Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8W34DJSVSSWDM9AA4PV7E4

The air in the abandoned Camden Tube station tasted of damp brick and ozone. Detective Harlow Quinn stood on the grimy platform, her torch beam cutting a swath through the absolute dark. The station had been closed for decades, but the silence here felt recent, violated. Her sharp jaw was set, her body held with the military precision of eighteen years on the force. The worn leather watch on her left wrist ticked audibly in the stillness, a familiar anchor. The call had been bizarre, routed through channels she didn't recognise. A possible homicide, location classified. She’d been met at a service door by a nervous uniformed constable who handed her a small, cold object—a token carved from what looked like bone—and muttered instructions about a market. Now, the token felt heavy in her coat pocket. A flickering, sourceless greenish light illuminated the far end of the platform. As she approached, the space resolved into a scene of chaotic commerce frozen in mid-transaction. Stalls made of repurposed piping and moth-eaten velvet were shoved aside, their wares spilled across the tracks: vials of shimmering liquid, bundles of feathers that seemed to shift colour, books bound in strange leather. This was the Veil Market. She’d heard whispers, always dismissed them as the ramblings of informants trying to sound important. Now, the evidence was literal at her feet. In the centre of the disruption, two Scene of Crime Officers in white suits moved with deliberate slowness. And beside them, a splash of vibrant red hair under the sickly light. Eva Kowalski looked up from a shattered glass case, her round glasses reflecting the green glow. She tucked a curl behind her left ear, a nervous gesture Quinn had noted the one other time they’d met, when Eva had been brought in for questioning about her association with Aurora Laine and that whole peculiar clique Quinn had her eye on. “Detective,” Eva said, her voice tight. “They said they were sending you.” “Miss Kowalski. Explain your presence.” Quinn’s tone was flat, procedural. She took in Eva’s freckled complexion, the worn leather satchel at her feet, bulging with books. “I’m a consultant. The museum… they have an understanding with certain departments. When things are… like this.” Eva gestured vaguely at the overturned stall. “They called me.” Quinn didn’t like it. She moved past Eva, her eyes cataloguing. The stall was clearly a jeweller’s or an artificer’s. Tools for fine metalwork were scattered among shards of glass and twisted bits of brass. The SOCOs were focusing on a cleared space on the workbench. “What’s the incident?” One of the SOCOs, a man named Porter, glanced up. “Theft, looks like. And possible assault. The proprietor, a Mr. Silas, is missing. A witness reported a struggle, a flash of light, then silence. When the market security arrived, this is what they found.” “Witness?” Quinn asked. “Gone. Vanished. Market crowd closed ranks,” Porter said, shrugging. Quinn’s gaze swept the area. The violence of the disruption was focused here, but it made no tactical sense. The stall was smashed from the inside out. The glass of the case was blasted outward, as if something within had exploded. Yet the most valuable-looking items—gemstones that pulsed with inner light, intricate silver mechanisms—lay untouched on the floor around it. A thief interested in loot would have grabbed those. “What was in the case?” Eva answered, her voice closer. Quinn hadn’t heard her approach. “A navigation device. A Veil Compass. Brass casing, sigils for protection. It doesn’t point north.” “What does it point to?” Quinn asked, though a cold knot was forming in her gut. “The nearest thin spot. A rift. A door.” Eva’s green eyes were earnest behind her glasses. “It’s a very powerful, very rare tool. And now it’s gone.” Quinn ignored the implication. She bent down, careful not to touch, and examined the pattern of the debris. Among the brass shards was one larger piece. She pointed her torch at it. It was a crescent-shaped fragment of a casing, etched with intricate, swirling lines that made her eyes water if she looked too long. The patina was a distinctive blue-green verdigris. “The compass was broken during the theft?” “It doesn’t look like it was broken,” Eva said, kneeling beside her, her satchel creaking. “It looks like it was opened. Forcibly. The energy release would have been… significant.” “Energy release.” Quinn stood, brushing dust from her trousers. “You’re talking about an explosive device.” “I’m talking about a supernatural artifact being destabilised,” Eva corrected gently, but there was steel beneath. “This wasn’t a simple robbery. Someone didn’t just want the compass. They wanted it to act as a key, or a trigger. The force came from within the case. See how everything is pushed away from this central point?” She traced an arc in the air. “No external impact.” Quinn saw it. The pattern was clear. But her mind rejected the cause. She’d spent three years rejecting causes, ever since Morris’s body was found in that warehouse with no marks, no cause of death, just that same faint smell of ozone and a look of utter terror on his face. The file was still open, still cold. “A shaped charge,” Quinn said, her voice hardening. “Placed inside the case. The thief knew what he was taking and didn’t want it traced. The blast pattern is consistent with a small, contained explosive.” Eva shook her head, a curl escaping again. “Detective, with respect, a shaped charge wouldn’t leave this residue.” She used a pencil from her satchel to point at a faint, shimmering dust that coated the surfaces near the case. It looked like powdered crystal, catching the light. “And it wouldn’t explain the witness’s report of a flash of light with no sound. Or this.” She pointed her pencil toward the back wall of the stall, a section of old, painted brick. Quinn hadn’t noticed it before. There was a mark, not a scorch, but a kind of shadow. A perfect, human-shaped silhouette, as if someone had been standing there and the very brick had forgotten them. The outline was crisp, detailed—she could even make out the suggestion of frayed cuffs on the jacket. “The proprietor?” Quinn asked, her professional detachment the only thing holding her steady. “Perhaps. Or someone else. That’s not a burn. It’s an absence. A metaphysical erasure.” “It’s a chemical reaction from the explosive,” Quinn insisted, but the words sounded hollow even to her. She walked to the wall, her torch beam illuminating the silhouette. Up close, she saw that the brick within the outline was not damaged, but different. It was older, more worn, as if decades of grime had settled in an instant. She reached out, then stopped herself. “You’re trying to fit this into a box your mind can accept,” Eva said, her voice low. “I understand. But the evidence doesn’t add up if you ignore half the variables. This market, the compass, the nature of the theft… this is my field, Detective. Someone used that compass to open something, or to find something, right here. And the backlash did… that.” She nodded at the shadow on the wall. Quinn turned from the wall, her eyes scanning the stall again, forcing herself to see. The untouched valuables. The inward explosion. The soundless flash. The crystalline dust. The shadow. Her watch felt heavy on her wrist. Morris had been investigating a series of bizarre thefts before he died. The reports mentioned strange residues. They’d been laughed out of the evidence room. She walked back to the workbench. Among the tools was a small, precise vise. Clamped in its jaws was not a piece of metal, but another fragment of the brass casing. This one had a different sigil. She leaned in. The etching was sharper, less worn. A duplicate? A replacement part? “The artisan was repairing it,” Quinn murmured, thinking aloud. “Or modifying it. The compass wasn’t just on display; it was being worked on. The thief didn’t just take a finished product. They took a project.” Eva was beside her again, following her gaze. “Yes. Which means they knew its exact state. This was targeted, specific. They needed *this* compass, at *this* moment in its construction.” Quinn’s mind raced, connecting points against her will. A compass that points to rifts. A forced activation. A silhouette of erased existence. A partner lost to a mystery that smelled of ozone. She looked from the shadow on the wall to the earnest, worried face of the occult researcher. The colleague offering the interpretation she’d spent years fighting. “Porter,” Quinn said, her voice betraying none of the chill spreading through her. “Bag all this crystalline residue. Full analysis. I want to know its chemical composition, but I also want to know if… if it reacts to anything unusual. Low-frequency sound. Magnetic fields. Light.” Porter blinked. “Unusual, ma’am?” “You heard me.” She turned to Eva. “You. The museum’s archives. Do you have records on these sigils? On this Silas?” Eva nodded, a spark of something like hope in her eyes. “I can look.” Quinn’s gaze returned to the shadow on the wall. What others had missed—what she had been missing—was the connection. Not just between the items, but between this crime and the hollow, unsolved space Morris had left behind. The evidence didn’t add up because she’d been trying to solve an equation with only half the numbers. Eva Kowalski was handing her the other half. She didn’t have to believe it, not yet. But she could follow it. She could hunt with it. “Then look,” Quinn said, her voice quiet but precise as a blade. “Someone knew exactly what they were doing here. That makes them smart. And smart people make mistakes. We just have to learn their language first.” She took one last look at the ghost on the brickwork, then strode from the stall, her torch beam leading her back into the dark. The bone token in her pocket felt like a key, and for the first time, she was afraid of what door it might unlock.