AI Her knee hit concrete and she kept running.
The man ahead took the corner too wide, one hand slapping the brick as he vaulted a low fence. Harlow Quinn's breath cut short, lungs burning the way they had the night she chased a drunk through a council estate and came back with a broken wrist and a promotion. She pushed forward, boots clattering on wet cobbles, the city spitting at her in a dozen gutter-snap sounds. Her left hand brushed the worn leather watch on her wrist the way a soldier checks a rifle before a raid.
He glanced back once, a sliver of white teeth under a hood, then dropped down a set of concrete steps that led into an obsolete Tube entrance. The metal gate at the top was half-closed, rusted and foul with old chewing gum, but someone had pried one chain loose. Beyond, a ragged poster flapped in the breeze, advertising a jazz night that no longer existed. The man vanished into the dark.
Quinn reached the top of the steps and hesitated two heartbeats. She had a list of rules for dangerous places, borrowed from Morris and honed by her own stubbornness: identify exits, keep sight lines, avoid dead ends. The staircase narrowed and smelled of damp plaster and something metallic. Rain had already made the outside slick; the steps drank it and refused to let it go.
She plunged down.
Each step swallowed sound. The world narrowed to the thud of her boots, the scrape of her trousers against the rail, the steady click of the leather watch as her fingers brushed it again. A voice echoed below, not a shout but a bark, clipped and familiar .
"Quinn!"
She stopped, took a hard breath, then moved harder. The voice belonged to a market trader, one she half-remembered from late shifts in Camden. An argument bubbled, too fluid to be police and too guarded to be a drunken squabble. She caught the scent then: curry and ozone, copper, a faint perfume of incense. Under it, something old and animal, like the lungs of an animal preserved in salt. Her scalp tightened.
At the bottom of the steps a man stood beneath a broken lamp, the light staining his hoodie in jaundiced yellow. He was half-turned, talking to a barred doorway that had once been sealed . Quinn's eyes adjusted and found the thing the man held between his fingers: small, pale, carved bone on a leather thong. A token. She knew the description as well as she knew the serial of her service pistol. Bone tokens were mythology in the papers, a good story for Sunday supplements. They belonged to stories told by late-night drunks and occult forums. Except when they didn't.
The man fed the token into a gap in the doorway, a notch carved in the stone like a mouth. The gap ate it. The barred doorway shivered. For a heartbeat it resisted, then a hidden hinge sighed and the metal slid aside, revealing a steep descent of bare earth, ropes, and an iron ladder that disappeared into opaque darkness.
A murmur rose beyond the doorway, not human words, but a cadence that hooked into the bones of the stairs. A murmur of traders, of animals in cages, of voices bargaining in tongues Quinn half-recognised from interviews with smugglers and refugees. The man with the token moved through the opening with the easy confidence of someone who paid for things that did not always belong to him.
She gripped the rail. Her breath fogged in front of her, the air colder and more still than the rain had been. Morris's face flickered —not an image so much as a shape, a pattern in the way her hands remembered the feel of a partner's shoulder, the rhythm of two people clearing a room. She had not allowed herself that memory for three years, not since he stopped coming home. Memories were small weapons; she kept them sheathed.
"Stay put," she said to the empty stairwell. Her voice ricocheted and came back thinner. She heard the man laugh, low and without humour.
"It's not that kind of market, detective," he called over his shoulder . "You'll want a token. Safe. Ordered. No one dies if you buy the right thing."
She did not move. She did not take her eyes off the doorway. Her hand found the grip of her pistol because it was a movement she trusted, not because she intended to fire. The leather watch on her wrist clicked against the metal. On the second thought she stepped down again, three steps, to keep sound in her favour.
The market beyond the doorway breathed. Stalls closed against shadow arranged themselves like teeth. Lanterns burned in jars, their flames a sickly green. People passed through pockets of light: a woman with silver hair and gloves that looked like bare branches, an old man whose eyes reflected the lanterns like fish, a kid with a skateboard under one arm and something folded and wrapped in black in the other. Not everyone looked human. Not everyone looked like they wanted to talk to the police.
Quinn kept moving. Her training forced her to catalog risk: exits and entrances, the weight of bodies nearby, the potential for knives and for a crowd to swallow you. Her senses pulled in taste, sound, smell in equal measure; they built a map. The man with the token had pushed through a cluster of stalls and into a narrower passage. She followed at a distance, counting breaths, watching hands.
From a stall came a voice, English smeared with a dozen accents.
"Token or not, officer, best you go back upstairs, yeah?"
"You know how I handle 'best you's,'" Quinn said. She kept to the shadows and let the pockets of lantern light play over her face. She felt more like a piece of equipment than a person. Sharp jaw, shoulders keyed. The words were a warning and a joke and a posture all at once.
Someone laughed, and the laugh sounded like coins down a drain . A woman stepped out, wearing a long coat that cracked visually like old paper. She had a catalogue of scars along one forearm, and a smile that sold danger.
"You chasing lost dogs or lost souls?" she asked.
"Both," Quinn said. She moved past the stall and the woman made no step to stop her. The market had rules, and Quinn had broken plenty, but there was still an etiquette among thieves and traders. The woman watched her like a cat that had seen too many mice.
The passage angled and widened into a gallery. Stalls lined either side, offering jars of shimmering powder, boxes labelled in languages she could not decypher, amulets tied in knots. A sound cut through: the rasp of leather and the high whisper of the token man. Ahead he shoved through a curtain of beads hung from a stall and got caught as if in a net. When he turned his head, Quinn saw his face in the lantern light, smeared by fatigue. He was not the suspect she had come for—he was too young, too small-time to run a ring. He held out the token and a man with bare arms like carved wood took it, examined it and laughed, then slipped it into his own pocket like a thief tucking a prize.
"You're not from around here," the carved-wood man said.
"No," Quinn said. "I'm looking for a man. Short, bad tattoos. Blue hoodie."
A shadow moved behind the carved-wood man. A hand slid a cloth-wrapped parcel across the counter.
"You pay, you ask," the carved-wood man said, eyes like flint. His accent was clipped , efficient . His fingers brushed the parcel. "Asking's free, but it makes trouble."
Quinn's mouth stayed closed. She weighed her options. The market demanded currency she did not have, in forms that were not always legal. The bone token was, however, transactional and physical. If she followed someone without meeting the market's rules she risked being trapped inside a place that rearranged itself at will, a market that moved locations every full moon. Evidence suggested the Veil Market's proprietors traded in things that tended to find a way to stick to the people who handled them. Morris's file had been annotated with a single sentence scrawled in someone else's handwriting on the margins: "Do not go where the signs are wrong."
Her pulse answered with a steady count. There were, on the far side of the gallery, two exits she could see. One led down to a room where the air smelled of boiled meat and a tv playing static. The other narrowed further into a corridor that promised darkness and maybe a crowd.
The carved-wood man touched her wrist as if testing a pulse .
"You sure you want this?" he said.
"Yes," Quinn said.
His smile widened like a hinge. "You're brave."
She did not feel brave. She felt practical. A man had run away from a crime scene. Something valuable had changed hands. She had a duty. She had a partner's memory that tightened into a line of refusal at the thought of walking away.
She moved again, slower now, letting the stall-owners take her measure. Someone behind her called her by name, the syllables spoken like a prayer to a god who liked to be ironic.
"Harlow Quinn."
She turned. A boy, no more than sixteen, leaned against a pillar and chewed the end of a bone. He had the same medallion Quinn had seen around the neck of every kid in the market: a small Saint Christopher, dull with use. Not a bone token. Tomás Herrera stepped out from between crates as if he had always been there. He wore a jacket patched at the elbows. His olive skin glowed in the jar light. He had a scar along his left forearm, pale under the dimness. He did not move like someone hiding; he moved like someone who had, in the past, stood in places where violence settled and chosen to heal it.
"Tomás," she said.
He inclined his head. "Detective Quinn." His English carried a soft Spanish cadence. "You're far from the hospital."
"You're far from a hospital," she said.
He shrugged. "Different kinds of patients." He smiled, then his expression hardened in a careful way. "What is it you seek?"
"A man in a blue hoodie," she said. "Token in hand."
Tomás's eyes flicked to the carved-wood man, then to the narrow corridor where the market swallowed shadows. His fingers brushed the medallion at his throat and didn't fumble.
"You don't have a token," he said.
She tightened her fist rather than answer. Tomás's voice held no judgement, only a fact.
"What's the cost, then?" she asked.
Tomás's smile was small and rueful. "Entry's one thing. Staying is another. They do not like visitors from upstairs, especially with ties to the force."
He said it without warning, the way a surgeon mentions a tumour in a routine consult. The carved-wood man shifted, the sound a slight threat. Quinn's hand hovered near her holster.
"Tell me where he went," she said.
Tomás scanned the market with the same tenderness he might have used to find a vein. "He went deeper. Past the knives. Past the apothecary with the jars that hum. The knot in the corridor gives way to a room. People with badges leave behind the smell of iron. He might have traded something the wrong way. Or he might be bait."
"Is this bait for me?"
Tomás looked at her then, his warm brown eyes steady. "What you think a market like this pays attention to, detective, is not you. It's the question you carry. If your question smells like police, it will be answered differently."
Her jaw tightened. Sound in the market shifted, a low vibration. Someone knocked over a stack of metal bowls and their music died. A hand passed behind a curtain and did not come out. The carved-wood man laid a palm flat on the counter, his fingers long and precise.
"Either you have coin, or you have a friend with coin," he said. "Or you leave. Properly. Nobody likes a ransacking cop."
Quinn thought of Morris again only as a technical detail: partner missing, file cold, unexplained evidence vanished from a secured locker. She felt the memory as a weight on her abdomen rather than a sentiment. She removed her hand from her holster. She had a duty. She had instincts. She had a stubbornness refined by eighteen years of service.
"I'll go in," she said.
Tomás took a breath that tasted like apology . "If you run, you run with what you take. If you stay, stay close. If you fight, don't make it a story. Make it a solution."
"Stop giving speeches," Quinn said.
He laughed once, a small cheer, then folded back into the crowd like a volunteer sinking into an ambulance. He did not offer a token. He never offered idly. He had, Quinn suspected, reasons to keep his hands clean and his fingers close to his own scars.
She moved toward the narrow corridor. The carved-wood man didn't stop her. A child at a stall watched, eyes wide, the glow of the lantern reflected in his pupils. He mouthed something that might have been a prayer or a warning. Quinn passed close enough to see the handwriting—names scratched into the inside of his wrist. She kept going.
As she entered the corridor, the air closed. Lantern light dragged down into a throat of black. Her watch clicked; she read the seconds by it rather than by her chest. Somewhere ahead, behind another curtain, a voice turned into a laugh and then into a sound like something being snapped .
Her phone buzzed once and died under the market's interference. She heard it, low and useless, and shoved it back into her pocket. The carved-wood man's laughter rolled after her like distant thunder. She had followed enough people into enough basements to know that you could always turn back—until you could not.
The corridor took her into a circular room that smelled of iron and lemon, where people bartered with gestures and signatures more than words. In the centre, a table stood with an old radio that hummed as if it were remembering a song. The man in the blue hoodie stood by the far wall, speaking to someone who did not show his face. He placed his hand, palm open, on the table and the skin of his hand looked raw.
Quinn stepped forward. The world tightened. The man with the unseen face turned slowly , and when he moved, the lanterns caught something that made Quinn's skin go cold. The face that looked up at her was not a face she recognised, but a thing that had been scrubbed smooth and wrote its own history. It smiled.
"Welcome," it said. The voice carried a thousand small sounds folded into it, like someone speaking with coins in their mouth.
A hand closed on the back of Quinn's jacket, hard, and pulled her into someone’s shadow. A whisper slid across her neck, intimately close.
"You're not the first of the police to come down here," the whisper said, and the words tasted like salt . "Will you be the first to leave with both shoes on?"
She felt the grip tighten, and a figure moved into the lamplight, a gloved hand revealing a ring carved from bone.
The table's radio popped and a new voice bled from static into speech.
"Detective Harlow Quinn," the voice said, clear and too amused, "we were wondering when you'd visit."