AI Rain smeared the city into streaks of light and shadow. The green neon sign of The Raven’s Nest bled over the pavement and painted everyone who passed in sickly colour.
Harlow leaned against a lamppost across the road, collar up, hands deep in her coat pockets. Water gathered along the line of her sharp jaw and slipped under the collar. The worn leather strap of her watch tugged at damp skin each time she flexed her fingers.
Her eyes never left the doorway of the bar.
He stepped out at last. Hood up, shoulders hunched, plastic takeaway bag swinging at his side. Wrong for the weather; the bag sagged as if it carried bricks instead of food. He hesitated under the neon, checked the street.
Harlow watched his gaze slide right over her.
She pushed off the post.
He moved north toward the main road. No umbrella, just the hood. Trainers hit puddles with the light stride of someone used to running.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She ignored it, cut across traffic, drew close.
He checked over his shoulder again. His gaze narrowed when it landed on her.
He quickened his pace.
Harlow matched it. Her breath came slower than his, trained and measured . Eighteen years of foot chases had carved grooves into her muscles.
He crossed against the light and slipped between a black cab and a bus. The driver leaned on his horn.
“Police,” Harlow called over the noise, her voice flat. “Stop where you are.”
He didn’t even glance back.
She swore under her breath and bolted after him, boots splashing filthy water up her trousers. The bus driver spat a curse as she dodged past his bumper.
The suspect took off down a side street. The main drag’s glow vanished. The brick walls here pressed in and the street narrowed to an alley that stank of old beer and rotting takeaway. Rain drummed on overflowing bins.
“You run, you add another charge,” her voice bounced off the walls.
“Get lost!” His shout broke, more panic than bravado.
He jerked the takeaway bag up like a shield, shoulder-checking an overflowing bin. Cans and bottles clattered over the wet ground. One rolled toward Harlow’s foot. She hopped over it, kept her stride.
The alley spat them out onto another road, this one busier, streetlights glaring on slick tarmac. Cars crawled, tyres spitting dirty water. A double-decker wheezed past, windows fogged.
Harlow closed the gap. She saw the damp dark hair at the edge of his hood, the twitch of his jaw.
“Hands where I can see them.”
He cut left without warning, vaulted a low barrier and dropped onto a set of stone steps that led down to a pedestrian underpass. Water streamed down the walls in greasy sheets and pooled on the concrete.
Harlow followed. Her left knee twinged at the sudden descent, a reminder of a chase from years back and a fence that hadn’t given way. She ignored it and took the steps two at a time.
By the time she reached the bottom, he’d already crossed the underpass and bounded up the far side. A group of teenagers in soaked hoodies scattered out of his way.
“What’s his problem?” one of them muttered.
“Him,” another jerked his chin as Harlow thundered past.
She flashed her warrant card without breaking stride.
“Met Police. Move.”
They opened like a curtain.
Back on street level, the city had shifted. Shopfronts leaned in close, narrow and crowded, their signs in mismatched fonts. A half-lit kebab shop. A shuttered tattoo studio. A charity shop with a warped mannequin staring out from behind steamed glass.
Above, a sign pointed: Camden Town.
He headed toward the Tube.
Harlow’s chest pulled tight. Not from the run. From memory.
Morris’s face flared behind her eyes, soaked in blood and tunnel grime, pupils blown wide with that last staggered breath. The wet concrete of the platform under her knees as she tried in vain to find the source of the bleeding that hadn’t made sense.
The tunnels had never felt the same.
She spat rain and went after the suspect.
The entrance to the Underground loomed ahead, a dark, yawning mouth, stairs angling down. Commuters huddled past, shoulders hunched, heads bowed against the downpour. The suspect barged through them, earning curses and shoves.
Harlow followed, her hand brushing the butt of her holstered pistol under her coat. London hadn’t changed for her; pages of policy and the same old restrictions. Firearms were a last resort. This felt like something else entirely .
The air grew warmer as she descended, the mix of wet wool, cheap perfume, and metal. At the ticket barrier he didn’t slow, just vaulted through the gap by the attendant’s booth.
The attendant jerked up.
“Oi—”
“Police,” Harlow snapped, flashing her warrant card, not pausing for any further questions.
She pushed past the barrier as shouts rose behind her, boots clanging on metal.
The suspect didn’t head for the main platform. He veered off toward a “Staff Only” door at the end of a side corridor. The fluorescent tubes here flickered , and water stains bloomed across the ceiling tiles.
He rattled the handle. Locked.
He dropped the russet takeaway bag for half a second, dug under his hoodie, and pulled something from a chain around his neck. Not a key. A small, pale shape, no longer than a thumb, smoothed with age. Bone.
He pressed it to the lock.
The metal clicked.
The door swung in.
He grabbed the bag and slipped through.
Harlow slid to a halt, rain from her coat shoulders dripping onto the dirty linoleum. She stared at the door. It hung ajar. No one else had seen what he used. Commuters hurried past at the far end of the corridor, oblivious.
She pushed the door with two fingers.
The hinges didn’t squeal. No staff notices, no clutter of mops or cleaning supplies. Just a narrow concrete stairwell plunging down into dim orange light that pulsed as if with a slow heartbeat.
The sound reached her next. A low, constant murmur, too steady for a single crowd. It rolled up the stairwell, thick with haggling voices, clinks of metal on metal, and something that didn’t fit any market she knew. A dry chime like glass teeth.
Harlow listened for the suspect’s footsteps .
Nothing.
She stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind her.
The noise of the Tube station cut off in an instant. Only the stairwell’s own air remained, cooler, dense. A thread of scent snaked up to her, strange and layered: incense, singed hair, metal polish, and the copper tang she knew far too well.
Her thumb pressed against the familiar groove of her watch . Morris had given it to her after their first year on the job. She rubbed the leather clean of damp.
“Not the time,” she muttered to the stubborn thought of him.
Her radio crackled in her pocket at last. Dispatch’s voice rasped through the static.
“DI Quinn, your location?”
She drew it out, eyes on the orange glow below.
“In pursuit, Camden Town Station. Suspect male, grey hoodie, jeans. Headed into restricted access. Possible link to Soho incident. I’ll update.”
“Backup en route. Do not enter hazardous areas on your own.”
The words hung between them.
Her jaw clenched .
“Noted.”
She clipped the radio back to her belt.
Then she descended.
The steps grew slick under her boots, filmed with something more than water. Dark streaks scored the concrete, like old burn marks that refused to die. Her fingertips brushed the wall for balance, and grit came away under her hand.
The orange light swelled. The murmur became voices. A woman haggling over a price.
“That’s goat’s blood. You charged me half that last winter.”
A man with a voice like rust.
“Then winter came cheap.”
Harlow slowed. Her hand hovered near her holster.
The stairwell opened without warning. One more step and she stood on the lip of a vast, disused platform. The tracks themselves lay buried under rows of stalls and awnings, patched together from tarps and scavenged wood. The old station signs had been scraped off or painted over with symbols that swam if she looked too long. Lanterns hung from cables and hooks, casting a patchwork of colours: bruised purple, sickly green, fire yellow.
The Veil Market breathed before her.
No posters. No familiar adverts for phone plans or West End shows. Instead, banners made from stitched leather, some still bearing the faint shadow of hair. Crates. Tables. Blankets on the ground, each piled with things that glimmered or writhed or pulsed like organs.
Her pulse calmed instead of racing . Habit. New scene. Assess and log. She stood at the edge and watched.
The crowd moved in restless eddies. Some looked normal enough: men in damp overcoats, women in chunky knitwear and boots, faces weathered or smooth. Others didn’t. A tall figure in a hooded cloak that never quite landed on a colour, its edges blurred like heat haze. A person with eyes too pale, pupils a thin ring that mirrored the lantern flames. A child who held a glass jar pressed to her chest, something dark and many-legged inside it watching with more attention than she liked.
At one stall, a man held out his arm as another hovered a small silver knife above his skin. The seller’s hands shook with age or strain while he traced symbols just shy of the man’s wrist. The smell of burnt salt and something sharper rose with each near-touch.
Harlow scanned for the grey hoodie.
There, by a pillar, halfway down the platform. The suspect stood stiff, takeaway bag clutched against his chest. He spoke to a man whose hair curled short against an olive-toned neck, a thin scar along his left forearm caught the lantern light each time he gestured. A Saint Christopher medallion glinted at his throat.
The paramedic from the file. Tomás Herrera. License revoked. Suspected link to unregistered clinics. The name flashed across her memory with the neat font of casework.
She drifted along the wall, half-shadowed, letting the flow of people shield her. No one paid her much attention. A few eyes lingered on the plain cut of her coat, the set of her shoulders. Not tourist, not trader. Something else.
An old woman blocked her path, bones like hooked wire under thin skin, a basket on her arm filled with candles that burnt with blue flames.
“You’re far from your beat.”
Harlow kept moving.
“Not buying.”
“You already did.” The old woman sniffed. “In blood. Long ago.”
Harlow brushed past, spine rigid.
Herrera’s voice reached her, softened by distance.
“You’re late. You know what this stuff does if it sits too long?”
The suspect shifted.
“Cops at the Nest. One of them tailed me.”
Herrera’s gaze flicked over the space, sharp and quick.
“Here?”
“Lost her topside, I think.”
Harlow eased behind a crate stacked with jars. Things floated in the murk: an eye that tracked on its own, a curled hand with webbed fingers, teeth threaded on wire.
Herrera’s hand settled on the takeaway bag.
“Relax. You made it. Bone got you in, didn’t it?”
The suspect pulled the small white token from his hoodie again, let it dangle from its chain. In the lantern light the carving showed. Not random. Not a bit of scrap or jewellery. A tiny femur etched with lines that hooked into each other, no language she knew.
“Would’ve been easier if you just met me at the bar,” the suspect muttered.
“At the bar, anyone watches.” Herrera’s mouth barely moved. “Here, no one talks.”
Harlow’s palms itched. She logged each word, each object, each face. Glances. Access rituals. The way the token fit that lock upstairs.
Her radio gave a soft crackle in her belt, a reminder of another world above this one. Backup. Procedures. Forms.
Her gaze snagged on the nearest stall. Teeth. Dozens of them in small cloth pouches, each tied with a different colour thread. Human, canine, some too long and too thin for either. A handwritten sign above, letters cramped.
“Night-sleepers. Memory biters. Sweethearts.”
The seller’s eyes met hers. Twin pools of ink. No white.
“You look like a woman with regrets,” their voice poured over her like oil.
“Don’t we all.”
Her own voice sounded flat even to her. The seller smiled, threads of spit shining at the corners of their mouth.
“Want one gone? Easy price.”
“I’m working.”
Harlow shifted away.
Herrera took the takeaway bag and opened it enough for her to catch a glimpse. Vials racked in foam. Thick liquid in each, darker than blood. Not opaque. Something moved in several of them, twitching against the glass.
Herrera’s voice dropped.
“Market closes in thirty. After that, it all shifts. I’m not storing live draught anywhere above ground.”
The suspect wiped his palm on his jeans.
“It’s for them, yeah? Your … lot?”
Herrera’s jaw tightened.
“You get paid. You don’t ask that again.”
The suspect dropped his gaze.
Harlow’s attention flicked to the far end of the platform. A stone archway sunk into the wall, lined with bones instead of bricks, each one hammered into the mortar like nails. Two figures flanked it, faces wrapped in scarves, eyes dark above. In their hands, long rods tipped with carved vertebrae. They watched the flow of people who approached, each visitor pressing something small and pale into their palms.
Bone tokens.
Beyond the arch lay deeper shadow, a tunnel with light that pulsed a slow blue. She caught a slice of something on the other side: stalls with no lanterns, only jars that glowed from within, and shapes that didn’t move quite right.
Herrera nudged the suspect toward that arch.
“Payment first. Then we go through.”
The suspect’s fingers shook as he cupped the bone token, thumb tracing the etchings.
Harlow’s mouth dried. If he went through, she’d lose him. The tunnel beyond that arch did not belong to the city on any map. Her Met ID meant nothing down here. Her pistol might.
Dispatch’s warning crawled back from memory.
Do not enter hazardous areas on your own.
She scanned the market again. No uniforms. No CCTV. No way to explain any of this in a report without earning an appointment with Occupational Health.
Her hand closed on something cold. The old woman with the candles had drifted near again. She pressed an object into Harlow’s palm, wrapped her fingers around it.
“You’ll need it if you go chasing rabbits,” the crone rasped. “They don’t open the bones for free.”
Harlow looked down.
A tiny fragment of bone lay in her hand, carved and smoothed. Different from the suspect’s. Smaller, with a spiral etched into one end, like a storm caught in miniature.
“I didn’t—”
“Already paid.” The woman’s grin showed three teeth, all sharp. “In grieving. In the tunnel. Years ago. Remember?”
Morris’s face again. The unnatural way the blood had run uphill on the platform wall, abandoning gravity, streaking toward that dark gap where no train had come.
Harlow pocketed the token. Fingers brushed the Saint Christopher medallion of Herrera across the platform as he shifted; it caught the lantern light again, a brief star in the murk.
Her choice solidified. Stay at the edge, wait for backup, risk the trail going cold in a place that would vanish with the full moon. Or step in, follow them through the arch, into a world that had stolen DS Morris and left questions rotting in her file cabinets.
She watched Herrera and the suspect join the small knot of people at the bone-lined gateway. One of the guards held out a gloved hand.
“Token.”
The suspect placed his bone into the palm. The guard’s fingers curled around it. For a heartbeat, the etched lines on the bone glowed, sinking into the glove, then vanished.
“Market welcomes you.”
Herrera followed, holding up his own bone sliver between two fingers. The guard dipped his head in a gesture that almost looked like respect .
Harlow stepped away from the crate, the decision burning clean and simple in her chest. Her boots carried her toward the arch and the guards with their bone-tipped staff, into the press of bodies and flicker of impossible lights, her hand already closing around the token in her pocket.