Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WDTCQ52XXX22XXW39T66M

The rain fell in relentless sheets, turning the London streets into a black mirror of neon and sodium vapour. Detective Harlow Quinn’s boots slapped against the slick pavement, each stride a controlled explosion of motion. Ahead, a dark figure—a man in a soaked leather jacket—darted around the corner onto Dean Street. The green neon sign of The Raven’s Nest bled colour into the wet air as she passed it, a momentary smear of emerald in her periphery. She didn’t break stride. Eighteen years of service, three since Morris, had sanded her patience down to a sharp point. This one, this runner, was connected. She’d seen him outside the warehouse in Wapping, the one that reeked of ozone and burnt copper. He’d been talking to a woman with eyes that held no reflection. Now he was running, and that was all the confirmation she needed. Her breath came in sharp clouds. The salt-and-pepper crop of her hair was plastered to her skull. The worn leather band of her watch was a sodden weight on her left wrist. She pushed harder, her movements retaining the military precision drilled into her at Hendon. The man glanced back, his face a pale oval under a streetlamp. Fear there, yes, but something else—a calculation. He cut left into a narrow alleyway choked with overflowing bins. Quinn followed, the smell of wet garbage and decay hitting her like a wall. The alley opened onto a broader service road. The runner was already halfway down, heading north. Towards Camden. Quinn dug deep, her thighs burning. She was gaining. The gap closed to twenty feet, then fifteen. The man skidded to a halt at a rusted iron gate set into a brick archway. He fumbled in his jacket pocket, pulled out a small, pale object. Even from a distance, Quinn recognized the shape—a human knuckle bone, drilled and threaded on a cord. A token. The codex entry flashed in her mind. *The Veil Market. Entry requirement: bone token.* He shoved the bone into a crevice beside the gate. A section of the brick wall shimmered, like heat haze over asphalt, and he stepped through. The wall solidified behind him. Quinn reached the gate five seconds later. She placed a hand against the cold, wet brick. Solid. Unyielding. She examined the crevice—a narrow, almost invisible slot. Empty. She stood there, rain coursing down the sharp line of her jaw. The decision crystallised with the cold clarity of the downpour. Follow him in. She had no token. She didn’t know the rules, the dangers, the entities that frequented a black market for the supernatural. Morris had vanished chasing a lead that smelled like this—wrong, off-kilter, *other*. The official report called it a disappearance. Quinn called it a theft. She still woke some nights feeling the ghost of his hand on her shoulder, the last time she saw him alive, telling her to drop it. She could turn back. File a report that the suspect was lost in the Camden warren. No one would question it. The case would grow cold, another oddity buried in the Met’s basement archives. Her fingers traced the scar on her left forearm, a reminder of a different kind of violence, straightforward and human. This was different. This was the shadow world that had taken Morris. This was the source of the clique’s power, the reason ordinary crimes had extraordinary explanations. A memory surfaced. Tomás Herrera, the former paramedic with the warm brown eyes and the Saint Christopher medallion. He’d patched up a kid from the Estates last year, no questions asked. When she’d pressed him, he’d just smiled, tired. “Some wounds, Detective, don’t show up on an X-ray.” He knew things. He might even be down there now, in that market, tending to clients who weren’t entirely human. She could find him. Use him as a guide. Or she could walk in blind. Quinn’s hand went to her hip, to the familiar weight of her service weapon. It felt absurdly inadequate. What good was a nine-millimeter against things that needed bone tokens for entry? The rain slackened to a drizzle. A distant siren wailed, a sound from the normal world, the world of procedure and paperwork and pension plans. The brick wall before her promised the opposite—chaos, truth, maybe death. She made her choice. She wouldn’t go in unprepared. She needed a token. The runner had one. Others would too. This was an entrance. They had to come out. Quinn moved back, melting into the deeper shadow of a recessed doorway across the service road. She unzipped her sodden jacket, letting the cold air bite through her shirt. She settled into a watchful crouch, her eyes fixed on the shimmering patch of brick. The worn leather of her watch strap dug into her skin. She would wait. She would watch. And when the next patron of the Veil Market arrived, she would get what she needed to follow her suspect down into the dark.