Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VP6JZJ63ZX7NARGZB8S26

Rain hammered the pavement on Camden High Street in sheets so thick the streetlamps dissolved into smears of amber. Harlow Quinn's boots slapped through a puddle that swallowed her ankle, and she did not slow down. Thirty meters ahead, the figure in the dark jacket cut left past a shuttered kebab shop, his silhouette strobing between the headlights of a passing night bus. She keyed her radio. Static hissed back. Dead air. Had been dead air since she'd crossed the canal bridge, which was either terrible luck or something else entirely. The figure — Herrera, she was almost certain — vaulted a low railing and dropped out of sight behind a construction hoarding. Quinn reached the railing four seconds later, rain streaming down the bridge of her nose, and saw the narrow alley beyond. Torn posters. A dumpster. No Herrera. She went over the railing. Her landing jarred up through her knees and into her lower back, a sharp reminder that she was forty-one and hadn't stretched since Tuesday. The alley smelled of grease and old rain. She drew her torch from her belt and swept the beam low, keeping it away from her centre mass the way they'd drilled into her at Hendon two decades ago. Water ran in a thin stream down the alley's middle, carrying cigarette butts and a crumpled flyer for a psychic reading service. At the alley's far end: a door. Metal, no handle on the outside, cracked open by three inches. A warm amber glow bled through the gap. Quinn pressed herself flat against the brick wall and listened. Somewhere below her feet, a bass note pulsed — not music exactly, more like a heartbeat translated into sound. She checked her watch. The worn leather strap had darkened with rain. Eleven forty-seven. She'd been chasing Herrera for nine minutes since spotting him leaving the Raven's Nest through a side exit she hadn't known existed, moving fast, a messenger bag bouncing against his hip. Nine minutes since her surveillance had gone sideways. She thought about calling for backup. Pulled her phone free. No signal. The screen displayed a single bar that flickered and vanished like something was drinking the connection. The door shifted another inch in a gust of wind, and the amber glow brightened. Warm air rose from whatever lay beyond, carrying a scent she couldn't place — copper and burning sage and something older, earthier, like the inside of a cathedral crypt. Quinn pushed the door open with her shoulder and stepped through. Stone steps descended in a tight spiral, the walls close enough to touch on both sides. Victorian brickwork, the kind you found in the oldest Tube tunnels, mortared with something that glistened faintly in the torchlight. She killed the torch. Enough light rose from below to see by, and she didn't need to announce her approach. Twenty steps down. Thirty. The bass pulse grew stronger, and voices reached her — fragments of conversation in languages she didn't recognize, layered over a low ambient hum that vibrated in her molars. The stairwell opened onto a platform. She stopped breathing. The abandoned station stretched before her in a cathedral of tiled arches, but it bore no resemblance to any decommissioned platform she'd ever seen on a planning document. Stalls lined both sides of the tracks — not makeshift tables but permanent structures, draped in fabrics that shifted colour when she wasn't looking directly at them. Lanterns hung from the vaulted ceiling on chains of no visible origin, casting that amber light she'd seen from above. Dozens of people moved between the stalls, some in ordinary clothes, some in things decidedly less ordinary. A woman with skin the colour of birch bark examined a glass vial held up to the light. A man in a Barbour jacket haggled with a vendor whose fingers were too long by at least two knuckles. The Veil Market. She'd heard the name exactly once, whispered by a confidential informant who'd refused to say it a second time. Quinn's hand drifted to her hip where her expandable baton sat clipped to her belt. She hadn't drawn her weapon — she was off-duty, technically, and the Glock was locked in her flat in Bermondsey. Eighteen years of service, a Queen's Commendation, and she was standing in what appeared to be a supernatural black market with a baton and a dead radio. She scanned the crowd for Herrera. Olive skin, dark curly hair, the scar on his left forearm. The messenger bag. There. Forty meters down the platform, weaving between a cluster of buyers gathered around a stall hung with what looked like animal bones strung on copper wire. He moved with purpose, not running now but not strolling either, heading toward a doorway at the far end where two figures stood with their arms folded. Quinn stepped off the bottom stair and onto the platform. The crowd's texture changed around her immediately. Conversations dimmed. Heads turned — not all at once, not a dramatic sweep of attention, but one by one, like dominoes falling in slow motion. A vendor to her left, a stocky man selling jars of dark liquid, narrowed his eyes and pulled a cloth over his wares. She didn't belong here. That much was radiating off every surface. She kept walking. Chin level. Spine straight. The same bearing that had carried her through crime scenes in Peckham and interview rooms at the Yard. Whatever this place was, she was still Harlow Quinn, and Herrera still had whatever was in that bag, and three years ago a place like this — a world like this — had swallowed her partner whole and she hadn't understood why until tonight. Morris. Standing in a Hackney warehouse, his torch beam catching something in the dark that made him say her name in a voice she'd never heard him use. Then nothing. Then the coroner's report that made no anatomical sense. She picked up her pace. A hand closed around her elbow. "You don't have a token." The voice belonged to a young woman seated on an overturned crate, braids coiled atop her head, one milky eye and one sharp green. She wasn't looking at Quinn. She was looking at a deck of oversized cards spread across her knees. "I'm not here to buy." "Doesn't matter. Can't be here without a bone token. That's the rule. Not my rule." The woman turned a card over. "You walked in through the rain door. Rain door's only open when someone's being chased. Market likes a good chase." "The market likes—" "You should leave." Now the green eye found her. "People who come here without tokens leave in ways they don't choose." Quinn pulled her arm free. Herrera had reached the doorway at the far end and was speaking with one of the guards. He hadn't looked back. He didn't know she was here — or he did, and this was the plan. A trap. The thought arrived clean and cold. She catalogued her exits. The stairwell behind her. A maintenance tunnel branching off the platform midway down, blocked by a hanging curtain that swayed without wind. The doorway Herrera was approaching. Three options, one she knew could get her back to the surface. Herrera passed something to the guard. A small object, pale, that caught the lantern light. The guard stepped aside. Herrera vanished through the doorway. Quinn's jaw tightened. She could feel the crowd's attention like a physical weight, pressing against the back of her neck, the space between her shoulder blades. The vendor with the jars had stopped pretending to work and was watching her openly now, one hand beneath his table. The woman with the cards spoke again without looking up. "Your partner came here too. Three years back. Had a token, at least. Still wasn't enough." The words landed like a blow to the sternum. Quinn turned. The woman shuffled her deck with fingers that moved too fast. "What do you know about Morris?" "I know he asked questions. I know the Market answered." A card flipped. The image on its face showed a door standing open in a field of black. "Same thing's about to happen to you, detective. Only difference is you get to choose whether you walk through that door. He didn't." Rain dripped from Quinn's jacket onto the platform tiles. The drops hissed faintly where they landed, as if the stone were warm. She looked at the stairwell. Twenty seconds back to the surface. To the rain and the dead radio and the case files pinned to her kitchen wall — Herrera, the Raven's Nest, the clique, all the threads she'd been pulling for months. She could walk back up those stairs, file an intelligence report that no one at the Yard would believe, and go home to Bermondsey. She looked at the doorway. The guards had closed ranks again. Beyond it, whatever Herrera was protecting. Whatever had consumed Morris. The answer to three years of silence in her chest where a partner's voice should have been. Quinn unclipped the baton from her belt and extended it with a flick of her wrist. The snap of metal telescoping open cut through the market's ambient hum. Conversations stopped. Even the lanterns seemed to dim. She started walking toward the doorway. The card woman's voice drifted after her, almost gentle. "Bone token gets you in. Courage gets you further. Neither one gets you out." Quinn kept walking. The crowd parted ahead of her — not in deference, but the way people step back from a car accident unfolding in real time. The vendor with the jars shook his head slowly. A child with no shadow tugged at its mother's sleeve and pointed. The guards watched her approach. One cracked his knuckles. The other smiled in a way that had nothing to do with welcome. Fifty meters to the door. Forty. Her radio crackled. A single burst of static that formed, for half a second, into a voice she recognized — low, South London vowels, the ghost of a laugh in it. Morris. Then nothing. Quinn's grip tightened on the baton. Her pulse hammered in her ears, louder than the rain above, louder than the Market's heartbeat below. The sharp line of her jaw caught the lantern light as she closed the distance. Thirty meters. Twenty. The guards uncrossed their arms.