AI Rain cut the neon into ribbons.
Detective Harlow Quinn stood across the street from the Raven’s Nest with her collar up and her jaw set, a statue carved out of damp wool and patience. The bar’s green sign buzzed above the door, throwing sickly light onto slick pavement. Soho kept moving around her—laughter spilling from doorways, umbrellas bumping shoulders, taxis hissing through puddles.
Her worn leather watch pressed cold against her wrist when she checked it. 23:18.
A pair of smokers drifted outside the Nest, their breath mixing with cigarette fog. Quinn watched the doorway. She held herself still, military straight, like the rain needed permission to touch her.
The door swung open.
A man slipped out alone, hood up, shoulders hunched. He moved like someone who counted exits without looking at them. He paused under the green glow, thumbed something small into his pocket, then stepped into the street.
Quinn crossed at once, not fast, not slow. Just enough.
The man angled left, heading away from the bar’s windows, away from the brighter stretch of Old Compton Street. He cut through a knot of tourists, then pushed into a side road where the streetlights failed to commit.
Quinn followed. Her boots hit water with hard, quiet slaps. She kept her hands free, coat unbuttoned.
The man glanced back.
His face caught a sliver of light. Young. Cheekbones sharp. A thin line of silver at one eyebrow , like old scar tissue. His gaze snagged on Quinn and didn’t slide off.
He turned and walked faster.
Quinn closed the gap by a pace, no more. She let him feel her presence without giving him the satisfaction of seeing her break stride.
He broke.
He bolted across the road, straight through a red light, forcing a taxi to brake with a wet squeal. The driver leaned on the horn and shouted something that vanished into the rain.
Quinn ran.
Her breath tasted like metal. Her cropped hair held the rain in tight needles against her scalp. She threaded between pedestrians, catching a shoulder with her forearm and taking the shove back without losing speed.
“Police! Stop!”
The man didn’t look over this time. He hit an alley mouth and vanished into it, shoes skidding on greasy bricks.
Quinn followed him into the narrow cut between buildings. The noise of Soho fell away, replaced by dripping pipes and the slap of footsteps bouncing off walls. Refuse bins lined the passage like steel cattle.
Ahead, the suspect skidded around a corner. A stack of cardboard boxes collapsed under his hand. He didn’t stop to pick them up. He didn’t need to. He only needed the seconds they stole from her.
Quinn hit the corner, shouldered past the wobbling bins, and kept going. Her coat hem caught on a latch, tore free with a rip. She didn’t feel it until later.
The alley spat them out behind a row of closed shops. Metal shutters wore graffiti like bruises. A delivery entrance stood open, a rectangle of dark and deeper dark.
The suspect dove inside.
Quinn followed and took two steps into a service corridor that smelled of damp plaster and old frying oil. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, one of them strobing, turning motion into broken frames.
The suspect raced toward a stairwell door at the end, slapped it open, and disappeared down.
Quinn reached it a second later and looked down into a concrete throat. The air rose cold, carrying the faint hum of electricity and something else underneath—sweet, burned, wrong.
Her hand hit the rail. She took the stairs two at a time.
“Oi!” a voice called from above, somewhere in the service corridor. A security guard, waking up to his job. “Where d’you think you’re—”
Quinn didn’t answer. The stairwell swallowed sound.
She caught sight of the suspect’s shoes as he hit a landing and turned. He moved like he’d run this route before. That made her teeth grind. She had spent eighteen years learning London’s veins; he ran down one she hadn’t mapped.
The stairs ended at a door with no signage, just a push bar and a smear of grime where hands had leaned. The suspect shoved through it.
Quinn hit it hard and pushed after him.
Cold air punched her face.
She stepped out onto an old Underground platform, abandoned the way a tooth socket stayed abandoned—empty but still shaped by what used to be there. Tiles clung to the walls in patches. Old adverts peeled like dead skin. Water dripped from the ceiling into black puddles on the track bed.
And people.
Not commuters. Not tourists with cameras. A shifting crowd stood between the pillars and the platform edge, hooded and hunched under makeshift awnings of tarpaulin and canvas. Stalls lined the platform, lit by lanterns that gave off colours Quinn didn’t recognise: blues too deep, greens that looked bruised.
The suspect moved through them like smoke.
Quinn stopped at the top of the steps for half a heartbeat, taking in the scene with a detective’s hunger and a human’s unease.
A woman at the nearest stall held a glass jar full of something pale that pressed against the glass from the inside. A man in a cap argued with a vendor over a bundle of dried herbs tied with copper wire. A kid no older than twelve cradled a cage that rattled with unseen movement.
Quinn felt eyes land on her. Not curious. Measuring.
The suspect threw his shoulder into the crowd, pushing past a pair of men carrying a long wrapped parcel. One of them snarled and reached for him, then froze when he saw what hung from the suspect’s fingers: a small, yellowed token that looked like a bit of bone .
The men let him through.
Quinn moved down the last steps onto the platform.
A broad man in a heavy coat stepped into her path near a pillar. His head shaved clean, his face marked by pock scars. A chain hung from his belt and clinked when he shifted.
He held out a hand, palm up, like he expected payment.
“No token, no market.”
Quinn’s gaze flicked past him, tracking the suspect’s hood as it bobbed through bodies. The crowd kept swallowing him.
“I’m police.”
The man’s mouth pulled into something that wasn’t a smile.
“Police don’t come down here. Police don’t come anywhere without their little friends and their paperwork.”
Quinn let her hand hover near her jacket. She didn’t draw anything. The space didn’t feel like a place where a badge had weight .
“I’m not here to shop.”
“Everyone’s here to shop.” He nodded toward her empty hand. “Or steal.”
A laugh broke from somewhere nearby, sharp and short. A cluster of people stood around a stall where a vendor laid out knives on velvet . The knives looked ordinary until Quinn’s eyes tried to focus on them and the edges refused to sit still.
The suspect hit a gap in the crowd and made for a darker stretch of platform where the tiles had fallen away, exposing brick.
Quinn leaned sideways, looking around the gatekeeper.
“Move.”
The man didn’t.
His eyes dropped to her left wrist. The worn leather strap of her watch had darkened with rain.
“Time doesn’t work right down here. You’ll miss your tea.”
Quinn’s jaw tightened.
“I’m not leaving.”
“Then pay.”
She took one step closer. The air around the man carried a dry, dusty smell, like old bones in an attic. His chain clinked again as he shifted his weight , bracing.
Quinn’s voice cut low, controlled.
“Last chance.”
He pointed over her shoulder with two fingers.
“Go back up. Sleep in your safe little bed. Let the grown-ups do business.”
Behind him, two figures in long coats watched Quinn with faces half-hidden. One of them held a paper cup that steamed. The steam curled and twisted into shapes that didn’t fit the air currents.
Quinn’s stomach tightened. Memory flashed sharp as broken glass—DS Morris’s laugh in a squad car, then his scream down a corridor that had no end, three years ago. A report that refused to explain what her eyes had seen. A file that sat on her desk like a dare.
She pushed the memory down and kept her eyes on the suspect, who now stood at the edge of a stall where an old man sold strings of teeth like necklaces. The suspect looked back once, his hood slipping enough to show the silver scar at his brow.
He mouthed two words, slow and clear, meant for her.
“Not yours.”
Then he turned and shoved through a hanging curtain of beadwork that marked the end of the platform, vanishing into a tunnel mouth lit by a faint red glow.
Quinn moved without thinking.
The gatekeeper’s hand shot out and grabbed her sleeve. His grip crushed fabric and skin.
“No token.”
Quinn twisted, using his grip as an anchor, and drove her elbow into his forearm. He grunted and loosened. She slipped free and stepped back, breathing through her nose.
A murmur spread through the crowd. People shifted, giving her space the way water gave space to oil.
A woman near the knife stall leaned in, eyes bright under smeared eyeliner.
“Love, you lost?”
Quinn ignored her and looked at the gatekeeper.
“What’s a token worth to you?”
His head tilted.
“You got nothing I want.”
Quinn’s gaze swept the crowd, fast and hard. She saw hands vanish into pockets. She saw a man’s sleeve ride up and reveal inked symbols across his wrist that looked like maps of cuts . She saw a teenager’s grin flash too wide.
And she saw, near the edge of the nearest stall, a small bowl filled with pale slivers—bone tokens, stacked like poker chips.
The vendor behind the bowl looked up. He wore a raincoat that shone with damp, though they stood underground. His eyes looked milky at first glance, then sharpened when Quinn met them.
His lips peeled back from stained teeth.
“Fresh face. Full of rules.”
Quinn stepped to his stall, keeping the gatekeeper in the corner of her eye.
“How much for one?”
The vendor tapped the bowl with a fingernail. The sound carried like a bell.
“Depends what you’ve got to spare.”
Quinn pulled her warrant card and held it up.
The vendor laughed, full-bodied, like Quinn had offered him a napkin.
“That won’t buy you a look down the tunnel.”
Quinn slid the warrant card back inside her jacket.
“What will?”
The vendor’s gaze drifted to her left hand, to the ringless fingers, to the faint white lines at her knuckles. Then to her watch .
“Time piece.”
Quinn’s throat tightened.
“That’s not for sale.”
The vendor leaned closer, and the lantern light drew harsh angles across his face.
“Then stay out. That’s how this works.”
The suspect had vanished. The crowd absorbed his last trace. The tunnel mouth waited like a throat.
Quinn turned her wrist, feeling the leather strap, the familiar weight . The watch didn’t just tell time. It held it. It marked the hours she spent after Morris died, the nights she sat at her kitchen table with a file open and a glass untouched.
She yanked the strap free in one hard motion. The buckle bit her skin and left a red line. She dropped the watch into her palm and held it out.
The vendor’s eyes widened , greedy and bright. He snatched it with quick fingers, like it might vanish.
“Now we’re talking.”
He slid a bone token across the stall. It looked like a fragment from a bird’s wing , polished and notched. It felt warm when Quinn took it, as if it had sat against someone’s skin.
The gatekeeper watched her, expression flat.
Quinn moved back to him and held up the token.
“Open it.”
He looked at the token, then at her face.
“You don’t know what you’re walking into.”
Quinn’s mouth tightened.
“Open it.”
He stepped aside and gestured toward the bead curtain and the tunnel beyond.
“Don’t bleed on the goods.”
Quinn pushed through the beads. They clicked against her shoulders and whispered along her coat like teeth.
The tunnel air hit different—drier, warmer, carrying spice and rot. The red glow came from lamps bolted to the wall, their light pulsing like something breathed behind them. Voices echoed ahead, layered over a distant rattle, like trains that never arrived.
Quinn stopped at the tunnel mouth for a beat, token clenched in her fist. Her radio sat heavy against her ribs, useless without signal. The city lay above her, rain and sirens and streetlights, all of it suddenly far away.
A voice drifted from deeper in, rough with amusement.
“Copper actually came down. Mad.”
Another voice answered, softer, closer.
“She won’t last.”
Quinn stepped forward, shoulders squared, and followed the suspect into the Veil Market.