AI Rain hammered Camden like a drumline, beating the streets into slick black mirror. Harlow Quinn cut through it with her head down, breath sharp in her throat, suit jacket plastered to her ribs. The suspect—hood up, cheap nylon flashing in and out of neon—was a dark smear ahead, legs churning , skidding, recovering. He peered back once, a white blur of worry, then dropped over the curb into a tangle of market stalls lashed shut for the night.
“Stop!” she shouted, pointless over the hiss of water and the rattling chain link. He bolted, and Harlow followed, her soles slapping cold puddles that swallowed the shapes of dead leaves and cigarette ends. Her calf twinged. She drove on. The worn leather of her watch strap scraped against her wrist bone when she flung her arm up to shield her face from a splash.
An hour ago she’d watch ed him through The Raven’s Nest window, framed by green neon, watch ed him nod to a shadowed man in the back and slip something small and hard into his pocket. The Nest’s maps and photographs had thrown grainy nets across the barroom walls. She’d sat with her tea going cold and her eyes on the bookshelf that rumor said moved. She’d pretended to be any other late customer, and he’d pretended not to clock her. When he finally went out into the rain, she let him have five steps before she slid from her stool.
“Backup en route,” her radio had said, too bright with the excitement of a uniform on a slow shift. Now its voice was muffled in her pocket under the weather. Thunder rolled. Sirens wailed somewhere else, someone else’s storm.
The suspect darted left at a shuttered newsagent plastered with last decade’s promotions, right again under a railway arch with its bricks weeping black. Harlow’s lungs burned. She tasted metal and river air washed down from the canal. He stumbled on a broken pallet and recovered with a fast, panicked hop. Then the ground fell away into a lower world: a flight of worn stone steps, rain sweeping down them like a glass sheet.
He took them two at a time. Harlow hit the railing, cold as bone under her palm, and hauled herself after him. Water leapt her ankles. The air grew cooler, held its breath. Camden’s glow thinned. On the landing below, a steel door nested in white-tiled wall—Tube-era tile, curved edges gone a little green with damp. Someone had scraped the graffiti off; ghosts of letters clung on. A hand-painted sigil that looked like a stylized rib cage was tacked above the handle.
A man in a dark coat stood beside the door with his hands in his pockets, not moving to shelter under the lip of concrete. His hair was cropped close like hers, his expression impassive. The suspect skidded to a stop at the threshold and fumbled out something small, pale, glinting dully. He presented it. The door-keeper’s eyes flicked to it and away. He pulled the door. Warmth and noise breathed up as if a beast down below had exhaled.
The suspect darted inside.
Harlow reached the landing ten seconds later, chest heaving. She wiped rain out of her eyes with the back of a knuckle and stepped forward, pulling her warrant card just enough to show black leather and a flash of metal.
“Police. Move.”
The man didn’t. He had a thick neck under his collar and shoulders like a wardrobe. “Token.”
Her brows ticked in, then up, reflexive. She glanced at the door and got a slice of yellow light and the scent of spices, crackling fat, and something like lightning trapped in a jar. Heat brushed her face. The door began to ease itself shut on a slow hinge.
“What token?” she said, keeping her voice from climbing.
The man’s mouth didn’t bother with a smile. “Bone.”
“I’m following a suspect into a crime scene.” She lifted the card, showed the crest like it might matter under the city. Rain drummed the steps behind her, water pooling, creeping into her sock through a split seam.
“No token,” he said, “no Market.”
“We can do this easy,” she said. “Or I can drag six uniforms and a sergeant down here and watch you explain this to them in the wet.”
He looked past her at the empty stairs rising up into the rain, then at her left wrist where her watch was ruined -dark leather and scratches, the face fogged at the edges. His gaze was slow and sure when it came back to hers. He could carry her easily. She measured the distance from his stance to her knee and filed it away like she always did—military habits from a life she hadn’t lived, but wore in her bones.
From beyond the door, a voice floated up, oily-thin: “Hurry it up, Rafe. We’re not a charity.”
Harlow leaned, trying to wedge her shoulder into the narrowing slice. Her heart clocked hard. She thought of Morris, of the way his last words had been clear over the phone and soaked through with noise she’d only understood later—air moving wrong, a distant hum like bees under glass. Don’t come under, he’d said, hush-flat, and then the line had gone starved.
The man—Rafe—shifted. His hand came up an inch, easy pattern for a stop. Harlow’s radio chose then to crackle uselessly: half a syllable, a fizzing sibilant. She could shout. She could head-butt him and make it personal. She could go back up to the street and wait for backup that wouldn’t know where to look, watch the city swallow her lead.
“Harlow?” a new voice said, close and with a thread of surprise.
She snapped her head to the side.
A man stepped into the door’s fading wedge against his own reflection in the wet tile. Olive skin washed gold in the market light. Short dark curls flattened by the rain. His eyes were warm brown and tired. A Saint Christopher medallion gleamed at his throat, swinging with his quick breathing. He had a battered medical bag on his shoulder, and the T-shirt clung to a scar along his left forearm like a pale riverbed.
“Tomás,” she said, more breath than voice.
He looked at Rafe. They had a language between them with no words. “She’s okay,” he said. “She’s with me.”
Rafe’s jaw tightened, not buying it, but he didn’t slam the door. “Token.”
“I vouch,” Tomás said. His accent was Sevilla softened by years. “Emergency. They called me back in. If she stays on my hip, we’ll keep the peace.”
“Tommy,” someone barked from below. “The girl!”
Tomás shifted his bag, raised a palm in the universal gesture—wait, hold, this is no one’s best plan—and met Harlow’s gaze. Up close he smelled faintly of antiseptic stubbornly trying to kill blood and sweat. “You don’t want to go down there,” he said quietly. It wasn’t plea or threat. It sat somewhere in the tired middle.
She cut a glance at the closing gap where her suspect had threaded himself into the world beneath London that polite men pretended didn’t exist. He was ten meters ahead and falling further. She looked at Tomás’s forearm scar, at his saint. She heard Morris say not under and pictured the green neon wash of The Raven’s Nest on her hands when she’d flattened her palm against its bookshelf for some mechanism that never gave, like superstition. She had the clique in her teeth and the taste of it was chemical and old.
She nodded once. “Keep out of my way then.”
Tomás huffed something that might have been a laugh and stepped aside. Rafe looked like a man forced to take a stake he didn’t like. “On him,” he said to Tomás. “You bring her out if she brings trouble in.”
They slid through the door together. Heat closed around Harlow’s soaked body with an almost desolate sweetness. The sound changed from rain to voices pitched low and urgent, the soft clatter and grind of work being done. The stairs curved down into a belly of old tile and new cables. Fluorescent tubes hummed. Her shoes squeaked.
The Veil Market opened at the bottom like a trick, a spill of space in the hollow where a train should have screamed through. Arched ceiling, enamel signs browning at the edges: Exit, Way Out, No Smoking. Stalls knocked together from old doors and polished crates made lanes that broke and turned in unwritten patterns. Smells collided—sharp coriander, something sugar-burned, battery-metal, wet wool. Strung bulbs cast hard light on the faces moving past each other without touching.
People clocked her and looked away. No uniforms, but watch ful shapes with folded arms occupied the junctions. Hoods, hats pulled low. A woman at a stall strung with bones threaded on black cord cut her gaze across Harlow with appraisal and slid a drawer shut with two fingers.
Harlow went still long enough to scan. She didn’t kid herself; she was what she was even out of her skin, and this place tasted for it. She edged to the lane’s shoulder, not pressing too close to a rack of vials oily with something that threw off a blue sheen. A tall kid with a shaved head hawked packets of dried plants from a crate and never stopped talking: cures, courage, clear sight, cheap tonight only.
“There,” Tomás said beside her, not pointing but angling his chin to the right. “He cut left. Hood down now. Look for the trainers.”
White flashed. Harlow moved. She dropped into the flow, kept her shoulders narrow, her jaw set. At a stall that stank of tannery and engine oil, a woman hammered something that looked like a piece of chain into a different shape that refused to hold unless she murmured to it. Harlow looked away, refused the story.
She threaded between a hunched man licking his finger and drawing runes in ash on a tabletop and a boy with wide greased eyes gnawing a fried something on a stick. White trainers flickered again at the edge of a draped archway marked with a chalk spiral. He’d shed the nylon. His shirt stuck black to his back. Harlow pushed through the curtain and caught a different pocket of the Market: cooler, narrower, goods under glass. A woman in a black dress eyed her from behind a display of teeth small as pearls, not all of them human.
“Lose the tail,” Harlow murmured, like she was talking to herself, and scanned for a second exit. The suspect slid through a service door at the far end with the assuredness of someone who’d rehearsed this path. Harlow had the sadness of a moment when she saw herself from the ceiling—forty-one, rain-slick hair cropped short, lines around her mouth cut by habit, her watch heavy with water—and how often she’d made this same choice anyway.
She went through. Tomás caught the curtain before it took his face and slipped after her.
The service corridor beyond forgot the Market’s pretense and went all utilitarian: bare bricks, damp shining on them like sweat, conduit snaking along the ceiling. The hum changed timbre. It got darker without permission. Footfalls pounded ahead and then softened, like the ground had changed under the suspect’s feet. Harlow’s heart put a hard fist against her sternum. She broke into a run, the tile slick. A hand reached out of the gloom and caught her elbow.
She spun, weight low, ready to break a wrist. Tomás kept his grip loose enough not to get hurt. “Not that way,” he said. He was already out of breath from trailing her. “Sellers’ loading. Security will have you in seconds.”
“I don’t have seconds,” she said.
“Then you don’t have a suspect either.” He tipped his head down the opposite turn, where the light pooled warmer over a set of broad steps. “Cut him off at the bay.”
She didn’t ask how he knew. He’d been patching this place together long enough to learn its shortcuts the way a good paramedic learned a hospital’s blind corridors. She went. Tomás let her go, then fell in two paces behind like a man who couldn’t help it.
At the bottom of the steps a bay opened where an old platform curved away. Abandoned, if you were polite; repurposed, if you weren’t. Crates stacked head-high, stamped with symbols instead of addresses. A forklift older than she was ticked as it cooled. Men worked in silence too even to be union. Her suspect flashed between stacks, head lowered. The hooded figure he’d met at The Nest had arrived ahead of him and stood at the edge of the bay marked by a red line painted along the concrete—a boundary that meant something here.
“Don’t,” Tomás said, low. He knew that red meant different things in different hands.
Harlow ignored it. She sped up enough to draw breath to call out and then she didn’t call because every pair of eyes in the bay had turned and there was nowhere to run but on. The hooded figure lifted a small parcel wrapped in waxed paper. The exchange was quick, practiced. Harlow took two long strides and put herself in their line.
“Met Police,” she said. “Hands where I can see them.”
Most people in London heard those words and played the game. Nobody here did. The hooded figure kept hands low and out of sight. The suspect’s head jerked like a rabbit’s at the edge of a hedgerow. He looked smaller here, less at home. He had a slice of stubble across his jaw and a wet lash stuck to his cheek.
“You don’t know where you are,” the hood said, voice genderless, cool.
“I know who you’re buying from,” Harlow said. “And I know what you’ve taken up to Silas’ bar twice a week for the past month. Which means I know enough to ruin your night without trying too hard.”
A laugh sailed from the shadow of the crates, thin as fishing line. Someone shifted; someone else said hush.
“Detective Quinn,” the hood said then, and her name sanded itself across her without intimacy. “You keep poking your face into holes. Last time you lost someone. How much of your memory are you willing to spend on strangers?”
It bit. It always did when they pulled Morris from under her ribs and pointed at him. Harlow squared her stance and heard the step behind her, small, urgent. Tomás, moved enough to be seen but not enough to be counted as part of this.
“Hands,” Harlow said, to the suspect this time. “Now.”
His hands came up, empty. The waxed paper was already gone. The hood must have pockets like deep water. Movement at the edge of her vision: Rafe, or a man like him, closing the gap from the right with patience, unhurried as a tide. More behind. Enforcers. The Market flexing its dog.
She could show the badge and make herself a signal fire. She could wait and get buried by their politeness. She could reach for the suspect and find her hand broken. She felt the seconds slide past like fish. She thought of the file on her desk, the clique’s name threaded through assaults and disappearances like a blood vessel, pumping quietly. She thought of Morris in daylight on a pavement with coffee, grinning, that last normal morning imprinting on her as if it could protect them from later.
Tomás’s voice brushed her ear. “Walk it back, Harlow.” Not an order. A line on a map.
She almost did. It would have been the reasonable thing, the career thing. It would have checked a box that said Discipline and gotten her a talking-to instead of a eulogy. She saw herself do it under the station’s old lamps and she didn’t recognize the woman who turned away.
She lunged.
Her hand closed on the suspect’s jacket collar. He convulsed, tried to fold, tried to bite. She wrenched him sideways, away from the hood, away from the red line, away from the clean exchange that had just become a mess.
Enforcers moved. The hood stepped back, hands vanishing into cloak. Someone knocked a crate. Glass chimed and a wet, sweet smell bloomed, wrong as flowers in winter. Tomás swore in Spanish, short and shocked. Harlow ducked a fist and kept her clip at the same time. The suspect’s weight was wrong, bird-boned and slippery. He twisted like he had a hinge where other men didn’t and slid out of his jacket. She came up with canvas and empty air.
Rafe put a hand out to bar her. She drove her shoulder into his sternum and felt him acknowledge her for the first time as a problem. They both stayed polite for half a second out of habit, then he grabbed.
“This is your line,” Tomás said from close to her left, urgent. “Decide.”
The suspect sprinted for the service tunnel, head down, wet hair shivering against his neck. The hood bled into the deeper dark. The red line gleamed like a wound. Harlow found her breath, raw and hot in her chest. She met Tomás’s eyes and saw there the same thing she felt—fear shapely enough to know its own name.
“Decide,” he said again, lower.
She let the jacket drop. “Down,” she said, more to herself than to anyone else, and broke after the suspect, off the sanctioned lane and into the tunnel’s throat. Voices rose behind her, bodies turning to block a path that was already gone. The air cooled and leaned. She didn’t look back. She sank into the unfamiliar, the dangerous, with her watch ticking its small, stubborn seconds against her skin and Morris’s ghost at her shoulder, both of them counting.