AI The air beneath Camden tasted of wet rust and something older, something sweet and cloying like rotting lilies. Detective Harlow Quinn clicked her torch on, the beam slicing through the gloom of the abandoned Tube station. Dust motes danced in the light, swirling in patterns that seemed to o deliberate, too choreographed for mere draft. She adjusted the strap of her holster, her movements sharp, military precise. Eighteen years on the force had taught her that crime scenes rarely spoke the truth at first glance; they lied, they obscured, they waited for someone impatient enough to miss the detail that broke the case wide open.
"Over here, Guv," called out PC Davies, his voice echoing strangely off the curved tiles of the platform. He sounded small, swallowed by the vast, dark throat of the station. "It's... well, you need to see this."
Quinn moved with a steady, rolling gait, her boots crunching on debris that looked suspiciously like shattered glass mixed with dried leaves. She wasn't supposed to be here. Officially, this sector of the London Underground had been sealed off for structural repairs three years ago. Unofficially, the locals whispered about things vanishing near the Camden Lock, about shadows that moved against the wind. Quinn didn't believe in ghosts. She believed in forensics, in chain of custody, in the cold hard logic of cause and effect. But the body found this morning, dumped on the tracks with no signs of entry or exit, demanded she suspend her usual skepticism just long enough to figure out how the killer had walked through a locked door.
She reached Davies near the edge of the platform. The young officer was pale, his face slick with sweat despite the chill. He pointed a trembling finger toward the center of the tracks.
"There's no blood," Davies said, his voice cracking. "Not a drop. And look at the markings."
Quinn stepped down onto the gravel bed, her eyes scanning the area. The victim, a young man in his twenties, lay sprawled near the third rail. His clothes were intact, expensive-looking silk that shimmered with an iridescence that made Quinn's teeth ache. There were no wounds. No bruising. No ligature marks. He looked as though he had simply laid down to sleep and never woken up, save for the fact that his skin had turned the colour of old parchment, crumbling slightly at the edges where Davies had nearly touched him.
Around the body, drawn in what looked like ash, was a circle. Inside the circle, symbols had been etched into the ballast. They weren't graffiti. They were too symmetrical, too complex.
"Ritualistic," Davies offered, seizing on the only explanation his training provided. "Satanic panic stuff. Maybe a cult initiation gone wrong?"
Quinn crouched, ignoring the damp seeping through her trousers. She pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and snapped them on. "Don't be daft, Davies. Cults leave mess. They leave panic. This is clean. Too clean." She leaned closer, her brown eyes narrowing as she inspected the ash. It wasn't wood ash. It smelled of ozone and burnt sugar. "And look at the perimeter."
She stood and walked the circle. The ash line was unbroken, perfect. But there were no footprints leading into it. No footprints leading out. The gravel around the body was undisturbed , as if the victim had materialized out of thin air and collapsed.
"If he walked in," Quinn muttered, more to herself than to Davies, "he flew. Or he was carried by something that doesn't weigh anything."
"Maybe he was dropped from the tunnel ceiling?" Davies suggested, shining his light upward. The darkness above seemed to press down, heavy and suffocating.
"No drag marks on the rail," Quinn countered, her voice sharp. "No scuff marks on the walls. Nothing." She paused, her gaze catching on something glinting near the victim's hand. It wasn't part of the body. It was small, brass, and tarnished with a distinct green patina.
She reached out, her fingers hovering over the object before she carefully plucked it from the gravel. It was a compass, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. The casing was etched with sigils that made her head pound if she stared at them too long. The glass face was cracked, but the needle inside wasn't pointing north. It was spinning lazily , then jerking violently to point toward a solid brick wall at the far end of the platform.
"What is that?" Davies asked, stepping closer.
"Evidence," Quinn said, turning the object over in her gloved hand. "And it doesn't belong to any hiker or tourist I've ever met."
She remembered the file on her desk, the one she'd been building for months. The disappearances. The strange reports from the Camden area that got filed away under 'misplaced persons' or 'drug overdoses.' She had suspected a clique, a group operating in the shadows, moving contraband that didn't show up on standard scans. She had lost Morris three years ago chasing a lead that evaporated into nothingness, a case file that ended with a question mark and a silence that still haunted her dreams. She had told herself Morris had made a mistake, that he had gotten sloppy. But looking at this compass, feeling the hum of energy radiating from the brass, a cold knot tightened in her stomach. Morris hadn't been sloppy. He had found something he couldn't explain.
"The needle," Davies said, squinting. "It's broken."
"No," Quinn said, watch ing the needle snap toward the brick wall again. "It's working. It's just not looking for magnetic north."
She walked toward the wall, the compass pulling gently in her hand, like a dog on a leash sensing a scent. The wall was old Victorian brick, covered in decades of grime and layers of peeling paint. To the untrained eye, it was solid. But Quinn noticed the dust. The dust on the floor didn't settle evenly against the base of the wall. There was a gap, a distortion in the air, barely visible, like heat haze rising off asphalt in summer.
"Stay back, Davies," she ordered, her voice low.
"Guv, there's nothing there. It's a wall."
"It's a door," Quinn corrected. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her notebook, flipping to a sketch she'd made from a witness interview two weeks prior. A merchant, half-mad with fear, had babbled about a market that moved with the moon, a place you needed a token to enter. *Bone token*, he had said. *Bone and blood.*
Quinn looked at the compass again. The verdigris on the casing seemed to pulse in time with the spinning needle. This was the link. The victim hadn't been killed here. He had been ejected . Something had gone wrong on the other side, and he had been spit out like a bad seed.
"Davies, bag the body. Don't touch the ash circle. And get Forensics down here with the full spectrum scanners. I want to know if there's any residual radiation, chemical traces, anything."
"What are you thinking, Guv?" Davies asked, already pulling out his phone, his hands shaking less now that he had orders.
"I'm thinking," Quinn said, her eyes fixed on the shimmering distortion in the brickwork, "that we've been looking for a killer in the wrong world." She tucked the compass into her evidence bag, feeling the weight of it, heavier than brass should be. "And I think Morris knew about this place."
The memory of her partner's face, young and bright before the end, flashed before her. He had been chasing a shadow, and now, standing in the dark of an abandoned station with a compass that pointed to nowhere, Quinn realized he hadn't been chasing a ghost. He had been chasing a market. The Veil Market. The name surfaced from the depths of her memory, whispered in the corridors of the precinct by officers who thought they were joking .
She stepped closer to the wall. The air grew colder, biting at her exposed skin. The smell of rotting lilies intensified. The needle on the compass spun wildly, then stopped, pointing directly at the center of the distortion.
"Get the cordon up, Davies," Quinn said, her voice steel. "And call the Chief. Tell him I need authorization for a specialized unit. And tell him..." She hesitated, gripping the bagged compass tight. "Tell him I think we've found where DS Morris went."
The silence of the station seemed to deepen, holding its breath. Somewhere beyond the brick, beyond the shimmering heat haze, a bell tolled, faint and distant, sounding nothing like a church bell and everything like a warning. Quinn checked her watch , the worn leather strap familiar against her wrist. It was just past midnight. The moon was full. Whatever this place was, it was open for business, and for the first time in three years, Harlow Quinn knew exactly where to start looking for the truth.