AI Quinn caught the hoodie and it ripped out of her grip, nylon squealing against her palm as the runner twisted from the alley and cut hard into the main drag.
Police. Stop.
The word tangled with the blare of a horn and the slap-slap of trainers on slick stone. He glanced back once, pale face under the hood, eyes too bright, then he vaulted a stack of milk crates and plunged through a knot of late-night drinkers who scattered with curses.
Her shoulder hit a wall, paint flaked under her palm, and she pushed off. Knee high. Keep cadence. Thirty metres to contact. She measured breath against the twinge in her ribs and the weight of her service pistol under her coat. People moved like an unruly tide, laughter and music fraying as she cut through it, badge at her throat catching stray light.
He hit the kerb and vanished between a shuttered phone shop and a kebab joint where meat sizzled on a spit and smoke smelt like cumin and hot fat. Quinn drove into the gap, knuckles skimming the corrugated steel of the shop fronts, and her radio cracked.
Control, Quinn in foot pursuit. Male, dark hoodie, grey jeans, Camden High Street, heading east, possible link to the Soho burglary series.
The operator said something about units. She shut the sound down with a thumb and kept moving.
He took a sudden left through a side gate, shoulder to the metal. The padlock hung open but someone had tied a red ribbon around it. He did not pause. She fed herself through the gap after him, jacket snagging, watch scraping the edge. The gate clanged behind her. Ahead, the ground dropped away into a concrete stairwell that cut down under the street, a black mouth with a sign half torn away. The remaining letters made a word she knew and did not like. Camden. Disused since the line had closed this entrance down in the nineties.
He ran into the dark and his footfalls turned hollow. She took the steps two at a time. Water dripped somewhere with a tap-tap like a metronome gone lazy. The smell hit as the street peeled away from her nostrils, damp metal, the brackish scent of the Underground, old electricity and mould. She rounded the first switchback and saw him shoot past a metal door with a faded No Entry and a strange chalk mark beneath it, a looping symbol like a fish hooked on its own tail.
He did not slow at the bottom. He headed for another door, this one painted a careful black. The man standing in front of it wore a suit that had been good once and now carried the sheen of too many wipes with a damp cloth. His hair lay in neat lines as if combed with a ruler. In his palm, a sliver of bone gleamed, a thumb-length token carved with crosshatching and a tiny hole laced with red thread.
The runner palmed his own token. The suited man looked at it, looked at the runner, and his mouth twitched.
Quinn reached the last step. The suited man raised his gaze to her, measuring. His eyes had a stillness that did not belong in a station. He held out his hand.
She feinted left as if reaching for her ID and drove her right shoulder into the door. The man’s hand snapped out, not slow at all now, and caught her sleeve.
Membership, love.
Police. Move.
His grip tightened. She twisted, broke the hold, and he lost balance for a fraction. She put her boot in the gap and shoved. The runner had already slid inside. The door gave an inch, then two. Hands came from the gloom and pushed back.
Her palm shot to her left wrist and found leather. Not now. She drove the heel of her hand into the hinge and her weight through the frame. Muscle memory did the ugly work. The suited man hissed, breath sour with cloves. The door yawned. She slipped sideways, exhaled, and fell into the dark with her forearm up, pistol holstered by intent because shooting into unknowns buried you faster than dirt.
Sound changed. Everything felt close and then wide, as if the air had pulled a trick with its ribs. She blinked and a thousand small lights sprung out of gloom like stars where no sky lived. A train platform opened under her feet, not any in service, its tiles cracked and painted over with sigils, its ironwork dressed in faded banners. Stalls covered the length of it, stitched from canvas and velvet , scaffolds making narrow streets where the tracks had been.
The market thrummed with the soft press of voices and the wet click of something alive being put in a bucket. Glass jars leaned against each other in orderly ranks and clouds of pinprick lights swam inside them like patient insects. A woman in three layers of shawls poured something silver into a paper cone and folded it as if it were hot sugar. A boy with pupils stretched too long across his irises stood on a crate and sang an old song about ships. Money changed hands. Not just money. Rings. A lock of hair tied with blue cotton. A laugh that did not carry warmth .
Quinn flattened against a pillar and scanned . The runner had to be ahead, threading the stalls. He had not looked back in the last minute, which made him confident. Confidence got you sloppy.
Her radio murmured up her sleeve. She killed it. Somewhere under the adverts that had peeled and fallen to the platform floor, someone had chalked a long thin line and letters whispered, Veil Market, behave or get gone .
You do not belong here, detective.
The thought did not voice itself. It had DS Morris’s timbre and she shut it in a box with rusted sides and moved.
She slid along an apothecary’s table where dried herbs hung upside down in neat ties and the woman behind it ground something with a pestle while watching her with a narrow mouth. To her right, a stall sold maps. Not city ones. Parchment with waterways that had no names she recognised, lines like veins. An old man in a tweed jacket arranged them with reverent fingers, the way you might touch skin bruised by a ring.
Something punched her upper arm as a kid with a leather satchel ducked under her elbow, quick as a ferret. He looked up, dark eyes sharp, then saw her face and away he went. She let him.
Ahead, movement she wanted. The runner’s hood bobbed near the end of the platform, past a string of lights strung on copper wire and a crate of knives with mother-of-pearl handles. He turned his head. Their eyes met for one clean heartbeat across people and objects. He smiled, too many teeth for the mouth, and then he slipped down onto the old track bed.
Quinn followed. The tracks shone with old oil and new damp. Somebody had set planks across them as footbridges and they bounced against ballast when she made contact. The runner pivoted and picked up speed, a dart through the gap where the platform ended and the tunnel mouth began. She could not risk a shouted warning here. The place moved under rules that met letters she had sworn to and made them shiver.
A hand caught her sleeve, not the firm clam of the doorkeeper but a swift brush like a moth .
Detective.
She half turned. The man who had spoken wore a faded green jacket with dark stains and an exhausted smile. His hair curled in damp loops and his warm brown eyes measured her with a worry that looked honest. A Saint Christopher medallion flashed at his throat as he shifted, a quick glint in the string of lights. His left forearm carried a pale scar from wrist to elbow, raised and shiny in the low light.
Herrera.
I know a lost look when I see one. He kept his voice low. You need a token.
I need him. She flicked a glance past Tomás to the tunnel, where the last of the runner’s shoulder vanished into dark. He had a smaller shape with him now, or the dark made shapes. Her fingers twitched towards the pistol. Her jaw locked.
Then you need this. He pressed something cool and small into her palm and folded her fingers over it. Bone. Smooth with sweat. He looked over her shoulder. Two wardens stood three stalls back, tall and straight in black coats, faces hidden by iron half-masks engraved with designs that hurt when you looked too long. Their attention moved like lighthouses in slow arcs. They smelt wrong, like old pennies and rain on stone where no sky reached.
Quinn tucked the bone under her watchstrap. Her throat worked once.
Why are you helping me.
We patch people, no matter what mess they throw themselves into. He lifted a shoulder. Besides, your runner buys banned coagulants. Bad ones. I prefer him poor and annoyed.
Stay out of this.
I will, if you do not bleed out where I cannot reach you. He touched her sleeve a second, gentle. And, Harlow. Do not draw the gun unless you want the whole place to eat you.
She set off before he could see the line of her mouth soften. The tunnel swallowed her. Light fell away in steps, a notch at a time, until the glow behind her turned thin. The runner’s trainers whispered ballast, a soft grate. She steadied breathing. Her eyes adjusted. White paint on the wall ahead bore cracked letters that spelled Northbound and someone had written in tiny neat hand beneath, No such thing down here.
He had paused. She felt it like an echo . He was waiting for her. The ballast shifted under her boot.
Ten metres ahead, he slid into a side cut, an old service passage, brickwork sweating and crumbled at the corners. She slid after him, her free hand grazing rough brick. Sound muffled. The air in the passage lifted the hairs along her forearm, a current she could not locate. The runner turned, at last, and his face came clear.
You should have kept to roads, officer.
He was young. Cheekbones like blades and a healed slit in one eyebrow . His pupils sat wide, eating the brown. When he grinned, the canines touched longer than they should. He held something cupped against his chest, a glass vial stoppered with red wax. The liquid inside moved slow, not like liquid at all, more like a muscle trying to rest.
She showed her palm. No badge now. No gun. Nothing that could make the Market twitch.
Come quietly.
Come clever. He tilted his head, listening. Footsteps behind her, the wardens, patience embodied. He flicked his eyes to her left hand. His grin altered. Token. Tut. Someone fancies you.
I do not do fan clubs.
He lifted the vial and tapped the wax. The sound went ping. The hair on the back of her neck crawled.
You chase what you do not understand. He rolled the words in a voice that had learned to sound like boys on estates and then something else had taught it how to peel that skin away. You lost one already. Want to lose more.
Her hand went nowhere. He watched. He needed her angry. He needed her careless.
She breathed in. Copper stung the air. Blood. Not hers. Recent. She weighed the passage’s width, the runner’s stance, the give in his knees. She could close the gap if he committed to the throw. She could take the hit and still reach his throat. Two beats and a cut.
Behind him, the passage opened without opening. A soft change in bricks, a suggestion of space where wall had been. A curtain of beads, not beads, little bones with holes drilled clean and strung on gut. They clicked. He edged a half step toward them.
You step through that, I drag you back out by your spine.
Bold. His grin showed heat. He loved the game. He put his thumb to the red wax.
Someone spoke behind Quinn, voice clipped and formal, vowels flattened by an accent not from any London she knew.
Tokens please.
She did not look back. The runner did not either. He pressed.
Quinn moved.
Her shoulder hit his chest. The vial went up between them like a small heart, and she snatched for it as a child might catch a falling orange. Her fingers grazed hot glass. It turned. It fell. The wax kissed brick and the red seal split with a wet sound like lips parting.
Do not breathe.
Herrera. His voice cut across the distance. He stood at the mouth of the service passage now, haloed by market light, a fold of his jacket hiding his hands. His eyes held hers for a white-blue second.
Too late. The vial cooked open and breathed for them. A soft vapour rose, fine and shimmering, with a smell like cinnamon mixed with a penny held under the tongue. It snaked across Quinn’s cheeks, under her eyelids, cold and sticky.
The runner took that heartbeat . He snapped a tiny blade from his sleeve and struck across her forearm. A line of fire opened, thin and clean. Her grip did not loosen. She slammed him into the bricks and he laughed with surprise. His wrist bones popped under her fingers.
The wardens arrived at the passage mouth and the air behind them altered, crowd sound sliding away, like a room when someone important entered it. A mask loomed closer. Tokens.
Quinn showed her wrist. The bone hung pale in the skin of her watchstrap. The warden looked once. Its eyes behind iron did not blink.
Sanctioned. It said the word like a verdict.
The runner stamped on her foot. Pain climbed her shin. He wrenched and wriggled and then he had something new in his hand, not the blade, a rectangle of dark glass that drank the light. He put it against the curtain of tiny bones and the bones stilled as if a wind had stopped.
Quinn drove her knee. It took him low in the thigh. He howled and their faces came too close. His breath smelt like mint and old smoke.
Say hello to the rest of your dead.
She felt the low growl before she heard it. The bones of the passage vibrated with it, a sound like a far-off train but no train ran here. The vapour from the broken vial thickened, threads of it twisting into a figure that could have been a man or not. Teeth gleamed inside it like small strings of pearls. The runner’s eyes widened for a hair’s breadth, not with fear but with triumph .
Herrera shoved a cotton handkerchief into Quinn’s hand, already damp with something that smelt like eucalyptus and sugar. He made a sign with his other hand, two fingers touching thumb. Old first aid trick for kids to breathe slow. His mouth formed words without sound. Out. Now.
Quinn yanked the runner around to use his body as a barrier between her and the rising thing. He bucked, grabbed at her injured arm, and twisted. The knife flicked again and blood slicked her skin. Her boot slipped on the thickening damp and her hip hit brick. Behind her, iron scraped stone. The warden had taken a step forward and the edge of its coat revealed a baton wrought from something that ate light.
The curtain split.
It did not part like cloth. It unraveled. The tiny bones turned and turned until they lay flat, and then the gap showed nothing at all except that it made the hair on Quinn’s arms flatten to her skin. Cold reached through it. Voices leaked, reversed, like songs played backwards in a teenage room.
The runner smiled with his whole face, a boy and a wolf in the same skin.
Catch me, officer.
He tore free of her fingers, left skin in them, and flung himself sidewise through the gap.
Quinn went after him.
The thing in the gas turned its head, which was not a head at all but a twist in the shimmering . Its attention slid over her like oil. The warden’s baton came up. Herrera swore in a soft, tired voice.
The floor shuddered as if the station above had stretched and yawned. The planks over the track shifted, one popping like a snapped tongue. A bottle on a distant stall burst. People screamed. Not the good kind. The sound that said, this place has rules and someone has ripped one.
Quinn hit the threshold with her shoulder and the world tilted, and all the lights in the market flickered as if something had drawn a breath that emptied the room. She lost purchase on brick and gravity forgot its job.
She fell into the cut as the void opened its mouth and roared.