AI Harlow Quinn adjusted the worn leather watch on her left wrist, checking the time against the encroaching dark. It was barely noon above ground in Camden, but down here, sixty feet beneath the pavement in an abandoned spur of the Tube network, time felt heavy, stagnant. The air tasted of wet rust, ozone, and something copper-sharp that tickled the back of her throat.
She stepped over a rusted turnstile, her military precision keeping her movements tight and controlled despite the uneven ground. Her flashlight cut a sharp cone through the gloom, illuminating tiled walls thick with grime and graffiti that didn't look like any tag she’d seen on the surface. These were sigils, scratched deep into the ceramic.
"Watch your step, Detective," a voice echoed from the platform edge.
Quinn didn't jump. She simply shifted the beam of her light to find Eva Kowalski crouching near the tracks. The redhead looked out of place in the dank underbelly of London. At twenty-six, with round glasses sliding down her nose and a leather satchel bursting with papers, she looked like she should be in a library annex, not a crime scene.
"Kowalski," Quinn acknowledged, her voice a low rasp. She ran a hand over her closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair. "Tell me we have something more concrete than 'bad vibes' this time."
Eva stood up, nervously tucking a stray curl of red hair behind her left ear. It was a tell Quinn had cataloged months ago—the kid was anxious .
"It's the Market, Harlow. The Veil Market," Eva corrected, gesturing to the rotting wooden stalls that lined the derelict platform. "It shouldn't be here. The lunar cycle is wrong. It moves every full moon, but the moon is waning. Someone forced it to manifest. Anchored it."
Quinn ignored the terminology. To her, this was a homicide scene, albeit one in a jurisdiction that didn't technically exist. She moved past Eva toward the body slumped against a vendor’s booth draped in moth-eaten velvet .
The victim was male, mid-fifties, dressed in a trench coat that had seen better decades. He lay predominantly in shadow, but Quinn didn't need the light to smell the death on him. It was fresh.
"Cause of death?" Quinn asked, crouching. Her knees popped, a sound magnified by the tunnel's acoustics.
"That's the problem," Eva said, hovering over Quinn's shoulder. "There isn't one. Not physically. I think his anima was severed. Look at the expression. Pure terror, but no struggle."
Quinn shone her light on the man's face. Eyes wide, mouth agape, skin grey and slack. She pulled a pair of nitrile gloves from her pocket and snapped them on.
"There's always a physical cause, Eva. Heart failure, asphyxiation, poison. People don't just get their souls snipped." Quinn’s tone was sharp, a defense mechanism. Eighteen years on the force dealing with the worst of humanity, and now she had to contend with things that defied physics. It reminded her too much of Morris. The partner she’d lost to a case just like this—a room locked from the inside, a man dead with no marks, and a report that had been redacted until it was nothing but black ink.
She began her grid search of the immediate area, moving her hands over the victim's coat. The pockets were heavy.
"He was a broker," Eva offered, consulting a notebook she pulled from her satchel. "I recognize the insignia on the stall. He dealt in navigational tools. Restricted ones."
Quinn felt a hard, circular lump in the inner breast pocket. She reached in and withdrew a small brass object. It was heavy, cold to the touch, and covered in a patina of verdigris that stained her latex glove.
"A compass," Quinn murmured, turning it over.
"Not just a compass," Eva breathed, leaning in closer, the scent of old paper and peppermint tea wafting from her. "That's a Veil Compass. Shade-crafted. Look at the face markings."
Quinn angled the light. The face wasn't marked with North, South, East, or West. Instead, complex geometric sigils were etched into the brass plate. The needle, a jagged piece of dark iron, wasn't pointing North. It was spinning lazily , like a top losing momentum.
"It points to rifts," Eva explained, her voice rising with academic excitement. "Portals. If it's spinning, the residual energy here is chaotic. The killer might have used a rift to escape."
"Or," Quinn said, her eyes narrowing as she looked past the magic and at the mud, "the killer dropped it."
She placed the compass in an evidence bag, sealing it with a snap. "You're looking at the invisible, Eva. Look at the dirt."
Quinn pointed to the ground near the victim's left boot. The layer of dust and soot that coated the platform was undisturbed everywhere except for a scuff mark—a heel drag. And three feet away, near the edge of the platform drop-off, there was a void in the dust. A clear, rectangular impression.
"What do you see?" Quinn asked.
Eva squinted. "A box was moved?"
"A heavy box," Quinn corrected. "And look at the victim's hands."
She lifted the dead man's right hand. The fingertips were calloused , stained with ink, but the fingernails were broken, jagged. Under the nail of the index finger, a tiny fiber of blue wool.
"He fought," Quinn said. "You said no struggle, but he scratched something. Or someone."
"But the lack of wounds..." Eva started.
"Look closer at the neck." Quinn tilted the victim’s chin up. Just beneath the jawline, hidden by the high collar of the trench coat, was a pinprick. A single, tiny puncture wound with a localized hematoma. "Needle. Probably a paralytic first, then something to stop the heart. Precise. Clinical. Not a 'soul severance.' A murder."
Eva blinked, adjusting her glasses. "Oh. I... I missed that."
"You were looking for the magic," Quinn said, not unkindly. "You saw the location, the compass, the reputation of the market, and you stopped seeing the man."
Quinn stood up, scanning the darkness of the tunnel. "This wasn't a supernatural hit. It was a robbery. The box that was sitting there is gone. The victim was paralyzed so he couldn't scream, killed efficiently so he couldn't talk later. The killer took the goods and left the compass because they didn't know what it was, or didn't care."
"But how did they get in?" Eva asked, looking back toward the turnstiles. "The Veil Market requires a bone token for entry. The wards are lethal to uninvited guests."
Quinn walked to the edge of the platform and shone her light down onto the tracks. The rails were rusted , but in the center of the track bed, the grime was disturbed. Footprints. Heavy tread.
"They didn't come through the front door," Quinn said. "They walked the tunnels. Came up from the service lines efficiently bypassing the wards."
"That's impossible," Eva insisted. "The wards are spherical. They cover the underground approaches too."
"Unless," Quinn said, her jaw tightening as the pieces clicked together, "the killer had a badge."
Eva froze. "What?"
"Service tunnels," Quinn repeated. "The footprints have a specific tread pattern. It's a standard-issue tactical boot. The kind issued to Met specialist firearms officers. And look at the puncture wound again. That placement? It’s exactly where you’re trained to target if you want immediate incapacitation via the carotid bypass."
Quinn looked at the spinning compass in the bag. It wasn't pointing to a rift. It was reacting to the lingering signature of something else.
"Eva, what happens if a non-magical person forces their way into a space like this using... say, a police-issue battering ram engraved with seized runes?"
Eva's eyes went wide. "The dissonance would be catastrophic. It would scramble any detection charms. It would look like... static."
"Like a spinning compass," Quinn finished.
She turned back to the body. This wasn't just a robbery. It was an extraction. Someone knew the Market was here, knew the schedule was off, and knew exactly what this broker was selling .
"We need to go," Quinn said, her voice dropping to a command. "Now."
"Why? We haven't cataloged the—"
"Because," Quinn interrupted, unholstering her service weapon and checking the chamber, "if they came through the tunnels to bypass the wards, they didn't leave through the main exit. They went back into the dark." She swept the light down the tunnel again. The silence wasn't empty anymore. It was waiting .
"And they might realize they left the compass behind."
Quinn grabbed Eva’s arm, pulling the researcher away from the edge. The military bearing took over completely now, the grief for Morris pushed into a steel box in her mind. This was the job. The line between the law and the lore was blurring , and Quinn was the only one standing on the precipice, watch ing the shadows for movement.
"Move, Kowalski," she hissed. "Stay behind me. And if you see anything that defies the laws of physics, you tell me. Otherwise, we run."
As they retreated toward the rusted stairs, the needle of the compass in the evidence bag suddenly snapped still, pointing directly back the way they had come, into the deep dark of the tunnel.
Quinn didn't need to look at it to know. She could feel the gaze on her back. Cold. Calculating. And unmistakably human.