AI Quinn ducked under the sagging “Camden Town” sign and stepped into the service stairwell that shouldn’t have existed. The door had carried a fresh council padlock an hour ago. Now it hung open, the shackle bent like someone had worried it loose with their bare hands.
Her torch beam slid over damp brick and old posters sealed under grime. The air tasted of pennies and burnt sugar. Footsteps clapped behind her, too quick for the weight of the Metropolitan kit.
Eva Kowalski squeezed past the railing, breath white in the cold, curly red hair jammed into a wool hat. Her round glasses had fogged.
“You told me it was an abandoned platform,” Eva muttered, tugging her satchel higher.
“It is. Keep your voice down.”
Quinn checked her watch out of habit. Worn leather, cracked edge, the second hand ticking with stubborn calm. Eleven twenty-two. She had left the surface noise—buses, weekend shoppers, a busker sawing at a violin—like it belonged to another city. Down here, every sound landed and stayed.
The stairwell spat them onto a platform that never appeared on any map. Someone had stripped the light fixtures from the ceiling. A line of candles had replaced them, guttering in chipped bottles. Their flames leaned towards a black gap at the far end, as if the dark breathed in.
Police tape cut across the platform in a loose sag. Not proper Met tape. This had been thin, grey, almost like cloth ribbon. Quinn spotted a small knot tied with neat fingers, then a bone charm threaded through it. A token. Entry fee.
A uniform stood by the tape, helmet in hand, eyes pinned forward like he expected a train.
“Detective Quinn,” he blurted. “Didn’t think— I mean, I thought it was just…”
Quinn lifted the tape and stepped through. Eva followed, shoulders hunched as though the cold had teeth.
The platform held a market in suspension. Stalls had squatted against the tiled wall: a trestle table with a stained velvet runner, a wire cage full of feathers that still twitched, jars of something pale that shifted when Quinn’s light passed over them. A narrow aisle ran down the centre, littered with dropped coins and torn paper charms.
A body lay halfway between two stalls, face down, one arm stretched as if the man had reached for something and missed. His coat had been expensive once, black wool with the collar turned up. One shoe had come off and sat a foot away, toe pointing towards the tracks.
The tracks themselves looked wrong. No rails. No sleepers. Just a long, shallow trough filled with something darker than shadow.
A man in a suit stood over the body, hands on hips, jaw chewing hard. DS Rourke. Thick neck, hair slicked back, his tie loosened like the night had already rubbed him raw.
Rourke’s gaze snapped to Quinn, then to Eva.
“We let civilians in on this now?”
Eva’s freckles flared under the torchlight. She tucked hair behind her left ear, quick and familiar .
“I work for the British Museum,” she said, like that should settle it.
Rourke scoffed.
“Great. Maybe you can catalogue the bloody weirdness.”
Quinn crouched by the body. The smell hit her closer down—metal and sweet rot, like fruit left in a tin. The man’s hands had stained nails, black crescents. No blood pooled under him. That registered first, sharp and immediate.
A knife wound should have bled.
Quinn rolled him with two fingers under his shoulder seam, careful. The man’s face showed slack surprise, eyes open, pupils cloudy. His lips had a pale dusting, as if someone had pressed ash there.
Rourke stepped closer, toeing the fallen shoe.
“Looks like a mugging. Pickpocket fight gone wrong. Place is crawling with dodgy types.”
Quinn’s torch found the man’s chest. A neat slit cut the shirt and skin beneath, not deep enough for the heart. The edges looked… dry. Not torn. Not ragged.
“Where’s the weapon?” Quinn asked.
Rourke nodded towards a forensic tech on the far side, bent over a drain with tweezers.
“Nothing on him. No knife, no screwdriver. Could’ve been grabbed and taken. People run down here, dump bodies, vanish.”
Quinn ran a gloved finger near the wound without touching it. The skin around it had puckered in a thin ring, like a burn from a cigarette, except too clean. She shifted her light lower.
The man’s pockets bulged. That didn’t fit either.
Quinn patted down the coat. Her fingers hit paper, then metal. She pulled out a thick roll of notes held by a rubber band. Crisp twenties, not London grime money. Alongside it, a handful of old coins—some shillings, some foreign. A small bundle of paper tickets, corners punched, all dated different years. One ticket bore a faded stamp: BRITISH RAIL 1987.
“Mugging,” Quinn repeated, letting the word sit in her mouth like grit.
Rourke’s face tightened.
“Criminals aren’t geniuses, Quinn. He could’ve been killed for something else and dumped.”
“Then why bring the cash?”
Rourke shrugged with his shoulders, impatient.
“Maybe the killer got spooked. Maybe—”
Eva moved closer, eyes locked on the wound.
“That isn’t a knife.”
Quinn glanced up. Eva’s pupils had widened behind her glasses. She swallowed, then drew a breath like she had to force herself to speak.
“That’s a cut made by… not metal. Not steel. It’s too smooth. And there’s no blood because—”
Rourke’s laugh cracked and died.
“Because what? Vampires?”
Eva’s mouth pulled tight.
“Don’t start. I didn’t come down here for your stand-up routine.”
Quinn rose, scanning the ground. Fine black grit dusted the tiles around the body in a crescent, as if something had swept through and shed residue. Her torch beam caught the grit and it didn’t sparkle like ash or soot. It drank the light.
A charm lay near the man’s left hand. A strip of paper folded into a tight knot, inked with looping symbols. Not graffiti. Not any language Quinn recognised, but the strokes held discipline .
Eva’s gaze darted to it.
“Don’t touch that with bare gloves,” she snapped.
Quinn paused, then pinched it with tweezers from her pocket kit.
“My gloves aren’t bare.”
Eva’s fingers fluttered near her ear again.
“You know what I mean. That paper carries a charge.”
Rourke rolled his eyes and looked at Quinn for backup.
“You hearing this? Charge. Like it’s a battery.”
Quinn held the paper charm up to the torch. The ink reflected a faint green, like oil on water.
“Who called this in?” Quinn asked.
Rourke jerked his chin towards the uniform at the tape.
“Transit worker. Came down for maintenance, saw candles, saw the body. Ran back up screaming about a ‘bazaar’. Told control. Control called us. We came down. Door was open.”
Quinn’s eyes tracked back to the stairwell. The broken padlock. The bone charm on the tape.
“Who put the tape up?”
Rourke’s mouth shifted.
“Us. The best we could.”
Quinn didn’t argue. She didn’t need to. That grey ribbon didn’t come from evidence stores, and everyone on the platform knew it.
She moved towards the stall beside the body. A mirror stood propped on the table, its surface cloudy. A handwritten sign hung from the frame: YOUR TRUE FACE FOR A FAVOUR. The letters looked like they had been scratched with a fingernail.
Quinn tilted the mirror with the tip of her glove. Her reflection warped—jaw sharper than it was, eyes too dark, hair longer, then shorter, then her own close crop again. The mirror settled on her real face with a sudden snap that made her teeth ache.
Eva leaned in, voice low.
“That’s a Veil stall. This place wasn’t abandoned.”
Quinn looked along the platform. The candles. The odd merchandise. The absence of rails.
“The Veil Market,” Quinn murmured, tasting the phrase she had heard in half-muttered informant stories and one drunken confession that had ended with the speaker vomiting and crying.
Rourke’s frown deepened.
“Here we go. Another one of your pet myths.”
Quinn stepped to the track trough. The dark inside it moved in slow folds, like cloth in water. Her torch beam didn’t reach the bottom. It slid off and vanished.
Rourke hovered at her shoulder, then stopped himself from getting too close. His hand went to his radio, then away again.
“We’ve got no signal down here,” he muttered, annoyed.
Quinn crouched, and something on the lip of the trough caught her eye—small scratches in the tile, neat and parallel, like the marks left by dragging a heavy crate. They led away from the body towards the far end where the candles leaned.
Quinn followed them with her torch. The scratches crossed the platform and ended at a stall made from old Underground signage. The sign read MIND THE GAP, letters chipped. Under it sat a wooden box, lid half open.
Inside, nestled in old cloth, sat a small brass compass. Verdigris stained the casing, green creeping into the seams. Protective sigils had been etched into the face with a steady hand. The needle spun without settling, then jolted hard towards the track trough and stuck there as if pinned.
Eva sucked in breath through her teeth.
“You found a Veil Compass.”
Rourke stared, then gave a short, humourless huff.
“It’s a compass. You can buy one in any camping shop.”
Eva’s laugh came out sharp.
“Not one that points at rifts.”
Quinn didn’t touch it at first. She watched the needle. It trembled , then steadied. It didn’t point north. It pointed down the track trough. Towards the darkness.
Quinn reached into her pocket and pulled out an evidence bag. She lifted the compass by the cloth, careful not to smear any prints, and slid it into the bag.
The needle thudded against the clear plastic, straining towards the trough as if it hated the barrier.
Rourke leaned close, eyes narrowed .
“Fine. Say it’s your magic compass. What’s that prove about our dead bloke?”
Quinn looked back at the body. No blood. The dry, burned ring around the wound. The pockets full of valuables. The dragged marks on tile. The track trough that swallowed light. The paper charm with ink that flashed green.
She walked to the man’s bare foot. The sock had a hole at the toe. Skin showed through, grey as candle wax. Quinn pinched the sock fabric and rolled it back.
The ankle bore a thin band of bruising, perfectly circular, like a cuff. Not rope. Not tape. Something narrower. Something that clamped.
“Someone restrained him,” Quinn said.
Rourke crossed his arms.
“Or he had a kink. You’ll tell me next it was a demon handcuff.”
Eva knelt, careful not to cross any evidence markers. She peered at the bruise ring, then at the paper charm near the hand.
“That’s not restraint,” she said. “That’s an anchor mark.”
Quinn’s stomach tightened.
“Anchor to what?”
Eva’s throat worked. Her voice dropped to a hush that forced Rourke to lean in despite himself.
“To keep someone from drifting when a rift opens.”
Rourke blinked once, then straightened with a scoff that sounded thinner.
“You’re telling me a hole in reality opened on a Tube line and someone… fell through?”
Quinn’s gaze went to the compass in the evidence bag. The needle still pressed hard against the plastic, quivering with strain. The candles all leaned the same way. The air smelled like pennies and burnt sugar .
Quinn walked to the body’s hands again. The fingertips carried that same black grit. Under the nails, the residue clung like it belonged there.
She looked up at Rourke.
“No,” Quinn answered. “He didn’t fall.”
Eva’s eyes tracked the scratches on the tile, then the trough.
“They pulled him,” Eva whispered.
Quinn’s jaw tightened until it hurt. She felt the memory of another scene slam up behind her eyes—DS Morris’s funeral suit, the closed casket, the official report full of clean sentences that never matched what Quinn had found at the scene. No blood where there should’ve been blood. A smell she couldn’t place. A shape in the corner of her vision that never stayed long enough to name.
Rourke stared at the dark trough, then forced a laugh that didn’t carry.
“So what, Quinn? We call in… Ghostbusters?”
Quinn turned her torch on the far end of the platform. The candles sat in tighter clusters there. Someone had drawn a circle on the tiles with chalk or bone dust, lines intersecting in sharp angles. The circle cut through old grime like it had been laid down yesterday.
Near its edge, a smear of something pale clung to the tile—like melted wax, except it held a faint shimmer, like fish scale.
Quinn crouched, hovered her gloved finger close, then pulled back.
“Scenes like this,” Quinn muttered, more to herself than either of them . “They don’t happen by accident.”
Eva’s voice shook in her attempt to keep it steady.
“People in the Market paid for information. They traded favours. They traded bodies.”
Rourke’s face hardened, defensive.
“We don’t know that. We’ve got one dead man in a cosplay market. We log it, we bag it, we take it upstairs.”
Quinn’s torch beam caught something else at the edge of the chalk circle—a small object, half under a tile chip. She hooked it with tweezers and lifted it.
A button. Plain black plastic. The kind from a police issue overcoat.
Quinn’s fingers went cold inside her gloves. Her eyes dropped to her own coat, to the front panel.
All her buttons sat in place.
Rourke leaned closer, then pulled back when he saw Quinn’s face.
“What?”
Quinn held the button up to the torch. A hairline crack ran through it. Something dark had seeped into the crack and dried there like tar.
Eva peered at it, then at Quinn.
“Who else came down here before us?”
Rourke’s mouth opened, then closed. He looked towards the stairwell, towards the tape, towards the uniform stationed there like a scarecrow.
Quinn stood, button still in her tweezers, and turned the torch beam across the platform again, slower this time. She counted candles. She traced the scratch marks. She followed the compass needle’s pull without letting it drag her.
The scene held together in pieces that didn’t match any report template, and those pieces began to lock into place the moment Quinn stopped forcing them into something ordinary.