AI The platform smelled of rust and old rain. Fluorescent strips thinned to sickly amber light, and the vaulted ceiling kept swallowing sound until even the footsteps sounded cautious. Harlow Quinn pulled her collar up against the draft and stepped past the cordon tape, her watch catching the light and throwing a thin line across the tiles. She moved with the economy of someone who had practised every step a hundred times. Eyes measured , jaw set. She had grown used to stations with clocks and schedules; this one owed neither.
A cluster of bodies surrounded the make-shift stall: market traders with enamel bowls and ink-stained fingers argued in low voices; police officers leaned on railings, tired; a coronial tech knelt at the centre where the body lay, blue gloves silent. The stall’s canopy sagged like a wet sheet. Candles on a nearby altar buckled toward extinguishing. Strings of odd trinkets — bone charms, pressed feathers, a rusted horseshoe — hooked at the air.
Eva Kowalski was already there, glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose. She had tucked a curl behind her left ear twice by the time Quinn reached her. Her satchel sat open on a crate, several ancient texts peeking like nervous fingers. She looked smaller in that clutter, like a bright thing dropped into the dark.
"You got a warrant for this kind of mess?" Harlow asked.
"You always start with paperwork," Eva said. She crouched and didn't take her eyes off the body. "It's wrong, Harlow. The pattern — it's not like a normal attack."
Harlow didn't stand to argue. She crossed to the body, boots clacking on tile, and crouched so she could see better without anyone noticing. The corpse was a woman in a charcoal coat, collapsed against a metal post as if she'd tried to steady herself and failed. Her coat sleeves were neat. Her hair lay swept back, tidy. Blood had dried in a thin crescent beneath her head, but the pooling didn't match the angle of collapse. The skin around her mouth held a dusting of fine ash.
"Time of death?" Harlow asked.
"Half an hour before we found her," the coronial tech answered, voice flat . "Heart stopped, no blunt force trauma. No defensive wounds. Fingerprints wiped off the stall. No bone token anywhere on scene."
"Entry requirement?" Harlow asked, looking up at the canopy and the crooked stall signs. "The Veil Market doesn't open without one."
"It's an underground market, Harlow. People get in. People get out. Sometimes not the way you'd expect." Eva's voice hardened into information. She reached into her satchel, as if the act would make words safer, and pulled out a small brass object. The Compass gleamed dull under the station light, verdigris shading its edges. Its face marked with sigils like tiny, patient knives. The needle pointed away from the corpse, quivering between two tiles where the grout looked oddly disturbed.
Harlow took the Compass. The brass was warm from someone's palm. The needle trembled and held — not toward the body. Not toward any open tunnel. It pointed into the wall.
"Who left this here?" Harlow asked.
"Trader called it in," said a constable from the cluster. "Found it on a barrel, thought it was a prop."
The Compass had been crafted by a Shade artisan, Eva had explained at the lab last week when she'd found Quinn's disbelief amusing. It was supposed to hunt rifts. Quinn turned the Compass in her hand. The casing had been buffed on one side in a wide, ragged arc. A faint smear of something darker than the brass hid in a notch. It looked like a thumbprint that someone had tried to remove.
"Why would a rift compass point at a wall?" Eva asked. She leaned closer, voice small as if the word itself might shatter the air. "Rifts don't open into brick."
Harlow traced the needle with a fingertip, careful not to touch the sigils. She crouched lower and kept her eye on the tile. The grout between two slabs had been freshly replaced. It had not the fine crazing of old adhesive; it still held the smell of solvent. There were hairline cracks like spider threads running from the seam into the tile. The seam itself looked hollow.
"Someone dug," Harlow observed. Her voice didn't soften; items rattled when she spoke. "Not with a trowel. Something scraped from inside."
"Or something pushed out." Eva's fingers hovered over the Compass as if she feared its intent. "Harrow, this — this is the signature of displacement. A rift sloughs things off the edge. It's precise."
"Precise and messy." Harlow stood, swivelled her shoulders, and began to walk the perimeter. Police tape kept back people who were still whispering about bones and bargains. The trader who'd called it in kept his hat in both hands, mouth moving with the rhythm of someone repeating a prayer. Quinn's boots followed a trail that shouldn't have been there: scuff marks in a clean arc leading away from the stall, over tiles that were otherwise free of prints. The scuffs had a pattern. Repeated pressure at equal intervals. Not a frantic drag. Deliberate.
"Those don't match a normal carry," Quinn said. "Looks like something slid along."
The coronial tech zipped a bag, then stopped and squinted at Quinn. "You think she was moved?"
"Not moved," Harlow corrected. "Removed."
Eva's hand shot to her mouth. "Removed?"
"Blood pattern doesn't match a drop. It looks like someone sprayed less. The mouth residue — ash — isn't from burning. It's residue from a seal. If you push through a weak seam, whatever keeps the pocket closed flakes out."
Someone near the altar whispered, "That sounds wrong."
"Wrong doesn't help," Harlow said. She paced back toward the Compass. "The Compass points away from the body. The seam of the tile is fresh. There's no bone token. Whoever found the body did not come in like an honest customer."
Eva shook her head. "No. You're making it sound human, Harlow. The Veil Market doesn't need human hands to move things."
Harlow hooked an elbow on the post and pressed her forehead to the cool metal for a heartbeat. The market's light made everything look like stage props. She had been the kind of detective who trusted dust and pattern. For eighteen years she had let the little discrepancies do the work of a confession. Her fingers closed around the Compass again, and she noticed the way the needle caught in a notch when she turned it slowly . It was not smooth. Some gear had been jammed . Someone had forced it.
"If someone wanted to hide how something left," Harlow said quietly, "they could jam a device pointing back at where they wanted people to look ."
Eva straightened, face white. "You think they staged a scene to pretend the removal was a death."
"I don't think," Harlow said. "I know. Look at the seam. Look at the tile cracks. They compressed the surface outward. That's the handprint of expansion — something pushed from below to above. That doesn't happen with a knife. That happens with a pocket opening."
"Like a rift," Eva whispered.
"Like a rift someone opened and closed on purpose," Harlow said. "Someone who understood how to make it look like a death on the surface. Who could control where the leak happened and what bits got left behind. Someone who wanted the body here, visible, but not here."
"You mean the body's gone," Eva said.
"It's not supposed to be gone," Harlow said. "Not in a place like this. If it left, they meant for it to be taken, not just dumped. The people who run these stalls—if they were honest about attendance—they'd have records. A bone token in and none out. We have no token, which means the person got in without paying, or carried one out without telling anyone, or never left at all."
A pause gathered around them like a shadow. The trader who had called them in edged closer, ears sharp. "We move every full moon," he said. "We don't stay. We know who's in who isn't."
Harlow watched him. The man had old hands. There was a tiny symbol tattooed on his wrist, in the blind edge where a cuff would hide it. A mark of a clique she knew by reputation: a gang who specialised in smuggling enchanted goods and exploiting the Market's rules. She had been following them for months. They trafficked in rifts like any other commodity — a ticket, a smuggled door.
"Your people," she said, not waiting .
The trader blinked. "We don't traffic. We trade."
"Some of you did tonight," Harlow said. "Someone here triggered a pocket for removal. It needed a guide. The Compass got dropped. It was set to lie."
Eva swallowed. "So someone used the Compass to point away from the real doorway so we would look the wrong way."
Harlow pressed her thumb to the Compass' face and felt the tiny lips of the sigils. One had been sanded down, dull as if to disable a ward. Someone had tried to blind it. "If I had to bet," Harlow said, "they used the Compass to misdirect the people who'd arrive after. Let them find the body. Let them think they'd missed the angle. Look there — the grout pattern. Whoever closed that seam wanted it to look like the wall. They left enough evidence to make us believe a death occurred, but they left a trail they expected only someone looking for a regular exit would see."
"But the rift," Eva said. "If a rift opened, there'd be residue. We'd see the burn of pocket air. There'd be a smell."
Quinn kneeled again and touched the tile seam with a gloved finger. The tile shivered not with cold but with a memory of something pulled through . "There was a smell," she said. "Acetone and iron. Somebody used solvent to hide mechanical work. If you'd watch a seam day after day, you'd feel the way the air moves. People don't think about movement of air in a market. But someone who trades portals thinks in drafts."
The coronial tech straightened, eyes narrowed . "So it's staged to look like a thing only a rift could do, but isn't?"
"Either staged, or done by someone who wanted to make it look like they'd been here," Harlow said. "There are two ways for a rift to leave a signature: a careless rift-maker, or a rift-maker who wanted a distraction. The jammer on the Compass? That's deliberate."
Eva's hand came down on the satchel like a clamp. "And the ash?"
"Seal residue." Harlow turned the body gently , careful of the evidence bags the tech had already placed and halved. "They didn't want the heart's grit. They wanted the mouth sealed so it couldn't scream when the seam opened. It didn't need to be lethal. The heart stopped because the body was dragged into a place where the environment didn't support life."
"Dragged through a pocket," Eva breathed. "Taken somewhere else."
"Taken somewhere else," Harlow said. She set the Compass on the tile and watched the needle twitch toward the seam and then jerk back as if to point at her. "And whoever did it wanted us to think the removal was a death. Someone is selling rifts as a service."
Eva's breath hitched and then steadied. She pushed her glasses up and reached for the Compass without thinking. "We can trace the metal."
"It won't trace the way you expect." Harlow's voice narrowed to a line. "The Shade artisan who made this? They leave private signatures — marks only other Shades read. Whoever tampered with it knew how to hide their hand."
There were murmurs like falling rain. A constable moved to cuff a trader who protested too loudly, but Harlow raised a hand and the constable stopped, hands hovering like a question.
"Don't touch anything else," Harlow ordered. There's no 'said.' The stall's canopy rustled as if agreeing.
Eva tucked another curl behind her left ear, fingers trembling only a little. "So the clique. They had the skill. They had the compass. They had the buyer."
"Or they were the buyer," Harlow said. She crouched, place familiar , and drew a long breath under the vaulted station. "This doesn't end on a slab of tile. This starts there. Whoever closed that seam did it to control the story. They meant for only one kind of reader to find the scene, and for a different reader to know where the body went."
"Which means..." Eva started.
"Which means the missing didn't die here," Harlow said. "They just weren't supposed to be found here. They were supposed to be moved. Someone wanted them visible long enough for us to catalogue them and then moved them to a buyer who knew how to keep a pocket."
Eva's eyes filled with light. "We were meant to be fooled."
"And we almost were," Harlow said. She rose, the movement precise as a salute. She took the Compass, thumb on the sanded sigil, breath on the brass. "Whoever did this wanted the wrong kind of proof. They counted on the crowd's normality. They counted on us looking for ordinary violence."
Eva reached for her satchel, digging for the notes she'd already scribbled. "I can cross-check trader movements with the Market's memory. People always forget the bones they traded, but the ledger—"
"Do it," Harlow said. "Find the traders who were at this stall a week ago. Find who bought bulk seals. Find anyone with fresh solvent. Find the clique marks. Check for a bone token that vanished from the registry."
She could feel the station listening. The Compass lay in her palm like a small, impatient animal. Quinn had followed patterns for eighteen years. She missed little things: the way a knot wore on rope, the way mortar cracked under pressure, the angle of a scuff. Those things had led her once to a partner's body in a place that didn't exist on the map. She had not yet let that discovery make her soft. It had only made her precise.
"Don't tell them the Compass lies," she said, voice low . "Let them think the rift took them. Let them think this was magic. We follow the paper trail. We find the buyer."
Eva's fingers tightened, an intake that tasted like resolve . "You'll need—"
"I'll need evidence that this was staged," Harlow cut in. "Start with the grout, then the solvent. Match the paste to suppliers. Look for any trader with new grit under their fingernails. We'll not mention rifts in official statements. We won't let the Market's rules be a shield."
A trader spat on the tile and said something about gods. Harlow didn't ask him to stop. She listened to the scrape of a broom, the soft clink of coins, and the distant clatter of someone dismantling a stall with the economy of practiced theft. The Compass pulsed in her hand. It pointed at a place it shouldn't point, and she felt the wrongness resettle into something with a name.
"Keep the scene sealed," she ordered. "Bring me the ledger. Bring me every finger who touched that Compass before us. I want the slot the seam came from opened properly, with forensics in charge. No one moves anything until I say."
Eva nodded and moved like someone filling an order. "I'll find the traders. I'll cross-match the ledger with the market manifest. And the Shade mark?"
"Find Shade channels," Harlow said. "Find out who paid for handicraft that looks like this. Whoever bought the Compass will be very careful. They won't be local. They never are."
Eva looked down at the body, then at the Compass on the tile, and then up at Quinn. "Do you think it's the clique?"
"Yes," Harlow said. "Because they don't just steal goods. They use people's knowledge to traffic in doors." She set her jaw. "They sold a way to move the living away from us."
She let the sentence hang like a drawn breath and stared at the tile seam until the needle in the Compass leant toward it as if in recognition. The station held its breath with her.