AI The black trainers splashed through the oily puddle, vanishing around the corner of Berwick Street. Harlow Quinn gave chase, her own boots a flat, wet slap on the slick pavement.
*Eyes down. Pattern of movement. Left side of the street, weaving past the late-night kebabs queue.*
She’d been on him for six blocks, since he’d bolted from the glow of The Raven’s Nest. Just a glimpse, a dark hood pulled low, but she knew the loping run. Knew the shape of him from three weeks of grainy CCTV stills taped to her incident board. He was her only solid thread into the Clique’s operations, and he was about to snap.
Rain needled her neck, finding the gap between her collar and skin. She ignored it. Her focus narrowed to the space between shoulder blades thirty feet ahead. He cut right, down a narrow alley strewn with broken pallets and the sour stench of old beer. A dead end for cars. Not for people.
Quinn skidded into the alley’s mouth. He was scrambling over a high brick wall topped with rusted spikes.
“Met Police! Stop!”
He threw a leg over, not even glancing back. A practised move. She covered the distance, launched herself at the wall, fingers scrabbling for purchase on wet brick. Her leather watch strap caught, tore. She hauled herself up, the spikes snagging her jacket. She dropped down the other side into a concrete service yard, landing in a crouch that sent a jolt through her knees.
He was already at a heavy steel door, set into the foundation of a brutalist office block. Not a main entrance. A utility access. He produced a key, twisted it. The door swung open into darkness. He disappeared inside.
Quinn sprinted across the yard. The door was closing. She jammed her foot in the gap, shoulder meeting cold steel. It groaned open.
Silence. And a smell. Not damp, not mould. Something else. Incense. Ozone. The coppery tang of old magic, a scent she’d learned to recognise three years ago in a warehouse by the docks, the night Morris stopped answering his radio.
A single, naked bulb fizzed to life above a steep metal staircase leading down. Far down. The hum of the city faded, replaced by a low, subterranean murmur. Voices. The clink of glass. Music, tinny and strange.
She descended, one hand on the cold rail. The stairs ended in a short tunnel, brickwork giving way to the familiar , curved tiles of a London Underground station. But the roundels were painted over, the maps removed. Strand station, according to the archway, but Strand had been closed for decades.
A figure stepped from the shadows, blocking the arch. Tall, gaunt, wearing a long coat that might have been leather or something older. Its eyes were hidden in deep sockets.
“Token.”
Quinn kept her hands loose at her sides. “Metropolitan Police. I’m in pursuit of a suspect.”
“This is private property.” The voice was a dry rustle, like pages turning. “No token, no passage.”
Her suspect was in there. The murmur of the market beckoned, a promise of answers. Of proof. Morris’s face flashed in her mind. The empty, unmarked evidence bag they’d handed her with his personal effects. A bag that had, for one second, felt impossibly cold.
“What token?”
The gaunt man held up a skeletal hand. Between finger and thumb was a small, yellowed object. A knuckle bone, drilled and threaded on a cord. “The price of entry. Or the price of forgetting the way you came.”
She had neither. She had her warrant card and the steady, cold certainty in her gut. Going in blind was a disciplinary hearing. A career-ender. Possibly a life-ender.
Morris would have followed.
Quinn moved. Not forward, but to the side, using the curve of the tunnel wall . She feinted left, then dropped, sweeping a leg at the sentry’s knees. It didn’t buckle like a man’s would. It felt like hitting a tree root . A hand, cold as a tombstone, clamped around her bicep. She drove her elbow back, connected with something solid, and twisted free, surging past him through the arch.
The sentry did not follow. It simply turned its head, watching her disappear into the crowd. The gatekeeper’s job was done.
The Veil Market unfolded before her, a stolen breath held under the city.
It was vast. The abandoned platform stretched into gloom , lit by flickering gas lamps, strings of faerie lights, and the sickly green glow of bioluminescent fungi growing in ceramic pots. Stalls lined the walls, cobbled together from old Tube cars, shipping containers, and moth-eaten velvet drapes. The air was thick with smells: strange spices, burning herbs, the sweet decay of magical reagents, and underneath it all, the damp, mineral smell of the Thames.
And the people. Quinn’s brain catalogued them on instinct. A woman with scales glinting at her temples haggled over a jar of glowing worms. A hulking figure in a greatcoat, its face obscured by a scarf, examined what looked like a human finger bone carved into a flute. A pair of sharp-faced youths with too many teeth whispered over a spread of vintage watches, their hands moving with uncanny speed.
She’d lost visual on her hoodie. He was a shadow among shadows here. She moved through the crowd, her police-trained gaze feeling crude, obvious. She wasn’t a predator here. She was the rabbit.
“Saint John’s Wort? Fresh batch. Keeps the night-mares at bay.” A wizened creature beckoned from a stall of dried herbs.
“No, thank you.”
“Suit yourself, mortal. Your dreams are your own business.”
She pressed on, towards the centre where the crowd was densest. A stall displayed an array of lenses and spectacles. *See-True Glasses. One hour rental. See what is, not what seems.* Another sold vials of liquid moonlight and bottled laughter. The absurdity of it warred with the chilling precision of the place. This was commerce. Organised, centuries-old commerce in things the Met didn’t have a file for.
Then she saw him. He was at a stall near the old ticket booth, his hood down now, talking urgently with the vendor—a stout man with a jeweller’s loupe screwed into one eye. He was handing over a package. The vendor held up a small, complex device of brass and glass, clicking it open and shut.
A trade.
Quinn started forward, her hand going to the radio on her belt. Dead air. No signal this far down. She was alone.
She was ten feet away when he turned. His eyes—a startling, pale blue—locked onto hers. No surprise. Just a flat, weary recognition. He said something to the vendor, snatched the brass device, and melted back into the throng, heading for a darker archway marked *To the Tunnels *.
“Police! Stop right there!”
The market’s murmur dipped for a second. Dozens of heads turned. Not with alarm, but with a mild, irritated curiosity . An unwanted disturbance. The vendor with the loupe slowly began closing his shutters.
Quinn ran. She shoved past a cloaked figure who hissed, ducked under a line of hanging charms that tinkled like broken glass, and reached the archway. It wasn’t a platform. It was one of the old maintenance tunnels, narrow and dripping, lit by occasional, failing bulbs. The sound of running footsteps echoed ahead.
She plunged into the dank darkness. The air grew colder. The sounds of the market faded, replaced by the drip-drip of water and the scuttle of unseen things in the dark. Her breath plumed in the weak light. The tunnel branched. She paused, listening.
Silence from the left. A faint, shuffling scrape from the right.
She went right.
The tunnel curved, then opened into a wider space—a forgotten junction box or a signal room. Rusted metal cabinets lined the walls. In the centre, her suspect stood waiting, the brass device in his hand. He wasn’t out of breath.
“You shouldn’t have come down here, Detective.”
“Then you shouldn’t have run.” Quinn kept her distance, her stance balanced. “What’s in the package you handed over?”
“A down payment.” He held up the brass device. It looked like a cross between a compass and a lockpick. “This is the key. To a door your lot sealed three years ago. The St. Jude’s warehouse.”
Morris. The name hung between them, unspoken . The warehouse by the docks.
“Who are you working for? The Clique?”
He gave a short, bitter laugh. “The Clique are customers. Middle management. I’m freelance.” He tilted his head. “Your partner. Morris. He wasn’t supposed to be there that night. He was looking for something else. Something he shouldn’t have found.”
Her blood went cold . “What did he find?”
“A witness.” The man’s pale eyes were grave . “One the Clique very much wanted silenced. They used a… contractor. Something from the darker stalls of this very market. It left no trace your forensics could find.”
Quinn’s voice was steel. “You’re coming with me. You can give your statement under caution.”
“I don’t think so.” He raised the brass device. It began to whir, emitting a low, piercing hum that vibrated in Quinn’s teeth. “This doesn’t just open doors. It resonates. Attracts.”
From the darker tunnels behind him, something answered. A sliding, heavy sound, like stone on stone. Then a wet, rhythmic sniffing.
“The gatekeeper said the price of entry was a token,” the man said, backing towards another tunnel mouth. “Or the price of forgetting. They don’t like it when people skip the fare, Detective.”
He turned and ran.
Quinn took a step to follow, but the sniffing sound stopped. It was replaced by a low, guttural growl that seemed to come from everywhere at once . The last light bulb in the junction box flickered , died.
In the perfect , suffocating blackness, something heavy began to drag itself towards her.