AI Quinn ducked under the police tape and stepped down onto the dead escalator. Camden’s wet-night stink clung to the stairwell for three steps, then the air changed. Cold, dry. Like the inside of a sealed cupboard.
A constable waited halfway down with a torch held tight to his chest. His breath came out thin, like he had run.
“Ma’am. This way.”
Quinn’s boots rang against metal treads. Her leather watch strap rubbed her wrist as she checked the time out of habit. 02:14. Too late for an honest place, too early for a clean report.
The escalator ended in a corridor tiled in soot-stained white. Someone had dragged a line of portable lights in, their cables snaking back up to a generator. The lights turned the tunnel into a harsh stage set. Past them, the platform opened wide.
It should’ve looked abandoned.
It didn’t.
A row of stalls sat along the platform edge—patched tarpaulins, crooked tables, crates stacked like makeshift walls. Glass jars gleamed behind wire mesh. A stack of yellowed books sat under a lamp with no plug. A cage stood empty, door hanging open. Chalk marks and scratched symbols curled across the concrete like graffiti done by somebody with a steady hand and a reason.
Quinn let her gaze sweep the whole place once, then again, slower. Her jaw clenched without permission.
A man in a scene suit looked up from a kneeling position near the platform’s centre.
“Detective Quinn. We… didn’t know what we were walking into.”
Quinn’s eyes stayed on the stalls.
“You and me both.”
On the ground, a body lay on its side between two knocked-over crates. Mid-thirties, maybe. Black hoodie, jeans, trainers with the soles worn smooth. One arm tucked beneath him, the other outstretched, fingers curled as if he had tried to hook something and missed. A dark patch soaked into the concrete under his ribs. Someone had already snapped a numbered evidence marker down beside his hand.
Quinn stepped closer. She didn’t hurry. Hurry made people miss things. And something in the air already screamed that this place wanted her sloppy.
A forensic tech hovered, holding a camera and looking like he wanted to be anywhere else.
“Name?”
The tech swallowed.
“Not confirmed. No wallet. We got a phone but it’s bricked. Face doesn’t match anything obvious in PNC yet.”
Quinn crouched and stared at the man’s hand. His fingernails held a thin grey grit.
“Where’s the blood trail?”
The tech blinked.
“Sorry?”
Quinn’s gaze tracked the pooling stain.
“One hole in his side, lots of blood here. Where’s the drag. Where’s the spray. Where’s the stagger marks?”
The tech shifted his weight and stared down as if the answers might appear on the concrete.
“We thought… he collapsed here.”
Quinn leaned in. The stain looked wrong. Too neat, edges sharp, like someone had poured it and walked away.
Her nose caught the smallest tang beneath the iron smell. Not quite bleach. Not quite anything she could name . It made the back of her throat feel scuffed.
Boots approached with confidence and impatience. DS Rafi Singh cut into the light, his tie loosened, suit jacket unbuttoned. He looked at the stalls with a sceptic’s squint and then at Quinn with a grin that never reached his eyes.
“Late-night pop-up market,” he muttered. “Camden really committed to the brand.”
Quinn stayed crouched.
“Tell me the entry point.”
Singh nodded back up the escalator.
“Graffiti door off the street. Padlock cut. We followed noise down. Found two vagrants bolting up the steps, screaming about devils and bargains. Uniforms caught one. The other slipped.”
“No CCTV?”
Singh huffed.
“Underground. Door’s in a blind spot. We pulled the council camera from the corner, but it’s been dead a month. Budget, apparently.”
Quinn touched the edge of the stain with a gloved finger. The blood had a skin on it, like it had dried and then… not dried. It stuck to the latex and pulled like syrup.
“This doesn’t set right.”
Singh crouched beside her, close enough that she smelled cheap mint and tiredness.
“It’s blood,” he said. “Blood sets.”
Quinn lifted her finger and held it up to the light. The smear looked too dark, too thick.
“Blood sets. This clings.”
Singh’s stare fixed on her hand.
“You think somebody messed with it? Like, poured it from somewhere else?”
Quinn wiped her glove on a gauze pad and looked at the body again. The man’s hoodie had a clean tear at the ribs. No ragged fabric, no pull. Like it had been cut, then opened.
“No arterial spray on his clothes. No soaked sleeve from pressure. No handprints of him trying to hold it in.”
Singh’s mouth tightened.
“You’re saying he didn’t bleed out here.”
Quinn rose and took a slow step around the body. The concrete around him held dust, old soot, fine grit. But around his trainers the dust pattern broke in a clean halo. Someone had brushed it away, or something had moved air across it.
She glanced at the nearest stall. A wooden crate of pale stones sat beneath the table. Not stones. Teeth—animal, human, Quinn couldn’t tell at a glance—shaved down and drilled like beads.
A string of them hung from a nail.
“Who found this?” Quinn asked.
The constable who had guided her down raised a hand.
“Me, ma’am. Heard voices first. Thought squatters. Then the… place looked like this.”
Quinn took him in—fresh, wide-eyed, uniform crisp despite the underground grime.
“Name.”
“PC Larkin, ma’am.”
“Larkin, did you touch anything?”
Larkin’s chin jerked.
“No. I saw the body, I froze. Called it in. DS Singh arrived before anyone moved the victim.”
Singh’s shoulders rolled with irritation.
“He means before we did anything other than make it safe.”
Quinn walked to the far edge of the platform. Tracks ran along the drop. The third rail sat dark. No train would come. Even so, her skin crawled at the open void.
On the wall above the tracks, someone had scratched another symbol: a circle crossed by a crooked line, with small marks like teeth around the rim.
Quinn stepped close. The marks bit into the tile, fresh. White dust fell at her boots.
“Any chalk on scene?”
The forensic tech shook his head too fast.
“None. We bagged the dust we found, but… it’s just tile.”
Quinn bent and ran a finger near the scratch without touching it. The air around it felt different. Not warmer. Not colder. Like the space had a pulse .
Footsteps tapped behind her with a different rhythm. Lighter. A leather satchel thumped against a hip.
Eva Kowalski came down the last step with her curly red hair stuffed into a coat collar, round glasses fogged at the edges. She halted when she saw Quinn, then the stalls, then the body. Her hand went to her left ear, tucking hair back without thinking.
Quinn’s mouth went flat.
“What are you doing here?”
Eva lifted her satchel strap higher.
“I got a call from the museum. A bloke on nights. He saw uniformed officers go into the old station and he panicked. He thought—” Her eyes snapped to the scratched symbol. “Oh.”
Singh’s head turned.
“Who’s she?”
Quinn kept her eyes on Eva.
“Consultant.”
Singh barked out a laugh that died in the stale air.
“We didn’t request one.”
Eva moved closer, careful around the evidence markers. Her freckles stood out pale under the harsh lights.
“You didn’t request this place either,” she shot back, then her gaze slid across the stalls. “They left in a hurry.”
Quinn watched her. Eva didn’t look at the body like it was a problem to solve. She looked at it like it was a sentence in a language she had read before.
Eva crouched near the victim’s outstretched hand, careful not to cross the taped line.
“Look at his nails.”
Quinn’s eyes narrowed .
“I already did.”
Eva reached into her satchel and pulled out a small notebook. She didn’t open it. She held it like a comfort object.
“That grit. It’s not concrete dust. It’s bone ash.”
Singh’s eyebrows climbed.
“Bone ash.”
Eva’s gaze flicked up to him, sharp behind her lenses.
“Used in warding. In bargains. In old rituals people like to pretend they don’t still do.”
Singh gestured at the platform.
“This is London, love. Not a Dungeons and Dragons club.”
Eva’s mouth twisted.
“Then explain the stalls. Explain why the lamps don’t plug in.”
A quiet, uncomfortable shift moved through the uniforms. One constable stared hard at the lamp on the nearest table. The cord ended in bare wire. No battery pack. No socket. The bulb still glowed.
Quinn walked back toward the body. She forced her attention onto what she could measure.
“Eva, you’ve been here before.”
Eva’s shoulders tightened.
“I didn’t buy anything.”
Quinn tilted her head.
“That wasn’t my question.”
Eva’s eyes held Quinn’s for a beat too long.
“Yes.”
Singh straightened, gaze bouncing between them.
“You’ve been to this… market?”
Eva stood and brushed dust from her knees.
“People call it the Veil Market.”
Quinn let the words sit. Veil. The name scraped at the edge of an old memory. DS Morris laughing in a pub, then later, the same night, his face pale in the emergency light, and Quinn’s hands shaking as she tried to hold pressure on a wound that didn’t behave like a wound.
Quinn’s throat tightened. She forced it open.
“Entry requirement?”
Eva reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small object wrapped in tissue. She held it up without stepping closer.
“A bone token.”
Singh stared at it like it might crawl.
“You’re joking.”
Eva unwrapped it. The token looked like a coin carved from pale bone , smooth and worn, a hole drilled through it for string. A symbol marked one side—similar to the scratched circle on the wall, but cleaner, intentional.
Eva kept it on her palm.
“They check at the door. No token, no entry. Sometimes they… escort you out.”
Larkin’s voice came out thin.
“Escort you out how?”
Eva’s fingers curled over the token.
“Hard.”
Quinn walked toward the stalls. She didn’t touch anything yet. She watched the way the tarps hung. They didn’t sag with damp. They didn’t ripple from the draft that should’ve lived in a tunnel like this. The air sat still, held in place.
She stopped at a table that had been overturned . Something small lay beneath it, half-hidden in shadow. She crouched and nudged it into the light with a gloved fingertip.
A brass compass, small enough for a palm. Verdigris mottled the casing, green creeping into the seams. The face held protective sigils etched in tight lines instead of directions. The needle didn’t settle. It trembled , then swung, then locked toward the wall above the tracks.
Eva’s breath snagged.
Quinn kept her face blank.
“You recognise it.”
Eva nodded once.
“Veil Compass.”
Singh scoffed.
“Of course it has a dramatic name.”
Quinn lifted it carefully , holding it level. The needle stayed fixed on the scratched symbol. Quinn took one step to the left. The needle corrected, still pointing.
She walked a slow arc. Each time, the needle tracked the same spot like a dog with a scent.
Quinn held the compass out toward Singh.
“Tell me that’s magnets.”
Singh didn’t take it. He stared at the needle, jaw working.
“Old tunnels have metal everywhere. Rebar, rails, wiring. Compasses go funny.”
Quinn moved closer to the symbol and watched the needle. It calmed. It didn’t spin or wobble. It sat steady.
Eva’s voice cut in, low.
“It pointed toward rifts. Portals. Places where… the veil thinned.”
A uniform behind them gave a short laugh that sounded like it hurt .
“Portals.”
Quinn ignored the sound. She looked at the scratched circle again. The fresh gouges formed a crude version of the sigils on the compass face. Somebody had tried to copy a lock without knowing how locks worked.
Quinn crouched at the wall. The tile dust on the floor didn’t spread evenly. It piled in a crescent, like something had pressed out from the wall and shed it.
She tapped her glove against the tile. Solid. She tapped again, closer to the symbol.
The sound changed. Not hollow. Wrong. Like knocking on a door that had a room behind it but no hinge.
Quinn’s pulse picked up. Her eyes flicked to the body, to the neat pool, to the clean tear in the hoodie, to the brushed dust around the shoes.
She rose and walked back to the victim’s side. She crouched and studied the wound area without touching. The fabric edges sat too clean.
“Knife cut,” Quinn muttered, more to herself than anyone . “But he didn’t fight.”
Singh leaned in.
“No defence wounds on the hands?”
Quinn lifted the victim’s outstretched hand by the wrist, careful, and turned it slightly so the light hit the knuckles. The skin held a faint line, almost invisible.
“Not a defence wound,” Quinn murmured.
Eva crouched opposite her, eyes sharp.
“Then what?”
Quinn’s gaze tracked the faint line. It curved, not straight. Like a thin burn.
“A grip mark.”
Singh’s face tightened.
“From what, a cable tie?”
Quinn let the hand go and stood. Her eyes moved over the scene again, letting it reassemble in her head with different rules.
“The market packed up,” she said, voice flat . “Something went wrong. Someone got hurt. They didn’t dump him at the door. They didn’t leave him in the street where a passer-by would find him. They placed him here, in the middle, like a message.”
Eva swallowed.
“Messages in places like this weren’t for you.”
Quinn looked at the compass needle. It still pointed to the symbol, unwavering .
“Then it wasn’t meant for the police.”
Singh shifted, glancing up at the escalator as if he could see daylight from here.
“You’re telling me this bloke got stabbed somewhere else, hauled through a wall, and laid out like a bloody centrepiece.”
Quinn turned her head, slow.
“I’m telling you the blood doesn’t match the wound. The dust doesn’t match the movement. The compass points at a wall that sounds like a door.”
She walked to the nearest portable light and grabbed the stand, dragging it toward the tracks. The metal legs screeched against concrete.
A constable stepped forward.
“Ma’am, we’ve got procedures—”
Quinn cut her eyes at him.
“Then follow them. Photograph the compass. Photograph the symbol. Full scene scan of that wall.”
Singh watched her reposition the light until it threw a harsh glare across the scratched circle. Under the brighter beam, the tile around it showed hairline cracks spidering out, too fine to see before.
Eva’s hand went to her ear again, tucking hair back. Her fingers shook.
“Those cracks weren’t from a blade,” Eva whispered. “Something pushed through.”
Quinn leaned in close to the wall. The air smelled faintly sweet here, like burnt sugar left on a hob. Her breath fogged her own glasses—she didn’t wear any, so it shocked her when she realised it hadn’t been her breath. A thin mist rose from the cracks, barely there, curling along the tile.
Singh took a step back.
“Nope,” he muttered. “That’s… no.”
Quinn didn’t move away. She lifted the Veil Compass higher and watched the needle hold steady.
“Larkin,” she called without turning.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Get me a thermal camera from the van. And a mirror. Anything with a reflective surface.”
Larkin hesitated.
“A mirror?”
Quinn kept her eyes on the wall.
“Now.”
Boots pounded up the escalator.
Eva edged closer until she stood beside Quinn, shoulder almost touching hers. She kept her voice low, tight.
“If you put a mirror to it, you might see the seam.”
Quinn glanced at her.
“You’ve done that before.”
Eva’s mouth pulled into a line.
“I watched someone else do it. I didn’t like what looked back.”
Quinn shifted the light another inch, angling it so the cracks threw thin shadows.
“What looked back?” Singh demanded, impatience masking something else .
Eva didn’t take her eyes off the wall.
“Shoppers,” she replied. “And sellers. And things that didn’t have faces like ours.”
Quinn breathed through her nose and tasted that sweet scorch again. Her fingers tightened around the compass.
“Then our victim didn’t walk in through the graffiti door,” Quinn murmured. “He came through here.”
Singh’s voice dropped.
“And if he came through here, who else—”
Footsteps rattled down the escalator at speed. Larkin returned with a thermal camera case under one arm and, absurdly, a cracked hand mirror in the other, its plastic frame still dusted with van lint.
Quinn took the mirror and held it up in front of the scratched circle, keeping her wrist steady despite the tremor that wanted to start.
The mirror caught the platform lights and threw them back in a harsh flare. Quinn tilted it, hunting for an angle where glare died and the wall’s reflection settled.
The cracks in the tile didn’t reflect right. They bent. They curved inward, like the mirror looked at a surface that sat a fraction deeper than it should.
Eva’s breath rasped.
“That’s it.”
Quinn brought the mirror closer until it almost touched the tile. The air between mirror and wall rippled, thin as heat haze above tarmac.
Singh’s voice came out rough.
“Quinn. Don’t.”
Quinn didn’t blink. The compass needle quivered once, then steadied again, pointed straight into the ripple.
She kept the mirror in place and reached her other hand toward the thermal camera case.