AI He caught the flare of her coat and the sound of boots striking puddles, then something jumped the metal grate and swallowed him.
Harlow Quinn did not falter. She planted her shoulder into the rusted barrier, slipped the strap of her shoulder bag under her arm like a soldier bracing for contact, and dove through the half-open gap. The rain's residue streaked the neon below, a green smear that wanted to tell her names. Her left hand flashed her worn leather watch , thumb tapping the glass without thinking, counting heartbeats instead of time.
He threaded between delivery bikes, skirted a damp table of discarded menus, and pushed into the doorway under the distinctive green neon sign. The Raven's Nest exhaled a warm, cigarette-and-whiskey breath that smelled of smoke and old secrets. People turned. Glass chimed. He slid past the bar, hands low, and disappeared behind a shelf of dog-eared maps and black-and-white photographs.
She moved like someone who had practiced violence into habit. Her jaw set sharp, shoulders squared with military precision, she crossed the threshold and let the room flow into her instead of the other way around. Names on the walls watched her. The bar's chatter thinned like breath leaving a room as patrons noticed the chase and then decided, very loudly, not to be involved.
A hand rose in a gesture of warning, then slid down. The back shelf sagged as if on cue. Books shuffled, hinges worried, and a narrow passage opened between the volumes. He vanished through it.
Quinn did not hesitate. She shoved past the books, knocking a pamphlet loose that slapped the floor like a small, wet bird. Books rattled. The secret room smelled like mould and old gin. A single bare bulb swung, painting the faces of three men around a low table. One folded his hands without looking up. Another reached under the table and drew something that caught the light.
You could meet the Veil Market in ways that made other men nervous. This was not one of them.
A trapdoor sat at the far end of the room, half-hidden beneath a tattered rug. The man with the object in his hand tapped it against his palm. Bone. Old bone, polished to a dull bone colour. The token glinted.
That was the entry requirement. She had read the file on the Veil Market once, late, when she thought detective work lacked the appropriate darkness. It moved every full moon. It lived beneath a Tube station. It accepted bone tokens. It sold things that should never be listed.
Her logical brain supplied caution. Her left hand whispered against her watch again. Her partner's file slipped under her fingers in memory, a loose, frayed thing that never stopped pricking. DS Morris three years gone, the case closed with an unpleasant finality, the kind that left an outline you could never fill in. Something about the way he had died tasted wrong in her mouth like half-chewed metal. She had been close then, too close. She stayed close now.
The man with the token glanced up. He wore a hood. He knew she was there. He smiled without humour.
"We do not like noise," he said.
The voice came soft, careful. The words landed like a blade that had been wrapped in velvet .
"Names," she said.
He lifted the token and let it spin. The bone caught the bare bulb and threw off a sliver of light that landed on Harlow's cheekbone, on the sharp line of her jaw. The room tilted tiny degrees into menace.
The man flicked a hidden latch at the edge of the trapdoor. A metal ladder groaned as it extended. Damp air breathed up from below, colder and older than anything above ground, and carried with it a smell of copper and something sweet she could not name. Harlow inhaled. Her teeth wanted to grind.
"You're a policeman," he said.
"Metropolitan, yes." She did not say Detective. The word tasted too soft in this room.
He shrugged, a lazy, indifferent motion. "We do not admit policemen. Bad for business."
She stepped closer. Her boots scuffed the rug. "You were followed. I am taking a statement."
The men around the table laughed, small and surprised. The man with the bone token looked to his companions as if to make sure they had the same map in their eyes. He pushed the token into a small brass plate mounted at the trapdoor's edge. It sank, and the plate swallowed it like a mouth closing.
There was a click, mechanical and old. The ladder rattled. A gust of subterranean air poured up the ladder and made the bulb above her swing, dust spinning like tiny planets. For a beat, panic tried to unfurl inside her. She tightened her grip on the strap of her bag. The air below smelled of iron. Blood, recent, and something else, something older than blood.
"Go home," the man advised in a tone that was almost pity.
Harlow's hand felt for the badge under her coat, finger tracing the cool metal. She kept it there and did not show. Everything she had on this case was unofficial now. No paperwork, no back-up. Good. Bad. Both things were simple words that had nothing to do with the decision in front of her. The suspect had gone below. The suspect had a token. The market did not want policemen.
Her choices arranged themselves in quick geometry: walk away and follow through legal channels later, risk losing him; force her way and become the intruder; or manipulate entry by finding a proxy.
Tomás Herrera stepped from the shadow like an answer she had not expected and did not want. He had his sleeves rolled, a familiar scar dividing skin on his left forearm, and the Saint Christopher medallion at his throat shone dull and saintly. He had the kind of hands that were too used to kindness and quick to hide it when asked.
"Harlow," he said, as if they had ever been friends who simply fell out of touch .
She had seen him once before, patching a ribcage in a back alley three years ago, the way his fingers moved like a surgeon and a thief at once. The police file called him an ex-paramedic with an expired licence. The rest of London had called him a rumour.
"You shouldn't be here," she said.
"You shouldn't be asking permission either," he said. "Come down for a look. It's not the sort of place to miss."
He was not smiling. The medallion hung low against his chest. She noted, uselessly, the scar on his forearm and the way his voice carried a warmth like poured molasses.
"Name your price," she said.
He spread his hands, palms up. "No price, just acknowledgement. For some of us, the market keeps things from bleeding into the wrong places."
"Wrong places already have a way of coming back to people's kitchens," she said.
Someone behind him spat on the floor. The man who had admitted the token, the hooded one, picked up the ladder by its sides and began to descend. The crowd moved, making a gap like a wave pulling back from a reef. The staircase swallowed his knees. His shoulders dipped. He reached the lower darkness and did not look back.
Harlow stepped forward. The floor smelled hotter now, or maybe it was the squeezed heat of bodies. The trapdoor offered a ladder worn smooth by many hands, not uniform. The metal was cold under her palms. She ran a quick inspection with practised fingers. No trip wire. Not the sort that would ruin your day anyway.
Tomás watched her climb, his eyes like a question mark. He let his fingers flick her bag strap, a small, private reassurance. She did not feel reassured.
"You have a choice," he said once they were both half the way down. "This market has rules we honour out of fear more than respect."
"Rules change the minute someone decides not to honour them," she said.
He made a small noise that might have been a laugh. "You of all people should have learned that three years ago."
Her teeth chipped at his phrase. She did not answer.
The ladder descended into a throat of stone and script, light thinning into a ribbon that shrugged into darkness and then opened into the station. Rotting posters clung to the tiles like old skin. The platform had been emptied of tracks and given over to stalls draped in cloths, glass cabinets, cages, and an assortment of goods that breathed like animals. Someone sold bottled whispers, their labels written in a quick hand she did not know. A baker slid a tray of something that looked like pastry but hummed when touched. A woman in multiple scarves sold jars of black water.
The market itself moved with a momentum separate from the people in it. People sold things that could be used to hurt, to fix, to barter souls for favours and favours for blood. It smelled of smoke, metal, and the faint sugar scent of offerings. Light came from an odd variety of places: glowstones, candles, a refrigerator that kept turning out small, cold glass boxes with names no one recognised.
Harlow's hand tightened around the ladder rungs. Her boots touched the platform and the market moved to examine her. Eyes looked up, narrow, wide, blank; some recognised the pin of the Metropolitan and something like a hush threaded into the air , then unravelled. No phones. No cameras. People seemed to calculate her like a price and decide not to bid.
The hooded man who had escaped ahead threaded through the stalls with a practised ease. He kept his hood up even when he reached a vendor who chopped up small bones into powders and packed them into little paper cones. He handed over a scrap of paper. The vendor produced a small packet wrapped in grey tissue and slid it into his palm.
Two men blocked Harlow's path.
"Official," one said. He spoke with a feel of leather and old law, as if he had once carried papers for a court and never let go. He looked the sort to have been a bailiff in a previous life.
"Unofficial," the other countered, with a voice like a child's broken toy. He smelled like street tar and sulphur .
"Leave," Harlow said.
"Leave," the first repeated, slower, as if testing the word like a new coin . "You can leave, but know this. Anyone who came here without permission brought trouble."
"Trouble is my business," she said.
They laughed, and the laugh felt thoughtful, as if it had been waiting for permission for a long time. Harlow noticed without wanting to how the vendor with the bones watched them with a peculiar hunger. The vendor's hands were stained dark at the tips. Tomás had already melted into the tide, his back disappearing between a stall selling talismans and a man operating something that clicked with gears and made small animal noises.
She had two breaths to decide . Leave and watch from the street by the green neon until the man was out and then try to tail him again, or go forward into a place that refused law and might vomit up more than she could swallow. Her mind cheated to the past: Morris in the twenty-four hours before his disappearance, a coffee ring on a paper, a phone that kept receiving calls with static; images that refused to fit the neat boxes of explanation. The Veil Market had been mentioned once in the margins, a note tucked in someone's file: a place between things where people lost themselves.
Someone pushed a cart noisily near her and a glass globe on it chimed like a bell. A child with too-old eyes stared at her and smiled a smile that hurt her teeth. The hooded man turned a corner and vanished. The crowd swallowed him like an answer.
Harlow stepped through.
Her badge was still hidden. Her watch lay cool at her wrist. She moved like she always did: precise, economical, with the intent to do one thing and do it well. She had not come this far to let a shifting market decide outcomes. The platform narrowed and voices thickened. A vendor blocked the way with a display of jars. One jar held a specimen she did not want to name. The man behind it nodded at her as if they had always been expected in this role.
"Outsiders bring police," he said, curiously calm. "Intruders bring fire."
Footsteps behind her accelerated. She pivoted. Tomás had returned and put a hand to the small of her back as if to guide her. It was a useless, polite action, the kind that said I will help you even when you do not ask. He squeezed once and stepped back.
The hooded man had returned too, now with a companion. They had a small paper packet between them and a clockwork thing that clicked in a slow, patient way. As they reached the centre of the market they stopped. The vendors around them drew a small ring and the noise of the market receded, a single breath holding.
The hooded man unfurled his hands and set the packet on a battered crate. He tapped it twice. The air changed. It went colder and thicker, as if someone had slid a heavy curtain across the room. Something in the packet flared, a small blue light like a stubborn heart. The clockwork thing began to spin. The ring tightened like a noose.
Harlow realised, with the professional clarity that follows training, that they had planned for intruders, that they had prepared a welcome. She moved a half-step forward, hand going to the bag strap again.
Someone from the ring stepped forwards at the same moment and bellowed a word she had not heard before, a syllable that scraped the tiles. The blue light in the packet hit the crowd like a cut. A vendor screamed, hands clapped to his mouth. A bird in a cage began to shriek, then stopped as if the sound had been cut.
Tomás lunged. He moved like a man who had mended bodies for a living, like someone who could make something whole again by touch. He reached for the packet.
He did not get his fingers on it.
The hooded man smiled, sharp and unkind, and the packet opened like an eye. Something came out that was not meant to be named in the ledger of the living. Heads turned. The market surged. Harlow moved to intercept as chaos unfurled, sensations folding into violence.
She drew breath, set her jaw, and stepped into the centre of it.
The world then remembered to howl.