Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VXNEPMFP9TYA3PBQVS7X6

The rain turned the street into a mirror. Quinn's boots punched through standing puddles as she rounded the corner onto Chalk Farm Road, her breath coming hard, her eyes fixed on the figure forty metres ahead. He was fast — faster than anyone who'd spent the evening hunched over a corner table in the Raven's Nest had any right to be. She'd clocked him forty minutes ago, nursing the same half-pint for two hours while his eyes worked the room like a camera, cataloguing everyone who came and went. The moment she'd moved to cut off his exit, he'd bolted before she'd taken three steps. Now he was running like something was after him worse than her. The Camden streets were half-empty at this hour, the last stragglers from the market stalls long gone, only the occasional cluster outside a pub doorway watching the rain like it owed them money. Headlights dragged orange smears across the wet tarmac. Quinn pressed her earpiece. "Dispatch, this is Quinn, Detective Sergeant, badge four-four-one-six. I'm in foot pursuit northbound on Chalk Farm Road approaching the junction with Castlehaven. Male suspect, dark jacket, red trainers. I need units—" A burst of static swallowed the rest. She checked the device with two fingers as she ran. Dead. Not a signal issue — the thing had simply stopped, the way electronics sometimes stopped around certain people she'd been watching for the past three months. Her jaw tightened. The suspect cut left without warning, disappearing down a side street she almost missed. She caught the flash of red sole against wet pavement and yanked herself around the corner, nearly losing her footing on the camber. A row of shuttered shops, a skip overflowing with cardboard, a fox frozen under a doorframe watching her with solemn orange eyes. The man was already at the far end, vaulting a low wall. Quinn followed. She landed in a service lane that smelled of old cooking fat and something else beneath it — something metallic and old, like the inside of a church that hadn't been aired in decades. She'd smelled that before. The night Morris had died, that smell had been everywhere, soaked into the walls of the car park on Bermondsey Street, though she hadn't understood what it meant then. She understood it better now. A set of metal stairs led down from the lane into a sunken yard. The suspect was already at the bottom, and he'd stopped running. He stood at a door — or what had been a door once. The frame was bricked over, but he pressed his palm flat against the mortar and the whole section swung inward without sound, as though it weighed nothing. Before he stepped through, he glanced back at her. Young face. Maybe twenty-five, south Asian, sharp cheekbones. He wasn't panicked. He looked almost curious. Almost sorry. Then he was gone. Quinn descended the stairs one deliberate step at a time, her hand moving to the firearm at her hip without drawing it. The door — the impossible door — sat open at an angle, offering a rectangle of dim amber light from whatever lay behind it. Stone steps led down. The smell intensified, metallic and dark, layered now with something chemical, something like sulphur and dried lavender fighting each other to a standstill. She stopped at the threshold. In eighteen years she had followed suspects into burning buildings, into flooded underpasses, into a squat in Dalston where four men had been waiting with iron bars. She had put herself in harm's way hundreds of times with the calm practical certainty that the risk was understood, bounded, nameable. Police work had a grammar. Danger in police work had a grammar. This didn't. She pulled out her phone. No signal. She photographed the doorway anyway, the stone steps, the brickwork, the lock mechanism that shouldn't have existed on what appeared to be a sealed wall. Evidence was evidence even when you didn't know what it was evidence of. From below came noise. Not the noise of a man running, or hiding, or waiting to ambush her. It was the noise of a crowd, a low oceanic murmur, voices in languages she couldn't pick apart, and beneath it a sound like something being beaten against metal in a slow, deliberate rhythm. Light moved at the bottom of the stairs, not the static amber she'd first seen but a shifting, restless gold, like torchlight but not quite. Her radio crackled alive without warning. "—Quinn, do you copy? Quinn?" A woman's voice, unfamiliar. She pressed the earpiece. "Quinn here. Go ahead." "Don't go down there." Not dispatch. Not any voice she recognised from the station. "Detective Quinn, I need you to step back from that entrance." She pulled the earpiece out and looked at it. Footsteps behind her. She spun, reaching. "Easy." Tomás Herrera raised both hands. He was soaked through, his dark curls plastered flat, the Saint Christopher medallion catching the light from the open door. He held nothing. "I'm not your suspect." "Who are you?" "Someone who knows what that place is." He nodded at the steps. "And someone who knows you don't have what you need to walk in there." "I'm a Metropolitan Police officer in pursuit of a suspect. I don't need your clearance." "You need a bone token." He said it plainly, without drama, as though it were as mundane as showing a library card. "Without one, you won't get past the threshold. Not in any condition to make an arrest, anyway." Rain dripped from the edge of the sunken yard's concrete lip above them in a steady curtain. Quinn looked at him, then at the open door, then back at him. The crowd noise rose and fell below like breathing. "Who are you?" she said again. Quieter this time. He reached into his jacket and produced a small object, pale and irregular, no larger than a chess piece. He held it out on his open palm. A bone. Carved into it, in lines almost too fine to see, was a pattern she couldn't name. "My name is Tomás. And if you want to go down there, you'll need to trust me first."