AI Rain came down hard enough to sting, slanting through the glow of the green neon raven above the door.
Harlow shoved through the crowd spilling out of The Raven’s Nest, one hand clamped over the Glock under her coat, the other batting aside a drunken man in a leather jacket.
“Move,” she snapped.
The man lurched right. She took the gap, boots splashing into a puddle that threw up oily rainbow. Ahead, the suspect’s hood bobbed once above the mass of umbrellas and dark coats, then dipped left, slipping down a narrow side street.
Harlow’s worn leather watch bit into her wrist as she ran. 22:46. Eighteen years on the job and her knees still took the impact without complaint. Her lungs burned; she ignored it. The air smelled of fried food, petrol, and wet asphalt.
She hit the corner and pivoted, shoulder glancing brick. The side street was a chute of slick cobblestones and overflowing gutters. Hooded man, grey sweatshirt, black messenger bag thumping against his hip—twenty yards ahead, maybe less. He glanced back once, face lost under the hood, then pushed harder.
“Police!” Her voice cracked across the street, swallowed by the rain and the distant siren wail. “Stop!”
He didn’t even flinch.
Her shoes skidded on a film of muck; her hand slapped the wall to steady herself. Military steps. Heel-ball-toe. Don’t overstride. She adjusted, found her rhythm, kept him centered.
The Raven’s Nest’s green light receded behind her, shrinking to a smear on wet brick. She’d waited there three hours on the back wall beneath yellowed maps of an empire that didn’t exist anymore, nursing a flat tonic water while the suspect drank with men she’d seen on CCTV with her clique of little aristocratic monsters. When he slid off his barstool with that too-light, looking-over-his-shoulder movement, she’d followed. He’d clocked her in the doorway.
Now here they were.
He cut right between a shuttered kebab shop and a locksmith’s with its grates down. The alley narrowed, turned into a dogleg that spat them out onto a busier road. Horns blared as he bolted across four lanes of traffic, headlights exploding off rain. A black cab screeched, tyres shrill.
He vaulted its bonnet. She went around the back instead, hand slapping the boot for balance, anger sharp in her mouth. Small, stupid choices like that cost you meters; meters were cases closed or cold.
“Control, this is Quinn,” she gasped into the mic clipped low under her lapel. “In pursuit, male, grey hoodie, black bag, heading north from—”
Static hissed in her earpiece, then a burst of garbled chatter. The rain chewed at her words, or the city did. Either way, she was on her own.
Just like that night .
The thought slid in uninvited, carrying the echo ed scream of steel on steel, Morris’s shout cut off halfway through her name. Harlow shut it down. Not now.
They barrelled past a cluster of tourists cowering under a shop awning. Someone yelled something about crazy people. She ignored it, eyes locked to the bob of that grey hood.
He dove down the steps of a Tube station two at a time. The red roundel flashed in her peripheral vision. Tottenham Court Road.
Harlow took the stairs hard enough that shock jolted up through her ankles. The wet stone was treacherous; somebody had dropped a chip wrapper, flattened into pulp. She cleared it, boots hammering. The warm underground air rose in a damp, metallic breath, smelling of hot rails and old dust.
He didn’t stop to buy a ticket. He angled toward the barrier, planted a hand on top, and vaulted. For a brief second his sweatshirt rode up, showing a strip of pale back and the black waistband of his jeans. No visible weapon at the spine. Messenger bag could carry anything from heroin to a severed head.
Harlow hit the barrier half a second later. Eighteen years ago she’d done the same move in training, instructors shouting about economy of motion. Now she felt the spring still in her thighs, though her right knee twinged as she landed.
A TFL staffer yelled, “Oi!” from a kiosk. She flashed her warrant card without stopping. It meant nothing down here, but people mostly moved when you waved shiny metal at them.
Down another flight of stairs, the walls sweating moisture and adverts. He threaded through the few late-night commuters on the platform, then the doors of a Northern Line train hissed shut between them.
He didn’t see her slip sideways into the next carriage before the doors clapped.
The train lurched forward, wheels grinding. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Harlow grabbed a pole, breath coming in ragged pulls. Her coat was soaked through to her shirt; cold cloth clung to her wrists. She checked her watch . 22:49. Heart hammering too fast.
Through the scratched plastic window at the end of the carriage she could just make out the back of his head in the next one along. He stood with his shoulder turned toward her, making himself narrow, smaller. Runner’s stance. Coiled.
Harlow rubbed the ache in her left forearm, phantom pain where broken bone had healed after a knife fight in Hackney seven years back. The scar that ran from wrist to elbow tugged under the skin. Her fingers drifted, almost by muscle memory, to the chain at her throat, found nothing, dropped. She’d never been one for saints.
Morris had, though. Saint Christopher, patron of lost travellers. His medallion had been bagged and labelled with his other effects after they pulled what was left of him from that tunnel outside King’s Cross. The rest of the file sat on her desk, three years cold.
The train plunged through darkness. Her reflection looked back at her from the window: brown eyes too sharp, salt-and-pepper hair plastered flat, jaw set. She looked like a woman bearing down on something she’d already decided to break, even if she didn’t know what it was yet.
The carriage swayed. Voices murmured. An ad for cheap holidays peeled away from the wall in the damp.
Camden Town. The announcement rasped overhead, the automated voice distorted through the speakers. The brakes screamed; the train shuddered to a stop.
Doors bleeped and slid open. He was already moving, slipping out with the first spatter of disembarking passengers. Harlow shoved past a man with headphones and a woman dragging a suitcase, caught the platform just as the warning beeps climbed in pitch.
Up more stairs. The tunnel air here was colder, the tiles older, stained and cracked. The exit led up to the street—tourist Camden, all neon and cheap leather and the stink of spilled lager and weed—but he didn’t go that way .
He veered off left down a service corridor marked STAFF ONLY. No CCTV camera in the immediate sightline. Harlow’s brain noted it, underlined it. Somebody had done their homework.
She slowed, counted three heartbeats, then turned the same way.
The corridor was narrower, painted a bilious institutional green that flaked in strips. Old posters curled from the walls, listing engineering works from five years ago. The air tasted different here—stale, thick with something under the metallic tang of the Underground. Like a basement full of incense and mould.
At the far end, a metal door waited, unmarked. No exit sign. No push bar. Just a slab of steel welded into brick.
He wasn’t there.
Harlow’s hand went to her gun.
“Come on,” she muttered. Her voice died fast on the dead air.
Then she heard it: a faint clunk, very distant, like metal on metal, from beyond the door. And under it, a murmur. Not the roar of a train or the hollow echo of empty tunnels. Voices, dozens of them, softened by stone. A low, constant thrum.
She stepped closer. The hair on her arms lifted beneath her wet shirt. That wrongness twisted in her gut, the same one she’d felt three years ago when the lights had gone out in that rail tunnel and something had chittered against the walls, too many feet on the tracks.
“Don’t, Quinn,” she told herself.
But her hand was already on the door.
Up close, she saw it wasn’t welded shut. A narrow slot sat at head height, flush with the metal. As her knuckles brushed it, it snapped open from the other side with a sharp metallic crack, exposing a strip of darkness and a pair of eyes.
Not human. Not quite.
The pupils were vertical slits, ringed by a pale grey iris that caught the fluorescent glare oddly, reflecting it back like cat’s eyes in a headlight.
“Token,” a voice rasped from the other side. Genderless. Cold. “Or move along.”
Harlow’s throat tightened. For a second, her mind snagged on the pupils, cataloguing, refusing. Contact lenses. Must be. Stupid underground club, stupid theatrics.
“Metropolitan Police,” she said, forcing her voice low and bored. “Open the door.”
A dry chuckle. “No police tonight. Token or piss off.”
Something hard and white flashed in front of those eyes—a pale shard held up for her to see. Bone, her brain supplied. Polished, finger-length, carved with tiny, tangled lines that hurt to look at. The eyes behind the slot watch ed her watch it.
“You can’t operate an unlicensed venue under—”
The slot snapped shut.
Harlow stared at her reflected ghost on the dull metal. The faint murmur of voices curled around her like fog. Her hand had a fine tremor; she clasped it around the butt of her pistol to stop it.
There it was. The line.
Protocol said you called for backup when a suspect vanished into a location you couldn’t access alone. You boxed it, watch ed it, waited until you had numbers. You certainly didn’t keep going when something on the other side of a door stared at you with predator’s eyes and talked about tokens like something out of a fever dream.
Three years ago, they’d followed a trail of missing teens into a maintenance tunnel off King’s Cross. Signs every where saying NO ENTRY, DANGER OF DEATH. Morris had gone in first. “We can’t pretend this is all knife crime and bad luck forever, Harlow,” he’d said, laughing when she called him an idiot. Twenty minutes later, he’d been a severed torso on the tracks, no blood on the rails, no human explanation that fit the damage.
She’d had nightmares about the way the tunnel had sounded when they pulled back. Not empty. Not quite. Like something breathing out there in the dark, just beyond what torchlight could touch.
The hum beyond this door had the same weight to it. The same density, as if the stone itself was holding its breath.
Her watch ticked on her wrist, each second a hard little punch. 23:02 now.
“Fuck it,” she said softly .
Footsteps approached behind her. Light, measured. The sound of someone used to moving around other people’s emergencies without getting in the way.
“Whatever you’re looking for,” a male voice said in accented English, calm and low, “you won’t find it banging on that door.”
Harlow turned, hand falling away from her gun but hovering near enough.
He was maybe thirty, olive-skinned, olive jacket darker with rain, curly dark hair damp against his forehead. Warm brown eyes, wary but not startled, took her in in a quick, practised scan—shoes to shoulders. A Saint Christopher medallion glinted at his collarbone, catching the harsh fluorescent light.
She clocked the scuffed medical bag slung across his body, the tired set to his mouth, the pale, puckered line of a scar running along his left forearm where his sleeve had ridden up. Not a threat, not armed obvious. Not random, either. Nobody random came down staff corridors at nearly midnight.
“You work down here?” she asked.
He gave a tight half-smile that didn’t reach his eyes. Spanish accent, Andalusian maybe. “Sometimes.”
She held his gaze. He didn’t flinch from the weight of it. Didn’t look at the badge clipped inside her open coat, but she felt him notice it anyway.
“Then you can open the door.”
His eyes flicked to the metal slab, then back. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you’re planning to arrest half the room.” His tone was mild. The line of his jaw wasn’t. “Or only one man with a grey hood and a black bag.”
The skin between Harlow’s shoulder blades prickled.
“You saw him.”
“Every one down there saw him.” He shifted the strap of his bag. The Saint Christopher medallion gleamed again, swinging. “He’s shouting at anyone who will listen. Very bad for business.”
There it was again—that word, down, as if what lay beyond the door wasn’t just another extension of the Tube but somewhere else. Somewhere lower.
“Then open it,” she said. “Let me do my job, and you can get back to yours.”
“You’re far from your job, Detective.” He said the last word like he’d tasted it before. “There are…different rules past that door.”
Her fingers tightened on the edge of her coat. “Is that a threat?”
“A warning.” He lifted his left hand, palm out in a placating gesture. The scar along his forearm caught the light, a white rope against darker skin. Not self-inflicted. Defensive. Knife, probably. “If you go in like that—” a nod at her gun, her stiff shoulders “—you won’t last ten minutes.”
“Let me worry about that.”
He studied her for a heartbeat longer. Then he sighed, as if he’d just decided to do something against his better judgement.
From his trouser pocket, he drew a small object and held it between thumb and forefinger. A piece of bone, smooth and off-white, carved with the same curling lines she’d seen before. The bone token looked wrong in his careful hand, like something dug out of an old grave and polished clean.
“One per person,” he said. “Normally.”
“Normally,” she repeated, tasting the word. “Is this an abnormal night?”
His smile was gone now. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
He stepped around her to the door, moving with a medic’s unhurried assurance. He rapped twice, knuckles on metal. The slot snapped open. Those slit pupils appeared again, narrowing.
“Busy,” the voice rasped. “Fuck off, Herrera.”
“Two,” he said, holding up the token. “She’s with me.”
The creature behind the door sniffed. Harlow felt the drag of that breath across her skin, cold and searching. The eyes shifted to her, went thinner.
“She stinks of law.”
“I’ll keep her on a leash,” the man—Herrera—said dryly. “You want the screamer upstairs to keep shaking your ceiling all night, or shall we resolve it inside?”
A long, unpleasant pause. Then the slot shut.
Bolts scraped in their housings, heavy and thick. The door opened a hand’s span, then wider, exhaling a breath of air that smelled of incense, hot metal, and something darker underneath. A wash of sound rolled over them—voices, music from a dozen sources, the low clink of glass and stone.
Harlow’s heart kicked against her ribs. This was it. Past this threshold, she had no jurisdiction, no backup, and no clear idea what she was walking into. The Met didn’t have codes for markets that required bone to enter and hired doormen with cat eyes.
She could turn around. Box it off. Stake it out properly tomorrow with a team. Pretend she hadn’t smelled anything familiar in that underground air.
She thought of Morris on his slab, of the ME saying, “I’ve never seen tissue trauma like this, Harlow. It’s like something chewed on him from the inside.” Of the way the higher-ups had shuffled his file into a box marked UNRESOLVED and then buried it under Budgets and Optics.
She thought of grey hood, black bag, and the quiet meetings in The Raven’s Nest under maps of a world that didn’t exist anymore.
She stepped forward.
Herrera shifted aside, giving her space. As she crossed the threshold, his hand brushed her elbow, steadying her on the lip of the stair.
“Don’t touch anything that talks to you,” he murmured. “And whatever happens, try not to look surprised.”
The door swung shut behind them with a final, iron sound. The bolts slammed home.
Harlow descended into the Veil Market.
The stairway twisted, spiralling down deeper than a standard service level, brick sweating moisture, the hum of voices growing richer, more layered. Light bled up from below—amber and violet, too warm for fluorescents, too steady for candles. The air thickened, full of spices she didn’t recognise and the copper edge of blood.
At the bottom, the tunnel opened out onto what had once been a Tube platform. The tracks were still there, twin black scars cutting through the middle, but the rest had been devoured by stalls and awnings, makeshift counters made from old doors, glass cases glowing from within.
Hundreds of people moved through the space, silhouettes against shifting light. Many were ordinary—jeans, hoodies, business suits with loosened ties. Others were not. A woman’s skin shimmered like beetle wings under the lamps. A tall, bald man with tattoos creeping up his neck had eyes as flat and deep as a shark’s. A hunched figure at a nearby stall wore a gas mask and thick leather gloves as it decanted something luminous and green into tiny vials.
Harlow’s stomach clenched. Her hand drifted unconsciously toward her gun again, then away. Herrera’s warning echo ed in her ears. Different rules.
“Welcome to the Market,” he said softly at her side. “Try not to get robbed. Or eaten.”
She scanned, forcing her breathing to slow. Grey hood, black bag. Where?
On the far side of the platform, half-obscured by bodies, she saw him. Standing on an overturned crate, hood thrown back now to show a pale, desperate face. He was shouting , gesturing wildly with the messenger bag clutched to his chest. The crowd nearest him had backed off a step, not from fear exactly, but from the sharpness of his panic.
Above it all, a painted sign hung crooked from an old signal gantry: a skeletal hand parting a curtain. The words beneath it, in flaking red, read:
THE VEIL MARKET – FULL MOON ONLY.
Harlow’s pulse thudded in her ears. She shouldn’t be here. Every instinct told her that. This was outside every thing she knew, every thing she could write up in a report and slide onto a sergeant’s desk. But the suspect was right there, and somewhere in this hot, humming, impossible space, the truth that had killed Morris three years ago was waiting .
She squared her shoulders, set her jaw, and moved into the crush, toward the man on the crate and whatever waited beyond him.