AI Rain hammered the pavement so hard it bounced back up and soaked her thighs. Quinn sucked air through her teeth and pushed off the kerb.
"Police! Stop!"
The hooded figure glanced back once under the streetlamps, pale face sliced by shadow, then cut left through a knot of tourists sheltering under a pub awning. Plastic pint cups toppled. Someone swore.
"Watch it!"
Quinn kept her arms close and drove through the crush. Her shoulder clipped a man in a leather jacket.
"Move. Armed police."
The man saw the badge at her belt and stepped aside fast. She heard his muttered, "Bloody hell," as she burst onto Camden High Street.
Neon bled through the downpour. Bus headlights smeared across wet tarmac. Traffic honked, trapped in a knot near the crossroads. The suspect broke off the pavement and vaulted a low barrier into the road.
"Don't you—"
A black cab skidded, tyres screaming. The driver leaned on the horn, face twisted behind a fogged windscreen. The suspect skimmed the cab’s bonnet and hit the far pavement running.
Quinn landed on the slick white line, lungs braced against exhaust and rain. Her worn leather watch slapped her wrist with each stride. She cut a line between two buses and bounced onto the opposite kerb, boots slipping for half a heartbeat before she found grip.
Her radio spat static at her hip.
"Control to any units near Camden Lock, reports of—"
She thumbed the button without breaking pace.
"Control, DC Quinn in foot pursuit, single suspect, male, black hoodie, dark jeans, heading north on Camden High, possible link to Soho homicide. Requesting units to cut off at Hawley."
The radio crackled.
"Quinn, nearest unit five minutes out. Advise if suspect armed."
"He had something at the Nest. No visual on a weapon now. I'm not losing him."
"Copy that. Proceed with caution."
The suspect swung right between a closed vape shop and a kebab place still open, its windows smeared with steam and grease. The alleyway drank the light from the street. Quinn followed, boots splashing through a stream of water and old chip boxes.
"Met Police. Don’t make this worse."
His voice floated back, thin and sharp.
"Get off me, copper!"
"I will if you stop running."
Her breath tore at her ribs. Eighteen years on the job, a body that knew violence better than rest, but the kid moved like he trusted the dark to hold him up.
He hurdled a stack of crates and hit a chain-link gate. For a second she pictured a climb and had her hand on her baton. Instead he palmed something from his pocket. Bone-white, finger-length. He held it to the rusted padlock.
Metal clicked.
The gate yawned inward.
Quinn slowed as he slipped through. The padlock swayed on its loop, still closed. Water hissed off the chain-link. She grabbed it and rattled. Solid. Whatever trick he used, it shut behind him.
"Come on," she growled.
Her torch beam cut through the dark gap. Stone steps dropped away, steep and narrow, slick with moss and rain. A draft crawled up from below, cold and stale with old dust, old oil, something chemical beneath it.
Her radio crackled again.
"Quinn, status?"
She swallowed against the dryness in her throat.
"Suspect entered an unsecured stairwell off Camden High. Access point looks like disused infrastructure. I'm following."
"Wait for backup. Do not enter underground structure alone."
She stared into the stairwell. A faint light glowed somewhere below, the colour of old nicotine. Voices echoed up, words tangled and foreign. Not just the one lad. A crowd.
Her fingers tightened around the radio.
"Control, he's my only lead on the Nest shooting. Last eyes on the victim before he bled out. I'm not standing at the top of some stairs while he ghosts."
"You have previously noted… irregularities on that case. Repeat, do not—"
She thumbed the radio off. Silence smacked her ears, heavy and cold.
Rain plastered her shirt to her spine. She eased through the gap, shoulder scraping the metal, one hand on the Glock at her hip, the other on the wall. The steps dragged her down, each one a slick threat.
A doorway hunched at the bottom, cut into brick blackened by years of soot. A metal shutter hung half open, pulsing with faint green light from within. The sound reached her now. Voices, dozens at least. The clink of glass, a low mechanical hum, something like animal chittering just under it.
She ducked under the shutter.
The world opened.
The Tube platform stretched wider than any she'd worked in during evacuations, but the space felt wrong. Cables hung from the arched ceiling like the roots of some steel tree. Old enamel signs still clung to the walls—WHITECHAPEL, CHALK FARM—but someone had scraped out the names and scrawled looping symbols in their place.
Stalls lined the platform where commuters once stood. Tables draped in velvet , tarps, flayed airline adverts. Lanterns burned with green, blue, dull gold flame that gave off almost no heat. People moved between them in dense knots. Too many coats with hoods up. Too many faces turned away as if by habit.
Quinn stopped just under the shutter, breath stuttering. Her fingers brushed her badge out of reflex.
"Christ."
A woman in a red raincoat brushed past her, eyes sharp and amused.
"First time?"
Quinn matched her stare.
"Move along."
The woman snorted and melted into the crowd.
She scanned for the black hoodie. A flash of wet fabric, the fall of a familiar shoulder near the far end of the platform. He pushed through a beaded curtain strung between two stalls and vanished.
She surged forward.
Stallholders watched her move. A man with a shaved head and a scar like a finger along his jaw leaned over a tray of silver vials.
"Careful, love. You break it, you buy it."
"Keep talking. I’ll find time for you later."
A tall bloke in a tweed coat held up a jar as she passed. Something pale curled inside it.
"Fresh banshee vocal cords. You look like you need them."
Her jaw clenched .
"You got a licence for that, mate?"
He laughed, eyes too bright.
"For what?"
The Market drank the exchange and went on with its business. Behind the stalls, the tunnel gaped dark. A hand-painted sign hung overhead, white letters on black wood: THE VEIL.
Her brain filed the name and shoved it next to Morris's last words in that hospital corridor three years before. Something about a veil. A shadow under the fluorescent lights. His fingers clutching at air.
She pushed the memory aside. She had no room for ghosts.
Halfway down the platform, a barrier cut across the flow. Two men lounged in front of it, broad shoulders under heavy coats, the bored stillness of people who knew violence up close. A chain stretched between them, bones threaded along it like knucklebones.
One of them lifted his chin as Quinn approached.
"Token."
She held up her warrant card.
"Detective Quinn, Metropolitan Police. Step aside."
The man eyed the badge as if it annoyed him.
"Pretty picture. Token."
His mate swirled a toothpick in his teeth.
"House rules."
Quinn drew a breath, tasted oil and metal.
"You're obstructing an active investigation."
"No, luv." The first one tilted his head toward the crowd behind her. "You obstructing trade."
He flicked his fingers. The chain of bones rattled. Every little piece was carved —runes, numbers, tiny faces. Some of them didn't look human.
On the other side, through the gap between the men, she glimpsed the black hoodie again, already thirty metres away, angling toward a far arch that glowed with hazy yellow light. If he hit another exit, she would lose him, and with him the thread that ran from the Raven's Nest in Soho to the corpse on that sticky floor and now down here.
Her left wrist ticked under her sleeve. The old watch she wore for Morris, its face fogged with age. The second hand crawled.
The toothpick man jerked his head toward her holster.
"Firearms need special permits down here. You don't look like you've filled the right forms."
"Down where?"
"Veil Market."
The name snapped against her nerves.
She looked past them again, into the deeper tunnel. The air shifted there, thick with something sweet and rotten. Stalls gleamed under that wrong light—glass domes with storms trapped inside, knives that shimmered like they cut through more than air, cages she did not want to focus on.
Her radio sat heavy at her belt, dead by her own hand. Backup would reach the alley in… five minutes. Ten? In that time the suspect could slip through a side tunnel, or climb on a train that should not run, or vanish in whatever way people in places like this vanished.
"If I walk away," she forced the words out, "he gets free. He goes back up top, another body hits the slab, my superintendent wants to know why I stood at the door of a bloody bazaar while a murder suspect shopped for cursed junk."
The first guard studied her face with dull interest.
"No cops in the Veil. That's why it works."
"It's London," she snapped. "Everything's under our remit."
"Not this." He patted the chain. "This is old turf."
"Then arrest me." Her voice came out sharper than she'd planned. "You don't look keen."
A laugh broke from a nearby stall, rough and amused. A man with olive skin and dark curls stepped away from a table littered with bandages and glass bottles. A Saint Christopher medallion rested against his throat.
"You'll lose," he called across. Spanish rolled around his consonants. "She’ll stand here all night. She's got that look."
The guard with the toothpick lifted it in greeting.
"Stay in your lane, Tomás."
Tomás raised both hands and backed off, but his eyes stayed on Quinn. Curious. Measuring.
She turned that curiosity back on the guards.
"Here's what happens if you keep me out," she pushed on, words snapping in rhythm with her pulse . "I go back up there, get a dozen uniforms, armed response, and we lock this place down. Fire exits, vents, sewer grates. You won't move a single bone until I've checked every stall, every punter. How does that sit with your 'works'?"
A ripple moved through the nearest knot of shoppers. People glanced her way then away.
The first guard rolled his neck.
"You bring uniforms," he drawled, "and half these people bolt into pipes you don't know exist. Then what? You file some forms, lose some paperwork, get told from higher up to let it go. The Market don't close. It moves. You lose it."
The certainty in his tone sat under her skin. She tasted bureaucracy and shrugs and Morris's name on a memorial wall.
She stepped closer to the bone chain. The carved pieces knocked against each other, hollow music.
"I only need one," she said. "The lad in the hoodie. He killed a man in a Soho bar tonight. Witness puts him with the victim and a gun. I bring him in, this calls less attention. You let me through now, I focus on him, not your…"
Her gaze flicked over the stalls, the unregistered drugs, the glinting blades.
"…side hustle."
Toothpick snorted.
"Not his first time down here. He pays his dues. You got paperwork for your accusation?"
"In my pocket. Along with my power of arrest."
The first guard studied her stillness, her squared shoulders, the way her hand stayed away from her weapon. He drummed fingers on his bicep. The bone tokens rattled with each tap.
"You walk through that arch," he nodded toward the deeper tunnel, "you do it their way, not yours."
"Whose way?"
"Everyone's but yours."
She thought of Morris's empty desk. The look on the superintendent's face when she floated the word "veiled" in her report and got silence back. The list of bars and basements and back rooms like the Raven's Nest that never quite turned up on official maps.
Her throat tightened.
"Last chance. Move, or I move you."
The toothpick stilled in the second man's mouth.
"You really want to swing at this, officer?"
Quinn looked past them one more time.
The suspect slipped through the far arch. Just a glimpse—a shoulder, the back of his head, the way he never looked behind him because he trusted the crowd to swallow pursuit. A splash of rainwater dropped from his hood to the floor.
Every lesson from every training day screamed at her to hold the line, wait for backup, document, contain. The part of her that had knelt with Morris on that concrete three years ago watched his hand fall away from hers and knew the thing in the shadows had not feared paperwork.
Her watch ticked against her skin.
"Tomás," she called across without taking her eyes off the guards, "you patch these people up when they get knifed?"
He wiped his hands on a rag.
"Among other services."
"Stay close."
His brows hooked.
"That a threat or a warning?"
"A favour to both of us."
The first guard blew out a slow breath.
"You go in there," he muttered, chain swaying, "no badge. No radio. You’re just meat with a gun."
"Then I'm not wasting time explaining myself."
She stepped forward.
The bone chain bounced against her hip. The guards held their ground for half a heartbeat. Then the first man lifted the tokens with a grudging twist of his wrist.
"Your funeral, Quinn."
She pushed through the gap into the deeper tunnel and followed the suspect into the Market.