AI Stop. Police.
Quinn shouldered through a knot of gawkers before the word finished leaving her mouth. The runner glanced back, hood tight over his skull, an armful of something wrapped in oilcloth thudding against his ribs. He slipped on the slick paving, windmilled, then caught himself and bolted down the alley between a shuttered kebab shop and a bar that still leaked drumbeat through brick.
Her boots hit a puddle like a fist. Spray hit her face. She did not blink. Her breath came measured, count of four in, two out, the cadence drilled into her years ago. Her left wrist burned where the worn leather of her watch dug in. She pushed harder.
He darted left past a parked moped, knocked a crate of limes into the street. Green orbs chased each other, a stupid hazard. She vaulted them and kept him centred. The whiff of petrol from the moped’s exhaust mixed with frying oil and something metallic that made the tongue sting. He looked back again. Young, maybe late twenties, pale eyes that did not match the street. The kind that logged exits the moment he entered a room.
He hit Camden High Street and risked the crossing. A cab braked and swore at him. She cut behind the cab, brushed its hot bonnet with her thigh, and the driver leaned on the horn like he owned it. The runner vanished past a mural of a screaming mouth. A bus belched to her right, and a gust shoved at her. She kept low and ran.
Her radio rasped at her shoulder. She ignored it. No time to feed the net. Another set of sirens bayed somewhere distant, not hers. She had him close.
He cut down a service road lined with bins, took a slim gap through a buckled metal fence, and dropped out of sight. She reached the gap, shouldered through, metal tore at her jacket, then she stood at the top of a short flight of crumbling steps that sank away into the dark.
He had not vanished. Footfalls thudded below and to the left. Echoes muddied the direction. Wet brick sucked sound like a mouth. She drew her torch and thumbed it. A lean cone cut the gloom . Mould flashed like frost. An old enamel sign, chipped to letters that looked like a puzzle . Underneath, spray paint still dripped. NO COPS. NO TAILS. NO TRACKING. A bone-white handprint marked the corner.
She went down two at a time.
The stair opened into a tiled corridor that still wore the Tube’s red banding around its gut. Posters the colour of old bruises layered across one another, opera and illegal raves and something in Cyrillic. She smelt rust and wet stone and a thin thread of incense. Another left, a right, the space widened and then doubled back on itself, a rabbit warren built by council neglect and someone else’s will.
The runner vanished through a doorway half blocked by a roll shutter. A figure stepped into her path. She saw teeth under a scarf and the flash of something in a palm.
She did not ask twice.
Move.
The figure shifted, not quite human in the tilt of the head, then melted into the arch and watched her pass with pupils blown wide .
She hit an iron gate hung with padlocks that were not for show. The runner stood beyond it in a pool of lantern light, hands up, palms out, oilcloth bundle under one arm. Between them, a desk that had been a pulpit in a life she could not imagine, now painted with constellations of tiny skulls.
A woman sat behind the desk. Hard eyes, cropped hair, jacket neat enough to front of house any club in Soho, but her hands were scarred like a butcher’s. She held a coin between thumb and forefinger. Not a coin. The size was wrong and the surface less flat than it should have been. Bone, carved with something that did not like being looked at too long.
Bone token, the thought formed without permission.
The woman held out her palm.
The runner slapped a matching piece into it. Her other hand hovered above a bell the size of a baby’s fist. She did not glance at Quinn.
He is about to vanish.
Quinn reached for the gate. Cold stung her fingers. She rattled the bars and the padlocks danced like metal fish.
The woman’s gaze cut to her at last. Calm, then colder.
Token.
Police, Quinn said. Move.
She was aware of how thin the badge sounded down here.
The woman’s mouth did not smile. No police.
She reached for the bell.
Quinn shifted her weight . She could climb. Padlock chain had slack. Gate ledges scarred by a century of fingers. She could be over before the bell.
A voice spoke from behind her shoulder, soft and almost warm.
You do not want that bell rung, detective.
Quinn did not take her eyes off the runner. He had begun to edge backward, away from the cone of light, into the drift of steam beyond. The corridor behind him breathed like a throat.
You know me, she said.
I patched a man you dragged out of an alley with his own glass bottle in his belly. You paid cash and did not ask my name.
She slid her gaze and saw him. Tomás Herrera. Olive skin sallow under bad bulbs, curls damp against his skull. His Saint Christopher medallion winked once at his throat. He cradled a canvas doctor’s bag in the crook of his elbow like a child. He had a scar down his forearm, pale as chalk on brown skin.
Herrera, she said.
He gave a small shrug. I answer to Tommy faster. And I answer to a place like this even faster when that bell rings.
I need through.
He looked from her to the woman at the desk, then to the shadow that held her quarry. His mouth twitched with a thought he chose not to share.
They do not let your kind into the Market without a token, he said. Not with your steel and your rules. They prefer their own rules.
He opened his bag, fished, and brought out something that clicked gently against his fingerprint. A chip of bone with a hole through it, worn smooth by worry.
Quinn held his gaze. You keep one of those for patients.
I keep one for not getting trapped up there when it moves, he said. Full moon makes new maps.
She put out her hand.
He closed his fingers around the token a beat longer than she liked, then released. Her palm felt a scratchy warmth that did not feel like dead bone. The carved lines bit against her skin, a pattern that made the eye want to slide off it. She refused.
The woman’s hand came out of the lantern light with the bell poised. Token, she repeated, bored now.
Quinn lifted the token and placed it in the scarred hand. Skin met bone. The chain of padlocks released with a heavy clunk that she felt in her molars as much as her ears. The gate creaked open.
The runner smiled with half his mouth and turned on his heel.
Quinn pushed through the gate. Herrera moved at her side, close enough to count as an error. The woman behind the desk watched them go, her fingers caressing the bell’s stem as if it were a promise.
Remember your tithe, she said like a dentist reminding you to floss. The Market collects.
They had stepped into the throat and it swallowed them.
The tunnel widened until it thought itself a hall. Lanterns hung where strip lights had died, draped in sailcloth and paper charms that had bled in old rain. Stalls had sprung like mushrooms in the gaps between iron pillars, each with its own smell and sound. Quinn clocked the lay fast. To her left, a table of knives, old and clean, each labelled with a name in neat ink, some in alphabets she had not learned. To her right, an apothecary of thick glass jars, leeches coiling like eyelash hair, powders in colours found only in dreams that end with screaming. A woman ground something that flashed blue under the pestle. She did not look up.
People pressed on all sides, and the word did not fit some of them. Sweat and clove and smoke fought in the air. A child with eyes like cat glass stared up at Quinn’s holstered sidearm and hissed. Herrera slid in closer, more shadow than bulk.
Do not draw that, he said without looking at her. It is iron, and iron starts fights here.
If he runs, I stop him.
If he runs, you keep him in sight and we walk, he said. Keep your left shoulder to the knives and you will find the main concourse.
The runner stayed a ribbon of movement ahead, not fast, not slow. He knew the rhythm of a place where running drew attention. He did not brush a single hanging amulet. He did not look back. He belonged to the Market’s pulse , not above ground. Quinn felt the ground slant under her in a way that said old rails slept beneath. Her throat tasted of copper. She swallowed and moved.
A man selling teeth called after her in a voice that had been a choir once. Teeth for luck, for love, for speaking false. She kept her jaw set and ignored him. A glassblower worked in the middle of his own stall, a stick of fire at his mouth. Liquid light drooped and turned into a bottle that throbbed . Herrera’s shoulder brushed hers and his breath hitched, a small sign that he had seen something he wished he had not.
Why help me, Tommy.
Because I have seen what happens when your lot go in alone, he said. And because someone taught me to pay a debt when I could count it.
The runner slipped under a chain of bones strung between two posts and ducked into a lane that cut away from the main throng. Quinn followed. Herrera cursed in Spanish no mother would claim and kept pace.
The ceiling dropped to a height that made tall men bow. The smells shifted. There was old smoke, yes, but behind it a tang like the inside of a battery. A tattered sign above a stall read Philtres and Always. A man in a blazer with school crest still hanging by one thread fixed a watch with a tool that looked like a dentist’s pick . He glanced at her with a priest’s pity and returned to his gear.
Another turn and the runner shoved a stack of crates into the path. Bottles clinked. One slid free, hit stone and did not shatter. The liquid inside turned from red to green in one lazy pour. Quinn vaulted the stack. Her heel touched wood, it gave, and she came down stumbling harder than planned. Her palm skidded across grit and something waxed that wanted to claim her fingers. Herrera’s hand snagged her jacket and jerked her upright.
We go slow, he said, hand already gone back to his bag as if to cover the reflex.
Slow loses him.
Losing him keeps you breathing.
She shot him a look that would have finished the conversation anywhere else. He did not fold.
Up ahead the runner had reached a T in the corridor. He paused, unsure for the first time, then chose left. The lantern there had gone out, the dark thick enough to chew. He reached into the oilcloth and snapped a stick that spat green flame at the tip. Phosphor lit his grin and turned his face fox bright.
He vanished round the left.
Quinn hit the T and stopped for half a beat. Right or left. Right smelled like vinegar and tide . Left smelled like cold meat and hymnals . The left called. She turned, and they went.
The stalls here did not court. No bright wares. Doors shuttered with rawhide and stamped with symbols half familiar from incident boards she had laughed at three years ago when DS Morris had told her about the case that ended him. Her hand closed around air and remembered nothing but a man lying in wet leaves under a tree with roots like hands. She shut the memory like a drawer.
Herrera saw the drawer in her face and said nothing.
Ahead, a figure stepped into their lane with a sweep of coat that brushed both walls. He was wide in the way of men who run on meat, not air, and his face had the calm of someone paid to stay calm. He held a lantern in one hand and a club in the other. His club had nails in it, neat, like jewellery.
No steel, he said. No chasing.
The runner popped up behind him in the safety of the fixer’s shadow. He tipped an invisible cap at Quinn. His other hand kept the oilcloth close, but a corner had slipped and she saw a brass hinge with notches worn satin by a thousand palms. A case. Old. Loved.
Her chest hitched with a not-quite laugh .
Let him by, she said. He is carrying evidence.
Evidence of what, the calm man said. A debt getting paid. A family finding a thing they lost. Not your laws. Not down here.
Police, Quinn said again, and it tasted farcical with incense and old teeth making the air heavy. She met the man’s eyes. He did not look back down. She liked him for that and wanted him gone at the same time.
Herrera shifted a fraction and his shoulder brushed hers. His hand touched his medallion, small and absent, as if by reflex, as if the saint could navigate the labyrinth for them.
Please do not push, he said under his breath. You do not see all the guns in this room.
I see enough, she said.
The calm man tilted his head. Your tithe, he said. The Market remembers.
Quinn swallowed a curse. The woman at the gate had said the same. She glanced to Herrera. He frowned.
He means coin, he said. Or a promise.
I am not promising this place anything.
Then coin, Herrera said. Or blood. Blood binds fast here.
She pulled her wallet out with fingers that felt colder than they should. She did not carry much cash. Notes folded crisp. She held them up. The man with the lantern looked to the bundle of oilcloth and made a soft tsk.
This is a thing of old weight , he said. Notes are light. Blood is heavy, worth the step.
Herrera moved first, although he looked like a man biting on tinfoil . He slid his sleeve up and showed his scar along the forearm as if it were a line in a ledger that could be added to. The calm man nodded once. A woman stepped from a dark alcove Quinn would have sworn had been a window a heartbeat before. She carried a bowl carved from antler. She did not speak. Her eyes had no white in them at all.
No, Quinn said.
Herrera gave her a look that said she did not own him. It did not ask permission. He pinched the skin over the old scar and reached for a small blade tucked in the bag’s outer pocket.
Enough.
She got the blade out of his hand without anyone seeing how. She let the room see the blade and how she held it. She did not show the gun.
I will pay, she said.
She pushed the blade into the pad of her thumb. Pain flared like a tiny sun. She caught the drop with her other hand before it hit the floor and let it fall into the antler bowl. It rang like a small bell when the blood met it. The calm man’s lantern flame fell silent, as if listening .
The woman with the deer-bone bowl shivered in a way that did not move her skin.
Paid, she said. The sound came out like the scrape of match on rough paper.
The calm man stepped aside. The runner slid by with a move that looked like dance practice, one hand raised as if he knew how to appease gods and guards.
He shot Quinn a grin that had too many teeth and she knew a piece then that she had suspected. He had wanted her here. Pulled her with the right speed, the right glances, the right obstacles. Lured.
Herrera’s breath ghosted her ear. I do not like that smile, he said.
Quinn moved, now, and the runner let her see him slip into a space between two metal shutters where no space had been. He pressed a hand with a signet ring on the corrugated steel and it unstuck its atoms enough to let him pass. She reached to do the same and her palm hit iron.
He had a key she did not.
Herrera tapped her shoulder and pointed. A second way, pale and thin between pillars ten yards left. They went. It smelled of dry rot and salt.
The second way opened into a chamber that had been a platform once, a moment in the city where trains had stopped and kissed air. The tracks were a black mouth to their right and a row of lamps hung low like beheaded saints. A hundred people moved over the stone like ants in an upturned nest. Vendors hawked charms and someone sang in a language that made Quinn’s teeth itch.
The runner notched through. He was not the only target now. Faces she did not want to name moved in the edges. A man with daylight under his nails. A woman with a fox’s tail tucked into her belt and no shame about it at all. It would be trivial to vanish here with a twist and a second.
Herrera grabbed her elbow hard.
Do not freeze, he said. Pick. He will go north, to the tunnels that do not remember their maps. Or he will go to them.
He pointed. Across the platform, a line of bulk in coats the colour of old bruise watched the crowd. Their coats all matched by accident or design and their eyes were wrong where the whites should be. Market enforcers. They watched the runner as one man watches a tip go across a table.
Quinn moved. Herrera kept up. They slid behind a stall hung with glass beads that spun light like water. The stallholder made a shape with her hand that meant keep your fingers where I can see them. Quinn kept her hands high.
The runner hit the enforcers like a gull hitting wind. He melted into their shadow and emerged at the far side with his oilcloth bundle suddenly under another arm, that of a taller man with rings stacked like knuckledusters without apology. The tall man’s smile ran thin and private. He put his hand on the runner’s neck as if guiding a child across a road and then lifted his chin a degree .
Eyes found Quinn. Every wrong white fixed on her.
No steel, the calm man had said. No chasing.
Quinn did not draw. She changed her line to cut the angle to the tall man’s right instead, three paces out of blade reach. A body in a coat moved to block, slow, testing her footwork. She feinted right and went left. Something brushed her hip. It was not a hand.
Herrera said without using his voice, We are alive because you are a guest. Do not make them host you.
She saw the tall man hand the oilcloth to a boy of maybe twelve whose ears were marked with old burns. The boy ran, rabbit fast, along the edge of the lamps, feet slapping stone. A woman with knifemaker hands cut a string above her stall and an avalanche of cheap trinkets collapsed into the path, sparkling choke.
Quinn vaulted the trinkets. Her boot snagged a chain of pewter moons. She tore free and the metal bit her calf. She swore, one word, clean as a cut.
She locked onto the boy. A small back in a dirty hoodie with a cartoon wolf. She chased.
Someone screamed behind her and a fight started that had nothing to do with her. Or had everything to do with her because eyes turned and the boy looked back and saw the storm he could borrow. He veered into it.
Herrera’s hand found her wrist, pulled, then let go. He had made his choice too. He kept with her even though it shortened his likely life to a stub. His medallion flashed again, against throat, a desperate lighthouse.
They cut through a gaggle of men arguing in a staccato she did not know , beer bottles held by their throats. One man’s sleeve brushed her and she smelt metal filings and orange peel. The boy ducked under a table draped in velvet with handprints patted into the pile. Quinn went over rather than under. A jar rolled. Something inside the jar swam and met her gaze as she flew. It blinked. She landed and let her knees take the shock.
Up ahead, the boy vanished into a tunnel that yawned like a coal seam. A sign bit into the arch: NO CREDIT. NO GODS. NO COPS.
The tall man turned his head. He looked at Quinn with calm and the kind of interest you wear at the races. He raised a hand. The Market listened.
The lamps dimmed a shade. The stalls at the tunnel mouth closed together, owners shifting their weight to make a wall that looked casual and became not casual at all. A bell rang once, a high note that made the lids of jars quiver.
Behind her, the gatekeeper who had palmed her blood’s sound in the deer bowl had a twin with a bigger bell. Not a twin. Something that had been a twin and eaten the other.
Herrera’s mouth tightened. He did not run. Neither did she.
The enforcers closed ranks. Clubs with nails, hooks, coils of chain. The tall man smiled like he had chosen the exact card he wanted out of a stacked deck.
Quinn slid her hand to her holster.
The topmost lamp burst and showered them with hot glass.