Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VRQYXEQ9XDRNRH4RGK9JX

Rain hammered the pavement in sheets, turning Soho into a blur of reflected neon and black water. Quinn's boots struck the slick cobblestones in a rhythm she hadn't felt since her army days—measured, controlled, every footfall placed with purpose despite the burning in her lungs. Ahead, the figure in the dark jacket cut left down Bateman Street, his silhouette strobing through the wash of headlights from a passing taxi. She keyed her radio. Nothing but static. Third dead zone in as many blocks. The green neon of the Raven's Nest smeared across a puddle as she sprinted past the bar's entrance. She knew that place. Had sat outside it for eleven hours last Tuesday in an unmarked Vauxhall, cataloguing faces. The connection wasn't lost on her—her suspect had been circling back toward familiar ground before she'd flushed him from the alley behind Greek Street. Tomás Herrera. Twenty-nine. Former paramedic, license revoked eighteen months ago. The file on her desk said fraud and unauthorized medical procedures. The file didn't explain why three of his former patients had no NHS numbers, no national insurance records, no birth certificates on file with any registry in the United Kingdom. He vaulted a low railing and dropped into the gap between two buildings. Quinn followed without breaking stride, her shoulder clipping brick as she squeezed through. The gap opened onto Wardour Street and she caught a flash of him—olive skin slicked with rain, that Saint Christopher medallion catching light as it bounced against his chest—before he disappeared into a crowd spilling out of a late-night dim sum place. She pushed through bodies. Elbows and complaints. Someone's umbrella caught her across the cheek and she batted it aside. Herrera was already across the street, running north now, away from Soho proper. Heading for Tottenham Court Road. No—past it. He crossed against traffic and a delivery van locked its brakes, horn blaring, the sound swallowed almost instantly by the downpour. Quinn dodged the same van and gained three metres. She could see his breathing now, the way his shoulders heaved. He wasn't trained for this. She was. "Herrera! Stop!" He glanced back. Warm brown eyes wide with something that wasn't quite fear. More like desperation. He ducked into Camden High Street and the crowd thickened again—late Thursday revellers, tourists who didn't know enough to get out of the rain, rough sleepers huddled in doorways. She lost him at the intersection near the canal. Quinn stopped. Chest heaving. Rain running in channels down the sharp line of her jaw, soaking through her collar. She turned a slow circle, scanning. The street bled colour—red from a kebab shop, sickly yellow from a betting parlour, the blue pulse of a phone screen held by a kid in a doorway. She wiped water from her eyes and looked again. There. A maintenance door set into the facade of a boarded-up building. It was closing. The hydraulic arm caught it for one second, two, and in that gap she saw the flutter of a dark jacket descending stairs. Quinn checked her radio again. Dead air. She pulled out her phone—one bar of signal that flickered to zero as she watched. She glanced at her worn leather watch. Eleven forty-seven. Nobody knew she was here. She'd been off shift when she spotted Herrera coming out of the Raven's Nest, and she'd made the decision to follow on foot instead of calling it in because calling it in meant explaining to DCI Havers why she was running unauthorized surveillance on a man connected to a case that had been officially deprioritized. The door had almost closed. In three seconds the opportunity would be gone. She caught it with her fingertips and pulled. The stairwell beyond smelled of rust and stagnant water and something else—something sweet and chemical that she couldn't place. Institutional tile on the walls, cracked and yellowed. Emergency lighting that hadn't been emergency for decades, rewired now with a low amber glow that came from no bulb she recognized. The fixtures looked hand-blown, the glass thick and uneven, and the light inside them moved like something living. Quinn drew her expandable baton from her belt. She didn't carry a firearm—Met regs, and she'd never had cause to push for authorization. She was second-guessing that now as the stairwell wound down and the sound of the rain above faded to nothing. Twenty steps. Thirty. The architecture shifted. The institutional tile gave way to older brick, then to stone that looked Victorian, then to something rougher still—hand-hewn blocks of Portland limestone stained with what might have been centuries of soot. She was below street level now. Below the sewers, maybe. Below the Tube. She rounded a corner and stopped. The platform stretched out before her in an impossible cavern of light and sound. It was a Tube station—she could see the bones of it, the curved walls, the platform edge, the dark mouths of tunnels at either end—but it had been transformed into something that looked like a cross between a Marrakech souk and a fever dream. Stalls crowded together in dense, winding rows, draped with fabrics that shimmered in colours she didn't have names for. Lanterns hung from the arched ceiling on chains of black iron, casting pools of light that seemed to have weight, to fall like liquid onto the merchandise below. And the people. Dozens of them, maybe a hundred, moving through the stalls with the purposeful drift of experienced shoppers. Some looked ordinary enough. Others didn't. Quinn's eyes caught details and her brain tried to file them and jam after jam built up: a woman whose fingers were too long by at least two knuckles; a man whose shadow moved independently of him; a child, maybe eight or nine, whose eyes reflected light like a cat's when he turned his head. The Veil Market. She'd heard rumours. Every detective who'd worked the strange-adjacent cases had heard rumours. A black market for things that weren't supposed to exist, operating somewhere underground, moving locations to avoid detection. Every full moon, one informant had said. Matches the pattern of the disturbances, Quinn had written in her own unsanctioned notes. Havers had crossed it out. She pressed her back against the cold stone of the entrance arch and scanned for Herrera. The rain on her clothes was already drying in the strange warmth of the place, steam rising from her jacket in thin curls. The air tasted of copper and anise and something that made the fillings in her back teeth ache. There. Herrera had stopped at a stall near the centre of the platform, his hands braced on a table covered with small glass bottles filled with liquids of various murky hues. He was talking to the vendor—an old woman who sat on a high stool and watched him with an expression of wary familiarity. He pulled something from his pocket. A bone token, small and pale, carved with markings Quinn couldn't read from this distance. He placed it on the table and the old woman picked it up, turned it over, nodded. Unauthorized treatments to supernatural patients. The words from his file took on a new dimension. The banned alchemical substances on that table weren't recreational. They were medical. Herrera wasn't dealing—he was restocking. Quinn's grip tightened on her baton. Eighteen years of service. Decorated twice. She'd tracked killers through council estates and financiers through shell companies and she'd been afraid, properly afraid, exactly four times. This was the fifth. Not because of the strangeness—though that alone should have been enough—but because of what admitting this place existed would mean. For her case. For the questions she'd been asking about DS Morris for three years now, the ones that had earned her a mandatory psych evaluation and a quiet demotion from Major Crimes. Morris had died in a tunnel. Underground. The report said structural collapse. The report was a lie—she'd known that the day she read it. His injuries weren't consistent with falling debris. They were consistent with nothing she'd ever seen. Herrera finished his transaction and tucked three small bottles into his jacket. He turned from the stall and his gaze swept the market, passing over her position without stopping. He hadn't seen her. The crowd between them provided enough cover, and she'd instinctively pressed into the shadow of the arch. He moved toward the far tunnel. The one on the left, darker than the right, the one where fewer people seemed to go. Quinn looked back up the stairwell behind her. The amber light still pulsed gently in those strange hand-blown fixtures, marking the path back to the street, to the rain, to a world that operated on rules she understood. She could walk out. File a report on Monday that mentioned nothing about this place. Continue the surveillance from the outside, build the case through traditional channels, pretend she hadn't seen the woman with too many joints in her fingers or the child with reflective eyes. She could do all of that. It would be the rational choice. Her hand went to her watch, a reflex. She ran her thumb across the cracked leather of the strap. Morris had been wearing one just like it the last time she'd seen him alive. Standard Met issue, back when they still gave those out. He'd been three weeks from retirement. He'd been her friend. Herrera reached the tunnel mouth and paused. He looked back over his shoulder—not at her, but at the market behind him, like a man checking that he wasn't followed. Then he stepped into the dark. Quinn released the stairwell wall and moved forward into the market. She kept her baton low against her thigh, half-concealed beneath the hem of her jacket. The crowd parted around her with an indifference that felt deliberate. A vendor at the nearest stall—a thin man with intricate tattoos that seemed to shift and rearrange across his forearms—tracked her with flat, assessing eyes as she passed. "You're not from here," he said. Not a question. She didn't answer. Didn't slow. The tunnel entrance loomed ahead, an arch of soot-blackened brick leading into a passage where the lantern light didn't reach. The thin man's voice followed her. "No one goes down there without a reason. Bad ones included." Quinn reached the threshold. The air beyond was cooler and carried a sound she almost recognized—a low, rhythmic thrum, not mechanical, not natural, something in between that resonated in the bones of her inner ear. She held her baton at her side and stared into the black. Herrera's footsteps had already faded. She stepped through.