Run: 2026-02-25-01KJ959YJRD6FDYRX0X1WRFG3V

The air hung heavy, a metallic tang of damp earth and rust permeating Detective Harlow Quinn’s lungs. Faint light splintered through a grated opening high above, painting the abandoned Tube station's gloom in fractured streaks. Water wept down cracked concrete walls, pooling in brackish puddles between the grime-caked tracks. Her boot heels echoed a sharp staccato as she descended the rickety aluminium ramp, past the yellow tape that sliced through the cavernous space. Uniformed officers moved with an uncertain caution, their movements hushed in the vast, echoing chamber. Forensics technicians, gloved and masked, bent over luminous sheets, their flashlights carving clinical arcs across the scene. The usual cacophony of a murder investigation – the clipped radios, urgent calls, the hurried exchange of intelligence – was absent. A profound, unnatural quiet swallowed sound. Harlow drew a deep breath. Her eyes, sharp and brown, swept over the tableau. Graffiti marred every surface, sprawling tentacles of spray paint consuming the original advertisements. Yet, something felt off. Too still. The dust lay thick on the deserted platforms, undisturbed save for the clumsy prints of first responders. No discarded rubbish. No faint scent of stale urine or forgotten decay that typically clung to such places. Just the cold, metallic damp. "Detective." DS Davies, lean and pale, approached, his breath misting in the chill. "Glad you're here. This one's... unusual." Harlow offered a terse nod. "What do we have, Davies?" She glanced at the worn leather watch on her left wrist. "Single male, mid-thirties, found slumped against the pillar, near the tracks." Davies hitched a thumb towards a distant scene. "No ID on him. No conventional entry or exit points. Tunnel seals are intact at either end. No signs of struggle, no forced entry anywhere in the immediate vicinity here. Uniformed patrol stumbled on it during a routine sweep. They actually fell through one of the surface grates after a tip-off about squatters. Lucky it was only a few feet drop." "A routine sweep in an abandoned station under Camden? That's new," Harlow said, her gaze fixed on the body outline. "And no ID? In this area, someone always talks." The Metropolitan Police's grip on the city's myriad forgotten spaces was tight, if often grudgingly maintained. Davies shifted, his eyes darting around the cavernous space. "That's the thing, guv. No one knew this section of the line existed until now. It's not on the old maps, not even the really old ones. It's like it just… appeared." Harlow’s sharp jaw tightened. "Just appeared? What's the preliminary cause of death?" "That’s where it gets really weird, Detective." Davies lowered his voice. "Body's intact. No visible wounds, no obvious trauma. No blood. But..." He trailed off, pulling a hand through his thinning hair. "Forensics are saying... they can't get a temperature reading, and rigor mortis is uneven. Like he’s been dead for hours, but also just minutes." Harlow felt a familiar prickle along her nape. She remembered Morris, the impossible, inexplicable things that had surrounded his last case. She pushed it down. "Show me." They walked towards the pillar. The silence deepened, broken only by a distant drip of water. As they drew closer, Harlow saw the body. A man, dressed in what looked like good quality, if slightly old-fashioned, tailoring. He sat upright, propped against a concrete support, his head lolling to one side. His eyes were open, staring at nothing. His face held a rictus of profound surprise, almost fear. "And her." Davies gestured to a figure with a shock of curly red hair, perched on an upturned crate a little further down the platform. She wore round glasses that caught the weak light. A worn leather satchel lay open beside her, spilling books onto the grimy concrete. Eva Kowalski. Harlow recognised her from sporadic, slightly unnerving reports from other divisions. An "occult specialist" the museum sometimes lent out when things got too strange for conventional archaeology. "What's she doing here?" Harlow’s voice was flat. "She was apparently already here when uniformed showed up," Davies offered, "researching obscure transit lines. Said she knew this place existed, even if maps didn't. Insisted she could help. We've kept her from touching anything, but..." He shrugged. "Said her expertise might be 'relevant'." Harlow ignored him, her gaze fixed on the body. She moved with her characteristic military precision, stepping over scattered fragments of brick, avoiding disturbing the faint sheen of dust. She knelt, her gloved hands hovering. The man's skin had a peculiar translucence, like old wax. It wasn't the usual pallor of death. Instead, it was as if his vitality had been carefully, completely, extracted. No, not extracted. Emptied. Harlow scanned the immediate area. The dust. A thick, uniform layer covering everything. And yet, around the body, on the concrete immediately adjacent to the man's slumped figure, the dust was slightly thinner. Not swept away, but almost... repelled. A faint, perfectly circular demarcation line. "No blood trail, not a drop," Davies reiterated, clearly unnerved. "What about his shadow?" Eva Kowalski's voice cut through the stillness, calm and oddly strong for someone so slight. She had approached, moving with a quiet confidence that jarred with the 'nervous habit' mentioned in her files. She tucked a strand of curly red hair behind her left ear. "Have either of you noticed?" Harlow straightened, turning slowly to face Eva. The occult researcher's green eyes, magnified by her glasses, held a disquieting intensity. "His shadow?" Harlow repeated, a ghost of a challenge in her voice. "Look at the way the light hits him from the grate," Eva gestured with careful precision towards the distant opening. "You see the pillar’s shadow, the broken railing’s shadow, even yours and the sergeant’s. But his? It's... flat. Lacking depth. It doesn't fall across the track as it should, not with that light source. It's almost consumed by the shadow *behind* him." Harlow turned back to the body, her brow furrowed. The afternoon sun, breaking through the high grate, cast long, distorted shadows across the station floor. Davies pointed a flashlight. The man's shadow *was* there, a dark stain against the concrete, but it lacked the crisp, defined edges of the other shadows. It appeared fuzzy, somehow less substantial, as if clinging desperately to the wall directly behind him, instead of stretching out. Like a photographic negative gone wrong. "Interesting observation, Miss Kowalski," Harlow allowed, her voice guarded. "Anything else you've found in your 'research' of abandoned Tube lines?" Eva’s gaze remained fixed on the body. "This isn't just an abandoned Tube line, Detective." She spoke softly, yet her words held a sharp edge. "This is a former entry point to the Veil Market. Or at least, it was. A place where trade isn't always of this world." "The Veil Market," Harlow repeated, testing the words. "And what precisely do they trade in, Miss Kowalski? Ghostly goods and invisible information?" Sarcasm laced her tone, but she watched Eva closely. "Enchanted goods, banned alchemical substances, esoteric information," Eva corrected, meeting Harlow’s gaze without flinching. "And sometimes, things more... fundamental. Like essences. Or life force." She pointed a slender finger to a small, smooth object half-buried in the dust near the victim’s outstretched hand. It looked like a carved piece of bone, bleached white and intricately worked with fine grooves. "That is a bone token. An entry currency to the Market. Its presence here means he wasn't just passing through." Davies peered at the token, frowning. "Looks like a piece of old ivory. Could be a souvenir." "Or evidence," Harlow countered, her eyes still on the bone. The unusual stillness of the air, the unscientific temperature of the body, the bizarre shadow – they all started to coalesce with Eva’s words. It made her stomach churn. Morris. "That token," Eva continued, "is often used in exchanges where a price beyond coin is demanded. Sometimes, it's a memory. Sometimes, a year from one's life. And sometimes, it's a soul." Her green eyes, earnest behind the glasses, flickered to the victim. "I believe this man did not die of conventional means, Detective. He looks drained. Hollowed out. As if something was ripped from him. The uneven rigor mortis, the lack of discernible temperature, the phantom shadow... these are consistent with a profound energetic displacement." Harlow knelt again, ignoring the dirt. She studied the faint ring in the dust, the almost-clean circle around the body. Not a cleaning, but a boundary. An energy, repelling the fine particles. Could it be? She ran a gloved finger over the section of concrete. It felt colder than the rest, much colder, not a natural damp chill, but a sort of hungry cold. A cold that absorbed. She remembered the fear on the man’s face, the open eyes. A surprised terror, not of a killer, but of a process. Of being *taken from*. "No visible wounds, you said, Davies." Harlow spoke slowly, her gaze sweeping from the man’s stiff, waxy face to the peculiar shadow clinging to the wall. "But what if the wound isn’t visible? What if it's something internal, something... pulled out?" She studied the area again. She saw it now, a subtle distortion in the air itself, just above the man’s chest, like heat haze but in reverse, a wobbling emptiness. Too subtle for standard forensics, but undeniable once you looked for it. A tremor in the light, where no light should waver. Davies looked between Harlow and Eva, his face a mask of confusion. "Pulled out? What, like... his guts?" Harlow shook her head, her eyes distant, fixed on the man’s impossible shadow. "No, Davies. Something else." Her mind raced, connecting the unsettling cold, the phantom shadow and the waxy skin to the vague, terrifying reports from Morris’s final case. The impossible wounds, the inexplicable drain of life. The way the light had seemed to bend around *something* in the old warehouse, something that had pulsed with an unnatural hunger. She had dismissed it then, rationalised it, but the memory now surged, raw and undeniable. The man hadn't just died here. He had been emptied. And Eva, with her strange theories and books, saw the footprint of the draining. Harlow looked at the bone token, at the flat, anemic shadow, at the cold concentric ring in the dust. She saw what Davies and the forensics team, bound by their empirical training, had missed. She saw the evidence of a transaction, completed, and horrifically, paid in full.