AI Rain skinned the city. It ran off guttering signs and poured from awnings in sheets that slapped the pavement like thrown tarps. Detective Harlow Quinn cut through it with her collar up and her shoulders set, boots striking puddles hard enough to kick up cold spray.
Ahead, a figure in a dark hood broke from the mouth of an alley and darted into the Soho traffic. Quinn caught the flash of a pale hand, the shine of something white clutched tight. Bone, she thought, and her stomach tightened around the idea.
A car horn blared. Tyres hissed. The suspect slipped between two black cabs, forcing one to brake with a squeal.
Quinn pushed after them, palm up at oncoming drivers.
“Police. Stop.”
Nobody cared. London in the rain never cared. She vaulted a puddle that hid a pothole and landed on the balls of her feet, shoulders squared, breath steady. Her worn leather watch soaked through at the strap; the face ticked on, indifferent.
The suspect glanced back. A quick turn of the head under the hood, just enough for Quinn to catch a narrow chin and eyes that reflected streetlight like an animal’s.
“Don’t,” Quinn snapped, voice carrying over engines and rain. “Not tonight.”
The hooded figure answered with a raised middle finger and bolted across the road.
Quinn followed, legs burning, lungs taking in wet air that tasted of diesel and old chip fat. She cut close to a building front, using the wall as a guide, avoiding the slickest patches. Military habits sat in her bones; even now, she counted distances without meaning to. She closed the gap by inches.
The suspect turned sharp into a side street, and Quinn went with them, shoulder clipping a brick corner. Pain flared. She didn’t slow.
The side street narrowed into a service lane, bins lined up like dull metal coffins. The rain drummed on bin lids, loud enough to cover footfalls.
The suspect ducked under a low chain and ran into the lane’s back end. Quinn grabbed the chain and vaulted, coat snagging for a beat. The metal bit into her palm. She landed and kept moving.
A door banged somewhere. A voice barked from a window.
“Oi!”
Quinn ignored it. Her eyes stayed on the hood ahead, on the way the figure carried their weight forward like someone used to sprinting and not used to stopping. The hood slipped for a second and exposed a strip of hair, dark and plastered to the skull.
The suspect cut left again and burst onto a wider road. Neon bled into the rain. People huddled under umbrellas, faces pinched, collars up, hands buried. Nobody wanted trouble. Trouble found them anyway.
Quinn shouldered through a cluster of smokers outside a closed shop. One of them staggered back.
“Watch it!”
“Move,” Quinn threw back, and the word came out flat, edged with command .
The suspect headed north, away from the brighter streets. Quinn’s radio crackled at her shoulder, half-muffled under wet fabric.
“Quinn, you still on foot?” a control room voice asked.
Quinn pressed the talk button without slowing.
“Still on foot. Suspect heading north, taking back routes.”
“Units—”
“Hold them off,” Quinn cut in. “I’m close.”
A laugh burst from her own throat, sharp and joyless. Close meant nothing if the suspect reached wherever they wanted to go.
The rain thickened. It ran off her cropped hair and down the sharp line of her jaw. She tasted it, metallic, mixed with the city’s grime. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and kept her eyes up.
The suspect veered toward a black railing that guarded a staircase down to the Underground. The sign above it flickered , half the letters dead. Camden Town sat farther on, but this entrance looked wrong—no lights, no commuters, no posters for West End shows. Just a mouth in the pavement, open and waiting.
The suspect bounded down the steps two at a time.
Quinn reached the top and hesitated long enough to take in the details: the rain didn’t fall straight into the stairwell. It slid off something, like an invisible canopy. The air rising up felt warmer than it should, and it carried a smell like damp earth and hot pennies.
Her chest tightened around an old memory—DS Morris pinned under a broken door, his face gone slack in a way that had never matched the injury, the corridor around them whispering with something she hadn’t been able to name. Three years, and the taste of that corridor still sat at the back of her throat.
Quinn took one step down.
A voice came from above, behind her. A man in a beanie and a soaked puffer jacket stood under a shop awning, phone in hand, eyes fixed on the stairwell.
“You don’t want that one,” he called.
Quinn didn’t look back.
“Police. Clear off.”
The man’s laugh bounced off wet brick.
“Yeah? Police don’t go down there.”
Quinn’s hand tightened around her badge in her pocket. She held it like a talisman and forced her legs to keep moving. Her boots hit the first landing; water pooled there in a dark mirror.
Down below, the suspect’s feet slapped wet concrete, fast and sure, as if they knew the route. Quinn followed, taking the steps in long strides, keeping her centre low. The stairwell curved. The city noise fell away, replaced by dripping water and the distant grind of something mechanical .
The suspect reached the bottom and turned into a corridor where old posters peeled off the tiles in wet curls. A rusted “Way Out” sign pointed to a bricked-up arch.
Quinn rounded the corner and nearly lost footing. The floor slicked under her boot. She caught herself on the tile wall, fingers sliding over grime.
Ahead, the hooded figure didn’t slow. They ran toward a set of steel doors that should have been chained shut. A strip of pale light leaked from the seam.
The suspect slipped through. The door shut behind them with a soft final click that didn’t fit the heavy metal.
Quinn reached the doors and grabbed the handle. Cold bit her skin through the wet glove. The handle turned with ease.
A voice snapped from her left, close enough to feel like a hand on her shoulder.
“Token.”
Quinn turned.
A man stood against the wall where the corridor widened, half in shadow, half in a spill of strange light. He wore a long coat that hadn’t seen a dry day in its life. His face looked ordinary until Quinn’s eyes snagged on the teeth—too even, too bright, like they had been filed .
He held his hand out. Palm up. Expectant.
Quinn took in the rest of the corridor. It didn’t match the station map. Someone had set up a rough checkpoint: a folding table, a battered cash box, a lantern that burned with a greenish flame without smoke. Two other figures lingered behind the man, hoods up, hands tucked away like they hid tools.
“Police,” Quinn said, and the word sounded thin down here .
The man’s mouth stretched, amused.
“Token,” he repeated. “Or you go back up. Rain’s nice, yeah?”
Quinn stared at his open palm. The suspect had carried something white. That had to be it. Bone token, her mind supplied, unhelpful and precise.
“I’m in pursuit,” Quinn answered. She nodded at the steel doors. “They went through there.”
The man’s gaze flicked to the doors and back to her face.
“Not your doors.”
Quinn’s fingers flexed. She forced herself to take one slow breath, then another. Her pulse beat hard at her wrist under the worn leather watch strap.
“Last chance,” she said. “Move.”
The man leaned closer. The air between them smelled of cloves and damp wool.
“You don’t know what’s on the other side,” he said, like he offered advice to a tourist. “You don’t want to walk in without a bone. They’ll smell you.”
Quinn’s eyes narrowed .
“They?”
The man’s grin widened. One of the hooded figures behind him shifted, and something clinked, like glass vials bumping together.
Quinn looked past them at the steel doors. The seam of light pulsed , faint but alive, as if something breathed behind it.
Her radio crackled again, the sound swallowed by the corridor.
“Quinn? You’re off GPS. Confirm location.”
Quinn didn’t touch it. She kept her gaze on the man with the too-bright teeth.
“Where did they get a token?” Quinn asked.
The man’s grin dropped. His eyes slid over her wet coat, her boots, the set of her shoulders.
“Not from me.”
Quinn shifted her stance. She eased her right foot back, weight balanced, ready to lunge. She didn’t have time to play gate games while the suspect vanished into whatever lay beyond.
A faint sound floated through the steel doors—voices, layered and busy, like a crowd packed into a space that shouldn’t hold it. Metal scraped. Someone laughed, sharp and short. Something hissed, like a hot iron plunged into water.
Quinn’s stomach tightened again. Not fear. Calculation. She had walked into gang dens with no backup. She had knocked on doors with blood still wet on her sleeves. This felt different. It felt like rules she didn’t know, and she hated not knowing the rules.
The man kept his hand out. Patient.
“Token,” he said again. “Or you stay in your world.”
Quinn’s gaze dropped to the table. The cash box sat half-open, full of coins that looked wrong—dull, irregular, stamped with symbols instead of heads. Next to it sat a shallow tray. Inside, a handful of small items: a bent nail, a ring of tarnished silver, and a tiny carved piece of bone the size of a knuckle.
Quinn’s breath caught. She nodded at the tray.
“That one. That’s a token.”
The man’s eyes followed her nod. His mouth hardened.
“Those aren’t for you.”
Quinn stepped in.
The man moved to block, fast. Quinn drove her forearm into his chest and shoved. He stumbled back into the wall, teeth clicking together. One of the hooded figures grabbed for her sleeve.
Quinn twisted, caught the wrist, and wrenched down. The hooded figure hissed through clenched teeth and let go. Quinn snatched the bone piece from the tray with her left hand and closed her fist around it.
The token felt warm. Not body-warm. Furnace-warm, like it had sat under a heat lamp.
The man pushed off the wall, eyes sharp now.
“You steal,” he spat.
“Add it to the file,” Quinn shot back, and the sarcasm came out raw .
She stepped to the steel doors and held the bone token up, unsure who watched from the other side. She pressed it against the seam.
The token vibrated in her fist. The green lantern flame flickered and leaned toward the doors as if the air pulled it. The steel clicked, and the seam widened without Quinn touching the handle.
Light spilled out, not the harsh white of a station bulb but a low glow that looked like it came from stained glass and oil lamps and something else, something that moved under the colour.
Quinn stood at the threshold.
Beyond the doors, an abandoned Tube platform stretched out and then bent, warped into a market that shouldn’t have fit inside any station blueprint. Stalls crowded the space: patched tarps, old velvet curtains, wooden carts stacked with jars, bundles of herbs, knives that caught the light like wet teeth. People pressed shoulder to shoulder, faces half-hidden by hoods and scarves, hands passing coins and vials and folded paper. The air carried spice, smoke, iron, and a sweet rot that sat at the back of Quinn’s tongue.
A man hunched over a table covered in pale powder scooped it into a paper packet. A woman with tattooed fingers argued with a vendor over a bottle that held a swirling black liquid.
“Two coins,” the vendor snapped.
“You sold me water last moon.”
“Then don’t drink it this time.”
A cluster of figures turned their heads toward the doorway. Eyes caught the light: normal brown, cloudy grey, one pair that shone a flat gold for a blink too long.
Quinn stepped back a half pace without meaning to.
The suspect cut through the crowd twenty metres in, hood still up, moving fast and low. They didn’t look back. They vanished behind a stall hung with strips of dark cloth.
Quinn tightened her grip on the bone token until it bit her skin. Behind her, the checkpoint man’s voice came tight and close.
“Now you’re marked,” he muttered. “You walk in, you don’t walk out the same.”
Quinn looked down at her soaked sleeves, at the dirt ground into her knuckles, at the token heating her palm. She raised her eyes to the market again.
Someone brushed past inside, and the steel doors twitched, as if they wanted to swing shut on their own. Quinn moved her foot forward and wedged it against the threshold, stopping the closing with the solid line of her boot.
Her radio crackled once more, faint as a dying insect.
“Quinn. Confirm.”
Quinn didn’t answer. She kept her eyes on the gap where the suspect vanished. She inhaled. The air in the market tasted of copper and burnt sugar.
She tucked the bone token into her pocket, pushed her shoulders back, and stepped over the threshold into the Veil Market.