Run: 2026-02-19-01KHT0RE2GB6CW54PBVTCR8AVZ

Glass shattered under my boot as the stairwell gave way behind us, a dry crack that echoed like a gunshot in the hollow underworld. I hit the platform with a half-step and kept moving, breath catching in my throat as the air tasted of rust and wet wool. The Veil Market wasn’t supposed to be here tonight. It never was. Not in daylight, not in a tunnel that stank of damp concrete and old blood rushing up from the rails. But the sign—a crooked neon flicker—was there, and with it the faint, unnerving whisper of old ritual coming alive in a place that should have been nothing but ruin. The platform had a heart now, though, beating with lantern lights and the soft hiss of unseen stalls. A crowd of crates and tarps formed a makeshift maze, and between them stood a line of figures that belonged as much to a memory as to this century. Vendors peddled things that should not be legal to touch, let alone own: charms that promised silence, powders that promised forgetfulness, and a bone token resting on a velvet cloth as if it belonged to a queen. The token demanded to be noticed, as if it carried some stubborn, bone-white memory of what had happened here. “Quinn,” Mara Singh said, her voice level and natural as a blade drawn clean from its sheath. She kept pace beside me, a steady drum in my ear as we threaded through the stalls. Her coat brushed a veil of dust from a crate that might have held anything—could have held a snuffed candle or a dead thing, or both. Mara’s eyes scanned every corner with that practiced, unshowy intensity that said she’d seen worse and would see worse again. A body lay slumped against a stall’s edge, half hidden by a torn awning that flapped like a tired eyelid in a draft. A man, middle-aged, pallid where the light touched him, with a neat cut on the temple and a palm pressed tight around a small object. The bone token. It glinted ivory under the flicker of the Market’s lanterns, a tiny, stubborn beacon in a place designed to mislead. “Not a fight,” Mara murmured, crouching to inspect the victim’s hands. “No struggle, no defensive wounds. It’s as if he walked in and forgot to leave.” Quinn stepping closer, her own eyes narrowing as she took in the seal on the man’s hat and the way the thread of his coat had been snagged on a nail. The crime, if one could call it that, looked almost ceremonial—a staged death designed to send a message as much as to end a life. The clank of the door behind us suggested someone had slipped through a secondary entrance, or perhaps someone had merely chosen that moment to enter the Market’s strange theatre. A woman with curly red hair and round glasses—Eva Kowalski—slid into view, her satchel slung across her chest, her steps soundless despite the grit underfoot. Eva had the look of someone who could pick a lock with a paragraph and a prayer. “Relax,” Eva said softly, though her eyes gave away her nerves. “I heard you were here, Harlow. I don’t intend to be an obstacle, not now. But there are things in here that laugh at your police tape.” Quinn’s breath did not fog, but it moved the air in a way that suggested she was listening to something the others could not hear. She turned to Eva with that quiet authority that demanded attention, the way a conductor might lift a baton just before the orchestra began to tremble. “Tell me what you know, Kowalski,” Quinn said. “We’re not here for stories tonight. We’re here for a mismatch that should have stayed buried.” Eva’s lips curved into a brief, almost shy smile. “The bone token is the hook,” she began, glancing at the ivory circle that lay in the victim’s grasp. “It’s not just a key to the Veil Market’s doors. It’s a talisman in a rite I’ve read about in restricted notes, a rite that invites what you fear most to step into the light. Bone as totem, token as invitation.” The words felt heavy in the air, like dust settling on a window pane. Mara’s eyes flicked toward the token, then away, as if the token’s quiet prompt carried its own kind of danger. “The bone token takes you in,” Mara said, voice almost careful. “It doesn’t keep you safe. It doesn’t keep you out. It makes you part of whatever this Market wants you to be.” Quinn knelt, her left hand hovering near the victim’s hand, as if she could coax the passenger out of the man's grip. The scent of damp wool and old leather rose from the coat. She studied the palm and found a tiny smear of something dark, something that wasn’t quite blood, spread along the lifeline as if someone had pressed something into the skin and then curled away. “Tell me we aren’t looking at a simple drug overdose,” Quinn said and her voice carried a note of deliberate weariness—the kind of weariness that keeps a person from blurring truth into a dream. Eva stepped closer, her breath catching as she traced a line from the victim’s temple to the edge of the token. “There’s a sigil carved onto the back of that token,” she said. “A set of lines, not random, arranged to trap a trace of energy. It’s a map, Harlow. A map to a place, not a person.” Quinn looked at Eva with a quick tilt of her head. The two had a long history, and it showed in the way their eyes found each other across a room. Eva spoke with the calm assurance of someone who had spent years reading between the lines of ancient script, while Quinn spoke with the blunt practicality of someone who had learned to survive a dozen circumstances most people would call superstition. “Show me,” Quinn said. Eva obliged with a careful, almost gentle motion. She unfastened a small notebook from her satchel and opened it to a page where a diagram—two circles connected by a line with small marks along its edge—was drawn in careful ink. The ink, Eva explained, was not ink at all but a powder mixed with resin, an ancient method used to carry a sigil’s memory. “These are the patterns we see in the old rites. If you align the token with this—” She tapped the diagram with a gloved finger, the gesture precise as a surgeon’s. “—you can pull a trace of energy, a whisper of something not entirely human.” Quinn’s jaw tightened. “And you think the Market is a cover for a ritual space?” “Or a portal,” Eva replied, her voice dropping as if sharing something between conspirators. “Rituals require space. They require an audience. The Veil Market is precisely that: a stage, and a doorway.” Mara’s gaze flicked to the far end of the tunnel where a door stood slightly ajar, its edge catching the light in a way that looked almost intentional. “If there’s a doorway, it’s not leading to a room filled with your favourite antiques. It’s leading somewhere else entirely.” The Market’s lights hummed, a low neon chorus, and the air tasted of copper and old metal. A stall keeper—young, with a tattoo of a crown on his wrist—slid forward, as if drawn by the energy that the token had already released. He spoke with a low accent, a cadence that sounded like it belonged to a different, older London. “Is this the part where you tell me there’s a price for entering that bone token?” he asked, his eyes skimming over us as if we were not people but a set of numbers in a ledger. Quinn did not blink. “Tell me what you know about the token,” she said, the words clipped and precise, every syllable weighed. The stall keeper shrugged, the motion smooth and practiced. “The token? It’s not mine to tell. It belongs to the Market, to the stream of visitors who come to bargain for what’s not allowed outside. Tonight, it’s a guest for the wrong table.” A rattle came from the tunnel’s throat, a sound that could have been a chair, a crate, or a creature. The ground trembled slightly, a tremor not from an earthquake but from something that shifted just beyond ordinary sight. The Veil Compass, tucked into Quinn’s coat pocket, warmed against her chest as if it longed to be used. The needle wasn’t fixed; it moved, perhaps instinctively, toward something unseen. “Your compass,” Mara observed, with a lift of her eyebrows. “It’s spinning, Harlow. It wants something.” Quinn did not answer immediately. She reached for the Veil Compass with measured care and drew it from her pocket. The brass casing gleamed, a small sun in a room full of lanterns and shadow. The face’s sigils looked as though they were carved into something ancient and protective, a chorus of warding that had no business being on a pocket tool in a modern day. The needle jerked once, then settled, pointing toward a narrow corridor lined with crates and a sheet of black velvet that dragged along the ground like a sob. “The rift isn’t in the air,” Quinn said, standing up, the compass still in her hand. “It’s in the space between things—the Market’s edge and the world we call ours. The token and the sigil are lures. They bring energy, yes, but they also pull attention away from something else.” Eva’s eyes widened slightly, that spark of discovery lighting them for a heartbeat. “Which is?” she asked, though she didn’t push for an answer as if she already glimpsed it and merely waited for Quinn to name it. “The truth is never obvious when someone wants you to see a version of it,” Quinn replied, her tone almost soft. “But something isn’t matching. The time of death, the lack of struggle, the placement of the body, the token’s position—nothing aligns with a single method. Someone wanted us to see a ritual. They wanted the Market to think it was a rite, not a murder.” Mara’s lips pressed together in a line, but she did not argue. She moved toward a cluster of tables where a pair of security guards kept watch over what looked like little more than dust and old velvet. The ground’s tremor shifted into a pulse, a rhythm that seemed to originate from the corridor the compass pointed toward. “Let’s split up for a moment,” Mara suggested, her voice still even. “Two teams. If this is a ritual, someone may still be in the shadows, waiting to see if we swallow the bait.” Quinn nodded, though the nod looked more like a controlled measurement than agreement. “You take the corridor. Eva, stay with me. We’ll test the Market’s edge for a real portal.” The two teams moved with that quiet, practiced efficiency that seems to belong to people who’ve learned to move through danger without drawing attention. Quinn led Eva toward the velvet curtain, the token’s glow faintly illuminating their path. The corridor behind the stall opened into a narrow, rickety stairwell, the kind that led down into an unseen lower level. A metal ladder coughed as if protesting every footstep. The moment they stepped beneath the curtain, the air changed. It was cooler, denser, a weight that pressed on the chest in a way that suggested the room was listening to them more closely than any crowd of Market-goers could ever pretend to. The velvet orbiting the lanterns above them threw their shadows long and thin, like knives sliding along concrete. Quinn’s voice, when she spoke, was a whisper that sounded almost intimate. “Close your eyes for a second.” Eva’s breath hitched, but she obeyed. The sense of being watched intensified, the kind of pressure that made the skin prickle and the scalp feel as if someone had drawn tiny fractals across it. When she opened her eyes again, the corridor’s end seemed to pull away, as if the space itself wanted to lose them. “What are you doing, Harlow?” Eva asked softly. “Testing the boundary,” Quinn replied. She slipped a gloved finger along the wall, tracing a seam where the plaster met the brick. A faint energy hummed under her touch, like a string vibrating just before a note is plucked. The Veil Compass in her other hand ticked in quick, staccato thumps, each beat landing in the air as if it expected something to appear. A sigh—soft, not human—wafted from the darkness beyond the corridor. A shadow moved with the grace of something trained to slip through crowds and not be noticed. It paused, listening to them, and then continued deeper into the tunnel. “Who’s there?” Eva called, her voice steadier than she felt. The answer came not in words but in a sudden glimmer along the edge of the passage—the soft flash of a blade, the glint of metal that never belonged to this place. The shadow paused again, and then a figure stepped into the glow of a hanging lantern, a silhouette both human and not. The figure wore a cloak the colour of rusted iron, the hood shadowing their face. Their mouth moved, but the words were swallowed by distance before they could reach the ear. The cricket-click of a distant signal seemed to answer, a reminder that someone, somewhere, kept the Market’s theatre in check. Quinn stepped forward, the Veil Compass settling to a steady glow, the needle now pointing directly at the cloaked figure. She spoke, her voice cutting through the hush that had fallen between them, crisp and unyielding. “Stop right there. This isn’t your stage, not tonight.” The cloaked figure raised a gloved hand and, with a swift movement, knocked something from the cloak—a small cube that clicked when it touched the ground. The sound was not loud but intimate, like a whispered warning. The cube cracked open to reveal a shard of glass that reflected the lantern light in a way that made Quinn’s own face look tormented in miniaturised form. The shadow lunged, and the corridor erupted into motion. Eva reacted with a quick, precise step, placing herself between Quinn and the assailant, her satchel catching the glow of a second lantern and throwing off a mosaic of reflections that blinded the attacker momentarily. Quinn used the distraction to close the gap, her hand looping the leather strap of her jacket to free her pistol without making a sound. She didn’t shoot. Not yet. She watched, waiting for the moment that would tell her the truth instead of letting fear tell her a false story. The attacker’s hood fell back for a breath, showing a face that looked too young to bear the weight of what it carried, with eyes that were almost hopeful before they fixed on the woman who had stepped between him and the truth. The man—if that is what he was—laughed, a short, dry sound that could have been a cough or a dare. “We want what you’ve found, detective,” he said, his voice thin and slightly metallic, as if something else spoke through him. “You think you’ve found the seam. The seam is a doorway, and doorways invite the hungry.” Quinn’s mouth pressed into a line. “If you’re hungry, you’ll bite the wrong hand. Step back.” Eva shifted slightly, her hand hovering near the notebook in her satchel, ready to jot down details that would matter later. “What is this ‘seam’?” she asked, voice calm but vibrant with the need to understand. The attacker’s smile did not reach his eyes. “You know the story,” he said. “You’ve read the lines that say the Veil Market is a treaty with the city’s shadows. You’ve seen the tokens and the sigils. The Market is a doorway, and tonight the doorway is hungry.” A pressure pulse ran through the corridor, and the token in the victim’s hand seemed to heat up in hypothetical recognition of that same hunger. The Veil Compass hummed again, its face etched with sigils that looked like tiny, protective runes, their purpose not entirely clear but seemingly effective at keeping energy anchored. Quinn stepped closer, the compass steady in her grip. “If this is a doorway, where does it lead? To a market of bargains, or to something darker than that?” The attacker’s expression blurred, the lines of his face rearranging with a sudden, unearthly malleability. “Where do any doors lead?” he asked. “To a room where you might finally understand what the Market truly demands.” Before anyone could react, a sharp crack echoed through the tunnel. The ground tremor intensified into a tremor with teeth, as if a beast slept beneath the rails and was waking to the sound of two people arguing with a doorway. The attacker lunged, but a second figure sprang from the shadows—Mara, who had reappeared down the corridor with two officers in tow, weapons drawn, faces taut with the recognition that they were in over their heads but still moving with the stubborn desire to finish what they started. “Hold it,” Mara barked, grabbing the attacker by the shoulder and twisting so the man’s back pressed against the metal wall. The officers moved in, cuffs ready, but Mara’s grip was firm, unyielding, trained. The attacker struggled, not with the strength of a monster but with the desperate resolve of someone who would rather die than give up his secrets. Quinn did not move to help the attacker. She watched the thief’s struggle, her eyes measuring the man’s breath, the cadence of the heart against the dust of the tunnel. The Veil Compass’s needle bobbed, then steadied, pointing toward a place behind the wall, a place that seemed to slide just beyond perception. “It isn’t him,” Eva whispered, sliding closer to Quinn as the scene tightened into a single point of truth. “There’s something else here—something the token and the ritual were preparing for.” Quinn met Eva’s gaze, a spark of determination passing between them. “Tell me what you see.” Eva’s hand hovered over the notes again. “Energy follows intention,” she said. “If the intention here was to open a doorway, there must be a double purpose: to attract a victim and to anchor energy to the Market’s edge. The token was a lure, yes, but it was also a beacon that called something in.” The crowd of stalls, previously merely background noise, now seemed to glow with a faint, otherworldly poll, as if every piece of merchandise were listening to the argument of the tunnel and deciding how to respond. The Velvet Curtain that sealed the back of a stall shifted ever so slightly, revealing the seam of a hidden passage beyond. The passage’s air carried a scent of damp earth and something older, something that belonged to a time before the Market’s modern rules existed. Quinn stepped toward the passage, her lips pressed into a firm line. “We need to see what’s beyond the seam.” She looked at Mara. “You keep him contained. If this is a doorway, we don’t want to wake the thing on the other side without a plan.” Mara nodded, releasing the attacker long enough for two officers to secure him, then tipping her chin toward the seam with a practiced calm. “If there’s a doorway, there’s a guard. We’ll have two teams: one to seal the gate, one to walk through.” Quinn gave a tight nod. For a moment, she allowed herself a rough half-smile—the kind of smile that belongs to people who understand there is no rest, only the next calculation. “Let’s finish the arithmetic.” We moved as a unit toward the seam. The air grew cooler and denser with each step, the sounds of the Market fading into a muffled murmur as if the tunnel itself held its breath. The seam widened just enough to reveal a staircase descending into blackness, the edge of the passage lined with chalky sigils that glowed faintly in the lantern’s pale light. The Veil Compass pulsed with a brighter, steadier light in Quinn’s hand, the needle hovering as though it would snap toward the unknown at any moment. “Two more steps and we’ll be in,” Eva whispered, almost to herself, not to risk breaking the thin thread of ritual energy that still hung in the air. Quinn paused, listening to the soft rasp of air as it moved through the stairwell. “If this becomes a ritual space, we need to act like it’s real,” she said, her voice low but clear. “Not like a crime scene we can explain away with a few clever notes.” The first step down revealed that the stairwell wasn’t just a crumbling relic; it led to a chamber that wasn’t there before, a room that felt carved out of the underground itself, a place where shadows gathered and pooled with intent. The floor bore a map etched in old blood, but not the kind of blood any normal wound would yield. The pattern looked like a covenant, a promise carved into stone with something sharp and deliberate. The compass’s glow intensified as Quinn stepped into that chamber. The room’s walls bore sigils—old, strange, half-forgotten—that did not belong to the Veil Market’s current folklore. They belonged to something older, something bound to the Earth by fear and secrecy. “This is it,” Eva breathed, eyes shining with the mix of fear and exhilaration that comes with discovering a truth that refuses to be ignored. “This is where energy is drawn into the Market, where the doorway is kept open by ritual memory.” Quinn lifted her chin, her scrutiny sharpened by the crisp sense of danger that surrounded them. “If we close the gateway, we close the leak,” she said. “But we need to know what we’re closing and who’s going to be left behind.” She moved toward the wall, careful not to disturb the sigils. Her fingers hovered over the glowing lines, and the Veil Compass’s needle steadied, then spun once, as if it found a new course and wanted to lock onto it with a stubborn certainty. It settled on a focal point—a circle drawn within a larger circle, a keyhole pattern that matched the token’s sigil. “See this?” Eva asked, her voice a whisper of awe. “It’s a seal. It’s meant to hold energy here, in this room, rather than letting it bleed into the tunnel beyond.” Quinn’s mouth tightened. “Who would seal energy in a place that trades in energies?” “The Market,” Eva replied. “The market seals energy for its own ends. It feeds on what it binds.” A clang from above made us all jump. The attacker, still in restraints, had managed to break free, a feat that spoke of more than ordinary physical strength. He charged, but Mara’s team intercepted him, and the man was wrestled to the ground, the struggle loud enough to shatter the hush of the chamber. The doors closed behind them with a clang that sounded final, as if security had decided this is where the scene ends for now. Quinn did not release the tension in her shoulders. She pivoted, her eyes catchingEva’s again, a question unspoken but understood: what did we do next? Eva spoke first, drawing breath as if she’d run a mile. “If the seal holds energy, we’ve got a choice. We can force it closed, but we risk trapping whatever energy has already been drawn into this chamber. Or we can live with the energy in exchange for the knowledge of what’s been awakened.” Quinn studied the sigils, the glowing circle, the token, the needle, the pulse in her own chest that matched the beat of the chamber’s energy. Then she looked toward the exit where the tunnel’s air pressed close, as if to remind them where they came from and what danger awaited beyond. “We’ll do it by the book,” she said, with a speed that suggested she was already forming the plan in her mind. “We seal the ritual with the Market’s own instrument, then we re-seal the doorway with the compass. We keep the token in sight but remove the energy that binds it to the room. If the doorway reopens, we move with it.” The plan sounded crisp, even to Eva, who nodded with a sigh that was half relief, half fear. The three of them moved toward the central sigil, their steps in perfect, careful synchrony. The Veil Compass pulsed in Quinn’s hand, a heartbeat with a mind of its own. She began to chant, not with words that made sense to the modern ear but with a rhythm that felt ancient, a cadence as old as the stone itself. Eva, drawing on her knowledge, translated in her head, guiding the chant with suggestions about the sigil and its memory. Then the room shivered, or perhaps the room was waking. The sigils burned brighter, a pale green that crawled along the walls like creeping ivy, and the tokens lay in their places as if they were guardians rather than objects. The doorway hummed with a note like a string being plucked, a note that echoed in the tunnel and in the bones of everyone present. The lights above flickered once, and a figure moved not through space but through time, as if someone had stepped through a church door and into a market that did not belong to the living. The figure wore the same cloak as the attacker, but this one was more solid, more real, a being who belonged to the room rather than merely to the Market. Quinn did not flinch. She held the Veil Compass steady, its needle pointing to the figure with a certainty she could feel in her bones. “Show me your intent,” she commanded, though she knew the ritual would not always listen to command. The figure paused, a breath of cold air sweeping across the room’s warmth. Then the cloak drew back to reveal what was beneath: a face both familiar and alien, a member of the Market’s inner circle—the very clique she had spent 18 years trying to expose. The recognition was a spark that flickered in her eyes, and for a fraction of a second the past and present collided in a single, brutal truth. The figure smiled—not with warmth but with the cold satisfaction of a game well played. “Detective Harlow Quinn,” the voice finally spoke, a mirror of hers that carried not hope but a message, a warning, a threat. “You chase what you fear most, and you fear that what you fear most will walk free. The Market answers to a different clock.” The line of dialogue hung in the air, a challenge and a threat all at once. Mara’s hand tightened on the cuffs around the attacker’s wrists, but she and the other officers’ eyes snapped to Quinn, waiting for her decision. Quinn spoke in a tone that was almost clinical, but the words carried an edge of defiance that had kept her alive this long. “If you’re here to speak in riddles, you’re wasting time. The evidence doesn’t lie,” she said, and her voice carried an undeniable authority. “You want a doorway? Then we’re going to close it, and we’re going to close you with it.” The cloaked figure tilted his head, as if listening to a choir that only he could hear. The air thickened, and the sigils burned brighter still, sending a beam of pale light toward the doorway. The needle of the Veil Compass leapt, then steadied, pointing not at the figure but at the wall behind him, where a faint seam appeared, a shadowed door between two stones. The Market trembled as if in agreement, the tokens clattered on their velvet cushions, and a new breath of air slid through the tunnel, tasting of rain and something older—soil and memory. Then, a noise—an explosive crack like thunder inside the earth—split the chamber. The wall ruptured inward as the energy the team had tried to bind finally found its freedom. The doorway—almost a mouth of stone—opened a jaw into nothingness, a yawning wound in the world that smelled of damp stone and distant thunder. A wind of echoes poured through, carrying whispers from elsewhere, voices that spoke in a language no one present could fully grasp. The figure’s eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed in defiance as if to say, We are not finished yet. The Market’s power rolled outward in a wave, and Quinn’s grip tightened on the compass, her other hand reaching for the pistol again, ready to seal the breach if needed. “Close it now,” Mara snapped, already moving toward the controls she knew existed in the Market’s architecture—the way a house knows where to lock its doors when it senses danger. Quinn opened her mouth to answer, but the door of the stone seam pressed outward, as if the night itself wished to breathe into the chamber. The energy surged, and for one heart-stopping moment the three women and the two officers were suspended in a breath between certainty and chaos. Then Quinn acted. The Veil Compass cracked with a bright flare, its verdigris casing shedding a final glint as she pressed the compass to the sigil on the wall and spoke the words Eva had suggested in a rush of memory—the words that would harmonise energy instead of letting it fly free. The room sang. The doorway reeled, the sigils flared bright, and something within the tunnel gave a shudder of relief as if it too had held its breath for far too long. The shadowy figure did not vanish, but the fear that followed did. The room’s energy settled, the doorway closed with a soft, almost reluctant sigh, and the Echelon of the Market—the hidden power that ran below the surface of London’s everyday life—reverted to its previous hush. The token lay still in the victim’s hand, no longer a beacon but a relic, its raw energy spent. Mara stepped back, her breath heavy but her posture still a blade’s edge. “That was close,” she said, and her voice carried that quiet disbelief that only follows a near-miss with something beyond the law’s reach. Eva’s eyes shone with the glow of a scientist who had watched a specimen finally give up its last secret. “We’ve seen the seam,” she said softly. “We’ve seen the doorway. And we’ve learned that the Market’s powers aren’t merely about purchase; they’re about binding energy to space and time, about curating events for an audience that believes itself invisible.” Quinn looked at the two figures who had just been unmasked as part of the Market’s shadowy core—the cloaked figure and the intruder who had died for his trespass. The Market had bent to their will once more, but not without a price. The price would be paid by those who believed they could use old rites as a way to escape accountability. “Take the attacker to the vehicle,” she said to the nearest officer, her voice steady as steel. “We’ll need to interview him again when he’s lucid enough to tell us what the Market’s leadership hoped to gain.” She turned toward Eva, something close to resolve shaping her features. “We’ll need to close this case with the evidence we’ve gathered,” she said. “And we’ll need to keep an eye on this Market, because one doorway opened means another might follow.” Eva tucked her notebook away, the scent of old parchment and rain clinging to the pages. “I’ll help you map the energy,” she replied. “We’ll chart the lines the token drew and track the Market’s next move. If they’re as old as the stones here, they’ll return when their rhythm calls.” Quinn lifted the Veil Compass again, letting the light settle in the palm of her hand as if to remind herself that the town’s deepest knots could be loosened, if not tied off completely. The Market’s chamber grew quiet again, a careful stillness that felt almost sacred, as if something divine and dangerous had just learned to bend and not break. Then came the usual sounds—boots echoing on the stairwell, the distant murmur of the Market outside, and the soft, stubborn clink of the bone token as a reminder that some keys never truly lose their power, only their owners. We retraced our steps, eyes peeled for the next ripple in the veil, the next sign that someone’s craving for the unknown would draw them back to this place. The case had begun with a crime that didn’t fit, a crime scene that didn’t belong to ordinary hands. It ended with a doorway closed, a ritual paused, and a city that would wake soon enough to find itself listening for the next whisper from beneath its skin. It wouldn’t be long before the whispers grew louder, and the Veil Market would choose its moment to move again—tonight, the full moon’s influence lingering in the air like a breath held too long. And somewhere in the shadows, the clique would be watching, waiting, and calculating their next move, while Harlow Quinn kept her eyes fixed on the line between truth and what the Market wanted the truth to be.