AI "Stop!" she barked, boots slapping puddles, breath rasping sharp against the city noise .
The figure in the hood did not stop. He cut left, swallowed a flicker of neon, vanished through a narrow gap between the Raven's Nest and a shuttered newsagent. Quinn's hand tightened on her torch. She had eighteen years of chasing people who ran for reasons that made sense and reasons that did not. Tonight felt like the latter instead of the former.
She hit the alley at a run, water sluicing down her collar, leather watch flicking black against her wrist. The Nest's green sign buzzed, the bar's door spilled laughter and cigarette smoke, photographs on the walls blurred in amber. A glass bottle rolled and shattered . The hooded man kept moving, lanky, alternating left then right with the kind of gait that said practiced escape. He might have thought he could trade the Nest's hum for anonymity. He had not accounted for Quinn's balance.
"Stop!" she repeated. The word had less pleading than command. Her voice carried a single thing: intent.
A voice answered from the darkness, nothing but breath and a rasp.
"Detective Quinn," it said. The tone held amusement and the kind of certainty that came from knowing the layout.
That stung. Her jaw went tight. Morris's name flashed, unbidden. She swallowed it down, like grit, and pushed forward. Names gave people roots. Quinn did not want the roots she had now.
The alley spat them out onto a wet main road where taxis hissed past. He darted across, cutting between a double-decker and a lamppost, then dove for the tube entrance at the corner. People pressed in, umbrellas flicking like dark surprised birds. He used the crowd as cover and disappeared below the metal teeth of the stairwell.
She hit the top step two at a time. The adverts at the platform glowed, the world turned brand names. The station smelled of oil and old cheap perfume. Most of the lights here had been dead for years, but someone had left a feeble fluorescent humming above the ticket machine. Her boot struck metal. The hooded man reached the turnstile and did not slow.
Quinn saw his hand as he moved past, a flash of pale bone-white between fingers. A token, that glint , quick as a fly's wing. He dropped it into a slot in the tiled wall. A section of the brickwork pulsed , then unlipped like a mouth into a stairway that led down, deeper, into an old service tunnel.
The hidden markets never had official addresses. They preferred bone tokens and folklore, contracts made in the dark. The Veil Market moved with the moon, they said. Entry required bone. Quinn had read the reports. She had not believed the parts that read like old wives' tales until a man named Morris stopped typing and stopped breathing three years ago.
She hesitated at the lip of the opening. The stairway down smelled of something old and hot, something sweet under the scent of iron. Voices drifted up, muffled and alive. She could call for backup. She could wait. The safe, lawful thing, that mantel of uniformed procedure she had draped over herself since she joined the Metropolitan.
She checked her watch . Time mattered less than choices. Her training told her two things. First, follow until you find out. Second, protect yourself while doing it.
"Quinn," a voice behind her said, small and urgent.
A man stepped out from under the vestibule where someone had stashed a discarded crate. Tomás Herrera, the last person in town to be purely civilian. He looked like an ambulance had made a home out of his face. Warm brown eyes, medallion catching a stray light. He did not look surprised to find her here. He always smelled faintly of antiseptic and oranges.
"Tommy," she said.
"You should not be down there," he said.
He said the words like he had measured them with a tray. He did not say you shouldn't because of law. He said you shouldn't because he had seen too many corpses that weren't quite corpses and too many things that should not have been stitched together in alleyway basements . He kept his hands out where she could see them. They were clean.
"I saw the token," she said. "Who was he?"
Tomás followed her gaze to the opening. "Not mine to speak of."
"Every market has faces. You know them."
He smiled without humour. "I patch people. I do not sell bone." The medallion at his throat caught and swung. "If you go down, you do not come back the same."
Quinn did the thing she never allowed herself in company: she weighed the man as if she could balance truth and fear on his shoulders. She remembered a photograph of Morris, hair cleaner, younger, alive. She remembered the cold of the river when they had pulled a body up and the way people's faces locked in denial as if that could hold the water out. She remembered the sound that had come from under someone's ribs as a thing moved and not a heart. She had not understood Bristol. She had not wanted to.
"I will not leave," she said. It was not a promise. It was the setting of a stone.
Tomás's mouth thinned. "Then be careful. They know you."
That cut in worse than the cold. Being known in places that hid was dangerous. Being known by people who preferred bone to badge even more so.
She dropped down one step. The air took her like a hand. A trade of cold for deeper cold. The stairway became a corridor edged with stalls and curtains. Lamps burned on strings, throwing light like warm teeth. Men and women turned—heads, bodies, a ripple of interest like birds unsettled . A dog barked once, then silenced. The market unfolded: a collage of trade and barter, of jars that glowed with liquid the colour of bruises, strings of feathers, knives wrapped in velvet , bones polished smooth to a shine. The sellers moved with an economy of motion that came from hiding and survival.
Tomás moved with her to the edge of the lane. He kept his hand at her elbow but did not touch.
"Tomás," a woman called from a booth, giving them no other name. "Fresh waxed teeth." Her voice slid like a coin.
Quinn ignored it. She scanned for the hooded man. She saw a blur of blue, a glimpse of a back turned too quickly , a scuff on the floor that made a dust cloud. She pushed through a curtain and a tangle of heavy voices folded over her. The market's sound was different from the city above. Here, language became a trade currency. People bartered in glances and talismans, not pounds.
A child—no more than twelve, hair cropped fierce—sidled toward the stall where Tomás had been pointing earlier. He had been stitching up a man whose skin had gone wrong in a place Quinn had no vocabulary for. The man took too long between breaths, but Tomás's hands moved like maps, sure and practiced.
"Out," Tomás hissed, eyes on the man. He dug in a pouch and pressed something into the man's palm. He watched the patient's chest rise.
Quinn's torch beam went past him. She caught the hooded man's profile at last: long nose, a scar under the eye, tooth like a stone. He stood by a vendor selling glass eyes. They were not for the living. The man dangled a small bone token on a string.
Quinn moved. The man's lips flattened into a smirk as he saw her. He did the thing people who had held bone tokens did when they wanted to be polite: he offered the token.
"You should not be here," she said.
"You shouldn't be surprised," he said. He tucked the token back. "We like surprises."
"You leave now, before this gets complicated."
He laughed, a dry, precise sound. "And what? Arrest me? Explain pointe d'os? Tell the boys upstairs we exchange bone for coin? They will laugh. They will not come."
Quinn considered the shape of the market around them. There were exits and loops and blind alleys designed by people who loved secrets. Every stall felt like a throat .
"Tomás," she said quietly.
He shook his head. "No."
"Then get out the way," she said louder.
He did not move. He had the look medics got when they watched a patient die slowly . She adjusted her stance and reached for the token.
Her hand touched the string. It was cold, like thin bone. The moment her fingers closed, the market shifted. Conversations tapered. A bell tucked somewhere in the market sounded once, pure and small. People folded in. A man at a cart raised his arm and then lowered it like a conductor. A barred door at the far end of the lane clanged shut.
"Don't," Tomás said. The single word fractured over his teeth.
She felt eyes collect like rain. The hooded man grinned with a predator 's ease and then moved. He did not run. He lifted the token high, as if making an offering . Words rolled from his mouth in a language Quinn did not have on any file. The light warped. Ink-black shadows peeled from corners and moved like smoke toward the token.
Quinn should have let go. She should have retreated and radioed. She should have obeyed the protocols that had kept officers whole for decades. She had never liked the way protocol softened the edge of danger. She preferred the hard angle of reality.
She stepped forward instead. Her shoulder brushed Tomás. He flinched but did not pull her back.
"Police," someone shouted, high and absurd. A vendor laughed once. A dog howled and then was quiet.
The token flared like a moth caught in a lamp. Shadows fanned outward. People who had been quiet began to move—one reaching for a knife, another snatching a coil of rope. The hooded man took one step back and then folded away into the crowd like a smudged photograph.
A figure detached from the press, cloth like a tide. Quinn saw a face now, not a hood: clean-shaven, older, eyes pale as bone. He stepped onto a small platform and lifted his palm. Vendors bowed. The figure's voice filled the space. It was lyrical, practiced.
"Guests," he said. The word was an invitation and a trap at once.
Tomás grabbed her arm, hard. "Get down," he hissed. "Now."
She did not bend. Instinct kept her upright. She saw the angle, then felt it—a weight behind her left leg. Something like a cable snapped out and wrapped around her ankle. She stumbled. The floor tipped. A heavy wooden crate swung from an overhead beam and cracked the back of her calf. Pain detonated bright and clear. Her boot slipped in a smear of something wet. A bolt of wood hit the tiles. She tasted copper.
Someone moved in the crowd, a long-armed figure, and the world narrowed to that movement. Tomás lunged, pulling at the cable. His medallion flashed. The older man's voice rose, a slow chant that sounded like old libraries being opened .
Quinn twisted, found enough purchase to throw an elbow. The cable bit harder, a rope lined with fear. The vendors drew closer. A dozen hands, some gloved, some not, reached. Her torch spun from her fingers and skittered into shadow. For a second, she thought she saw the face of Morris in the older man's eyes, as if the city had folded memory into present.
Tomás shoved something into her palm. "Take it," he said. It was small and cold and not bone. His fingers slipped back to the man's chest. Blood darkened his knuckles.
Quinn's free hand found something at thigh level, a forgotten baton. She heard a click, small and decisive. The older man gestured again, and the crowd flowed like clockwork to obey. A bright bolt screamed out from a hidden crossbow and skittered over the spot where her head had been a beat before. It struck the man beside her, who gave a sound like a dog and folded.
The market erupted.
"Out!" someone yelled in a language that was not English enough to confuse, but English enough to warn .
The crowd surged forward. The older man glared. Tomás shoved her toward a narrow service door and shoved a knife into the back of a crate to wedge it open. His breath came fast. He kept his voice low.
"Now," he said.
She moved because he said so, because his hands were blistered and steady. When she passed under a hanging lamp, she saw the older man's mouth thin with contempt. He lifted the token high. In the sudden light it looked like an eye .
Quinn shoved through the door and felt the market's press against her back. She did not have a token. She did not have a plan B. She had a badge folded in her pocket and a watch that still ticked. She had instincts that had cost her partners and nights of sleep.
A hand closed over her shoulder from behind and another in front. She was squeezed between two bodies that smelled of oil and old blood. Tomás shoved a sliver of paper into her palm. "When you get the chance," he said, his mouth close to her ear, "look for the map."
Before she could answer, before she could move, someone struck the string of a bell hard enough to set teeth on edge. The older man cried out a name that landed like a stone.
"Detective Quinn."
The entire market turned. The moment crystallised and broke. The older man's eyes found hers. He smiled with teeth that had never known kindness.
Tomás pushed her forward, then vanished, swallowed by a congregation of bodies. Quinn ran because there was no other thing to do. She burst into a lane of stalls and felt the rope that had wrapped around her ankle pull taut. The crate that had hit her earlier rocked back on its hinges and fell.
She vaulted over a low table stacked with jars that glowed darkly. A hand seized at her coat. She tore free, hears ringing, and then—
Something slammed into her, hard, and the world went bright with pain. The torch clattered, rolling. Glass shattered . A shout split the air. When she hit the tiles she tasted blood and the market's perfume. A figure leaned over her, face gone from human into a cut of shadow. Fingers curled toward her throat.
They were not meant to be touched.