Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8W0Q23S3G452S9P0WNWYY8

The rain came down in sheets, not drops, and Detective Harlow Quinn had lost feeling in her left hand somewhere around Charing Cross Road. She kept running anyway. The man ahead of her was fast — faster than she'd expected when she'd first clocked him outside the Raven's Nest, standing under that garish green neon sign with his collar up and his hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets. She'd been watching the bar for six nights straight, cycling unmarked vehicles, sitting on cold leather in rental cars that smelled of other people's takeaway. Six nights of nothing. Then Tomás Herrera had walked out at quarter past eleven, looked both ways like a man who knew exactly what looking both ways meant, and broken into a run before she'd even had her hand on the door handle. He was good. She'd give him that. He cut left off Shaftesbury Avenue without slowing, shouldering through a cluster of tourists wrestling with inside-out umbrellas, and Quinn followed, badge already in her coat pocket, no time for that now. Her shoes found every puddle. The city at this hour was all fractured neon and the hiss of tyres, black cabs spraying arcs of water as they turned, and Herrera was a dark shape threading through all of it with the ease of someone who'd mapped these streets in the dark many times before. She'd pulled his file three weeks ago. Former paramedic. NHS trained. Lost his license eighteen months back under circumstances that her superintendent had called administrative and she'd called suspicious. He kept company with people whose names appeared in reports she wasn't supposed to have accessed — reports connected to the case that had taken Morris from her three years ago and left her with nothing but a sealed file and a grief she'd since weaponised into something useful. She cut through a side alley after him, her shoulder clipping a drainpipe, water dumping down the back of her neck. He was maybe thirty metres ahead now, and he wasn't losing her but he wasn't slowing either, and she had the sudden unsettling sense that he wasn't running from her so much as running toward something. The thought made her push harder. He went north. Long stretches of wet pavement, the city thinning out as they crossed into Camden, the market stalls long locked up and shuttered, the smell of the canal somewhere beneath the rain. Quinn's leather watch pressed cold against her wrist as she checked the time — eleven forty-three — and filed the fact away. Her lungs burned. She hadn't smoked in four years, which she considered still a recent enough victory to resent. Herrera turned down a service lane behind a row of closed shops, and she rounded the corner to find him gone. She stopped. The lane was narrow, maybe three metres wide, brick on both sides, a single security light casting a bruised yellow circle near a loading dock. Puddles. A dumpster. The sound of rain on metal. No Herrera. She stood very still and listened the way Morris had taught her — listen past what you're hearing for what you're not. A sound below. A scrape of metal. Then nothing. Quinn moved to the far end of the lane where the wall met a corrugated fence, and found it: a gap, barely a shoulder's width, and on the other side a set of concrete steps descending steeply into the ground. No signage. No lighting that she could see. Just the steps and the dark and the faint suggestion of air moving upward, carrying a smell she couldn't quite name — something old and mineral and wrong in a way that raised the hair on her forearms. She stood at the top of the steps with rain running off her chin and thought about DS Morris. She thought about him the way she always did in moments like this — not his face or his voice, but his absence, the precise negative shape of him that had never been adequately explained. The sealed file. The witness accounts that contradicted one another in ways the investigating team had attributed to trauma rather than examine properly. She'd examined them properly. She'd been examining them properly for three years, and every thread she pulled led somewhere her colleagues refused to follow, somewhere that sat just outside the edges of what she was professionally permitted to believe. She knew what was down there was connected. She didn't know precisely how. Her hand found her torch in her coat pocket. She didn't switch it on yet — too visible, too early. She breathed once, measured, and started down. The steps were uneven beneath her feet, worn smooth in the centre, which meant traffic. Regular traffic. More than she would have expected from an unmapped access point behind a shuttered service lane in Camden at midnight. She kept one hand lightly on the wall as the darkness thickened and the smell grew stronger — that mineral wrongness resolving slowly into something closer to woodsmoke and copper and something else entirely, something she had no category for yet. The steps ended. She pressed herself against the wall and switched the torch on, kept it low and angled. A corridor, wide enough for two people abreast, vaulted ceiling, the old tiles of it covered in decades of grime. Tube infrastructure — old, decommissioned, the kind the city swallowed and forgot. The floor was not empty. There were marks on it, a tracked path worn into the dust, diverging at a junction twenty metres ahead. And on the wall opposite the junction, someone had scratched an arrow. No torches except hers. No sound of Herrera's footsteps anymore. But ahead, beneath the junction, she could see a faint light blooming — warm, amber, sourceless. She clicked her torch off. The amber light was enough to move by. She went to the junction and stopped again, back to the wall, and looked around the corner slowly. The corridor opened into something larger beyond — a platform, she registered, an old platform, the kind that hadn't seen a scheduled train since before she was born, and on it was something she had absolutely no framework for and spent two full seconds simply processing before the detective part of her brain overrode everything else and began, methodically, to record. Stalls. Dozens of them, draped in dark cloth and lit by lanterns that burned with that amber light, arranged along the platform length like a market — a proper market, densely packed, moving, alive with commerce. The figures browsing were human, mostly, but mostly was doing a great deal of work in that sentence. She saw things she catalogued simply as anomalous and set aside for later. She heard voices in at least six languages. She smelled things she had no names for. And there at the nearest stall, his back to her, his curly hair damp from the rain and his olive skin lit amber-gold by a nearby lantern, was Tomás Herrera. He was talking to the stall holder in a low, rapid voice, his left hand braced on the counter, and she could see the pale line of the scar running along his forearm where his sleeve had ridden up. His other hand went to his chest, briefly, touching the Saint Christopher medallion at his collar the way a man touches a thing he carries for luck. Quinn pressed her back to the wall of the platform entrance and breathed. She had no backup. She had no warrant. She had no jurisdiction over whatever this was or whatever law, if any, governed it. She had her badge and her torch and eighteen years of decorated service and a sealed file with her dead partner's name on it, and ahead of her was a man who was her only live thread to every unanswered question she'd been carrying for three years. The worn leather of her watch pressed against her wrist. She tightened her fist until she felt her pulse against it. Then she pulled her collar up, switched her torch off, and stepped onto the platform.