AI “Police. Stop.”
Harlow Quinn vaulted the last step of the Raven’s Nest’s narrow stair and slammed through the door into the street. Water flicked off her coat sleeves as she cut left, boots skidding on slick paving stones. The runner had a head start, but he carried something heavy, it dragged his right shoulder down as he sprinted.
He glanced back once. A pale face under a dark hood, eyes too bright in the spill of shopfront light. Then he vanished between two parked cars.
Quinn drove forward with the same hard cadence that had carried her through eighteen years of other people’s bad nights. Her worn leather watch chafed her left wrist as she pumped her arms. She kept her chin down, sharp jaw clenched , breath controlled. No shouting now. Noise helped him. Noise drew eyes.
A taxi horn blared as she clipped its wing mirror. The driver leaned out and cursed. Quinn didn’t turn.
The alley swallowed the runner, then spat him out into a wider street. Soho rushed past in smeared colours, neon and brake lights splintering in puddles. The runner cut across traffic without slowing. Quinn followed, one hand up, palm out. A black cab snapped to a stop inches from her thigh.
“You got a death wish?”
Quinn slapped her warrant card against the driver’s window without breaking stride.
“Met. Police. Move.”
She cleared the bonnet and hit the opposite kerb, shoes biting, then slipping. The runner shoved through a knot of smokers outside a late-night chicken shop. Grease and vinegar hit Quinn’s throat. Someone yelped as his elbow clipped a face.
“Oi!”
He didn’t apologise. He didn’t look back again either. He knew the streets.
Quinn gained a yard. Another. He hooked hard right past a corner shop with a flickering blue sign, then ducked into a service lane where bins sat like crouched animals. The lane narrowed, walls sweating damp. A cat shot from under a pallet and bolted.
Quinn’s shoulder brushed brick. Her radio bumped her ribs with each stride. She wanted to call it in, to flood the area, to do it by the book.
The book hadn’t brought Morris back.
The runner reached a chain-link gate at the end of the lane. It stood padlocked, but he didn’t slow. He slipped sideways, pressed his hand to a seam in the wall instead of the fence.
Brick rippled.
Quinn’s stomach tightened, not with fear, with recognition. Wrongness had a texture. It scraped the inside of her teeth.
The runner disappeared into the wall as if the city opened its mouth and swallowed him.
Quinn hit the gate and rattled it. Locked. Of course. Her eyes snapped to the brickwork. The seam still showed, a thin dark line that didn’t belong.
She pulled her baton. Steel clicked.
Her watch tick-tocked loud in her ears as she pressed the baton tip to the seam. The brick softened under the pressure like wet clay.
A voice floated from behind her.
“You look lost, detective.”
Quinn spun, baton up. A man stood under the overhang at the lane’s mouth, posture casual. He wore a flat cap pulled low and a long coat that shed water in thick drops. His face carried the bland patience of someone paid to wait.
Quinn kept the baton aimed at his sternum.
“Move.”
He smiled without warmth .
“Not that way.”
Quinn stepped forward, forcing him back.
“I’m not asking.”
He lifted both hands, palms empty.
“Then don’t. You can go back to your nice lit streets. Or you can go down, where the rules change and your badge turns into a joke.”
Quinn’s eyes flicked to the seam again. The runner had gone down. The man blocked the lane’s mouth like a lid.
“What’s down there?”
“Market.”
“Camden’s nowhere near here.”
His smile deepened, and that did it. A clean little confirmation that London didn’t behave for him either.
“Doors open where they open.”
Quinn’s baton lowered a fraction.
“You’re a gatekeeper.”
“I’m a doorman with a headache.”
Quinn stepped in close enough to smell tobacco and something metallic under it.
“Then open the door.”
He shook his head.
“Token.”
Quinn kept her gaze steady. Her mind ran through procedure, through the clean list of options. None fit. The runner had taken evidence, or worse. She had seen the weight on his shoulder, the careful way he held it. He stole something from the Nest, something he didn’t want to drop even while running blind through traffic.
Quinn’s hand went to her coat pocket. She felt paper, her phone, keys.
And then her fingers found a hard nub. Bone.
She pulled it free.
A small, polished token, off-white, carved with a spiral that made her eyes prickle. She didn’t remember putting it there. She didn’t remember seizing it either.
That bothered her more than the brick door.
The doorman’s gaze snapped to the token. For the first time, his calm slipped.
“You shouldn’t have that.”
Quinn held it up between thumb and forefinger.
“I’ve got it.”
His throat worked.
“Then you’re already in trouble.”
Quinn pushed the token against the seam.
The wall accepted it with a soft, obscene give. The seam widened. Air breathed out, damp and cold, carrying a stink of old iron, incense, and something like burnt sugar .
Quinn glanced once at the street behind her, the clean geometry of streetlights and shop windows. Backup wouldn’t find her if she vanished into a wall.
The doorman leaned in.
“You go in alone, you don’t come out alone.”
Quinn shoved past him and stepped through.
The brick turned liquid around her shoulders and snapped solid behind her with a wet slap.
A stairwell dropped steeply into darkness. Quinn took it fast, baton in one hand, phone torch in the other. The beam caught peeling Transport for London posters, their faces bubbled and warped by damp. She heard movement below, not one set of footsteps , many.
Voices rose, overlapping, bargaining and hissing. Metal clinked. Glass chattered. Somewhere, a child laughed, sharp as a knife.
Quinn reached the bottom and stepped onto cracked tiles. An abandoned Tube platform stretched ahead, lit by strings of mismatched bulbs and lanterns that burned without flame. Makeshift stalls crowded the track bed, tables built from doors and scaffolding boards. Canvas awnings sagged and dripped, but no water fell from above. The air tasted thick, like the station hadn’t breathed fresh air in decades.
People moved in close streams. Not commuters. Not quite human, some of them . Quinn caught glimpses, a woman with pupils shaped like slits, a tall man whose shadow lagged half a step behind him, a teenager with a bandaged hand that wriggled under the gauze like something lived inside it.
She kept her shoulders squared and walked as if she belonged. Military precision, no hesitation. Predators noticed hesitation.
The runner’s hood bobbed ahead, weaving through bodies. He looked back, saw her, and surged forward.
Quinn elbowed through a pair of men arguing over a jar filled with black sand.
“Watch it.”
“Move.”
A vendor called out from behind a stall covered in old keys.
“Lucky locks! Want a door no one can open, love?”
Quinn didn’t answer. She tracked the runner past a line of hanging herbs that smelled sharp and medicinal, then past a cage where something small and furious slammed itself against wire with a wet thud-thud.
A woman stepped into Quinn’s path. She wore a long, sensible coat and a scarf wrapped high, but her eyes held an amber sheen that didn’t match the rest of her.
“No police.”
Quinn stopped, close enough to see the woman’s lips had been stitched once, tiny scars like thread marks.
Quinn held up the bone token.
“I’m a buyer.”
The woman’s gaze shifted over Quinn’s face, caught on her watch , her posture, her cropped salt-and-pepper hair.
“Buyers don’t smell like paperwork.”
Quinn stepped sideways, shoulder brushing past. The woman didn’t grab her. That felt like a choice, not a surrender .
The runner turned down a corridor where old advertising boards leaned like gravestones. He knocked into someone and didn’t slow. A curse in a language Quinn didn’t recognise snapped after him.
Quinn followed the turn and nearly collided with a man crouched over a low cot behind a stall made of stacked suitcases. A bare bulb swung overhead. The man looked up, eyes warm brown, face drawn tight with focus. A Saint Christopher medallion rested against his throat, catching the light as he moved.
Tomás Herrera.
Quinn had seen him once in a file photo, attached to a case that never made it to court. Former paramedic. Off-the-books medic. A ghost in official records.
His hands pressed a blood-soaked cloth to a woman’s side. The blood looked too dark. The wound looked wrong, the skin puckered as if something had bitten and then melted the edges.
Herrera’s gaze flicked to Quinn’s baton.
“You’re not supposed to bring that.”
Quinn’s eyes darted past him. The runner’s hood flashed, then vanished behind a curtain of beads.
Quinn pointed towards it.
“He went that way.”
Herrera didn’t move from the cot. He kept pressure on the wound with one hand, his other hand hovered over a small bottle filled with cloudy liquid.
“He goes where he thinks you won’t.”
Quinn leaned closer, lowering her voice without softening it.
“You help him?”
Herrera’s jaw tightened. The scar along his left forearm showed as he shifted, pale against olive skin.
“I help whoever bleeds in front of me. Tonight that includes you, if you keep running into the sharp edges down here.”
Quinn’s stare stayed on his hands. Steady. Competent. The kind of hands you wanted on you if your insides tried to become outsides.
“What did he take?”
Herrera’s eyes flicked up, then away.
“Something that made people nervous. That should tell you enough.”
Quinn took a step towards the beads.
“You saw him. You know where he’s going.”
Herrera’s voice turned low, urgent.
“Detective, listen. You chase him deeper, you won’t like what chases you back.”
Quinn held his gaze.
“I didn’t ask for a warning.”
Herrera’s mouth twitched, not a smile, a grim acknowledgement.
“Fine. He heads to the brokers, down past the old ticket hall. He’ll trade whatever he stole for a clean exit.”
Quinn started for the beads.
Herrera snapped a phrase in Spanish to someone out of sight.
A boy appeared, no more than twelve, eyes too old . He held out a small packet wrapped in waxed paper.
Herrera didn’t look at Quinn as he spoke.
“Take it.”
Quinn stopped.
“What is it?”
“Salt and iron filings. If something follows you and it won’t stop, throw it in its face.”
Quinn took the packet. It felt gritty through the paper.
“Why help me?”
Herrera’s gaze flicked to her watch again, then to the baton.
“Because you look like you don’t quit. That gets people killed down here.”
Quinn slipped the packet into her pocket and pushed through the bead curtain.
The corridor beyond narrowed, the air heavier. Old ticket machines lined the wall, their glass fronts cracked. Someone had painted symbols over them in chalk and blood. Quinn’s torch beam caught the marks and slid away as if the light didn’t want to linger.
Footsteps scuffed ahead, quick-quick, then pause, then quick again. The runner.
Quinn moved faster, shoulders tight, baton ready. She reached the end of the corridor and entered what used to be the ticket hall. Stalls ringed the space in a rough circle, leaving a pit in the middle where the floor had collapsed into a deeper shaft. Lanterns hung over it, their light sinking into the hole without hitting bottom.
The runner stood at the edge, bent over, breathing hard. The heavy object hung from his shoulder in a canvas bag, the strap cutting deep into his hoodie. He faced a figure on the opposite side, a broker by the look of him, neat suit, polished shoes, hands gloved in pale leather.
The broker held out a small pouch. Coins clinked inside, too loud in the hush that gathered around them.
Quinn stepped into the open.
“Metropolitan Police. Drop the bag.”
Heads turned. Conversations cut off mid-sentence. The market’s hum tightened into a single, attentive silence .
The runner straightened. He didn’t run. He smiled, and his teeth looked wrong, too even, too sharp.
He swung the bag off his shoulder and held it out, not to Quinn, to the broker.
“Payment first.”
Quinn advanced, baton up.
“Now.”
The broker didn’t move. He tilted his head, studying Quinn like she had arrived without an invitation.
“No uniforms,” he said, voice mild . “No badges. No questions that waste time.”
Quinn’s throat tightened.
“I’ve got a badge.”
The runner’s smile widened. He reached into the bag.
Quinn lunged.
The runner pulled out a glass jar. Something inside it pulsed against the glass, not light, not exactly. It beat like a heart, thump-thump, and each beat made the lantern flames bend towards it.
Quinn’s skin prickled. Her watch seemed to tick louder, then faster.
The broker took one step back.
“Idiot,” he hissed.
The runner twisted the jar’s lid.
All around them, shutters slammed down over stalls in a chain reaction of metal and wood. The circle tightened. Figures in dark coats emerged from behind canvas, faces covered, hands full of hooked tools that caught the lantern light.
Quinn raised her baton as the jar’s lid came free and the thing inside screamed.