AI His boot hit a puddle and she felt the spray across her cheek as denim disappeared around the corner. Harlow Quinn vaulted the low wall without thinking, leather watch rasping against her wrist, and tasted the city in her mouth, diesel and rain and something iron that smelled like old secrets .
A taxi horn bleated behind her. Someone shouted. Footsteps skidded. She kept going.
He had been quick, quicker than the tip-off had suggested. Quick and pale and wrong in the way people who had been reborn wrong wore their faces. He carried a sack, something clanking inside. He glanced back once, saw her, and smiled like someone enjoying a private joke. That was why she could not let him vanish. Not after everything.
She forced the corner and hit the green neon of The Raven's Nest full in the face. The sign buzzed, cast sickly light into the puddles. The bar's door lurched open as the suspect shoved through and the warm reek of old smoke and cheaper spirits hit her like a wall. Maps lined the walls in the low light, black and white photographs looking down like witnesses.
People moved around them like furniture, shoulders and elbows and murmurs. A glass met the floor and shattered , but no one screamed. The music swallowed sound. He was already moving for the bookshelf at the back, the one everyone pretended was only decoration. She pushed through bodies, the crowd parting reluctantly , and saw him slide a book out, fingers nimble. The shelf gave with a sigh and a slit of darkness yawned behind it.
She did not hesitate. She lunged for him and found only splinters. He had gone through, and the shelf swung shut like a jaw.
"Stop!" she barked. The bark had to be more than noise. It had to pin him. No response. The room behind the shelf smelled of dust, of old paper, and a cold that did not belong in a bar. A narrow stair dropped away into shadow, each step carved and wet. Someone had installed the trap for people who believed secrets belonged behind books.
She drew in a breath and counted. One, two, three. Military habit. She should call it in, wait for back-up, secure the entrance. She did not. Every instinct that had kept her alive for eighteen years told her to move, and an old, darker muscle—anger—drove her down.
The stair folded her into a long, thin corridor. The light at the top winked out as the bookcase settled, leaving her to move by the green afterglow seeping from above and a single battered torch strapped to the wall. Water threaded across the concrete, followed by a trailing smell that made the back of her throat dry. The city unclipped itself from the polite street and descended into something older, an artery the modern maps pretended not to know.
He had been heading south, not further into Soho. She followed the slick footprints that his trainers had left, a map of mistakes. The corridor ran like a vein until it opened into a cavernous shaft where steam rose from pipes and the tiled walls were black with grime. A rusted sign marked an old station name, half-lettered away. Someone had stuck a flyer over the old timetable: Veil Market, beneath Camden, tonight. Bone token required.
She slowed when she saw that. Bone token required. The sign said it like a joke, but the damp made her skin prickle. She had heard rumours. The Veil Market turned up in late-night whispers at corners where the city let its underbelly breathe. An underground market of enchanted things, banned alchemical powders, whispered names for sale. She had tracked other smells that led to people who did not belong in the daylight. DS Morris had chased one of those smells three years ago and never come back the same. Not that the paperwork had called it supernatural. The paperwork called it an unexplained disappearance, and the river called it by another name when the bodies turned up.
Her pulse did not thank her for the thought. She moved on.
Voices rose like steam from the shaft below. Traders and purchasers, haggling in low tones. The air grew heavier, fuller, as if filled with small things waiting to be bought. She kept to the shadows and counted out the things she knew. No badge here would work like a door key. No uniform would carry the sanctity of law into a place where ancient bargains were currency. Her presence would make waves. She belonged to precinct squares and evidence rooms, not to places that traded in folded luck and teeth.
The steps narrowed and a figure slipped past on the lower landing. He was slight, dark curls slick with rain, a Saint Christopher medallion catching the light when he turned his head. Tomás Herrera.
She stopped. He did not. He moved with a quiet economy, an ex-paramedic's hands folded against his chest. He had the look of someone who had seen too much and chosen to thread himself into the seams of the city rather than stare at them from above. His scar along the left forearm showed where someone had tried to teach him permanence with a blade. The medallion swung.
She thought of arrests, of policies. She thought of questions that couldn't wait. She thought of the file she had read on him months back, the one that said licence revoked. She had not expected to see him in the flesh at a place like this. He glanced back then, and his warm brown eyes flicked over her like he recognised trouble.
"Tommy," she said. Her voice barely moved the air.
He blinked, then dropped into the stairwell as if the movement had been written . He said something soft in Spanish, something like calma, and his hands were up the way a medallist's hands always were when they wanted to show they meant no harm.
She was not here to admonish him. She had a man to catch.
The footsteps resumed ahead, closer now. He had reached the access hatch. The door to the disused platform was a slab of iron with a ring for a handle that looked eaten by rust. He forced it with a shoulder and the smell of the tunnel broke like a wave. Beyond, an old carriage lay black in a pool of dripping light. Canvas stalls were set up in the long shadow of the platform. Lanterns swung, blue and red, and a hundred faces leaned in where the light touched. The market spread like a secret made real.
The suspect ducked down into that light and vanished among the stalls. He did not exchange coins. He talked with fingers and rubbed a palm against something small and bone-coloured. The crowd devoured him.
Harlow paused at the lip of the platform. The market felt like a throat . People moved around stalls that sold things she did not have words for: jars with names folded into paper, lengths of string that pulsed faintly when someone held them, knives that shone too clean for their age. Vendors wore scarves and smiles, and the eyes watching them were often too bright.
She could go down. She could fight for jurisdiction in a place where rites outranked custody. She could play by law and go back up, call it all in, and wait for rubber-armoured uniforms to sweep the market like a net. But the net would never reach the hidden pockets. The suspect would slither into a stall and vanish. No. She had trained for certainty. She would follow.
She spoke to the darkness before descending, because she liked to say things out loud. "This is far from headquarters," she said.
"You always pick the dramatic entrances." Tomás stood where the stair narrowed, his shoulders a small wall.
"You live here now?" Her voice was a blunt instrument. There was no indulgence in it.
He smiled, half apology, half mischief. "I take care of the wounds." He tapped his medallion. "Sometimes the wounds are not for the police."
"Then what are you doing here?" she asked.
"Same as you, I think," he said. He moved aside, and the crowd closed like a skin over the platform. "Looking."
A child's laugh sounded near a stall draped in feathered boas. Someone hissed a sale. The suspect had been a shadow within a shadow; now the market offered him sanctuary . She took a breath and stepped down.
Every step closer revealed more. A table piled with bone trinkets shimmered under a lamplight that smelled faintly of ozone. A woman with silver hair and inked hands offered a packet of something warm for a coin, and when she smiled at Harlow, she smiled like she knew the shape of the detective's future. Harlow's jaw tightened. She kept her hand near her holster without reaching for it, because weapons did not help with bargains and occult protocols.
She spotted the sack. It lay beneath a cart that sold bottled amber liquid. The sack's contents clinked in half-remembered rhythms. He had not empty-handed escaped to buy trinkets; he had delivered something. She crouched, palpable absence of smell making the bones in her ear ache, and reached for the sack.
"Detective Quinn," someone said. The voice slid against her name with the ease of someone who had heard it before. It was the suspect. He sat cross-legged on top of a crate, the sack between his knees, a ring of men and women around him. "You are very far from papers and polite manners."
"You are under arrest," she said.
He laughed. It did not reach his eyes. "For what? Trespass? Improper possession of a bag? You carry law like a finger in a sore place. Here, law will get you nowhere."
"Stand and put your hands where I can see them."
He spread his palms. Small bones lay between his fingers, white and clean, threaded with a dark cord. He placed one on the crate and it rolled, slow, as if aware. The people around him hummed low. The hum made the hair on her neck stand up. The light from the lanterns flared briefly and then dimmed as if someone had exhaled.
Tomás stepped closer, his voice quiet. "Harlow, those bones—"
"Are evidence," she said. The word felt like armour. "Look at them."
He leaned in, then hissed, and his hand came away with a smudge of ash that did not feel like ash under his fingernail. He wiped it on his sleeve. "Not bones like you think."
"Show me," she said.
"Not a good idea," the suspect said softly . His smile widened. "You will not like what you find."
Quinn's jaw set. She made a choice. She reached for the bone to pull it into evidence, to confiscate it, to remove whatever stain it bore on the city's throat, and to do it with hands that would not tremble.
Before her fingers closed, the man in the circle rose like a puppet released. He spoke a syllable that was both like a door creaking and a bell. The lantern light dimmed to a hungry thinness and the market's hum became a chant. People around them shifted and the trader with the feather boas dropped her apron. The sack at her feet untied itself as if by breath and the bones rolled out in a tidy spill, each one aligning with an invisible grid on the platform.
Tomás reached for her wrist.
"Don't," she said, because he always thought he could fold her caution into kindness and it never worked.
The bones clicked into place and the air tasted of copper. Someone shouted a name she did not know. The lanterns swung and shadows peeled away from stalls like slips of skin. Harlow felt the world tilt, a shallow dip like a boat hitting a trough, and the light at the far end of the platform punched through to white.
She had seconds. She had to decide. Follow into whatever that place opened onto and risk losing the chain of custody, risk coming into contact with things the precinct would not accept, risk everything. Or back out and call in officers who would arrive with blinkers and tape and a distance that would let the suspect melt into a market that moved on the moon's whim.
She stepped forward. She did not know if she stepped because she wanted to catch him or because she wanted to see, finally, the thing that had taken Morris. She had trained to close distances. She had trained to move through thresholds. This was another threshold.
Tomás's fingers touched her wrist, urgent and soft.
"Quinn," he said. His voice was firm under the hum. "If you go in, you do not come out the same way. Not always."
She looked at him, at the medallion that swung once, twice. The suspect watched her, the smile steady as cavalry.
"Then I'll be the one who changes the terms," she said.
Her hand closed on a bone where it lay exposed to the light. It was colder than the air, and when she lifted it the lanterns flared like someone had blown on them. The sound around her split into a hundred small voices, close as breath.
The platform lurched . A wind rose in the underground as if the market were inhaling . The circle around the suspect contracted. The faces of the crowd seemed to alter, not with distance but with intent .
Tomás made a sound that was half prayer, half warning. He lunged forward to grab her arm.
The bone in her hand pulsed once, then twice. The light braided and for a heartbeat the market was a thing without edges, a room that wanted more. Someone shouted, knives flashed, and something in the dark beyond the stalls opened its mouth.