AI The rain fell in silver sheets, turning the cobblestones of Soho into a treacherous mirror of neon and shadow. Detective Harlow Quinn’s breath came in sharp clouds as she pushed forward, the weight of her soaked coat dragging at her shoulders. Her eyes, brown and unblinking, stayed locked on the figure forty yards ahead—Tomás Herrera, the former paramedic, moving with a panicked, darting grace.
“Herrera! Stop!” Her command was swallowed by the downpour and the relentless city hum.
He didn’t look back. He just ducked into an alley beside a familiar green neon glow. The Raven’s Nest. Quinn’s sharp jaw tightened. She’d had him under observation for a week, this ghost medic for the city’s unseen underbelly. Tonight, a tip about a purchase of unregistered medical supplies had finally given her a reason to bring him in for questioning. He’d bolted the moment he’d seen her, confirming every suspicion.
She reached the mouth of the alley, pressing herself against the wet brick. The green sign buzzed overhead, casting an eerie light on the rain. She saw the back door to the Nest swing shut. Quinn gave it a three-count, then followed, her hand resting on the grip of her service weapon. The door opened into a narrow, dim corridor that stank of stale beer and disinfectant. No Herrera. At the end of the corridor was another door, slightly ajar. Beyond it, she could see the main bar area, empty at this hour save for the silent, watchful proprietor, Silas. But to her left, the wall of bookshelves. She’d heard rumors about this place. A hidden room.
Her worn leather watch felt tight on her wrist as she approached the shelves. Military precision had taught her to notice anomalies. A slight scuff on the floorboards, a volume on cartography jutting out a half-inch further than its neighbors. She pulled it. With a soft, well-oiled click, a section of the shelf swung inward.
Quinn stepped into darkness, drawing her gun. A narrow staircase led down. The air grew colder, damper, carrying a strange mélange of scents—ozone, dried herbs, wet stone, and something coppery. She descended, the sound of her own footsteps masked by the distant drumming of rain on the street above. The staircase ended in a brick archway, beyond which flickered the light of torches, not electric bulbs.
She emerged not into a basement, but into a cavernous space that stole her breath. An abandoned Tube station, its old platform signs still faintly legible: Camden Town. But now, it thrummed with illicit life. Stalls lined the curved tile walls, lit by lanterns and glowing orbs that hovered in the air. The crowd was a mosaic of the impossible: figures in hooded robes, creatures with too many eyes, humans with skin that shimmered like mother-of-pearl. This was the stuff of her partner Morris’s fevered, final notes. Notes she’d dismissed as trauma-induced psychosis.
The Veil Market.
And there, weaving through the crowd by a stall selling bottled lightning, was Tomás Herrera. He glanced back, his olive skin pale under the strange lights, his hand instinctively clutching at the Saint Christopher medallion on his chest. He saw her. His eyes widened, and he bolted deeper into the market.
Quinn holstered her gun. Drawing it here would cause a riot. She moved after him, her bearing rigid, cutting through the crowd like a knife. Eyes followed her. Human eyes, inhuman eyes. Whispers slithered around her in languages that grated on the ear.
“Police…”
“Mortal law.”
“Quinn.”
They knew her name. A chill that had nothing to do with the damp traced her spine.
She kept Herrera in sight, his dark curly hair a beacon . He was heading for a section cordoned off by heavy velvet drapes, where the air smelled of antiseptic and grave dirt. A black-market clinic. He was almost there.
Then, a hand caught her arm. It was a large hand, scaled and cool.
“The surface world’s justice has no writ here, Detective,” a voice rumbled. The owner was a hulking figure with a bull-like head, his nostrils flaring. A minotaur, her mind supplied, hysterically. “You are uninvited.”
She looked at the hand on her coat, then up at his eyes. “I’m in pursuit of a suspect involved in the distribution of controlled substances. That’s my writ.”
The minotaur snorted. “Your writ is paper. This place runs on older currencies. You have no token. Your presence is a trespass.”
From the corner of her eye, Quinn saw Herrera slip behind the drapes. Gone. Her suspect was vanishing into a world she did not understand, a world that might hold the answers to what really happened to Morris. He’d been found down here, somewhere, his notebook filled with sketches of bone tokens and descriptions of a market that moved. His death was ruled a cardiac arrest. She’d never believed it.
She could turn back now. Climb the stairs, return to the rain-slicked streets of her jurisdiction, her case file, her rational world. She could report the location, let a specialized unit—if one even existed—handle it. It was the prudent move. The safe move.
Morris hadn’t been safe. He’d followed the mystery.
The minotaur tightened his grip. “You will leave.”
Quinn’s free hand moved, not to her gun, but to her inner coat pocket . She pulled out her badge, its metal gleaming dully in the torchlight. She pressed it into the minotaur’s palm, over his scales.
“That’s my token,” she said, her voice low and steady . “It’s all I have. It’s what I am. Now, are you going to arrest me, or are you going to let me do my job?”
The creature looked at the badge, perplexed. It was an object of a foreign power, meaningless here, yet heavy with a kind of intent. The standoff stretched for three heartbeats. Around them, the market’s noise had hushed, watching.
With a grunt, the minotaur released her arm and dropped the badge back into her hand. “Your mortal courage is your currency, then. It may not spend far. The clinic,” he nodded toward the drapes, “is not a place for your kind. The physician there… collects things. Memories. Regrets. Scars.”
Quinn looked at the scar running down her own forearm, a reminder of a knife fight years ago. She thought of Herrera’s scar, the one on his left arm from a knife attack. A coincidence, or a calling card?
“Thank you,” she said, and it wasn’t for the warning, but for the clearance.
She walked toward the drapes, feeling the weight of a hundred gazes. The fabric was thick, muffling sound. She pushed through.
The space beyond was a jarring fusion of a Victorian surgery and an alchemist’s den. Glass cabinets held organs floating in amber fluid. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling. And behind a steel table, Tomás Herrera stood, panting, his back to a curtained-off examination area. Before him was the physician—a tall, gaunt man with too-long fingers, his eyes obscured by smoked quartz lenses.
“You led a pollutant here, Tomás,” the physician said, his voice a dry rustle .
“I didn’t mean to, I swear,” Herrera pleaded, his Spanish accent thickening with stress . He saw Quinn and flinched. “Detective, you don’t understand. You need to leave.”
“You’re coming with me, Herrera. Questions. About your supplies. About who you treat.”
The physician turned his head slowly toward Quinn. The lenses seemed to drink the light. “He treats those your world forgets. As do I. You are hunting a saint, detective. A flawed one, but a saint nonetheless.”
“I’m hunting a man who broke the law,” Quinn countered, but her conviction felt thin in this room . Her eyes scanned the table. Surgical tools. A small, carved bone box. And a file, with a name tab she could just read: *Morris, D.S.*
Her blood went cold .
The physician followed her gaze. “Ah. You recognize the name. A curious man. He, too, came asking questions. He lacked your… conviction. He paid with his curiosity.”
The pieces, the wild pieces she had refused to assemble, clicked into a horrific picture. Morris hadn’t had a heart attack. He’d come here, asking questions about the clinic, about the market. And he’d been answered .
Herrera saw her expression change. “He was trying to help,” the former paramedic said desperately. “He found a kid, a changeling, left for dead by the river. He brought him to me. I tried… but the procedures, the medicines… they’re not human. The police surgeon would have asked questions. Morris was covering for me. He started poking around here, asking about sources. He stumbled onto *him *.” He jerked his head toward the physician.
“And what did he stumble onto?” Quinn asked, her voice dangerously quiet .
The physician smiled, a thin stretching of lips. “The truth that some knowledge is a terminal condition. His memories were quite insightful. A tidy archive of Metropolitan Police procedure.”
Quinn’s hand itched for her gun. This was the thing that had killed her partner. Not a suspect, not a gangland hit. This… collector. She was off the map. There was no backup, no protocol for this.
“You’re under arrest,” she said, the words automatic, hollow.
The physician laughed, a sound like breaking glass. “For what crime? Existing? My trade is sanctioned here. You are the intruder. You have two choices, Detective Quinn. Leave now, and forget this path. Or stay, and join your partner in my collection. I lack a detective’ perspective. It would be a valuable addition.”
Herrera looked from the physician to Quinn, terror in his warm brown eyes. He was a man caught between two worlds, a man who’d lost his license for trying to bridge them.
Quinn made her decision. It wasn’t about the law anymore. It was about Morris. It was about the scar on her arm and the one on Herrera’s, and the fact that some things needed cutting out.
“I’m not leaving without him ,” she said, nodding at Herrera. “And I’m not leaving without that file.”
She took a step forward, into the heart of the clinic, into the territory where her badge was just a piece of metal and her only real weapon was the terrible, clarifying certainty that she had already stepped too far to go back.