Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WSXEZY2F5DH1JKAPSWM6S

The rain came sideways off the Thames, the kind that found the gap between collar and neck no matter how you hunched. Quinn ran anyway. Herrera was forty metres ahead of her, weaving through the scattered foot traffic on Camden High Street like he'd rehearsed it. He'd bolted the moment he'd clocked her across the road outside the Raven's Nest — one look at her face through the green neon wash and he'd dropped his cigarette and gone. She'd caught the flicker of recognition in his expression, the precise calculation behind it, before his legs made the decision for him. Eighteen years on the job had taught her what guilty looked like at distance. "Stop — Metropolitan Police!" Her voice cut through the wet air, which turned exactly two heads on the pavement and did nothing to slow Herrera down. He ducked left, taking a narrow alley between a shuttered off-licence and a chicken shop still blazing fluorescent at half-eleven on a Thursday. Quinn followed, her shoes hitting the puddles hard, the water spraying cold against her shins. The alley smelled of bin bags and something fermented. A fox froze at the end of it, amber eyes catching the light, then dissolved into shadow. Herrera was already through, already on the next street, already turning again — south this time, she tracked the slap of his feet before she saw him. He was fast for a man running in a leather jacket. She gained ground on the open pavement, the worn leather watch on her wrist catching a glint of streetlight as her arms pumped. The gap closed to thirty metres, then twenty. He glanced back once, and she saw it in the angle of his jaw — the calculation running again, some different arithmetic this time. He ducked down. Not into a doorway. Not into another alley. He went down a staircase she'd have walked past a hundred times without registering — a narrow concrete descent behind a rusted railing, tucked between a shuttered newsagent and a betting shop. The kind of entrance that belonged to a basement bar or a storage unit. No signage. No light at the top of it. Quinn reached the top of the stairs and stopped. The rain drummed on the pavement around her. Below, the staircase bent out of sight after eight or nine steps, and beyond the bend there was light — not the cold white of a torch or the flicker of emergency lighting, but something warmer and stranger, amber-tinged, pulsing faintly as though it breathed. The sound that drifted up wasn't music exactly, more like voices in a large space, a low collective murmur threaded through with something she couldn't name. She put her hand on the railing. Cold iron, slick with rain. Seventeen months she'd been building the file on this group. The unlicensed treatments, the patients who didn't appear in any hospital records, the substances seized in the Brixton flat that the lab had come back on three times with three different contradictory analyses. She'd pulled Herrera's NHS file, traced the license revocation, interviewed the registrar who'd signed the paperwork with shaking hands and then refused a follow-up. Every thread she pulled unravelled into something she couldn't stitch into a coherent report. Morris had been pulling at threads like these when he died. She pushed that thought down. Flattened it. Her radio was on her hip. She could call in a location, request backup, wait at the top of these stairs for support to arrive and let Herrera disappear into whatever this was — because he would disappear, she knew that the way she knew her own heartbeat, the certainty of it sitting in her chest like a stone. Or she went down. She descended. The stairs went further than they should have. The geometry of it didn't work against the street plan she held in her head — they went down too far, turned twice, and the ceiling lowered until the cool damp air pressed close on all sides. The walls changed from concrete to something older, tiled in cracked cream ceramic with thin green borders, the kind of tile that belonged in an abandoned Tube corridor. Maintenance lighting ran in a strip along the ceiling, but half of it was overridden by hanging lanterns of greenish glass, and it was these that gave everything its underwater quality, that slow amber pulse. Then the corridor opened, and she stopped again. The space ahead of her had once been a Tube platform. The tracks were still there, sunk below, rusted over and webbed with something that caught the light between the ties. But the platform itself — wide, long, impossibly busy — had become something else entirely. Stalls ran the length of it, improvised structures of cloth and wood and metal shelving, crammed with objects she couldn't immediately categorise. Glass bottles holding liquids in colours she didn't have words for. Trays of small bones arranged in patterns. Bound books with covers that looked organic. A man in a moth-eaten suit behind a counter covered in teeth. An elderly woman who turned to look at Quinn and had no irises, only a flat pale grey from edge to edge. The noise was extraordinary up close — not loud, but layered, conversations in languages she couldn't identify, the occasional bark of laughter, somewhere the thin high note of something that wasn't quite music played on something that wasn't quite an instrument. Nobody had stopped what they were doing. Nobody had acknowledged her presence yet. Herrera was twenty feet ahead, moving between two stalls, and he wasn't running anymore. He was walking with purpose, head down, hand already reaching into his jacket for something — and Quinn saw it now, saw the calculation he'd been running since the moment he'd bolted: he hadn't been running from her. He'd been leading her here. Her hand moved to her warrant card, then stopped. She looked at the stall nearest to her. A small dish on the counter held a collection of objects about the size of a thumbnail — irregular, yellowish, worn smooth. It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at. Bone tokens. She hadn't paid to get in.