AI The air in the abandoned Aldwych station tasted of rust and wet ghosts. It clung to the back of Detective Harlow Quinn’s throat, a familiar flavor of London’s forgotten corners, but laced with something else tonight. Something sharp and alien, like ozone and dried herbs. She ducked under the police tape, her boots crunching on a thin carpet of grit and fallen plaster. The temporary floodlights cast long, dancing shadows that made the old travel posters on the tiled walls look like screaming faces.
Detective Constable Edwards met her at the bottom of the emergency stairs, his own face pale and slick in the harsh light. He was young, barely five years in, and still carried the earnest, slightly overwhelmed look of a man who believed procedure was a shield against the dark.
“Ma’am,” he said, nodding. “Thanks for coming. The SOCOs are just finishing up.”
Quinn’s gaze swept the platform. It was a mess, but a structured one. Flimsy-look ing stalls made from scavenged wood and tarps stood in a rough line along the far wall, now little more than splintered wreckage. Whatever had happened here had been fast and violent. “Talk to me, Edwards.”
“Victim’s a John Doe. No phone, no wallet. Found by a pair of urban explorers a few hours ago. Single wound to the chest. Looks like some kind of specialized shiv. Forensics are bagging it now, but it’s… odd.”
Quinn walked toward the body, her movements precise, economical. Military precision, her first training officer had called it. It had stuck. The victim lay on his back near the edge of the tracks, arms flung wide. The medical examiner was murmuring to a forensics tech beside the shrouded form. Quinn nodded to him, and he pulled back the sheet.
The man was maybe forty, dressed in a well-tailored but strangely old-fashioned tweed jacket. But it was the wound that held her attention. Edwards was right. It was odd. A perfect, circular puncture, no wider than her thumb. The edges weren’t torn or ragged. They were cauterized , blackened in a neat ring, as if the weapon had been white-hot. No blood to speak of.
“A specialized shiv?” Quinn murmured, crouching beside the body. The smell of scorched fabric and cooked meat was faint but unmistakable. “Heated to what, a thousand degrees?”
“Gangs are getting creative, ma’am,” Edwards offered from behind her. “We had that case in Hackney last year, the blades dipped in acid.”
Quinn didn’t reply. Her eyes roamed the scene. This wasn’t a gang killing. The stalls weren’t for selling knock-off trainers or counterfeit pills. On one overturned table, a scattering of dark, crystalline powder glittered like crushed obsidian. Beside it lay a bundle of what look ed like desiccated newts tied with silver wire. Another stall had remnants of smashed glass vials, releasing a cloying, floral scent that warred with the station’s damp decay. This was something else. A marketplace, yes, but not one she’d ever encountered in eighteen years on the force.
She checked her watch , the worn leather strap a familiar comfort against her wrist. 02:14. Her gut tightened with a familiar cold dread, a phantom echo of another strange scene, another unexplained death. Three years ago. The night she’d lost Morris.
“Anything else?” she asked, her voice flat.
“Just this.” Edwards pointed with his pen toward a small object lying a few feet from the victim’s outstretched hand. “Probably junk, but it was near the body.”
Quinn moved closer. It was a brass compass, small enough to fit in her palm. A patina of verdigris coated its casing, but the glass was clear. She nudged it gently with a gloved finger. The face wasn't marked with the usual cardinal directions. Instead, it was etched with a spiral of delicate, interlocking sigils she didn’t recognize. The needle, a sliver of dark, polished metal, wasn’t pointing north. It quivered , aimed directly at a dark, gaping service tunnel further down the tracks.
“Steampunk nonsense,” Edwards said. “There’s a whole subculture. Probably sold it right here.”
Maybe. But the way the needle trembled , alive with some unseen purpose, resonated with the wrongness of the place. She stood, making a mental note to have it bagged separately. “Witnesses?”
“The two kids who found him. They’re upstairs. Scared out of their minds. And…” He hesitated. “There’s one other. A young woman. We found her down the far end of the platform, hiding behind a maintenance locker.”
Quinn’s gaze sharpened. “Hiding.”
“Claims she was here doing research. For the British Museum, she says. Ancient marketplaces or some such.”
“Bring her to me.”
While Edwards went to fetch her, Quinn completed her circuit of the scene. Nothing made sense in the neat, orderly way a crime scene was supposed to. There was no sign of a struggle around the body. The stalls were smashed , but their contents weren’t stolen, just destroyed. It felt less like a robbery and more like a tantrum. A very specific, very violent one.
Edwards returned with the woman. She was small, engulfed in a thick coat, with a riot of curly red hair escaping her knitted hat. Round glasses perched on a freckled nose. She clutched the strap of a worn leather satchel to her chest like a shield. She look ed like a lost university student, not a hardened criminal.
“This is Eva Kowalski,” Edwards said.
Quinn fixed the woman with a hard stare. “Detective Inspector Quinn. You’re a research assistant at the British Museum?”
The woman, Eva, nodded. Her green eyes were wide, but there was a sharp intelligence in them that belied her frightened posture. “That’s right. I specialize in the history of unsanctioned commerce. This station has been rumored to host… pop-up markets… for decades. I was documenting the space.” Her alibi was smooth. Too smooth.
“Did you a see a pop-up market here tonight, Ms. Kowalski?”
Eva tucked a stray red curl behind her left ear. A nervous tic. “No. I mean, it look s like there might have been one. But when I got here, it was… like this. Empty. Quiet.”
“You came alone? To a derelict tube station in the middle of the night?” Quinn let the question hang in the cold air.
“My research is important. And I take precautions.” Her hand tightened on her satchel.
Quinn’s gaze dropped to the bag. It was stuffed , bulging with the rectangular shapes of books. “What did you see?”
“Nothing. I heard a noise, a crash. I got scared, and I hid. Then your officers arrived.” She tucked the same strand of hair behind her ear again. A tell. A definite tell.
Quinn stepped closer, lowering her voice. “You and I both know that’s not the whole truth. A man is dead. He was killed with a weapon that burns through flesh. The market stalls weren’t selling DVDs, they were selling… curiosities. And you just happened to be here, researching.”
Eva’s freckled complexion paled. She swallowed hard, her throat working. “I don’t know anything about a dead man.”
Quinn held her gaze for a long moment, letting the silence stretch. This girl knew. She was terrified , but she knew. It was there, behind the glasses and the academic cover story. Quinn had seen that look before. It was the look of someone who had peered into the same shadows that had swallowed her partner.
She turned away from Eva, her mind racing. The wound. The strange goods. The compass with its sigils and its errant needle. The needle. It was still pointing. Not at the tunnel, she now realized. It was pointing *through* the tunnel. It was pointing at Eva Kowalski.
Quinn walked back to where the small brass object lay. “Bag this for analysis,” she said to the nearest forensics officer, but as he bent down, she added, “On second thought, I’ll take it myself. Special handling.” Before he could object, she slipped a small evidence bag from her pocket, used her gloved fingers to pick up the compass, and sealed it. The moment it was in her hand, she felt a faint, almost imperceptible vibration through the plastic, a low hum of energy that made the hairs on her arm stand up. She slid it into her coat pocket. It was a flagrant breach of protocol, but protocol hadn’t helped her with Morris. Protocol was for a world that made sense.
She turned back to Eva, who watch ed her with a new kind of fear in her eyes. The fear of being understood.
“We’ll need a formal statement, Ms. Kowalski,” Quinn said, her voice quiet but carrying the weight of an iron girder. “Down at the station. We’ll talk all about your research. About unsanctioned commerce. About every thing you didn’t see tonight.”
Edwards look ed at her, confused by the shift in tone, by the pocketing of evidence. He saw a drug den, a weird weapon, a scared witness. Quinn saw the edges of something else. A world hidden in the cracks of her own, operating by rules she was only just beginning to grasp. And this red-haired, freckled academic, clutching her bag of books, was standing right on the border.