AI The station smelled of old rain and something metallic that wasn't quite blood. Harlow Quinn walked down the cracked concrete stairs with the practiced gait of someone who had learned not to hurry where others panicked. Her leather watch ticked against the inside of her wrist, the time the only small, reliable mechanism in a place where charms and sigils pretended at order. The Veil Market unspooled beneath Camden like a secret that had learned to whisper: lanterns hanging from rusted beams, stalls carved from scaffolding and old advertising boards, the air thick with scents that had no place on a Metropolitan notice —burning myrrh, citrus oil, the faint, cold tang of ozone.
People moved around the central stall in a circle the way a tide might avoid a reef. Photographers, uniformed officers, a Shade with a hood pulled low. Eva Kowalski stood at the edge of the crowd, fingers worrying at one curl and then tucking it behind her left ear, round glasses catching a lantern's light. Her satchel swung against her hip, the leather dented by books and paper. She looked at Harlow with a face that was too young to be so tired.
"You shouldn't be down here," Eva said, and there was accusation in it softened by concern. "If you're thinking—"
Harlow's jaw didn't loosen. She kept the sentence the way a blade holds its point. "If I'm thinking what?"
"That something—" Eva fought for the right word. "That this is the work of the market. Of a rift. Whatever opens under the city."
Harlow watch ed the stallmaster's body as if the way he lay could tell her more than anyone's words. He was on his side, his jacket flung open, hands splayed, skin that looked bleached under the lanterns. No blood pooled around him. A smear of something dark had been dragged from under the stall and stopped at his shoulder. Items from the stall—glass phials, a line of small carved bones—had been pushed aside with a clumsy, deliberate hands-off kind of violence.
"How long since he was found?" Harlow asked.
"Two hours," said a uniformed constable. "Market regulars flagged us. Came to trade, found him like that. No witnesses, no forced entry to the stall. Nothing taken, apparently. There's—" He gestured at the cart. "There's this." His glove pointed at a brass compass lying near the man's hand, its face turned up. The needle spun and shuddered as if trying to find a direction and failing.
Harlow crouched close enough to smell the compass—brass warmed by body heat, a faint patina of verdigris. The face had sigils etched in a pattern she didn't particularly believe in. She didn't, not at first. Sigils were either protective charms or decorative marks, depending on the hands that drew them. The needle, when she touched it with one gloved fingertip, didn't obey north. It slid to align with her finger and then kept moving, listing toward the far wall of the abandoned platform where the ticket booths had once been.
"It points to the maintenance access," Eva said, but not like she'd realized something new—more like she was reading aloud from an old, comforting text. "A compass like that doesn't point north. It points to the nearest rift."
Quinn's tongue pressed to the inside of her cheek. Her partner had disappeared three years ago in a situation that had cracked at the edges of explanation; she'd kept the shard of that fear filed away, precise as a paperclip. She didn't have categories for everything she'd seen. She had rules. She had evidence. "Maybe someone's got a compass that points to the nearest crack in the wall," she said. "Maybe someone stole it from a vendor and left it where they'd be found."
"Why would anyone do that?" Eva's green eyes were too wide for the light. "To lead people to a rift? Or to pretend there's one? To scare people off. For trade."
Harlow watch ed the compass needle again. It nudged, insistent, toward a segment of floor tiles with a bloom of darker stone and a seam that ran like a scar toward the edge of the platform. The seam had been filled and re-tiled. Someone had patched it. A work-scar that made her pay attention.
"Was anything taken?" Harlow asked the constable again.
"Most of his stock is intact," he said. "Phials, powders—alchemical goods. A couple of things burned. But we can't get the Shade to consent to a proper sifting without—" He trailed off, looked up at Harlow. "You know how it is. They've got rules."
Harlow straightened. The market's unspoken rules were not her fault. She scanned the body. The man's fingertips were singed . Beneath the singed skin, the nails were gouged in a neat pattern, as if someone had tried to carve through them with a small, tray-shaped instrument. Harlow notice d the edges: the gouges cut cleanly, like metal. Whoever did it had wanted either pain or a specific mark.
"He's not dead of bleeding," Harlow said. "No head trauma, no blunt force. He looks as if he stopped breathing."
"Seizure?" one of the forensic techs offered. "Poison?"
"Maybe." Harlow's voice kept the flat tone of someone cataloguing options. The man's breath wasn't moving ; there was lividity where his cheek had met the stone. But where the edge of his sleeve rested, the fabric was clear of the iridescent residue that clung to the tiles in a ring around the stall—thin, almost like a spider's web drawn in silver dust. Harlow crouched lower, the soles of her shoes skidding on grit. That residue glittered under her torch, but when she swept it back with a gloved hand, it held together, like a membrane.
Someone had spread something in a ring. Someone had deliberately circled the stall.
"Ritual," Eva said. "A binding? They used wax and sigils."
Harlow bent to the compass again. The casing had been scuffed in a way that didn't match market accident; the brass was rubbed in a thumbprint that had been deliberately dulled. Close to the hinge, someone had scratched a small symbol—three barbed lines, like a comb. She knew the symbol. She had seen it once on a case file three years ago, on a photograph taken from the corner of DS Morris's locker, a scrap of metal engraved with the same comb. The memory of that image was a small dull pain at the base of her skull.
She let herself note the pain and ignore the moment's urge to be sentimental. The compass had been crafted by a Shade artisan, she'd been told once, the kind of object that didn't circulate outside certain circles. Shades didn't ship their wares to amateurs. This compass had been used in a way its maker would have recognized. The maker's mark was where her eyes had landed.
"Did Morris keep one of these?" she asked before she realised she had asked.
Eva's hand went instinctively to her satchel. "No. He—" She stopped. Her freckled forehead creased. "He talked about them when we were studying artifact thefts. He said they were tools, not toys. That someone could point a compass at the wrong thing to make you look in the wrong direction. Point it at a crowd instead of a door."
Harlow's jaw clicked. The needle had stopped near the maintenance access, but the seam in the floor had been patched . There was no easy way through. She saw the ring of residue, the gouged nails, the singeing, and a person who had been found alive two hours earlier and now was stone-still. Someone wanted that stall to look dangerous. Someone wanted the next steps to be made by people who believed in gateways.
"Who benefits from that?" Harlow asked. "If I tell you we pursue the rift, who gets to walk away with the inventory?"
Eva swallowed. "The merchant who staked the stall, the collectors who come to the Market. But—" She chewed at her lip. "There are people who trade in the artifacts of rifts. They underwrite the dismantling of them once they've got what they need. People pay absurd sums to own a piece of a gate."
Harlow's eyes drifted to the Crowd then—a Shade with a hood, a thin-lipped woman with a lapful of coins, a man who had the posture of someone used to making deals. No one looked like a killer. Mostly they looked like regulars who had learned to pretend nothing scared them.
"You said the market moves on a schedule," Harlow said, lifting the back of the thought into the air. "Full moon. If we keep this cordon, we'll force them to close shop. Break trade. If someone wanted a market to do that, a staged gateway would be the method."
Eva's mouth formed a question Harlow didn't need answered.
"Or," Harlow said, "they staged the gateway to lure in the wrong people. The kind who come with a torch and a warrant. The kind who leave a mess to be picked over. The clock on that patch in the floor runs differently than a natural rift. There's a line on that seam that looks like... like a lift. Not a tear."
She pointed. The seam was a double line where tile met tile. Skills from her earliest years in police canvass—looking for things that didn't belong—hadn't slipped. The seam's inner edge had been deliberately filed to accommodate a plate. A plate that could be lifted with the right tool.
"Someone could have used the compass to direct attention," Eva said. "While another person lifted what's underneath."
Harlow took one more inventory of what was missing. The stall's ledger was gone . A small box that had once held bone tokens—entry requirements for the market—had been taken . A narrow strip of leather, the kind used for restraining, had vanished. Items that meant control. The merchant's satchel was empty. Whoever had wanted the goods had wanted not the goods themselves, but what they unlocked.
She let her face smooth. "Who walked away with something that opens a place?" she asked.
"Someone who knows the market's ropes," Eva said. "Someone who pays for discretion."
"Or someone who wants us to think it's a rift."
Quinn's hand closed on the compass. The needle warmed under her glove. She let her fingers press the rim and felt for resistance. There was a slight catch where the hinge met the casing. She pried at it with a careful thumbnail until the plate lifted, and a sliver of paper slid out like a leaf.
It was folded small and tight. When she opened it, the handwriting inside was angular and familiar in a way that made her stomach pull. Not Morris's hand—Morris printed in block letters. But the fold matched the notebook scrap she'd found in Morris's locker, the one that had been filed under "Personal — Do Not File," the one she had never had the nerve to open. The scrap was stamped with the same comb mark.
Harlow didn't read the paper aloud. She kept it loose in her palm and felt the edges of the ink under her glove as if she might hold a thought and keep it from evaporating.
"That's a signature," Eva breathed.
Harlow rubbed her thumb over the indentation. It wasn't a signature for a transaction. It was a tally. A short list of names with one crossed out. The rest—Harlow's eyes moved with a slow, exact precision—were dates. Notations in shorthand. A name at the bottom that she hadn't expected to see: a name associated with a clique she'd suspected of skirting the law, the undercity's elegant corruption. People who trafficked in boundaries.
She let the implications line up like recruits.
"What if it's neither a rift nor a trick?" Eva said. "What if it's both? A scare to distract from a theft intended to fuel the rift trade?"
"Then someone used the market's language to buy cover," Harlow said. Her voice was small enough to keep from disturbing the ring of watch ers. "They used objects that make people afraid so those people would look for the supernatural instead of the human."
She slid the paper back into the compass and snapped the casing closed. The needle had stilled when she touched it. It pointed now in a direction she could feel behind her teeth: not toward the maintenance wall, but along the path the man who had set the stall would have taken if he had wanted to guide someone into a hole. Someone had an accomplice with a crowbar and a cart.
"Get me the list of market regulars," Harlow said. "All of them. Names, deals, anything anyone has sold in the last two months."
The constable looked at her as if she'd asked for the moon. "That's a big ask, Detective."
Harlow's watch registered the passing of a minute. She liked time because it did what time said it would. "Make it small," she said. "Start with the Shades and the sellers who trade in bones and compasses. Whoever minted that comb mark, I want a ledger on them."
"Can you—" Eva hesitated. "Can you really rule out a rift? The man—"
"He could have been made to stop breathing," Harlow said. "He could have been given something that shuts the lungs but leaves the face pale so people who expect the dramatic will be satisfied. The circle of residue, the singeing, the compass—these are signs, but signs can be planted."
Eva's shoulders dropped, a small, human sag. She didn't look convinced. She was young enough to still want mysteries to stay mysteries. Harlow had been old enough for danger to become a list of checkboxes. She could see Eva's hands twitching, wanting to catalog everything before fear did.
"There's more," Eva said finally. "Morris—" Her voice hitched in a place Harlow hadn't meant to press, and then she forced herself forward. "There are photographs of Morris with that comb mark in the margins. When we were at the Museum, he photographed it as a joke. He said he thought it was a maker's mark. He labelled it 'Possibly... relevant.'"
Harlow's mouth thinned. The comb mark was a thread. Threads connected things. Morris's absence had been a missing stitch in a larger pattern Harlow had been trying to pick apart for three years. She kept her voice flat. "Then we start with that thread."
She thumbed the compass closed and let its weight sit in her palm like a verdict. The market hummed around them, indifferent commerce that had no patience for police procedure. A Shade vendor lit a new lantern and the green flame crawled up the wick. The ring of residue on the floor glittered like frost under the light, and Harlow could imagine how, with the right distraction, someone could have slipped a plate, lifted a crate, taken what was needed, and bent a predictability for the gain of another's hunger.
"Call Morris's file," Harlow said. "I'll need everything he's touched. And Evans —look at the list of buyers. I want any ticket sales, any bone tokens that changed hands this month. If someone is staging them, they'll be sloppy. People who think in fear tend to be clumsy in greed."
Eva didn't hesitate this time. Her fingers moved to her satchel and her face found a purpose. "I'll pull the sales ledgers," she said. "And the photographs. There's probably more in the Museum's restricted archive. I can—"
"Keep it tight," Harlow said. "No leaks. If the Market gets wind that the police are sniffing at their tools, they'll vanish. We need a lead we can follow that doesn't explode the whole place."
The compass in her palm vibrated faintly, as if it had one last insistence. Harlow let it sit there and made a small, private rule: she would not let the strange explain away the obvious. She would not let ritual become an excuse for human theft. But she also would not let her file of small, stubborn doubts stay closed.
As she rose, the platform angled in the lantern light and the ring of residue caught, incandescent, like a promise. Harlow walked the perimeter, watch ing the crowd for movements that didn't belong. Someone adjusted a coat to hide a scar. Someone moved a cart with a little too much care. Someone laughed, loud and bright, and their laugh didn't reach their eyes.
Something else had been taken besides inventory. A pattern had shifted. Harlow could feel the seam of it under her boots. She kept the compass in her jacket pocket, the sigils warmed against her chest, and for the first time since she had learned the word "rift," the possibility of a maker's hand and a would-be thief's plan sat side by side in her head, equally plausible, equally dangerous.
She would find out which was true. She had a list to work through and a small, stubborn set of rules: follow the evidence, distrust the obvious, and never let a market's superstition become an alibi for someone's greed.