Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VYVZFTBJ304QY5MXBZSGR

The air tasted like copper and chalk dust. Detective Harlow Quinn ducked under the police tape strung across the mouth of the service tunnel and descended the rusted iron staircase into what the transit authority's records called Platform 9B — a station that, according to every official map of the London Underground, did not exist. Two portable halogen lamps threw harsh white cones across the platform. The tiles along the curved wall had once been cream and forest green, the station name spelled out in the old Johnston typeface: CAMDEN DEEP. Most of the letters had been pried away. What remained read C_M_EN D__P, a gap-toothed grin in ceramic. "Watch your step past the pillar. Blood pool." DS Ferris stood at the platform's edge, hands in his pockets, breath fogging in the subterranean cold. He was thirty-two, built like a prop forward going soft around the middle, and he had the kind of face that broadcast every thought half a second before he spoke it. Right now his face said he wanted to be anywhere else. Quinn adjusted her nitrile gloves and stepped around the pillar. The blood pool was smaller than she'd expected — more of a smear, really, trailing in a crooked line from the centre of the platform toward the tunnel mouth. A body lay face down beside an overturned trestle table. Male, mid-fifties, dressed in what looked like a Victorian frock coat over modern jeans. His hands were open at his sides, palms up, fingers curled. No defensive wounds that she could see from this angle. "Victim's name?" "No ID on him. Nothing in his pockets except these." Ferris held up an evidence bag. Inside were three small discs, ivory or bone, each roughly the size of a two-pound coin, each etched with a symbol she didn't recognize. Quinn took the bag, turned it under the light. The discs were smooth, hand-carved. Old. One had a hairline crack running through its centre. "What do you make of the scene?" Ferris pulled a hand from his pocket and gestured at the platform. For the first time, Quinn let her gaze widen past the body. The trestle table wasn't alone. A dozen more stood in two rough rows along the platform, draped in dark cloth. Some had been knocked over. Objects littered the ground — glass bottles stoppered with wax, bundles of dried herbs bound in copper wire, stacks of paper covered in dense calligraphy. It looked like a ransacked flea market. "Squatters running some kind of underground bazaar. Drugs, probably. The bottles could be homebrew narcotics, that synthetic hallucinogen thing Vice has been chasing. Victim was a dealer. Someone came to collect a debt, it went sideways." Ferris shrugged. "Open and shut, really." Quinn said nothing. She crouched beside the body and studied the blood trail. It moved in the wrong direction. The smear led away from the body toward the tunnel, but the victim lay face down with his head pointing toward the staircase. If he'd been struck and crawled, the trail should originate at the body and extend outward. Instead, it started six feet away and ended beneath him, as though the blood had flowed uphill. She checked the worn leather watch on her left wrist. Half past one in the morning. The call had come in forty minutes ago from a Transport for London maintenance crew who'd noticed the service tunnel's padlock had been cut. "Who secured the scene?" "Uniforms. Two PCs. They're topside with the TfL lads." "And they moved nothing." "Said they didn't." Quinn stood and walked the perimeter. Her shoes crunched on something. She looked down. A fine layer of salt covered the floor in a wide arc, partially scuffed by boots — hers, Ferris's, the uniforms'. Beneath the scuff marks, the salt line had been deliberate. Geometric. She followed its curve and traced it around the body in a near-perfect circle, broken only where the trestle table had fallen through it. "Ferris. Come look at this." He ambled over. She pointed at the salt. "Someone drew a circle around the victim before the table fell." "Or the salt spilled off one of the tables. Look at all this rubbish." He nudged a fallen bottle with his toe. "Salt doesn't spill in a twelve-foot radius circle with uniform depth." Quinn knelt again and ran a gloved finger along the line. Consistent grain size. Coarse, unrefined. Not table salt. She bagged a sample. She moved to the nearest intact table and lifted the cloth. Underneath, arranged with care that bordered on devotion, sat a row of objects she couldn't immediately categorize. A jar of dark liquid with something suspended inside it — a root, maybe, or a finger. A leather folio tied shut with red cord. And a small brass compass, its casing patinated with pale green verdigris, its face etched with symbols that matched the ones on the bone discs. Quinn picked up the compass. It was heavier than it looked, dense in a way that didn't correspond to its size, like holding a stone that had been carved to look like metal. The needle trembled, then swung — not north. It pointed down the tunnel, into the dark, and held steady. "Ferris, get a photo of this. And these symbols." "Looks like junk shop tat to me." "Photograph it anyway." She set the compass down and opened the leather folio. Inside were pages of handwritten notes in at least three languages — English, Latin, and something else, a script she'd never encountered. The English sections were fragmentary. She caught phrases: *rift alignment*, *bone token — entry only*, *next transit: full moon (14th)*. A hand-drawn map showed what appeared to be the very platform they were standing on, with an X marked at the tunnel mouth. The fourteenth was tomorrow night. Quinn closed the folio and bagged it. She returned to the body and crouched lower this time, cheek nearly to the ground, angling her torch beneath the victim's torso. There — clutched against his chest, invisible from above — was a fourth bone disc. This one was different. Larger. The symbol on it was more elaborate, and it seemed to catch the torchlight and hold it a beat too long. "Help me turn him." Ferris came over, and together they rolled the body onto its back. The man's face was gaunt, hollow-cheeked, and his eyes were open. His expression wasn't one of pain or fear. It was astonishment, deep and absolute, the kind of face a person made when they witnessed something so far beyond comprehension that the brain simply stopped processing. The fourth disc fell from his grip and rolled in a tight circle on the platform before settling flat. Quinn caught it before Ferris could. No wound on the front of the body. No wound on the back, either — she'd checked. No blood on his clothing at all. "That blood trail isn't his." Ferris blinked. "What?" "No lacerations, no puncture wounds, no blunt force trauma visible anywhere on the body. Clean clothes. The blood on the floor — it doesn't belong to him." "Then whose — " "That's the question." Quinn stood and followed the trail again with her torch. It started — or ended, depending on your interpretation — at a point in the centre of the salt circle. No body there. No discarded weapon. Just a point on the ground where blood appeared to have pooled and then extended in a line toward the tunnel mouth, thinning as it went, as though whatever bled had been moving with increasing speed. She shone her torch down the tunnel. The rails were rusted solid, the gravel between the sleepers undisturbed except — there. Twenty yards in. A single footprint in the dust, pressed deep, toes pointing away from the platform. Then nothing. No second footprint. As if whoever made it had taken one step and then ceased to exist. "Your drug deal theory," Quinn said, straightening. "Does it account for a bloodless body inside a salt circle, blood belonging to no one, and a single footprint that leads nowhere?" Ferris opened his mouth and closed it. Quinn turned the bone disc over in her gloved hand. The symbol's lines seemed to shift at the edge of her vision, never quite settling into a fixed shape. She thought of DS Morris — three years gone, a stairwell in Deptford, the door that shouldn't have been there, the sound she still couldn't describe. The official report said cardiac arrest. The official report was a lie she'd signed because the truth would have ended her career. "I want full forensics on this platform. Luminal the entire floor. Run the blood. Pull CCTV from every Camden station entrance within a half-mile radius for the last seventy-two hours. And find out who this man is." "You think this is more than a drug deal gone wrong." Quinn slid the bone disc into the evidence bag and sealed it. She looked at the salt circle, the strange compass with its needle aimed into the dark, the dead man's face frozen in impossible wonder. "I think this is a crime scene where the most important evidence is whatever isn't here anymore. The blood left, Ferris. It walked away. Something bled in that circle, and then it walked down the tunnel and vanished after a single step." "People don't vanish." She thought of Morris. The door in the stairwell that was gone when the response team arrived. The scorched outline on the floor where he'd fallen, shaped like nothing she'd ever seen outside a nightmare. "No. They don't." Quinn pulled off her gloves and tucked them into her coat pocket. "So either we're missing something, or we need a bigger definition of people." Ferris stared at her for a long beat, then pulled out his phone to call the forensics team. Quinn stood alone on the platform and watched the compass needle. It hadn't moved. It pointed steadily down the tunnel, into the space where the footprint ended and the dark began, trembling with the faintest vibration — not from trains, because no trains had run through this station in decades. She picked it up one more time. The verdigris felt rough under her bare fingertip, and the sigils on the face seemed to warm at her touch. The needle swung — sharply, suddenly — from the tunnel to the staircase behind her. Quinn turned. The staircase was empty. The halogen lamps hummed. Somewhere above, London carried on in its usual oblivious roar. The needle held its new bearing for five seconds, then slowly, as if reluctant, drifted back toward the tunnel. Quinn set the compass down on the table and did not touch it again.