AI She wrenched the tape aside with a practiced forearm and stepped down into the hollow where the market breathed its old, damp breath. The air hit her like a hand on the throat—damp, metallic, undercut by something floral and wrong. Someone had emptied a spice jar here and left the scent to rot.
"Move back," she said.
Nobody moved. They clustered at the perimeter like moths. Flashing lights cast hard, flat faces. A uniform officer stood guard, pale beneath the film of dust. The body lay half inside a collapsed stall, limbs folded wrong, mouth open to a silence that had teeth in it.
Detective Harlow Quinn crouched, felt the familiar pull of the scene. Leather watch snug against her wrist, jaw unyielding. She did not kneel. She crouched with military precision: one knee up, one hand on cement, the other reaching.
The man's fingers clawed at something small, copper-bright against cracked skin. A compass, small brass, its casing mottled with verdigris. Someone had propped the lid open; the needle spun, slow and indecisive, then jerked violently and fixed itself toward the far wall where service tunnels yawned, sealed by wrought iron and cold mortar.
"Where'd you find him?" a voice asked .
"By the Northgate stall," said PC Leila Marsh. "Vendors said someone shouted. Then...this." Her hands mimed something too big for language.
Jonah Pryce squinted at the compass, then at the body. He kept his voice light, the way men use brightness to deflect the dark. "Looks like a mugging escalated. Stab wound in the chest. Pocket picked, valuables lost. And the kid held on to this like it was his last coin."
Eva Kowalski was at Jonah's shoulder, curly red hair a flare in the lamplight, round glasses catching reflections of camera flashes. She smelled of old paper and lemon polish. Her satchel sagged with weight ; she had pulled her hand free of it and tucked hair behind her left ear, a habit Harlow had noticed in worse moments than this one. Eva's green eyes slid over the sigils scratched into the compass face.
"That's not a travel compass," Eva said. "That's a Veil Compass."
Jonah's mouth tightened. "That's a fancy name for a trinket. Camden's full of tourists selling novelty items."
"It came from the Veil Market," Eva said. "You know the one. Abandoned Tube station beneath Camden. Bone token to enter. It moves every full moon. The casing has a particular patina when it's by a Shade artisan."
Harlow let the last clause hang. Shade artisan. Evocative. Dangerous. Harlow had heard the rumours in darker precincts, the cases that never reached paperwork. She checked the needle again. It trembled, then settled, pointing with a disdainful certainty at the sealed service arch.
No blood ran from the wound. The stab puncture blotted the fabric but had not bled. The man's lips were faintly blue, not the purple of a drowned man but the drained blue of oxygen gone wrong . There was no mark of restraint, no obvious defensive wounds, except for the dirt under his nails. Someone had torn at something before they went quiet.
"Blood pattern's odd," Harlow said. "He wasn't standing when it happened."
"Collapsed, then stabbed," Jonah said. "Someone got to him after."
"No," Harlow said. She ran a gloved finger along the jawline, felt the stiff muscle. The jaw was locked like a fist. "He gripped this compass until his fingernail beds cracked. That doesn't happen after death. He was alive and reaching."
Eva leaned in close, her breath warm in Harlow's ear. "The Veil Compass points toward the nearest rift. If the needle finds a portal, someone could have used it. Entrance costs a bone token. Maybe the token's in his pocket."
Harlow checked pockets. Wallet with a pay card, a receipt for a late bus, a folded photograph—nothing that bit. She unfastened the man's jacket, ran fingertips along the inner lining. A scrap of cloth, a smear of something powdery, pale as ash.
"Residue," Jonah said. "Looks like talc. Could be heroin filler."
"Matches a saccharum used in certain rituals," Eva said. "Not exactly—" Her voice ran against the crowd. "—unless someone is using a cover story."
People in police uniforms took to jargon the way bad actors took to a role. Jonah waved someone in. "Get the chemists down. Sweep for narcotics."
Harlow's eyes left the body and found the perimeter. The market stalls had collapsed into each other, wires like entrails, paper bunting dulled by dust. Drawers lay open; goods had been rifled , but not taken selectively. A chessboard lay intact on one stall. A set of enamel cups clinked when a uniform trod past. Nothing suggested a thorough robbery. The radio hissed.
"There's a bone token," Eva said suddenly . She drew a bone, small and smoothed, out of her satchel. The officers around them turned; Jonah's smile died.
Harlow looked at the token, then at the man's hand. The bone sat in Eva's palm like a verdict. It had a notch carved into its side, worn from handling. It smelled faintly of old earth.
"Where'd you get that?" Jonah asked.
"From the vendor Lydia," Eva said. "She runs the antiquities stall on Euston. She sells old beads and keeps weird things in jars. She said someone pawned it this morning. Said the boy had been looking for something. He had plate marks on his fingers like he'd been working a lathe."
Harlow noticed a smear of bronze beneath the man's nails when Eva moved the hand with gentle fingers, the way a medic moves a fevered limb. Bronze dust, synthetic sweat. Toolwork. Someone who crafted, not someone who stole.
"Metalwork," Harlow said. "Not a drug courier. A craftsman."
"Or a Shade's apprentice," Eva whispered.
"Save the fantasy," Jonah said. He looked at Harlow, the angle of his eyebrows a question. "We run a narrative here. Knife, robbery, murder. We don't—"
Harlow held up a hand. "What about footprints?" she asked.
They moved to the floor. Dust lay thick, interrupted by tracks: many, varied, overlapping. Trainers, work boots, a child's scuff. The lines were new, not weathered. A set of fine-soled shoes had pressed a neat circle, like a stamp. It was the circle of a pressed sigil.
"Fresh," Harlow said. "Someone cleaned through here recently. Like they were setting something up and then left quick."
Jonah knelt and took a photograph. "Foot traffic consistent with a market. People drift. No sign of a struggle beyond the victim here."
Harlow traced the circle with her eyes. The sigil had been pressed into the dust, not scrawled, clean edges. Whoever had made it had used a stamp or a mould. That required preparation. That argued against a spur-of-the-moment mugging.
She remembered Morris. The little details he'd noticed—the angle of a footprint, a scuff on a boot, the taste of an interrogation left like iron on the back of the tongue. He'd said facts mattered when nothing else did.
"Jonah," she said. "You see that, right? That circle isn't random."
He shrugged. "Looks like someone left their signature."
"The signature on market stalls says 'open for business'," Eva said.
Harlow crouched and examined the sigil closer. Etched within the circle were slashes, like letters misaligned. Her fingers brushed dead dust and unearthed a hair, fine and grey. Not human. Too stiff, hairlike but tubular.
"Shade hair," Eva said, voice small .
Harlow did not flinch at the word now. She had shelved superstition before—until Bristol's case, until Morris. But superstition left traces. It left a vocabulary of footprints, smudges, small betrayals. She had learned to read that lexicon . This hair did not belong in Camden's mundane inventory.
"This is going to the lab," Jonah said. "We log every part."
"Find out who was selling bone tokens," Harlow said. "Check Lydia's list. See if anyone reported a missing token."
Jonah made notes. Eva tucked the bone token back in her satchel, fingers lingering on the worn notch. She slid a hand into the satchel and brought out another object, wrapped in cloth: the edge of a compass lid, a tiny shard. Harlow's heart clipped. A compass lid matched the one in the dead man's hand. The shard had been broken clean, like a shell.
"Maybe two compasses?" Jonah said.
"Or one broken and passed," Eva said. "Someone used it to find a rift and then left part behind."
Harlow looked back at the needle. It had begun to wobble again, then spun hard toward the sealed arch. She rose to her feet. On impulse she stepped to the ironwork and pressed an ear to the cold. The wheel of the tunnel beyond hummed, a faint living thrum as if something turned on the other side.
"What do you hear?" Jonah asked.
"Wind," Harlow said. "Or the wrong kind of air. Like the smell of lavender through a radiator." She ran a gloved finger along the mortar. There it was—abrasion, unreadable script pressed into the seam. The script was not English. Not Latin. Slanted letters that melted in the light. She knew the alphabet from case files that had no conclusion.
"We're not letting anyone through there," Jonah said.
"No," Harlow agreed, then added, "Seal this arch. Close off the other service points. Get full coverage. Nobody goes in without me."
The radio squawked a Directive. The crowd at the edge thickened; someone climbed down to peer. Harlow saw movement beyond the iron arch, like a ripple in fabric. A smell, metallic and sweet, bled out. Copper. Blood.
"Back away," Harlow ordered.
A uniformed constable attempted a step. The thrum on the other side rose like a heartbeat under the floorboards. The compass in the dead man's hand twitched, then hit the seam of the arch and kept pointing as if it had anchored to something on the other side of the wall.
Jonah's voice sharpened. "You want to say what this is, Quinn? Because right now this is a man with a knife wound and people with conspiracy theories."
Harlow did not answer Jonah with words. She clicked the watch on her wrist twice, a nervous smallness like a drumbeat in her fingers. She hadn't meant to wind it tonight. She had woken and touched it without thought and found the mechanism resisted. Morris had given her that watch . It wound clean. This one pulled with a catch she did not like.
"Detective," Eva said. "If you follow that compass, you'll find the Veil Market. It goes where the rifts smell richest. It's how Shade artisans move their wares."
"And we'll find smugglers," Jonah said. "Not ghosts."
Harlow looked at the needle, the way it held steady despite the crowd, despite the iron. The compass did not lie. It had been crafted to find rifts, to point toward places where walls had softened. Someone had been carrying it for a reason. Someone had been looking for a door.
"Call it in," Harlow said softly . "For the record: possible supernatural nexus. Keep it in the notes. But more than that—no one goes home until we know what that boy was after."
She felt the shape of the case rearrange itself in her hands. Where other detectives saw a mugging, she saw a map. Where Jonah saw robbery, she saw the footprints and the stamp, the bronze under the nails, the bone token in Eva's palm. Each detail locked into a latch, and somewhere behind that sealed arch a mechanism slid into place.
"Corridor's sealed," Jonah said. He called a number into his radio. "Barrier team on the way. Lab unit too."
"Get Lydia," Harlow said. "And every vendor who deals in relics. Pull street CCTV from past eight hours. Check pawn records. And pull the Thames river reports. If someone smuggled a token through there before, someone paid for their silence ."
"Do you believe in the Veil Market?" Jonah asked, quieter now.
Harlow did not like to talk about belief. She spoke in facts. "I believe in evidence," she said. "And in patterns. Morris taught me patterns. Morris is the reason I don't let stories sit. If this compass led him to where he couldn't come back from, I want to know what led him. I want to know who else is losing people."
Jonah laughed then, sharp and empty. "You want ghosts on paper."
"Go make them tangible ," Harlow said. "Find me the token's provenance."
Footsteps echoed from the service arch, measured steps like someone dragging a weight . Everyone stiffened. The humming rose to a keening, a whale song pitched wrong. Dust lifted from the seam and traced the air like static. The needle slammed hard against the compass casing and then, with a sound like a throat clearing, spun so violently it knocked the lid clean closed.
The lid snapped, and the compass fell from the dead man's fingers and clattered on the concrete. It bounced toward the iron arch and came to rest with its face down. For a moment everyone held their breath.
Then the compass turned over.
The needle pointed, not at the arch, but at Jonah .
He took a step back, eyes wide. "That's...that's impossible."
Harlow's mouth was a line. She bent, picked up the compass, and turned it so the needle faced her.
It pointed out through the crowd, past the cameras, past Eva, and in the wet, reflected light the needle's shadow stretched long and thin and pointed toward a black seam in the wall where mortar had been rubbed clean in a careful, circular pattern. The seam vibrated one last time and then, without warning, the iron grate bowed inward as if pressed from the inside.
A voice, low and wet like rain in an old grave , said something in a language nobody in that station wanted on their tongue.
"Everyone back," Harlow snapped.
She felt the room tilt. The cost of curiosity had always been steep. Tonight it looked like a bill had come due . Footsteps from within the arch, the scrape of something heavy on stone, and a hand, pale and long-fingered, eased through the opening and touched the dust with nails that gleamed like the compass's brass.
The market had shifted to this place for a reason.
The hand recoiled, then another followed, then a face that was not a human face but which had all the polite assembly of one—eyes like dull coins, a mouth that did not know how to smile. It tipped its head at Harlow, the tiniest of acknowledgements, and reached forward.
Harlow drew her service baton. She did not fumble. She moved with the certainty of someone who had stood in worse places. Around her, a chorus of breaths held. The air tasted of iron.
She heard Jonah swear under his breath and Eva make a sound that might have been a name or a prayer. The hand curled around a discarded stall sign and flung it aside like paper.
"Quinn," Jonah whispered, as if the name alone could root her .
Harlow tightened her jaw and stepped forward. The compass in her hand pointed unerringly at the thing that had come through, then at the arch, then at the darkness beyond. Her watch clicked against the concrete. She did not know how the clock and the compass and the dead man and Morris fit together. She only knew there were pieces on the floor and people in the way of them.
The creature moved, quick enough to tear the moment in two. Jonah lunged. Eva flung the bone token into the arch as if she could wedge the seam shut with its small, worn body.
The token struck something with a noise like a bell and skittered into the dark. The creature turned, a wet, gliding motion, and from beyond the arch came the sound of many things uncoiling, like gears finding life.
Harlow braced. She felt the pattern solidify, the old, stubborn itch of a case resolving into purpose and threat. The needle of the compass sang against her palm.
"Shoot it if it advances," she said.
"You're ordering me to shoot a—" Jonah began.
"Do it," she said. Her voice left no room for argument.
He brought the baton up instead, then lowered it. The creature smiled as if understanding the joke, and the air around the arch shivered .
Something tore at the metal of the gate from the far side, the sound like fabric being shredded , and the first of the market's voices laughed inside the darkness.