Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WNX63KNBGTBQ36YRHY6P2

The platform tiles still bore the ghost of their original cream and burgundy, though decades of grime had turned them the color of old teeth. Detective Harlow Quinn ducked beneath the police tape strung across the bricked-up entrance that wasn't, as it turned out, bricked up at all. The false wall had been pulled aside on a rail system hidden behind a rusted advertisement for Bovril, revealing a passage that dropped into the guts of the abandoned station below Camden. "Mind the third step," called DC Farris from below. "It's not there." Quinn's boot found the gap. She adjusted, descended the rest of the narrow staircase with the kind of control that came from years of moving through spaces that didn't want her in them. The air changed halfway down — went from the damp chill of a London November to something thicker, warmer, carrying a sweetness like overripe fruit left in a closed room. The platform opened before her. Not the stripped-bare skeleton she'd expected of a decommissioned Tube station. Stalls. Dozens of them. Wooden frames draped in oilcloth and heavy canvas, tables still laden with merchandise that caught the light from the halogen work lamps Scene of Crime had erected. Glass bottles filled with liquids in colors she couldn't name. Bundles of dried herbs, or what looked like herbs, tied with copper wire. Books with no titles on their spines. The whole thing had the feel of a market that had been frozen mid-transaction, its sellers and buyers scattered like roaches when the lights flipped on. "Veil Market," Quinn said to no one in particular, reading the phrase off a hand-painted sign nailed crookedly to a support column. She pulled a pair of nitrile gloves from her coat pocket and snapped them on. The body was at the far end of the platform, just past where the tunnel mouth gaped into blackness. A man, mid-fifties, heavy build, face down on the tile with his right arm extended as if reaching for the track bed. He wore a wool coat too fine for this place and shoes that had cost someone real money. No visible trauma. No blood. His skin had taken on a waxy, grayish pallor that Quinn had seen only once before — on DS Morris, three years ago, laid out on the concrete floor of a Docklands warehouse with that same reaching posture, that same expression of absolute bewilderment frozen into features that had already begun to cool. She pressed the memory flat. Filed it. "Dr. Adeyemi put preliminary time of death around four hours ago," Farris said, appearing at her elbow with his notebook. "No ID on the body. Prints are running but nothing's come back yet." "Who found him?" "Anonymous tip. Came into the Camden nick at half six. Caller described the entrance location with enough detail that uniform couldn't ignore it, even though the whole thing sounded mad." Quinn crouched beside the body. The man's extended hand was closed around something. She could see the edge of it — brass, gone green with age — poking from between his fingers. She didn't touch it yet. Instead she studied the floor around him. The dust on these tiles was thick, undisturbed for what could have been years, except in the channels where foot traffic from the market had worn paths between the stalls. The body lay just off one of these paths. Drag marks, she expected. Signs of a struggle, displaced dust, scuff patterns. Nothing. The dust around the body was pristine, settled evenly, as if the man had been placed here with surgical care — or had simply appeared. "Farris." "Ma'am?" "Where are the footprints?" He looked at the floor. Looked at her. Looked at the floor again. "Could have been carried," he offered. "Two people, one at the shoulders, one at the—" "Then there'd be two sets of prints and deeper impressions from the added weight. There's nothing. Not even his own." Quinn pointed to the dead man's expensive shoes. The soles were clean. Not scuffed, not dusty, not bearing a single mark to suggest they'd walked across this platform. "He didn't walk here, he wasn't dragged here, and he wasn't carried here." "Right." Farris wrote something in his notebook. From his expression, it was mostly punctuation. "There's, ah, someone here to see you. Said she was called in as a consultant by DCI Marsh." "Who?" "Kowalski. From the British Museum." Quinn stood slowly, one knee popping in protest. A figure was picking its way between the market stalls with the particular mix of caution and barely suppressed excitement that Quinn associated with academics encountering primary sources in the wild. Short, red curls springing in every direction, round glasses catching the halogen glare, a leather satchel so overstuffed it had reshaped itself around its contents. Eva Kowalski stopped at the edge of the Scene of Crime perimeter and tucked a curl behind her left ear. "Detective Quinn. We've not met, but DCI Marsh—" "Said you might be useful. He's mentioned you." Quinn's gaze traveled from the satchel to the glasses to the freckled face behind them. Young. Mid-twenties. The kind of person who still believed that knowledge and understanding were the same thing. "What do you know about this place?" Eva's eyes swept the market stalls with an almost physical hunger. "It's real. My God, it's actually real. I've heard references — fragmentary, mostly — in seventeenth-century occult texts. A travelling market for... unusual goods. It's supposed to move locations every full moon. You need a bone token to enter, which means someone—" She caught herself, glanced at the body, and some of the color left her freckled cheeks. "Sorry. What happened to him?" "That's what I'm working out. You can look, don't touch anything." Eva approached the body with the careful steps of someone who spent more time with the dead in books than in person. She crouched where Quinn had crouched, and her attention snagged on the same detail. The brass object in the dead man's hand. "Is that — can I see it closer?" "It hasn't been photographed yet." "I don't need to touch it. Just — may I?" Eva leaned in, tilting her head to get an angle on the object through the cage of the dead man's fingers. Her breath caught. "That's a Veil Compass." "A what?" "Shade-crafted. Brass casing, protective sigils on the face — I can see the edge of one there, on the bezel. The needle doesn't point north. It points toward supernatural rifts. Portals. Tears in the boundary between—" Eva stopped herself again, tucking hair behind her ear. "Between spaces." Quinn absorbed this without expression. "And in English?" "It's a compass that finds doorways to places that aren't supposed to exist. They're made here, in markets like this one. They're incredibly rare. Incredibly valuable." Eva's voice had dropped. "Detective, if he was holding that when he died, he might have been using it. Actively. Following it somewhere." "Following it here, you mean." "Or following it to whatever's through there." Eva pointed toward the tunnel mouth. The darkness beyond the platform edge looked solid, viscous, like ink pooled in a bowl. Quinn stared at the tunnel. Then at the body. Then at the undisturbed dust around it. She thought about Morris. About the warehouse floor three years ago and the expression on his face and the way the coroner had hesitated before writing "cardiac event" on the preliminary report, as if the words tasted wrong. She turned to one of the market stalls. This one displayed small items on a velvet cloth — rings, pendants, what appeared to be teeth strung on silver chain. The dust on the velvet was even, consistent, except for a single circular impression where something small and round had recently been removed. The size was right. She measured it against the brass edge visible in the dead man's grip. "The compass was on this table," Quinn said. "He picked it up here." "So he was shopping? A customer?" "No." Quinn moved back to the body. She knelt again, this time studying the man's coat. Fine wool, yes, but the lining was visible where it had pulled away at the collar — hand-stitched, with a repeating pattern embroidered in dark thread. Not decorative. Deliberate. The same kind of angular, geometric marks she could see on the sigil edge of the compass. "He wasn't buying. He was selling. This is his stall, or he ran it." She pointed to the embroidery. "Same markings." Eva leaned closer, and her eyes widened behind her glasses. "You're right. Those are ward-signs. Protection sigils, sewn into the lining. That's old practice — artisan-class. He might have been the one who made the compass." "Which means he picked up his own merchandise. Something spooked him. He grabbed the nearest protection he could find." Quinn stood and faced the tunnel mouth again. The halogen lamps didn't touch the darkness beyond the platform edge. It wasn't shadow in the way she understood shadow — an absence of light with predictable geometry. It sat in the tunnel like something with weight and intention. "Farris. Has anyone gone into the tunnel?" "Uniform checked about thirty meters in. Nothing. Just track bed and rats." "How far does it go?" "They said it dead-ends. Bricked up, like the old spur tunnels." Quinn looked at the floor between the body and the platform edge. Here, finally, in the thin strip of tile before the drop to the tracks, she found what she'd been looking for. Not footprints. A line — a single, curving line scored into the tile, cut so finely it would have been invisible without the raking angle of the work lamps. It began at a point near the dead man's outstretched fingers and swept in an arc toward the tunnel, terminating at the platform edge. She followed it with her eyes. "Kowalski. Come look at this." Eva crouched beside her. Sucked in a breath through her teeth. "That's a transit mark. Someone — or something — moved through here. From a rift point." Her finger hovered over the scored line without touching it. "The compass would have been going mad. Spinning, or pointing directly at this spot. He saw something come through, grabbed his compass, and then—" "And then whatever came through killed him without leaving a mark on his body or a print on the floor." Quinn's voice was level. "Something arrived. Something left. And the only witness is a dead man holding a compass that points at doors we can't see." She studied the scored arc one more time. It wasn't random. It had a direction, a flow, and if she read it correctly — the way she'd read a thousand crime scenes, tracking trajectories, sight lines, the geometry of violence — whatever had made the mark had come from the tunnel and moved out through the market. Out. Toward the staircase. Toward Camden. Quinn pulled off her gloves with two sharp snaps and turned to Farris. "Get me the CCTV from every camera within half a mile of this entrance, last six hours. And find out when the next full moon is." Farris scribbled. Eva opened her mouth. "You." Quinn cut her off. "Stay. I have questions about that compass, and you're going to answer them without the academic footnotes." Eva tucked her hair behind her ear and nodded. The halogen lamps hummed. Down in the tunnel, the darkness held perfectly, absolutely still.