AI Blood on concrete. Someone’s boot had slipped, left a brief smear, vanished into shadows—then the figure crashed through an overflowing bin and bolted toward Charing Cross Road.
Detective Harlow Quinn sprinted after, breath steady, boots landing with military rhythm. The city blurred by. Rain hammered skin, turned neon into jagged rivers of light. Her eyes tracked the suspect’s coat: oilskin, torn at the hem, vanishing around a corner near a pile of stained mattresses.
A sharp scent—hot bread, car exhaust, the metallic lick of spilt beer. Harlow ducked a swinging elbow from a drunk in a threadbare blazer. The man cursed, voice lost in splashing tyres and sirens bouncing between shut newsagents.
Someone dodged out of Harlow’s way. She barely registered the face, a moment of black eyeliner, a silver nose ring, gone in a flash. The suspect’s silhouette skidded left, fingers clawing at wet masonry, slipped into the narrow service alley behind an old tobacconist. Brick glistened, ancient soot streaking the shapes cut by dim security lights.
She pressed the radio.
"Suspect heading south, Tottenham Court Road. Alleyway behind Jackson’s. Heading for the back streets. I’m in pursuit."
Static replied, then a fuzzed voice crackled. "Backup en route. Three minutes out. Keep eyes on—"
She risked another step, caught the faint sound of pursued boots ringing against loose steel. The suspect tossed a glance behind—cheek hollow, eyes wild, a jaw shaved clean but mottled with rain and fear. He clutched something tight in his right fist, coat jammed across his chest as if hiding not just whatever he’d stolen but his whole spine .
Harlow’s own chest burned. Memory flickered : a different alley, three years past, and Morris darted in ahead, torch swinging—gone before she truly understood.
The suspect slid down the stairwell that snaked behind a Chinese takeaway, nearly lost his balance, hit the bottom running. Harlow followed, hand on her belt, steps measured yet urgent, gaze catching the battered blue metal door he’d just slammed through.
She braced, shouldered through—
Noises guttered and warped. Light went grey. A low ceiling pressed overhead, curling paint hanging from pipes, streams of condensation dripping in time with her heartbeat.
He’d gone left, into the service tunnels. The sound of his haste echoed , carrying an edge of panic. But something else bled through: the faint, offbeat strains of a busker’s violin, muffled sobs of conversation, and a smell undercut with roasted coffee and engine oil and something sharper, unnameable.
The tunnel angled down, rough stone giving way to scarred tile. Bare bulbs swung above. Torn posters flapped on the wall—old theatre bills, strange sixties adverts for miracle salves, all faded to ghostly white.
Harlow slowed. A patch of graffiti caught her. Tiny, pale sigils, half-scraped. Wide, careful circles.
The air tasted colder here, prickling her skin. She slipped her torch from her coat, killed it quickly —better to go by the subtle amber glow that seeped from a breach up ahead.
A doorway hidden behind a battered billboard. The suspect’s shoulder left a fresh smear of blood on the frame. No sign of a handle. Harlow pressed her palm against the spot, testing for traps, pushed inwards. Wood shifted with a reluctant whine.
The world bloomed open.
She’d stepped beneath London.
A platform. The cavernous hush of an old Tube station, paint peeling like scabs from the walls. Platforms broken by age, lined with ramshackle stalls. Lanterns hung above: bone-white, stitched with runes, swinging uneven. Voices rose and fell: laughter too quick, whispers like violin strings fraying, bargains hissed in five different languages.
The Veil Market.
A teenage girl with a spiked collar danced past, carrying a basket of glittering teeth. Beside her, a heavyset man in a tweed suit bartered with a woman whose eyes burned gold and never blinked.
No entrance in the city guide. No CCTV. No rules she understood.
Harlow pressed a cufflink to her wrist radio, muting it. If Central caught what she saw, they’d put her on leave for months.
Down the platform’s far end, the suspect’s coat shuddered through a knot of traders. He looked back once, met her gaze—a plea and a warning, bright and brittle—then vanished deeper into the maze.
She scanned the faces, caught a flash of a fox’s mask, an antlered silhouette, a jaw covered in scales. Rain clung to the air underground, stale but sharp. Near the tracks, a cluster of children with black eyes giggled over strange sweets that fizzed and spat blue sparks.
One step down, and she blended in—almost. Her posture too straight, her focus new. Someone whistled behind her.
"You lost, copper?"
A man cheese-wired by muscle, accent like burnt rubber. Grey eyes flickered with something amused. He palmed what looked like a bone token, spun it through rough fingers.
"Official business," Harlow replied, keeping her voice low, steel-wrapped. "Where’d he go?"
Muscle man grinned. "Who’s he, pet? Most of us are just passing through."
She fixed him with all the weight of her badge, hidden but implied: the crisped edges of authority.
He shrugged, letting the token vanish. "Careful, love. Tourists walk out with fewer bits than they come in with. That’s if they walk out at all."
Harlow pushed past him, eyeing the stalls: a display of vials marked with warnings in two dialects, a shelf of keys that shimmered and wrenched themselves free at her gaze. She skirted a territory marked with chalk, sidestepped a basket of what her mind violently refused to register as human hands.
The suspect’s blood marked a trail. She caught it, flecks bright on the tile, crossing by a stall peddling shrunken heads.
Ahead, a flash of his boot. He spun, desperate, cornered at the edge of the old platform. Between them lay a hunched woman, teeth like splintered glass, cupping ash between tattooed palms.
He barked over his shoulder.
"Stay away, I mean it. You don’t know what’s—"
"Hand it over," Harlow snapped, voice calm, sharpened like glass . "Nowhere left to run."
His fist shook. The wrapped bundle pressed against his chest, leaking dark drops. His face flicked from terror to fury, jaw creasing, resolve flickering in the shallow breaths he couldn’t hide.
The hunched woman beside him looked up, face wreathed in smoke.
"You bringing trouble, love?"
Her accent was old East End, crisped by too many cigarettes, eyes sharp as broken bottles.
Harlow didn't answer. The crowd shifted, wild and predatory. The market lived and breathed, its attention sharp.
The suspect darted for the nearest black door—
A stall-owner in a velvet jacket blocked his way, lips split in a fox’s grin.
He twisted back, cornered between Harlow and the edge.
"Let me pass."
Sweat trickled into the collar. He eyed the drop onto the old tracks, risked a glance overhead—nowhere to climb, only the tunnel’s gut ahead.
"What's so important you’ll bleed for it?"
Harlow edged closer, baiting.
"No choice," he spat. "You try walking away once you owe these people."
A faint bell chimed. A new cluster edged forward, curiosity keen. Harlow’s hand tensed over her belt. One move and this crowd might snap teeth.
A roar from the tunnel. Something massive forced air ahead of it, shifting the hair on her arms. Lanterns guttered.
All heads turned toward the sound: the Market’s engine, alive, hungry.
The black door behind the suspect cracked open. For a half-second, Harlow saw another world: cold blue, something flickering in the dark beyond.
He bolted for the threshold. Harlow lunged.
Her grip closed on his wrist—slippery, twisting—then the portal yawned, wider than sky. The market howled, drawn to the scent of new blood.
His prize tumbled free, clattering over stone.
Harlow caught only a glimpse: an amulet slick with rain and blood, casting sick light.
Then the tunnel’s roar collided with the shriek of market traders, furniture skidding, deals snapping.
Someone grabbed her coat, claws scraping the fabric.
“Down!” a voice cried above the chaos, and then the world tilted as bodies flooded around her, pouring towards the opening, teeth bared, eyes ignited.
Harlow lost her footing. The amulet rolled under the velvet -jacketed stall—out of sight. The suspect crashed through the blue-lit divide and vanished.
And the black door slammed shut on the heel of her boot, the sound ringing like a gunshot.