AI Quinn shoved the plywood barrier aside and felt it bite back, nails screeching as the boards flexed.
"Careful," someone called from behind . "That’s not council grade."
"I noticed."
She ducked under the makeshift lintel and stepped down onto the old escalator, dead and jammed, its teeth packed with grit. Her torch cut a hard tunnel through the dark. The air carried petrol, damp concrete, and something sweeter, like burnt sugar left too long on a spoon.
A uniform waited at the bottom with a face that already wanted to forget what he had seen.
"Detective Harlow Quinn," she said, flashing her warrant card without slowing. "Who called it in?"
"Transport for London maintenance," the officer said . "They came to check the power feeds. Found... this."
Quinn’s boots hit the concourse. She read the space in a single sweep, the way she had learned to read a room before a weapon cleared leather. Abandoned signage peeled off the walls. Old route maps hung like dead skin. Yet the floor did not look abandoned. Too many scuffs. Too many fresh marks cutting through dust.
And the smell grew worse the deeper she went.
A crime scene tent squatted near the ticket barriers. Flood lamps threw sharp light across an odd spread of objects laid out on tarpaulins: glass vials, folded cloth, coins that did not look like sterling, and a small pile of pale shards that might have been teeth if she let her mind go there.
A man in a suit jacket stood by the nearest lamp, rubbing his jaw as if the place had given him a toothache. DS Calder. Good instincts, bad patience. He had the sort of face that always seemed to ask why the world kept being complicated at him.
"Quinn," he said. "You picked a bloody day to come in."
"You rang."
"I rang because it’s a body in a Tube station with a pop-up pharmacy and a tarot stall." He gestured at the darkness beyond the flood lamps. "We’ve got Camden weirdos nesting down here. One of them has gone over. That’s it."
Quinn walked past him and crouched by the tent flap.
The victim lay on her side, half in the light, half in shadow, as if the station itself refused to claim her. Female. Twenties, maybe. Black jeans. Trainers still laced. Her throat showed a long, clean line that held no raggedness, no hesitation. A surgical cut, except it sat slightly too high, too deliberate. Not a fight. An execution.
"Name?"
"Not yet," Calder said. "No wallet. No phone. Our pathologist’s on the way. Forensics are having a tantrum because half the surfaces are filthy and half are wiped like a showroom."
Quinn leaned in and studied the skin around the cut. Blood had pooled, but not enough. A throat like that should have painted the floor.
She looked under the chin, along the collar, and then at the concrete beneath the head.
No arterial spray. No cast-off. No panic pattern.
"She didn’t bleed out here," Quinn said.
Calder made a sound that pretended to be a laugh.
"Come off it. There’s blood."
"There’s not the right blood."
He crouched opposite her and pointed at the dark stain beneath the victim’s cheek.
"That’s plenty for a dead girl."
Quinn took out her gloves and pinched the edge of the stain with a swab. The surface had a faint sheen, like oil.
"It’s tacky," she said.
"Blood gets like that."
"Not this fast." Quinn brought the swab closer. The smell hit, metallic but wrong. Copper, yes, but threaded with something sharp, like a struck match.
She shifted her torch beam across the ground. The concrete showed faint lines, chalk or salt, drawn in a neat arc around the body and then scuffed away in places by shoes.
A circle, interrupted.
"Who drew that?" Quinn asked.
Calder’s eyes flicked down, then away.
"Some idiot’s art project. We’ve got stalls down the corridor, Quinn. Candles, bits of paper, herbs. It’s Camden. People do circles. They do crystals. They do whatever makes them feel interesting."
Quinn stood and followed the line of the half-erased circle with her light. It didn’t match a casual scrawl. The curve held steady. The gaps broke where people had stepped, not where someone had stopped drawing.
She walked towards the corridor Calder had indicated. The station opened into a long passage that led to a platform. Her torch beam found the edges of what used to be advertisements, now layered with posters for bands, for self-styled healers, for parties that promised transcendence.
Then the corridor changed.
It grew crowded with objects that did not belong in any abandoned station. Folding tables. Rugs. Little cabinets. A string of dull brass bells hung from a pipe, each one marked with tiny scratches. Someone had built a market out of the dead station and had done it with care.
A hand-painted sign leaned against a pillar.
VEIL
The letters looked wet, though the paint had dried.
"Jesus," Calder said behind her. "It’s like Glastonbury had a baby with a squat."
Quinn ignored him and moved forward. She kept her steps measured , not for fear of the dark, but for fear of missing what the floor told her . Shoeprints overlapped in layers. Some were fresh. Some had dust settled in them. A few prints showed a tread pattern she recognised from Metropolitan issue boots.
A few showed nothing at all.
She stopped by a table that held a row of small bottles, each stoppered with wax. Labels showed symbols instead of words. Her torch flashed across one, a curled shape like a hook, then another like an eye.
Quinn turned her light to the wall behind the table. Someone had scratched a diagram into the tile grout. A map, almost. Lines radiated out from a central point.
A compass rose without the rose.
"Who’s our victim to you?" Calder asked, impatience sharpening his voice . "Because I’ve got a whole team upstairs who want a straightforward brief."
Quinn pointed down the corridor.
"Your straightforward brief ends where her blood doesn’t match her wound."
Calder followed her gaze, then shrugged.
"All right. Say she died somewhere else. Someone carried her down. It’s a long corridor, but people move bodies. Gang lads have done worse."
"They carried her past all this," Quinn said.
"So?"
"So nobody broke anything. Nobody knocked a table. Nobody left drag marks."
Calder’s mouth tightened.
"We’ve got CCTV dead spots down here. It’s an old station. No power, no cameras. That’s why they use it."
Quinn walked on. The platform emerged ahead, and the sight stopped even Calder’s running commentary.
Stalls lined the edge where the tracks dropped away into black. Not hipster tables now. Proper structures. Wooden frames draped in cloth. Lanterns with glass chimneys. The kind of set-up you built when you expected to come back, again and again.
At the centre of the platform, a curtain hung from a pipe, heavy and dark, like theatre velvet . Someone had stitched pale thread into it, a repeating pattern of tiny loops.
A mark on the ground in front of the curtain caught Quinn’s torch beam.
A triangle, cut into the concrete. Its edges had been filled with some pale powder.
Bone.
Her pulse kept steady, but something in her gut shifted. A memory tried to surface and she pushed it down with the heel of discipline. She did not indulge ghosts, not even the ones that wore familiar names.
A woman in a high-vis jacket stood near the curtain, hands on hips, arguing with a forensic tech. The tech held a camera and looked as if the curtain might bite him.
The woman turned at Quinn’s approach. Round glasses. Curly red hair pulled back badly, like it had been yanked into place on the run. Freckles stood out against skin gone pale.
Eva Kowalski did not belong in a cordoned-off station, yet she stood there as if she had walked into the British Museum and found the exhibits bleeding.
Calder swore under his breath.
"Oh, for God’s sake. Not her."
Eva’s eyes locked onto Quinn’s face and did not flinch. She tucked hair behind her left ear, fast and automatic.
"They called me because they found writing," she said. "Not graffiti. Not English. Not anything your lot catalogue properly."
Quinn’s gaze dropped to the satchel on Eva’s shoulder, worn leather, heavy with books. The kind of weight you carried when you trusted paper more than people.
"Who called you?" Quinn asked.
Eva looked past Quinn, towards the uniforms.
"A constable with sense," she said. "He saw symbols and didn’t start scraping them off."
Calder stepped forward.
"She’s not police, Quinn. She shouldn’t be here."
Eva’s mouth tightened.
"And you shouldn’t be waving your boots through powdered bone, yet here we all are."
Quinn held up a hand, cutting them both off. Her eyes went back to the curtain and the triangle in front of it.
"What is it?" Quinn asked Eva.
Eva moved closer to the marking and crouched, careful not to disturb the powder. She pulled a small torch from her satchel and angled it across the cut lines. Shadows deepened. The triangle did not sit flat. The grooves held something darker than concrete, like an old stain that had soaked in and never left.
"It’s a threshold mark," Eva said. "A guide line, like ‘stand here’ on the floor of a lift, except this isn’t for a lift."
Calder snorted.
"Here we go."
Eva ignored him and reached into her satchel. She produced a thin notebook and a pencil worn down to a stub.
"It’s not a summoning circle," she said, tracing the air above the grooves without touching. "It’s an alignment. Whoever drew the circle back there, whoever laid this bone dust, they wanted the line clear. No iron in the powder. They used bone because it won’t interfere."
"Interfere with what?" Quinn asked.
Eva lifted her gaze. Her green eyes held a hard, scholarly certainty that did not belong in crime-scene lighting.
"With a rift," she said.
Calder’s laugh came out sharp.
"A rift. Right. A rip in reality under Camden. Of course. That’s why the dead girl’s got her throat cut. Reality did it."
Quinn stepped closer to the curtain. The fabric absorbed her torch beam instead of reflecting it. She reached out, then stopped. The air in front of it felt wrong. Not cold. Not hot. Just resistant, as if she held her hand near a speaker blasting a note too low to hear.
"Nobody touch it," Quinn said.
Calder stared at her.
"Quinn."
She did not look at him. She studied the floor instead.
Footprints stopped before the triangle. Multiple pairs. Small shoes, large shoes, the sharp tread of work boots. Yet none crossed into the triangle itself, not even by accident. People avoided it the way they avoided a grave .
Quinn crouched and shone her light along the concrete at the curtain’s base. Something glinted near the edge, half under the fabric.
Metal.
She slid two fingers under and pulled it out gently .
A small brass compass, its casing mottled with verdigris. Protective sigils had been etched into the face, fine as hair. The needle quivered , then swung hard to the left, away from true north, pointing straight into the curtain as if it had decided the laws of navigation were optional.
Calder leaned in despite himself.
"What’s that, then? Some steampunk tat?"
Eva’s breath caught, just once, like a scholar seeing a lost manuscript.
"That’s not tat," she said. "That’s Veil craft."
Quinn turned the compass in her hand. The brass felt warm, as if it had been held under a lamp, though it had sat on cold concrete.
The needle tapped against the glass. Tick-tick. Not random. Urgent.
Quinn looked back down the corridor towards the victim’s body. The half-erased circle. The wrong blood. The clean throat.
"She came through here," Quinn said.
Calder’s face hardened.
"Don’t start."
Quinn stood and faced him. Her voice stayed calm, the tone she used when she had to speak to men who mistook volume for authority.
"The body didn’t come down the corridor. The blood didn’t fall where she died. The prints stop because people stood and watched. They watched something happen here, at this curtain."
Eva rose beside them, her satchel creaking.
"They call it the Veil Market," she said. "It moves. It hides in places like this. You need a token to enter."
Calder looked between them, then at the curtain as if it had started to breathe.
"You’re both insane."
Quinn held up the compass.
"This needle points to the nearest rift or portal," she said, the words tasting like nonsense and yet fitting the facts with an ugly click. "That’s what it does, doesn’t it?"
Eva’s jaw set.
"Yes."
Calder took a step back.
"All right. Great. Portal. So what, some nutter dragged her through a magic door, slit her throat, then sent her back out? That’s your theory?"
Quinn shook her head once.
"No," she said. "They brought her here alive. They positioned her in the circle. They opened something. Then something else finished the job."
Calder’s hand hovered near his radio, not quite committing .
"You want me to call this in? Tell control we’ve got a something else? They’ll send a psychiatrist."
"Call for armed response," Quinn said. "And keep your people behind the ticket barriers. No heroics."
Calder’s eyes narrowed .
"Since when do you play occult consultant?"
"Since the evidence stopped lying the normal way."
Eva reached into her satchel again. She pulled out a small pouch and loosened the drawstring. A thin line of salt spilled into her palm.
Quinn caught her wrist.
"What are you doing?"
Eva met her stare.
"Stopping you from stepping into it."
"I didn’t plan to step into anything."
Eva’s voice dropped.
"It opens both ways."
The curtain stirred.
Not with a draft. It moved like a chest filling with breath. The brass bells on the nearby pipe rang once, then twice, as if someone had flicked them with a fingernail.
The compass needle slammed against the glass and stuck, pointing dead centre.
A low sound rolled out from behind the curtain, like a train passing through a tunnel that did not exist.
Calder’s radio crackled on his vest.
"Control to units at Camden disused. We’ve got an unconfirmed report of movement below. Repeat, movement below."
Quinn’s hand closed around the compass. The sigils pressed into her palm, sharp enough to sting.
"Back," she snapped.
A uniform at the far end of the platform took one step forward, drawn by the noise. The triangle on the floor seemed to darken, its grooves filling with shadow like ink poured into a cut.
The curtain split from top to bottom, not tearing, but opening as if it had always had a seam .
Something pale reached through. Not a hand.
A shape with too many joints, feeling for the air.
The uniform froze, his mouth open, his torch shaking. His scream did not come out until the shape hooked around his ankle and yanked.
He slid across the concrete, nails scraping, boots skidding straight towards the triangle, and the platform erupted into shouts as Quinn lunged for him.