Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VYH4JP7SPZV4YMPWXF76T

The rain had been falling for two hours by the time Quinn spotted him. She had been nursing a coffee she didn't want outside a chicken shop on Camden High Street, her unmarked car double-parked thirty meters back with the engine running. Surveillance work was ninety percent waiting and ten percent not thinking about DS Morris, and she was failing at both when Tomás Herrera came around the corner at a pace that wasn't quite running — the deliberate, controlled stride of a man who knew he was being watched and was trying not to show it. Quinn was moving before she'd finished processing him. She left the coffee on the bollard and cut across the pavement, water sheeting off her jacket, eyes fixed on the back of his dark hoodie weaving through the Friday night crowd. She'd pulled his file four days ago. Former paramedic. Lost his licence eighteen months back under circumstances the NHS disciplinary panel had described as "gross misconduct involving unauthorized and medically inexplicable interventions." The kind of language bureaucrats used when they wanted to say something impossible without actually saying it. She'd been collecting that kind of language for three years, ever since the night Morris had died in a building that the coroner's report still couldn't adequately explain. Herrera ducked left down a side street and she followed, closing the gap. Fifteen meters. Ten. He glanced back once — that was what broke his composure. The moment his warm brown eyes found her face in the dark, the pretense of a casual stroll evaporated completely and he ran. Quinn ran harder. She was forty-one years old and had spent eighteen years maintaining the kind of physical condition that made younger constables privately resentful, and she gained ground fast. Herrera vaulted a low railing with practiced agility, landed on the slick pavement of a pedestrian cut-through, and she went over it half a second behind him. Her left hand slapped the wet metal and she felt the worn leather of her watch strap drag against the rail. She hit the ground running. "Police!" She didn't waste breath on more than the word. There was nobody around to hear it anyway — the cut-through was a narrow canyon between two Victorian buildings, the walls dark with rain-wet brick, a single overhead lamp casting a jaundiced circle of light at the far end. He wasn't heading for the main road. She realized it just as he wrenched open a rusted metal door set into the base of one of the buildings — not a proper door, more like an access hatch, the kind that maintenance workers used. He went through it and she lost two seconds on the threshold, one hand braced against the doorframe, peering into the dark below. Stairs. Iron, descending steeply. The smell that rose from below was wrong in a way she couldn't immediately articulate — not sewage, not the usual subterranean rot of the city's innards. Something else. Something that reminded her, disturbingly, of the smell in the stairwell where Morris had died. Cold and mineral and faintly sweet, like copper left in the rain. She went down. The stairs switchbacked twice. She counted her footfalls and kept one hand trailing the wall, not trusting the darkness, and then the darkness gave way to something stranger. Light. Not electric — at least, not entirely. There were bare bulbs strung on cables that drooped in long festoons from the curved ceiling of an abandoned Tube platform, but scattered among them were other light sources: glass vessels that glowed amber and green, lanterns that burned with flames in colors fire wasn't supposed to make. The platform walls still bore the ghost of old roundel signage, the lettering long since flaked away, and beneath Quinn's feet the original tiled floor had been covered in overlapping rugs and wooden pallets. And on those pallets, in the stalls lining both sides of the platform — things. She stopped walking. Her hand found her radio by instinct, her fingers closing around it without bringing it to her lips. Training kept her breathing even. Training kept her feet from backing up the stairs. The station was populated in a way she had no framework for. She registered the bodies first — people, or things shaped like people — moving between the stalls with the unhurried purpose of ordinary commerce. Here, a figure in a grey coat examining a row of stoppered bottles. There, two women in conversation beside a table piled with what appeared to be dried bundles of bone. The ambient noise was low, transactional, the murmur of a market. It smelled of incense and something sharper underneath, and beneath that the unmistakable damp-stone breath of deep underground places. Herrera was thirty meters ahead, moving fast through the crowd, his dark curls plastered flat with rain. She saw the Saint Christopher medallion catch the light as he glanced over his shoulder — cataloguing the distance between them, calculating. She catalogued too. One exit visible, the stairs behind her. No way to know what lay at the far end of the platform. No radio signal down here — she'd known that the moment the bars dropped on her phone as she descended. No backup. No jurisdiction that she could name in any report she'd ever filed or would be able to file. And everywhere she looked, things she had spent three years quietly accumulating evidence of and three years louder denying to herself. The figure in the grey coat had turned to look at her. Then the two women. Then others, in a slow, rippling awareness, like a stone dropped in still water. She was the stone. Herrera stopped. He'd put forty meters between them but he stopped, turned fully to face her, and she could read the calculation on his face even at this distance. He was waiting to see what she would do — and there was something in his expression besides wariness. Something that looked almost like worry focused not on himself but on her. Quinn's jaw tightened. She was aware of her own heartbeat in a way she rarely let herself be, steady and too-fast and honest, the way Morris's heart monitor had been honest before it wasn't anymore. She had a decision to make. Her hand was still on the radio that wasn't working. Her feet were still at the bottom of the stairs. The market breathed around her, indifferent and ancient, and Tomás Herrera watched her from across thirty meters of impossible underground commerce, and the worn leather of her watch pressed against the inside of her wrist where she could feel the pulse there if she wanted to. She let go of the radio. She walked forward, and the crowd parted around her with a silence that was less like courtesy and more like the careful stillness of a forest when an unfamiliar predator enters it.