. Her expression didn't change. She simply stood there with her palm extended, immovable as geography, and Quinn understood with a cold certainty that her warrant card and her Glock and her eighteen years of decorated service meant exactly nothing down here. A bone token. She filed it away, the way she'd filed away a hundred impossible details over the past three years, fragments that didn't fit any framework she'd been trained to work within. She tried to push past. The woman's hand closed on her shoulder, and the grip was wrong—too strong, the fingers too rigid, as if the bones beneath the skin were made of something denser than calcium. Quinn twisted free and stepped back, her weapon raised, and for a long moment the two of them stood in the flickering corridor and regarded each other. "He came through here," Quinn said. "Dark hair, olive skin, scar on his left arm. You saw him." The woman's lips didn't move, but the faintest shift in her gaze—a quick, involuntary flick toward the corridor beyond—told Quinn everything. "I'll be back," Quinn said. She holstered the Glock. "And when I come back, I'll have whatever I need to get through that door." She turned and climbed the stairs, each step deliberate, refusing to rush. The rain hit her face when she emerged, and her watch started ticking again, and her phone buzzed to life with three missed calls from the station. She stood in the gap in the fence and let the rain soak her while she committed every detail to memory. The location. The symbols on the tiles. The amber light and the sounds from below and the woman with the wrong grip and the words no bone, no entry. Three years ago, Morris had followed someone underground and hadn't come back. Quinn was not Morris. She didn't walk blindly into spaces she didn't understand. She mapped them first. She learned their rules. And then she came back with leverage. She pulled out her phone and opened the notes app, and with rainwater streaming over the screen, she began to type. Everything she'd seen. Everything she'd heard. The way the air had tasted at the bottom of those stairs, sweet and chemical and ancient. The way her watch had stopped. Somewhere beneath her feet, in the hidden market that had no name she knew yet, Tomás Herrera was putting distance between himself and the surface world. Let him. Let him think she'd been turned away at the door because she lacked some trinket of bone. Quinn pocketed her phone and walked north through the rain, her stride measured, her jaw set, the city lights smearing across the wet pavement like spilled paint. She would find out what the Veil Market was. She would find out what Herrera was doing there, and who he was doing it for, and how it connected to a dead partner in a Docklands warehouse three years cold. She would find a bone token. And she would go back down those stairs.