AI The air in the abandoned Tube station was a physical presence, a cocktail of damp concrete, rust, and something older, something metallic and sharp that made the back of Detective Harlow Quinn’s throat itch. Flickering emergency lights, jury-rigged to a petrol generator somewhere above, cast a sickly yellow pall over the platform. This was the Veil Market, or what was left of it. The usual stalls of strange trinkets, glowing vials, and whispering merchants were gone , leaving only discarded trash and the profound silence of a place recently and violently evacuated.
Quinn stood at the edge of the platform, her hands tucked into the pockets of her trench coat. Her sharp jaw was set, her brown eyes missing nothing. The call had been cryptic, routed through channels she didn’t fully trust, mentioning a ‘disturbance’ at a known gathering point for fringe groups. She’d expected squatters, maybe a drug deal gone bad. This hollow, charged silence was worse.
“Over here, Detective.”
The voice came from the far end of the platform, near a tiled archway that once led to the tunnels. Sergeant Miller, a young officer with more enthusiasm than sense, waved a flashlight. Quinn approached with the quiet, military precision that defined her bearing. Her worn leather watch felt tight on her wrist.
The scene was a tableau of wrongness. A circle of the platform’s dusty tiles had been meticulously swept clean. In the center sat a small, neat pile of personal effects: a pair of round, wire-framed glasses, a leather-bound notebook, and a worn leather satchel, its strap neatly folded beside it. A few feet away, a dark, viscous stain soaked into the grout between the tiles. Blood. But not enough for a fatal wound, and no spatter pattern, no drag marks. It was as if someone had bled a measured cup onto the floor and then vanished .
“What do you make of it, Sarge?” Quinn asked, her voice low and even.
Miller puffed out his chest. “Looks like a robbery gone wrong. Perp confronts the victim here, takes their stuff, maybe roughs them up. Victim drops their bag and glasses in the struggle, gets a bloody nose or a cut, then either runs off or is dragged off that way.” He pointed his flashlight beam toward a dark maintenance tunnel, its gate hanging open. “We’ve got the K-9 unit coming to track.”
Quinn didn’t move. Her eyes traced the invisible lines of the scene. “Robbery. You take the bag, Sergeant. You take the notebook. Why leave them? They’re sitting there like a museum display. And the glasses…” She knelt, careful not to touch anything. The glasses were perfectly centered on a single tile. Not dropped. Placed. “Someone with poor eyesight is assaulted. Their glasses come off. They land… where? Not on the lens. Not folded neatly. They’re placed.”
Miller shifted his weight . “Maybe the vic put them down to fight?”
“With their satchel off, and the notebook out?” Quinn stood, her gaze sweeping the empty circle . “No signs of a struggle. No scuff marks in the dust outside this perfect clean circle. Someone swept this area. After the incident. Why?”
She walked the perimeter. The market’s detritus formed a ring: a shattered clay pot leaking black soil, a ritualistic cleansing, or… to see something on the tiles.”
She stepped closer to the blood. It was too dark, almost black in the low light. She pulled a pen from her pocket and gently touched the edge of the stain. It was tacky, but not fresh. A few hours old, maybe. And there, almost invisible against the dark grout, was a tiny, twisted piece of metal. Using the pen, she coaxed it out. It was a thin band of brass, warped as if by intense heat, etched with minute, intricate markings that made her head ache to look at for too long.
“What’s that?” Miller asked, leaning in.
“I don’t know.” But it felt important. It felt like evidence that didn’t belong in any robbery kit. She bagged it.
“Harlow?”
The new voice was familiar , tight with anxiety. Quinn turned to see Eva Kowalski standing at the platform entrance, held back by a uniformed officer. Eva’s curly red hair was a chaotic halo in the uneven light, her freckled face pale. She was tucking a strand behind her left ear repeatedly, her green eyes wide behind her own round glasses, fixed on the satchel on the ground.
“Let her through,” Quinn said, her tone leaving no room for argument . Eva was her occasional, unofficial consultant on the strange and historical, a link to a world of old books and older secrets. Her presence here, now, was another piece that didn’t fit.
Eva hurried over, her own worn satchel—a twin to the one on the ground—bouncing against her hip. “I heard the call on the scanner. The location… I had to come.”
“You know this place?” Quinn asked, watching her closely.
“By reputation. A black market. For things most people don’t believe in.” Eva’s eyes darted to the blood, to the neat pile, and a small, choked sound escaped her. “That’s Alistair’s bag. His notebook. He’s a… a colleague. From the Museum archives.”
“Your occult researcher friend,” Quinn stated, remembering fragments of past conversations. “What was he doing here?”
“Buying something. He was nervous about it. He said he’d found a lead on a… a tracking device. For his work.” Eva hugged herself, shivering despite the stagnant warmth of the station. “He called it a Veil Compass.”
The term meant nothing to Miller, who snorted softly . Quinn ignored him. A compass. A twisted piece of brass. Her mind began to connect dots, forming a picture she didn’t like.
“Sergeant Miller thinks it’s a robbery,” Quinn said, testing.
Eva shook her head violently. “No. Look at it. It’s an altar. A leaving. Or a… a transaction that went sideways.” She pointed a trembling finger at the clean circle. “The circle is a ward, a basic containment field. He must have drawn it for safety. The blood isn’t from violence; it’s a payment. A somatic anchor. But it’s all wrong. The blood is here, but the anchor is gone. The Compass would have been the focus.”
Miller laughed, a short, derisive bark. “A magic circle? Come on, Ms. Kowalski. This is a police investigation.”
But Quinn was looking at Eva, then back at the scene. The meticulous cleanliness. The placed, not dropped, items. The specific, concentrated bloodstain with no trauma around it. The missing body. The twisted brass sigil. It clashed violently with the messy, chaotic narrative of a crime of opportunity. It was structured . It was intentional.
“Say you’re right, Eva,” Quinn said, cutting off Miller’s next remark. “Say this was a ritual transaction. What does the missing compass, and the missing man, tell you?”
Eva took a deep breath, her researcher’s mind grasping for logic in the illogical. “The Compass points to rifts. To thin places. If the ritual was disrupted , or if the artifact was more powerful than he realized… it wouldn’t just point. It could open. The blood was the key, the personal effects the offering to bind the transaction. If the circle failed, or was breached…” She trailed off, looking at the dark maintenance tunnel. “It wouldn’t have taken him anywhere a dog could follow.”
Quinn felt a cold certainty settle in her gut, a feeling she’d last had three years ago, standing over another scene where the evidence taunted her, where the official report of her partner’s death read ‘cause undetermined’ and the things she’d seen in the shadows of that warehouse were dismissed as trauma. This had the same taste. The same profound wrongness.
She looked at Miller’s skeptical, impatient face, then at Eva’s terrified, knowing one. Two interpretations of the same facts. One fit the world as the Metropolitan Police understood it. The other fit the evidence on the ground.
“Sergeant,” Quinn said, her voice leaving no room for debate . “Call off the K-9. Secure the scene. No one touches anything. This is no longer a robbery investigation.” She looked at the dark tunnel mouth, then down at the twisted brass in the evidence bag. The etched sigils seemed to writhe in the flickering light. “We’re dealing with something else. Something that leaves a circle clean but takes everything inside it.” She finally understood what she’d missed at first glance: the scene wasn’t a disruption of order. It was the aftermath of a different kind of order, one with rules she was only beginning to perceive. And somewhere in the dark, a compass needle was pointing , and a man was lost.