AI Quinn elbowed a tattooed man aside and caught the iron railing before her boot slipped on something slick.
“Watch it,” the man snapped, but his eyes slid off her warrant card as if it carried its own weight .
She held the bone token up at face height, pinched between thumb and forefinger. Its carved hole looked like an eye that refused to blink. Two figures in stitched, oil-dark coats stood by the barricade of old Tube signage and welded mesh. They did not ask her name. They did not ask why a Metropolitan Police detective had pushed past a queue of people who did not look like commuters.
One of them brushed the token with a gloved finger, then unhooked a chain. Metal clanked, quick and final.
Quinn ducked through.
The tunnel swallowed the sound of Camden above. Grease and damp brick gave way to stranger smells, clove smoke, hot sugar, something like singed hair . The abandoned station platform had become a crowded artery of stalls and curtains, rope lights strung along old adverts, tarpaulin nailed to pillars, chalk sigils layered over faded roundels. People bartered with coins, with vials, with favours. A woman in a velvet hood offered a row of teeth laid out like pearls. A boy no older than fourteen cradled a cage that whispered.
Quinn kept her shoulders square and her pace deliberate. Military drill, her old sergeant would have called it. She scanned hands first, then faces, then exits.
Eva Kowalski stood by the taped-off corner near the old ticket office, curly red hair pinned back in a messy knot, round glasses catching stray light. Her worn leather satchel hung open, book spines visible, pages bristling with bookmarks. She tucked hair behind her left ear as Quinn approached, the nervous habit firing like a reflex.
“You came,” Eva said.
Quinn stopped just outside the thin cordon of blue-and-white tape that looked obscene down here, a polite lie in a place that did not respect rules.
“Someone died,” Quinn said. “You don’t keep that quiet, not even here.”
Eva’s mouth tightened.
“Not even here,” she echoed, and the way she said it held accusation, as if Quinn had chosen the Market to spite her.
The body lay against the wall beneath a torn poster advertising cheap lager from a decade ago. Male. Late thirties. Lean, as if hunger had sharpened him. His throat gaped, but not like a slash. The skin had split in a neat crescent, edges darkened, as if cauterised. No spray. No pooling where it should have been. Blood had dribbled in thin, hesitant lines down his chest and stopped halfway, drying into rust-coloured beads that glittered oddly.
Quinn crouched. Her worn leather watch pressed into her wrist as she steadied herself on the gritty tile.
“Name?” she asked.
Eva hesitated.
“They called him Latch,” she said. “He sold passage, introductions, little shortcuts through places that shouldn’t join.”
Quinn looked at the tiles around Latch’s shoes. Dust lay undisturbed, fine as flour, except for one clean half-moon where something had scraped. Not a foot. Too smooth. Too precise.
“You’re treating this like a ritual,” Quinn said, keeping her voice low. The Market’s noise had a way of leaning in.
Eva’s eyes flicked to the body, then to Quinn.
“Look at the wound,” she said. “A knife doesn’t do that. Not clean. Not without spray.”
“Could be a wire,” Quinn said. “Garrote. Quick cut.”
“No fibres,” Eva said. “And his tongue,” she added, nodding .
Quinn had not noticed at first because the mouth sat slightly open, as if Latch had tried to speak and failed. She leaned closer. The tongue had been bitten through. Not torn. Bitten, hard, like he had tried to swallow his own words.
Quinn straightened.
“That happens in seizures,” she said.
“In bindings,” Eva replied.
Quinn’s jaw set. She had heard too much nonsense in three years. The kind that had circled DS Morris’s death like flies around a bin bag. The kind that made witnesses fold in on themselves and refuse to testify, because the truth sounded mad.
Quinn shifted her focus. She studied Latch’s hands. The fingertips held a faint grey dust, packed under the nails. Brick dust, old mortar. He had clawed at something. The right hand curled around nothing, but the tendons stayed tight, as if death had frozen him mid-grip.
“Who found him?” Quinn asked.
“A runner,” Eva said. “He screamed. Three stalls shut their curtains. People don’t want police attention. They want… quiet.”
Quinn’s gaze travelled over the wall behind Latch. Chalk marks. Not a circle, not the dramatic nonsense people drew in horror films. These were simple strokes, like tally marks, but they sat at careful intervals, as if someone had measured the space.
Quinn reached into her coat pocket and drew out a small evidence torch. The beam caught something that the rope lights missed. A thin film on the tile, like dried glue. It shimmered faintly, not with colour, but with absence, as if the light bent away.
Eva’s breath caught.
“That’s rift residue,” she said.
Quinn swept the torch lower, following the smear. It ran from the wall to the floor and then vanished under a thick rubber mat placed near the ticket office door, a makeshift welcome mat someone had painted with a smiling skull.
Quinn hooked the edge of the mat with two fingers and peeled it back.
The tiles beneath looked cleaner than the rest, as if they had been scrubbed , but something clung to the grout lines. Fine metallic flecks. Brass, ground down. A faint greenish stain, verdigris.
Eva’s hand went to her satchel at once.
“Don’t,” Quinn said.
Eva paused, fingers hovering, then pulled anyway.
She produced a small brass compass with a casing mottled by verdigris, its face etched with protective sigils. It looked old and purposeful, not decorative. The needle shivered even before Eva opened her palm fully, as if it sensed the air.
Quinn’s eyes narrowed .
“You brought a compass.”
“It isn’t for directions,” Eva said. “It’s for proximity.”
Quinn watched the needle. It swung hard towards the wall behind Latch, clicked against the glass, swung again, faster. The compass did not settle. It hunted.
Quinn held out her hand.
Eva clutched it closer.
“This isn’t evidence you get to bag and tag,” Eva said.
Quinn kept her hand extended, patient in the way she had learned to be with suspects who liked control.
“You want me to take you seriously,” Quinn said. “You hand me what you’ve got.”
Eva’s freckles stood out as her face paled.
“You don’t take anything seriously,” she said. “You take it away. You put it in a room with fluorescent lights and pretend it behaves.”
Quinn’s fingers closed gently around the compass anyway. Eva did not let go at first. Then she did, like it cost her.
The compass felt cold, too heavy for its size. The sigils scratched at Quinn’s palm. The needle snapped towards the poster above Latch’s shoulder, not the chalk, not the wound. The poster.
Quinn rose and stepped closer to the wall. She could smell the body now, not rot, not blood, but something briny and sharp, like seaweed left on metal.
The poster had been glued , then torn, then slapped back on with new paste. Layers of paper, soft with damp. Someone had handled it recently.
Quinn pinched a corner and pulled.
The paper came away with a wet sigh, revealing a rectangle of newer tile beneath, cleaner and whiter, its edges sealed with fresh grout. Not original. Not even close. Someone had bricked over a doorway and disguised it.
Eva exhaled, quick and thin.
“That wasn’t there last week,” she said.
Quinn looked over her shoulder.
“You were here last week.”
Eva’s lips pressed together.
“I come here when I need things the Museum won’t catalogue,” she said. “Information. Odd texts. Materials.”
Quinn turned back to the wall. The compass needle strained towards the sealed rectangle, trembling as if it wanted to leap out of its housing. Quinn ran her fingertips along the grout. It felt gritty, still curing. Whoever sealed it did so recently, and in a hurry.
She crouched again, closer to the floor this time. The clean half-moon scrape in the dust pointed to the base of the rectangle. Something heavy had slid along here, not dragged by a person, but guided . Like a slab being moved into place.
Quinn’s voice stayed flat.
“Latch didn’t die where he fell,” she said.
Eva blinked.
“He’s right there.”
Quinn pointed at the thin blood dribbles. They had run down and stopped too soon. Gravity did not do that unless something changed.
“He hung,” Quinn said. “Or he lay flat. The blood dried, then someone propped him here for show. They wanted him found in front of this wall.”
Eva swallowed. She tucked hair behind her left ear again, fast, as if she could tuck the fear away with it.
“So it’s a message,” she said.
Quinn nodded once.
“A warning,” she said. “Or a lock.”
Eva shifted closer, careful not to cross the tape. Her trainers made almost no sound on the tile, but Quinn saw the way people nearby watched them, eyes flicking away whenever Quinn looked back. A man with milky irises pretended to inspect jars of black honey. A woman with a face like cracked porcelain adjusted bracelets made of braided hair. Curiosity here carried a price.
Quinn took out a pair of nitrile gloves and snapped them on.
Eva’s eyebrows rose.
“You came prepared,” she said.
“I always come prepared,” Quinn replied.
Quinn slid her fingers into Latch’s coat pocket. She expected a knife, a vial, a roll-up, a phone. Her glove met paper instead. She pulled it free.
A British Museum requisition slip, folded into quarters, smudged with charcoal. The printed header looked ordinary until Quinn saw the department line, stamped in red: RESTRICTED ARCHIVES.
Eva leaned in, then flinched as if it burned.
“That’s mine,” she said.
Quinn unfolded it carefully . The request listed an accession number and a short description, handwritten in a neat, academic hand. It ended with a signature.
Eva Kowalski.
Quinn held it up between them.
“You put this in his pocket,” Quinn said.
Eva’s eyes flashed.
“I didn’t touch him.”
Quinn watched Eva’s pupils. No false dilation. No darting. Fear, yes. Anger. Not guilt.
“Then he took it,” Quinn said. “Or someone took it from you.”
Eva’s voice dropped.
“That accession number is for a tablet,” she said. “Old. Not Greek, not Latin. It’s… it’s a contract. Not legal, not like you mean. A binding text. Names matter in those.”
Quinn folded the slip again, slower this time.
“What name?” she asked.
Eva’s throat bobbed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never got it out. The request was flagged. Someone in-house blocked it.”
Quinn’s gaze hardened. A colleague at the Museum. A gatekeeper. Someone who knew what Eva hunted.
“And Latch?” Quinn asked. “He had access to things that connect.”
Eva nodded.
“He claimed he could get me a look at it,” she said. “Off-site. He wanted a favour. I said no. He smiled like he had already been paid.”
Quinn moved to Latch’s other pocket. Her glove brushed something hard and ridged.
A second bone token.
Not identical to Quinn’s. This one had been stained dark, almost black, and carved with a different symbol, a circle split by three lines. The edges looked chipped, as if someone had snapped part of it off and then filed it smooth again.
Eva stared at it.
“That’s a toll token,” she said. “Old stock. People use them for crossings. For doors.”
Quinn’s skin tightened under the gloves.
“Doors like the one behind that wall,” she said.
Eva’s mouth opened, then shut. She nodded once.
Quinn held the token closer to the sealed rectangle. The compass needle jerked so hard it struck the glass again with a sharp tick-tock sound, like it kept time for something no one could hear.
Quinn glanced down at the floor by the wall. The verdigris flecks had a pattern. Not random. A crescent, like the scrape mark, but fainter, as if brass had been pressed and then lifted.
“Something sat here,” Quinn said.
Eva’s voice came out small.
“A compass,” she said. “Like yours. Like mine.”
Quinn’s grip tightened on the Veil Compass. The protective sigils bit her palm through the glove.
“So the killer used one to find a rift,” Quinn said, “then bricked it up.”
Eva shook her head.
“You don’t brick up a rift,” she said. “Not properly. You can disguise it. You can anchor it. But if someone opened it once…”
Quinn looked at Latch’s bitten tongue again.
“They made him speak something,” Quinn said. “A name. A phrase. He resisted, so he bit down. They forced it anyway.”
Eva’s eyes shone behind her glasses.
“A contract spoken aloud is enforceable,” she said. “That’s why the tablet matters. Written terms. Spoken activation.”
Quinn straightened and scanned the crowd again. People had drawn closer, pretending not to. Their attention had weight . The cordon tape fluttered when a woman brushed past it, and no one apologised.
Quinn turned to Eva.
“You told someone about the tablet,” she said. “Who else knew the accession number.”
Eva’s fingers clenched on her satchel strap.
“My supervisor,” she said. “Two curators. Security, for the request. And one man who doesn’t work there but acts like he owns the place when he visits.”
Quinn waited.
Eva forced the words out.
“He calls himself Mr Sable.”
Quinn stored the name without showing it on her face. She had a list in her head, a private ledger of people who moved between institutions like mould between tiles.
A scrape cut through the Market noise.
Quinn turned back to the sealed wall.
The grout line at the bottom of the rectangle darkened, as if ink seeped through it. The compass needle spun and then slammed towards the floor, quivering so hard the whole casing trembled in Quinn’s hand.
Eva stepped back.
“That’s not residue,” she said. “That’s active.”
A low thud sounded behind the wall, not a human knock, but a pressure change . The tiles beneath Quinn’s boots vibrated , subtle at first, then stronger, as if a train approached without tracks.
Quinn raised her torch and aimed it at the rectangle.
The clean white tile surface dimpled inward, as if something pressed from the other side. Another thud. The dimple shifted, travelled upwards, like a hand sliding over fabric.
Eva’s breath hitched.
“It’s coming through,” she said.
Quinn reached for her radio out of habit, then remembered there was no signal down here, no proper channel, no control. She moved between Eva and the wall, blocking her line without asking permission. Her shoulders squared, her feet set.
“Back,” Quinn said.
A crack sounded, sharp as a snapped bone. The rectangle split along the grout line from bottom to top, and a thin seam of black opened in the wall, not darkness, but a void that swallowed the torch beam whole.
Something on the other side inhaled. The Market lights flickered , and every stall curtain in sight dropped at once like a coordinated execution.
Quinn heard the click-clack of boots on tile, fast and purposeful, closing in from both ends of the platform.
Then a voice spoke from inside the seam, wet and eager, using Latch’s name like it tasted it.
“Token,” it said. “Debt.”