AI The suspect's boot hit a puddle and sprayed filth across Quinn's coat. She didn't slow. Eighteen years of chasing people through London's backstreets had taught her that hesitation killed momentum, and momentum was the only currency that mattered at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night in Camden.
He was fast, she'd give him that. Young, lean, moving like someone who knew these streets the way she knew the corridors of New Scotland Yard. He cut left down Hawley Crescent, vaulted a recycling bin, and disappeared behind the kebab shop on the corner. Quinn followed, her worn leather watch catching on the bin's edge as she scrambled over. The strap held. It always held.
"Metropolitan Police! Stop!"
He didn't stop. They never stopped.
Rain hammered the pavement in sheets, turning the neon reflections into smeared oil paintings beneath her feet. She rounded the kebab shop and caught a flash of movement, a dark jacket ducking through a gap in a construction hoarding she'd never noticed before. The boards had been pulled apart just enough for a body to slip through sideways.
Quinn pressed herself into the gap. Splinters caught her jacket. The space beyond opened into what should have been a demolition site but wasn't. Concrete steps descended into the earth where no steps belonged, lit by a sickly amber glow from somewhere below. The suspect's footsteps echoed up like stones dropped into a well.
She pulled her radio from her belt.
"Control, this is DI Quinn. In foot pursuit of male suspect, IC1, dark clothing, heading underground via construction site on Hawley Crescent. Requesting backup to my location."
Static. Not the clean static of a dead zone, but something thicker, wetter, like the radio was drowning .
"Control, respond."
Nothing.
Quinn stared down the steps. Water trickled along the edges, pooling in the cracks of each tread. The amber light pulsed once, faint as a heartbeat, then steadied. From below came the murmur of voices, too many for a Tuesday night in a hole under Camden.
She checked her phone. No signal. The rain intensified above her, hammering the hoarding like applause.
Three years ago, DS Morris had followed a suspect underground. Different borough, different case, same instinct. They'd found his warrant card in a drainage tunnel six days later. Nothing else. The official report cited structural collapse. Quinn had read the unofficial notes, the ones that mentioned symbols scratched into the tunnel walls and the fact that the drainage tunnel hadn't existed on any survey map since 1894.
She descended.
The steps went deeper than they should have. Thirty, forty, fifty treads. The walls transitioned from raw earth to Victorian brickwork to something older, smoother, stones fitted without mortar that wept moisture in the amber light. The air changed too. Up top it smelled of rain and exhaust. Down here, copper and something botanical she couldn't place. Sage, or something pretending to be sage.
At the bottom, a narrow corridor opened before her. The voices grew distinct enough to separate, haggling, laughter, the clink of glass on glass. And then the corridor ended at a heavy iron door, already ajar.
Quinn pushed through.
The space beyond stole her breath.
An abandoned Tube station, or what had once been one. The tiled walls still bore the ghost of a station name, scraped away decades ago, replaced by hand-painted symbols in languages she didn't recognise. The platform stretched in both directions, packed with stalls built from salvaged wood and draped in dark cloth. Lanterns hung from the vaulted ceiling on chains, casting pools of warm light that fought the shadows and lost. Hundreds of people moved between the stalls, and some of them, Quinn noted with a tightness in her chest, didn't move quite right. Too fluid. Too still. Too many joints in their fingers.
The Veil Market. She'd heard rumours. Every copper in the Met had heard rumours. Informants who mentioned it tended to recant within days, and the ones who didn't tended to disappear.
She scanned the crowd for her suspect. There, fifty metres ahead, weaving between a stall selling bottled liquids that glowed faintly violet and another displaying what appeared to be teeth arranged by size in velvet -lined cases. He glanced over his shoulder and their eyes locked. He bolted deeper into the market.
Quinn moved. She kept her warrant card in her pocket, some instinct warning her that flashing Met credentials in this place would be like bleeding in shark water. She shouldered past a woman whose skin shimmered with iridescent scales and muttered an apology that went unacknowledged.
A hand caught her elbow.
"You're lost."
She spun. A young man with olive skin and short curly hair stood beside a stall draped in white cloth. Medical supplies, she realised. Gauze, syringes, bottles of unlabelled liquid arranged with clinical precision. A scar ran along his left forearm, visible below his rolled sleeve, and a Saint Christopher medallion caught the lantern light at his throat.
"I'm not lost."
"Everyone who looks like you is lost down here."
"Looks like me."
"Like someone who pays taxes and trusts the police." He glanced at the bulge of her radio under her jacket. "Which you are."
Quinn's jaw tightened. "I'm pursuing a suspect."
"In here, everyone's a suspect." He released her elbow and began reorganising bottles on his stall, casual as a shopkeeper on a Sunday morning. "And no one's under your jurisdiction."
"Everyone in London is under my jurisdiction."
He laughed, a short bark without malice but without warmth either.
"You're funny. What did this suspect do?"
"That's police business."
"And this is Market business. The two don't mix." He nodded toward the far end of the platform, where the crowd thickened around a cluster of larger stalls. "Your man went that way. Past the bonecrafters, through the archway with the green paint. But I'd stop chasing if I were you."
"Why?"
"Because that archway leads to the deep stalls. Things get sold back there that don't have names in English. And the people selling them don't care about your warrant card, your handcuffs, or the fact that you've got a Glock 17 you're not supposed to be carrying in a shoulder holster under your left arm."
Quinn's hand instinctively moved toward her jacket. She stopped herself. The young man smiled, but his eyes held something complicated, not threat, not quite concern .
"Paramedic's eye," he said. "You learn to spot the weight distribution. I'm Tomás, by the way. And you should leave."
"People keep telling me where I should and shouldn't go. I find it motivating."
"Motivating." Tomás leaned against his stall. "Your suspect, the one running. I've seen him before. He comes every market night, buys from a vendor in the deep stalls. Alchemical compounds. Nothing recreational. The kind of thing you'd use for bindings."
"Bindings."
"Restraints. Supernatural restraints. The kind that hold things that don't want to be held." His fingers found the medallion at his throat, turned it once. "Three years ago, a police officer died down here. Not in the deep stalls, but close . He found something he shouldn't have, or something found him. The market moved locations after that. Took them a week to clean the platform."
Quinn's blood cooled. "How do you know about that?"
"Because I was the one they called to try and save him."
The market noise seemed to recede. Quinn stood in a pocket of silence with this stranger, this former paramedic with steady hands and a scar that spoke of violence, and the ground beneath her feet felt less solid than it had a moment ago.
"DS Morris," she said. "His name was DS Morris."
Something shifted in Tomás's expression. The practised neutrality cracked, just for a second, revealing something raw beneath.
"I know what his name was."
"The report said structural collapse."
"Reports say all sorts of things." He picked up a roll of gauze, set it down again. "The things in the deep stalls didn't collapse anything. They opened something. A door that shouldn't exist, in a wall that shouldn't be there. Your partner walked through it."
"And?"
"And what came back wasn't him. Not all of him. Not enough." Tomás met her eyes. "I couldn't save what was left. Nobody could."
Quinn's hand found the edge of his stall. The wood felt real. The gauze felt real. Everything around her, the lanterns, the stalls, the impossible underground station, felt real in a way that made her previous understanding of London seem flimsy, a postcard version of a city built on something much older and much less friendly.
"The suspect I'm chasing. You said he buys binding compounds."
"Every month. Same vendor."
"Show me which one."
Tomás stared at her. He pushed off from the stall and reached beneath the white cloth, producing a small bone token the size of a fifty-pence piece, carved with a symbol that seemed to shift when she wasn't looking directly at it .
"This gets you into the market. Without it, the door upstairs won't open for you again." He pressed it into her palm. "Next full moon, everything moves. New location, new entrance. You'll need a new token."
"I didn't ask for a membership card."
"No. You asked me to take you to the deep stalls, which is worse." He rolled his sleeves down, covering the scar, and stepped out from behind the stall. "Stay close. Don't touch anything anyone offers you. Don't make eye contact with anything that doesn't have the right number of eyes. And whatever you do, don't draw that weapon."
He started walking. Quinn pocketed the token and followed, past the bonecrafters with their impossible ivory arrangements, past a stall where a woman whispered into jars and sealed them with wax, past a man selling maps of places that, Quinn suspected, didn't exist on any surface she'd ever walked.
The green-painted archway loomed ahead. Beyond it, the light dimmed to something barely qualifying as light at all, and the air thickened with the copper-sage smell, stronger now, laced with something chemical and sharp.
Tomás stopped at the threshold.
"Last chance, detective."
Quinn looked back the way they'd come. The market churned behind her, a living thing with its own heartbeat and its own rules. Somewhere in the deep stalls, her suspect was buying tools designed to cage something inhuman. And somewhere in the deep stalls, three years ago, DS Morris had stopped being DS Morris.
She stepped through the archway.
The green paint on the stone wasn't paint. It pulsed beneath her fingertips as she brushed past, warm and faintly wet, and behind her, with the soft finality of a coffin lid, the archway sealed shut.