Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VY8PBHWE8YNJP6ZMXTHFM

The rain had been falling for three hours and Quinn was soaked to the bone before she even turned onto Kentish Town Road. She kept her distance — forty feet back, maybe forty-five — letting the crowd of umbrellas and hunched shoulders absorb her. Herrera hadn't looked back yet, but he would. They always did, eventually. The ones who knew they were being followed developed a kind of animal awareness, a twitch in the shoulders that came just before they bolted. Quinn had learned to read it in the first year on the job. She was reading it now. Tomás Herrera walked fast, hands buried in the pockets of a dark canvas jacket, head bent against the rain. The Saint Christopher medallion at his throat caught the amber smear of a streetlamp for just a moment as he cut left across the road, threading between two black cabs without looking. Quinn stepped off the kerb and followed, a lorry blasting its horn as she cleared its bonnet by less than a metre. She hadn't planned on running surveillance tonight. She'd been parked outside the Raven's Nest in Soho for six hours, nursing cold coffee and watching the green neon sign bleed its colour down the wet cobblestones, when Herrera had come out the side entrance — not the front, the side, which meant he knew things he wasn't supposed to know — and turned north at a pace that wasn't casual. Quinn had been out of her car before she'd consciously decided to move. That was instinct. Eighteen years of it. She checked her watch — the leather strap dark with rain, the face a little fogged — and noted the time. 23:14. She'd called it in an hour ago, just a loose surveillance tail, nothing formal. Her sergeant had told her to stand down and get some sleep. She had said yes, of course, sir, and then she had continued doing exactly what she was doing. DS Morris used to say she had a problem with authority. Morris had been right about most things. She pushed that thought back into its box and kept walking. Camden now. The high street's chaos of neon and puddles and late-night foot traffic should have swallowed Herrera, but Quinn had locked onto the rhythm of his walk — that slight forward lean, the way his left arm swung a fraction less than his right, probably the old knife scar pulling at the muscle — and she kept him in her peripheral vision even when she wasn't looking directly at him. He turned off the main drag, ducking into a narrow service road that ran behind the market stalls, and Quinn counted to three before following. The service road was darker. Quieter. Rain hammering corrugated iron overhead, water sluicing through a broken gutter in a silver rope. Quinn pressed herself against the wall and watched Herrera stop. He was looking at something she couldn't see yet — a door, maybe, or a gap in the hoardings. He reached into his jacket and produced something small. She couldn't make out what it was from this distance. He held it out at arm's length, as if presenting it to the darkness, and the darkness — Quinn's chest tightened — seemed to respond. A low, resonant sound, more felt than heard, passed through the soles of her shoes and up through her shins. Then a section of the hoarding swung inward, and Herrera disappeared through it. Quinn moved immediately, crossing the remaining distance in eight fast strides. She pressed her back to the wall beside the opening and listened. No voices. No footsteps retreating. She could feel warm air coming up from below, and with it a smell that made no sense in context — burnt copper, lamp oil, and something sweet she couldn't name. She counted her heartbeats. She had left her radio in the car. Her sidearm was on her hip. She had her badge and she had her instincts and she had the particular stubbornness that her last three superintendents had each mentioned in writing as both her greatest professional asset and her most significant personal failing. She peered through the gap. Steps. Steep, old, the kind cut from stone rather than poured concrete. They descended at a sharp angle into yellow-orange light that wasn't fluorescent and wasn't electric, or at least not any electricity she recognised. The walls on either side were tiled — cream and brown, the old Underground pattern, cracked and stained with decades of damp. An abandoned Tube station. She'd grown up near Aldgate. She knew there were ghost stations under the city, sealed up and forgotten, and she'd spent enough years working the streets to know that the forgotten spaces beneath London attracted the kind of activity that generated paperwork she wasn't always allowed to read. There had been a file, once. Three years ago, just before Morris. She had found it open on his desk and he had closed it before she could read more than a single paragraph. She had thought about that file many times in the years since. She looked again at the steps. At the orange light below. She could hear things now — not clearly, but the suggestion of sound. Voices. Movement. The low hum of something that vibrated at a frequency that made her back teeth ache. The sensible thing was to retreat. To call for backup. To document the location, establish a perimeter, do everything by the book she had been handed eighteen years ago and which she had been quietly deviating from ever since. Herrera had a kit bag. She'd clocked it at the Raven's Nest, slung over one shoulder, heavy by the way it moved. He was a former paramedic running unlicensed medical care — that was what the intelligence suggested, though intelligence was a generous word for the thread of rumour and half-confirmed sighting that had led her here. If there was something in that bag. If he was supplying something to someone down there. If there were answers down those stairs about what had happened to Morris. Quinn's jaw tightened. She pressed two fingers to the worn leather of her watch, a habit she'd developed without ever quite understanding why — something about feeling time against her wrist, grounding herself in the sequential, the rational. She was a rational woman. She had built her entire career on the premise that the world operated according to cause and effect, evidence and consequence, the demonstrable and the prosecutable. She took a breath of copper-scented air. Then she put her hand on her sidearm, checked the fastening on her holster, and started down the steps. The stone was slick under her shoes. The light grew warmer as she descended, and the smell intensified — the lamp oil smell became distinct now, actual oil-fed flames in iron sconces bolted to the old tiled walls, their tongues of fire bending toward her in the updraught from below. She slowed her pace, keeping close to the wall, trying to make herself small in the way that a five-foot-nine woman with military bearing cannot entirely manage. The staircase opened onto a platform. Quinn stopped on the last step and looked. The platform was long, the tracks below buried under wooden boards and rugs that shouldn't have survived underground. The vaulted tunnel stretched in both directions, and in both directions it was occupied. Stalls and tables lined the walls, their surfaces covered with objects she could see but not immediately categorise — glass vessels containing things that moved, bundles of material tied with dark thread, small wooden boxes with locks that didn't correspond to any key she'd ever seen. The vendors behind the stalls were human, mostly. Mostly. A woman in a grey coat examined a small bottle held up to the flame of a candelabra, and the light that passed through the liquid was the wrong colour, a deep arterial red that seemed to pulse. A man in a wide-brimmed hat paid for something with coins that Quinn couldn't make out clearly but which seemed too large and too dark for sterling. And there — twenty metres down the platform, turning to speak to a vendor with the careful, transactional manner of someone conducting regular business — was Herrera. He had the kit bag open on the counter. He placed something on the surface and the vendor, a compact, bald person of indeterminate age, examined it under a loupe. Quinn stood on the last step and did not move. Every piece of training she had told her what she was looking at. Black market. Contraband. Unlicensed trade. She had the grounds for intervention. She had the legal authority, the professional obligation, and the personal motivation. What she did not have was any meaningful framework for the burning oil lamps, the wrong-coloured light in the glass vessel, or the low resonant hum that she could now identify as coming from the tunnel itself — from the walls, from the tracks — as if the station were alive in some dim, geological way and barely tolerating their presence. DS Morris had opened that file. Three weeks later, DS Morris was dead. Quinn stepped off the stair and onto the platform. The nearest vendor looked up. A few feet away, a man in a long coat went very still. But no one moved against her and no one called out, and the ambient noise of transaction and low conversation continued around her like water rerouting around a stone. She kept her eyes on Herrera's back and walked forward.