AI The bookshelf lurched an inch and someone slipped through the gap. Harlow hit it with her shoulder, wood bit her collarbone, and she shoved into the narrow service corridor as a heel scraped brick ahead.
Police.
The word snapped off her tongue sharp as a baton strike. The figure ahead threw a look over one shoulder, then drove faster, trainers smearing grime. He had a Saint Christopher medallion flashing at his throat. Tomás Herrera. Off-the-books angel to the devils she hunted.
She took the turn he took and went low for the choke point, knuckles skimming the wall. He had two strides on her. Three. She cut his line to the rear exit.
Stop.
Tomás slammed the bar with his hip and punched through into the alley. Cold hit her face along with wet air that tasted of diesel and fried onions. Harlow kept her feet light over the slick cobbles and pushed into the night.
He darted under the distinctive green neon glare of The Raven's Nest sign, its bird flickering as if wincing, and veered left. Beyond the alley’s mouth the street churned with cabs and the stagger-step of Soho stragglers. Rain blitzed down in thin knives, turning the pavement into a black mirror that sliced her reflection and stitched it back together with every footfall .
Tomás cut across the flow. A bus brayed its horn. He sprang over a bike chain, his left hand skirting a bonnet, his right arm swinging free with the glow of the medallion. Harlow kept the angle, used the bus as cover, then burst past and gained half a stride. Twenty-nine, quick. She matched his rhythm, measured in the metronome tick of her old leather watch against her wrist bone.
He glanced back, breath fogging, then tossed words under his shoulder.
Leave it, Quinn.
She bared her teeth more than smiled.
You first.
He swore in Spanish and took the next alley without slowing. Harlow cut too late. Her hip clipped a wheelie bin and it bucked. Bottles clattered and something sour spilled over her trousers. She ignored the mess, kicked a crate to stop it rolling into her ankles, and spotted him mounting a low wall headfirst. He rolled over the top clean as a cat burglar. Harlow planted fingers and vaulted after him.
They landed in a service lane choked with pallets and cardboard. Oil filmed everything. The rain found seams and ran cold down the back of her shirt. He slid, recovered, then broke right again toward Charing Cross Road. She reached for the radio clipped at her belt, stopped herself. Draw a uniform net and you scare him into ground no one maps.
He shot past a kebab shop. Steam roared. Garlic and singed lamb blew into her face and fed heat into her muscles. People flattened against shutters as the pair tore by. A man with a nose ring raised a phone, then thought better. Harlow used the low kerb to give herself a small spring and caught two metres.
Tomás risked another look . Warm brown eyes flashed something not quite fear . He feinted toward the crossing, then knifed down the steps toward Tottenham Court Road station. Of course.
Harlow took the stairs three at a time and heard the flip-flop of someone in sandals behind her swear at the pace. A busker’s guitar note stretched out thin as wire when she burst through the ticket hall. He jumped a barrier with a hand on the polished top bar. She took the gap to the left and went through the open disabled gate as a family in matching tourist coats fanned out. A toddler wailed. Tomás shouldered a map from someone’s hands and it helicoptered back toward her. It plastered for a second across her chest and face, a wet kiss of paper and too much ink. She ripped it free and grabbed the banister to take the escalator running down.
Northbound Northern line. Camden Town. He headed straight for the old bones under the city.
Smart.
She rode the escalator railless to save time and felt her body hum from the controlled drop. Tomás hit the bottom, curved round a pillar and cut to the far platform. The board blinked, a list of times that meant nothing when your quarry had already committed. A train pulled in with the sigh of a tired animal. Doors yawned. Faces pressed.
He slipped inside. Harlow drove into the same carriage as the doors started to close. Her palm flattened on cold glass. For a beat, their eyes levelled, his up the car, her ten bodies away.
He shook his head like an older brother warning a younger one off jumping the wall.
No, Harlow.
She pushed between a pair of students in soaked hoodies and an old man with a folded Evening Standard that smelt of rain. The train jerked and ran.
This carriage had the specific stink of London in storms, wet denim, metal, breath, the faint drift of spilled lager. Her wet hair prickled tight to her skull; she had cropped it short enough that it never got in her eyes. She watched Tomás not watch her. Casual. He chose a grab pole with space on either side and did not touch it, a balance learned from nights in ambulances that took turns too hard.
Two kids with skateboard helmets eyed her holster. She lowered the edge of her jacket. She kept her voice dead quiet.
Herrera.
His jaw tightened as if she had pressed a cold coin under his tongue.
You have no jurisdiction where I am going, he said.
Sounds like a confession.
You do not want this.
The red smear of the carriage map slid overhead. The tinny announcement lied about delays. Her watch ticked once in her ear, or she imagined it. DS Morris would have made a joke to break the stiffness sitting in her spine. She stood straight instead. The Saint around Tomás's neck winked at the carriage lights and looked, for a blink, like a warning light on an ambulance rig.
At Camden Town the doors fanned open. A crush moved to leave, pulled by some tide bigger than them, stalls and canal and music. Tomás moved with it. Harlow moved with him. He took the long way into the tangle of tunnels and followed the signs not for any line but for a service corridor . He did not look back now. A cleaner saw him duck a gate and said nothing. There are kinds of people you do not stop underground.
Harlow hopped the low chain and felt grime oil her boots. They ran through a short throat that dead-ended at a steel door with a yellowed Keep Out. He did not go for it. He angled hard into a gap in the brickwork that looked like a shadow and went sideways, spine skim to brick, for two steps. Harlow hit the same narrow-dark sideways and counted those steps like she counted heartbeats while prone with a rifle back when she had to to get the job. The gap opened into a curving stair that dropped into old dust. A hand-painted arrow, small and black, pointed down. Beside it, carved into the brick, bone-white in the strip light’s jaundice, someone had scrimshawed a simple sign: a long-faced bird with a coin in its beak.
This was the bit everyone talked about if you knew which drunks to buy beers for. Most of them lied. Some gave half-truths that still made your skin crawl on a hot day. The Veil Market moved like a bad idea and tonight, if rumour ran right, it had nested in the abandoned stretch under Camden. It never met twice in one place except each full moon, because superstition calcifies into protection when enough bodies believe it.
Tomás took the steps as if he had taken them sober before. Harlow followed. Her breath held rock steady. A woman met them at the bottom, draped in a threadbare velvet shawl that smelled of old cloves and mothball. Eyes like auger bits. She held a little hinged case in one hand. Inside, under cotton, nestled discs carved from bone. Cow, by the look . Human, if you let your head make trouble.
Token, the woman said.
Tomás showed his. A thumb-smoothed circle with a crude chevron scratched in. She plucked it from his hand, weighed it on a little set of brass scales Harlow had not noticed sitting on an upturned crate, and nodded. He produced the token’s twin from his other hand and palmed it to the woman. Gratitude money. He believed in tolls. He slipped through a timber frame to the right, where a shelf of dented tins stood. The shelf rolled back. A trick of old masonry and newer greed.
Harlow stepped up and the woman lifted the hinge case without looking at her face.
Token.
Police.
The lid clicked shut. The woman smiled with all the warmth of a coin.
Not a club that takes your badge.
I am not here for company. I am here for a man evading arrest.
He will not be a man in there. He will be a customer. Different law.
Open it.
Bone first, love. Or a left little finger if you have no patience.
Her gaze flicked to Harlow's hands. Harlow gave nothing back. She took in the knot of other bodies down here, some wrapped in blankets, some in leather, one in a suit too fine for the rust stains on his shoes. A boy of maybe seventeen held a circle of bone loose in his hand and chewed the inside of his lip.
She spoke so the boy heard the low roll of it without thinking she spoke to him.
Trading banned goods. Concealing evidence. Aiding a fugitive. Stingy counts for something in court. Being cooperative counts for more.
The boy flashed his token then tried to palm it behind him. His eyes kept sliding back to her holster like it magnetised him. Someone’s mum had warned him to avoid coppers who sounded tired and calm.
Harlow kept her hands where they were, opened , the tendons up along her knuckles stark with the wet.
That token, she said, low.
The boy looked at the shawled woman. She pretended blindness. Rules ran the Market, and the rulers had the twitch of gamblers. The boy licked lips that had not yet learned to hide fear. He pressed the disc into Harlow’s damp palm and took without consciousness the twenty Harlow had fished up from her pocket with her other hand, an old habit taught by a training sergeant who believed favours mattered more than force until they did not.
You did not get this from me, the boy whispered.
From who then.
He swallowed, then grinned with terrible slowness.
From no one.
Good lad.
The shawled woman clucked, pleased by the little play that kept order without knives. Harlow let herself breathe once through her nose, shallow. Copper stung. Blood. Not much. Recent. Somewhere beyond the timber frame a knife had misjudged an onion or a vein.
She set the bone on the brass dish. The scales dipped, balanced, whispered acceptance. The woman slid the disc back across the crate toward Harlow with two fingers.
No steel out, the woman said. No debt left above ground. You break either, you bleed. Intent leaks in that place. It smells worse than old fish when it does.
Noted.
And your badge stays turned.
Harlow covered it with her jacket where it had flashed out by reflex. The leather had taken the worst of the grime and now lifted a sour steam. She tucked the token under her thumb and pressed forward into the space the shelf revealed when the woman hauled on a pulley hidden under frayed velvet . Timber groaned. The shelving rolled. A breath of air coughed out, close and thick with clove, char, damp, and a vinegar tang that made her gums twinge.
You do not want this, Tomás had said.
She wanted it.
She slid into the gap. It closed behind her, muffling the drip from somewhere back in the tunnel and trading it for a murmur with teeth in it.
The Veil Market did not look like stories said. It never does. It had the scale of a maze left by a giant drunk on his own sense of mischief. Arches opened on arches. Old tile shone slick in patches, cracked in others, a mosaic of municipal neglect and private commerce. Stalls sprouted in alcoves and against walls, hacked from doors and old booths, dressed with tired fabric and impossible goods. Glass jars held moths that did not flap their wings so much as breathe, a soft inhalation that fogged the glass from inside. Bottles with wax seals leant canted in wooden racks, the liquids inside not quite obeying tilt or gravity, behaving like cat fur stroked the wrong way . A woman in a tweed skirt and the wrong century’s shoes ground something to white paste in a mortar the size of Harlow’s head. A man with half an ear hawked laces not for shoes but for tongues, slick and pink, turning where they lay. Someone sold maps of London with streets she did not recognise looping out from margins as if the paper grew while she looked.
Rose heads, said the woman with the mortar without pausing. Good for stubborn habits. Grind slow. Pay faster.
Harlow moved.
She kept Tomás in the corner of her eye now. He had not sprinted. He walked. He kept the calm of a medic arriving in a scene already spun past panic into numbness. He cut toward a pharmacist’s table cobbled from a door. Plans sat fragile on his face and stalled when he saw her. He set the plan down.
He lifted a hand that showed the long scar along his forearm like a road he hated to take again. The Saint lay flat. He pitched his voice for her only.
You will not like what I buy in here, Quinn.
Pricey then. Or illegal.
Both. And necessary. Walk out and I will tell you afterwards over a coffee that you will pretend you do not drink.
She held his gaze a second. A seller with rings set with milk-white stones swept a curtsey to a customer with no ears and a freckled brow smooth as a child’s. Harlow took three more steps toward Tomás.
He tried one more time.
No badge helps you here. No weapon helps you here. Your name helps you less. Do something rare for you. Trust me.
She smiled soft and mean.
Trust made me a widow. Last man I trusted walked into the dark and never sent a postcard.
His jaw went hard at the mention of someone he had read about in reports and heard in the way she walked. He leaned in enough that the smell of disinfectant clung under the warm male soap, the signature of someone who still washed between fingers without noticing.
Then do not trust me, he said. Trust what hunts me. If I do not get this dose, Soho will have a street where everyone coughs up their lungs like ribbon tomorrow. I am trying to stitch Arley back together before someone pulls the thread.
Arley. The nest. The name slid between them bright as a blade. He watched her face for a flicker . She did not gift him one.
Then buy, she said. Slowly.
He turned, and the stall holder, an older man with teeth too even and a smile that stopped short of his eyes, placed two small amber vials in a folded cloth while keeping three fingers flat on the cloth like a parent on a child’s shoulder at a crossing.
Herrera, the man said, genial. Late as always. The batch yesterday walked quick.
They had legs, Tomás said. Bad joke. No laugh.
Harlow lifted her hand and the world in the Market turned its head like a flock at a dog’s bark. A breath synchronized so you could hear the hush carry. Eyes did not like police. They liked them even less here. She only wanted Tomás to see her palm, to show it empty. He saw, and something in him softened and then went taut.
A bell rang.
Not soft. A dull iron gavel hitting iron plate. Once. Twice. Three. The sound rolled under the tiles and around the bowls and through the jars and inside Harlow’s ribs. The seller froze. Tomás did not move.
What is that, she said.
Price checks, the mortared woman near her said, amused. Or wolves.
Three men eased from shadows high on a gantry that used to hold the Victoria line signs. They wore dark coats that looked like a priest’s and a butcher’s apron had made a truce. The middle one carried a long knife with a smile in the blade, a lazy curve that made you look at it before you saw the hand that held it. Their eyes, grey and a little wet, rolled over the crowd until they locked to Harlow like det cords snapping tight.
No steel out, the shawled woman had said at the door. The Market held rules. Harlow's Glock weighed her waistband like a secret that wanted its name spoken.
The middle man raised his knife an inch, not enough to break the rule yet, enough to declare a thought.
Outside law, he said. Inside problem.
Tomás shifted his feet a fraction so he stood between her and the blade. He did not touch her. The Saint lay against his chest like a held breath.
Quinn, he said, quiet. Do not twitch for the gun.
They know me, the middle man said, polite as a maître d’. They will know you by what you do next.
Harlow lifted her chin. Left, a pig mask with the fat cleaned out of it hung over a stall like a prize. Right, a radio with its guts ripped still played a song it should not have breathed. Behind her, the entrance had become a flat timber patch in a wall of timbers. No line back looked easy or safe.
She hooked her thumb across her belt and did not expose the butt of the Glock. Her other hand opened out to show skin and that damning badge’s bulge under damp leather. Around them, the Market held its breath hard enough to pull in fabric and make candles burn blue.
The middle man smiled like water that had not learned to be kind yet.
Bone first, he said. Or blood.
He tipped his knife toward her wrist where the worn leather of her watch left her pulse bold and certain. Harlow's fingers flexed, the old habit of counting shots without firing any. That leather had measured out a partner's last hour three years back. It ticked now. One. Two.
Tomás reached for the vials on the cloth. The seller lifted two fingers, then flattened them again. That hammer bell rapped a fourth time. Somewhere above, a door slammed. Hot wind rushed through the tunnels in a breath that felt like something big opening its mouth.
Harlow made her decision and moved.