AI Boot heel on bone. The crunch was small, precise, like someone stepping on a brittle promise. Harlow Quinn did not startle. She lifted the sole, let the grit fall from the tread, and followed the smear of dried copper across the tile.
"Christ," Davies said, crouching by the body. His camera clicked. "That's a lot of blood."
"Not as much as there should be," Quinn said. She stooped, thumbed the edge of the torn sleeve. The cloth felt flecked, not soaked. The cut along the wrist was neat, surgical almost, as if carved by someone who understood anatomy.
"Ritual," someone called from the far end of the platform. Eva Kowalski stood under the old advertisement, round glasses catching the harsh torchlight. Her left hand kept finding a curl of hair and tucking it behind her ear. The gesture had become a metronome during the last three years. It steadied her. Her freckled face had gone pale.
"Ritual's the obvious headline," Davies said. He spread his fingers over the chalk circle drawn around the corpse. Coins lay at equal intervals, their faces smudged with ash. Salt, Quinn noted, in a tidy ring that had not been disturbed by the foot traffic of this station's ghosts.
Eva knelt, lifting a small brass object. The compass caught the torchlight, etched sigils flickering like sweat. Verdigris stained the casing.
"The Veil Compass," she said, voice small, precise . "This is not a museum piece. It came from the Market. See the patina? Handmade, Shade artisan work."
Davies snapped another photograph.
"Perfect," he said. "Market trinkets and a dead bloke. Story writes itself."
Quinn let the flame of her torch trace the compass face. The needle trembled , then pointed with lazy certainty toward the closed maintenance tunnel at the far end of the platform. Not toward the City. Not toward the lifts. Toward the brick throat that led to the bowels of the line.
"The compass points to a portal," Eva said. She tucked hair behind her ear again. "It finds rifts. It would point toward—"
"Don't," Quinn said. The word came out flat, not unkind, but final . She kept looking. The blade marks along the victim's forearms were shallow, deliberately neat. There was no tremor in the cuts that came with recalcitrant victims. The rope burn circled behind the neck. The fibres showed an odd direction, the way they'd snagged, as if the victim had been turned while tied.
"He wasn't bound facing the altar," Quinn said. "He was tied facing away, then turned. Someone staged him to look like a participant."
"Maybe he volunteered," Davies offered.
Quinn glanced up at him. He was younger than her in experience and wanted closure. He wanted the neat box, the press statement. His jacket still smelled faintly of the station's old grease, of coffee, of the patchouli someone wore to assert they were not of Camden at all.
"Volunteered," Eva echoed , but softer, as if considering . She turned the compass over with care, fingers steady even as they trembled . "The sigils are wrong for a Shade piece. Someone copied a pattern and left this out to be found. Why would a Shade artisan want it to be discovered?"
"Because someone wanted you to find it," Davies said.
"Because someone wanted it to be obvious," Quinn corrected. She crouched and examined the prints in the dust. Trainers, two sets, one heavier, one lighter. One set halted at the chalk ring, the other crossed it, landed on the far tile, returned. The lighter set had a clean heel. The heavier had a torn tread, a smear of something like motor oil . None of them matched the shoes of the uniformed officers, or the press boots, or the old man who'd been loitering on the opposite platform when they'd arrived.
"Look at the heel wear," Quinn said. "Same person left both heavier prints. Whoever staged this stood outside the ring, placed the coins and salt, stepped in, went to the body, then stepped back in the same place. That return step would have smeared the salt ring if it had been placed after the body."
"Meaning?" Davies asked.
Quinn tapped the compass with her thumbnail. "Meaning the compass was put down after the ring was drawn, but before the person stepped into the ring for the staged photograph. They wanted someone to find the compass in the ring."
Eva's glasses flashed. "So the Market's being framed. Or someone at the Market wanted attention. The Market moves each full moon. The bone token rule means only someone with a token could enter. Nobody here had a token, except—"
"Except it isn't the Market's work at all," Quinn said. "This is a distraction."
Davies frowned. "A distraction from what? We caught the wrong train tonight?"
"You haven't checked the vault." Quinn let the words hang. The station smelled of old concrete and copper. Her watch, leather worn on the left wrist, scraped gently as she leaned against a pillar. She could feel the muscle memory of cases lining her shoulders, the way evidence arranged itself for those who looked properly.
"Vault?" Davies repeated, sounding habitually confused. "We've cordoned off the platform. There is no vault."
"Not here," Quinn said. "Elsewhere. A theft, a smuggling run, an exchange. Someone needed us to come and look at ritual nonsense while they did the actual job. Notice the path the lighter footsteps made. They approached from the lift shaft, not the main concourse. No one reported odd movement on the concourse. That means someone used an old maintenance access to move goods."
Eva's mouth opened, closed. "The British Museum had an exhibition yesterday. My supervisor sent a crate for transfer at midnight. It was scheduled to move through Camden back corridors, to a private conservator."
Quinn's head tilted. "Did you sign anything?"
"No—" Eva started, then stopped. She tucked hair behind her ear, then, on impulse, took the compass back. Her fingers lingered over the needle, and there was a look in her eyes that made Quinn's chest tighten in a way she could not name. "If someone wanted to divert attention from the transfer, they'd stage a spectacle. They'd use something the Market could plausibly be blamed for. People fear the Market. They write about it. The tabloids love a satanic underpass."
Quinn listened to the city above, a distant, indifferent hum. Her jaw tightened. Morris would have liked this part; he saw trails. He taught her to watch what people left behind, rather than what they took. She'd lost him to a case that smelled of old rites and something else, something that had slipped from the patterns she understood. She had not named it, but it sat with her like a splinter.
"Who benefits?" she asked.
Davies blinked. "The Market? The Museum? A private collector who wants a particular object gone? If the crate contained something remarkable , someone might have meant to sell it in the Market. Or someone might have wanted it destroyed."
"Or moved." Quinn's voice grew sharper. "Moved to a place sheltered from police, where someone could open it and invert what it contained."
"Open it for what?" Davies demanded.
"To extract something that doesn't belong in wood and straw. Some items carry... influences," Eva said, hearing herself explain with the slow care of a lecturer. The compass trembled in her hand. "Not all influences are magical in the way people sell. Some are psychological. Some are dangerous in the sense we call them dangerous because they break people."
"You mean cursed," Davies said, half laughing, trying on the word like a joke.
Eva did not smile. "I mean objects that change behaviour. The right object in the wrong hands can set people moving like puppets."
Quinn's mouth went thin. She watched the compass needle again, how it pointed past the maintenance tunnel, then flicked and found the hollow where the old signal box had been boarded . The boards had a fresh set of nail holes. Someone had come through that place recently.
"Find the transfer logs," she said. "Find the crate's manifest. Who signed for it, who transferred it, and who had access to Camden's service entrances between midnight and two."
Davies straightened and barked orders without pausing. He moved with the briskness Quinn appreciated. He also moved with the arrogance of a man sure the world was sensible.
"Bag the compass for evidence," she said.
"No," Eva said. Her voice was a quiet, sudden blade. "You can't. Someone will know. The Market mistakes their items when they're handled outside the Market's rules. If you remove it, you risk drawing whatever it points at."
Quinn met her eyes. The scholar's gaze had a weird, exhausted courage. Eva was young. She had seen enough to make panic live inside her in a neat, controlled manner. She pushed her glasses back up hard enough that they left marks on her nose.
"Then we photograph it, document its place," Quinn said. "We do not disturb anything unless we must. But Davies, we use the notepad of the forensic team. No press, no leaking."
Davies hesitated, then nodded. "Fine. Control. Got it."
Quinn crouched for a final sweep. Her fingers twitched over the compass case. She smelled metal and something faintly sweet under the breath of the brass. It was not the patina of age. It smelled of a solvent.
"Verdigris applied," she said. "So someone fabricated an obvious Market piece. Someone who wanted the Market blamed either to sell a story or to hide a theft."
"Who would want the Market blamed?" Davies asked. "Collectors? The Museum? A private buyer who didn't want police sniffing around?"
"All of the above," Quinn said. "And someone who understood the Market enough to fake a Shade artisan's work. That person had to know a lot about the Market's aesthetics and how to rile it up."
Eva's voice slipped between them, softer. "Or someone who knows someone in the Market."
Quinn felt the hair at the back of her neck prick. A small movement at the far end of the platform made her torch light jolt. She trained the beam. A shadow moved behind the boarded signal box. Not the loiterer, not any officer. Something thinner, quicker. A silhouette slid from the shelter of the boards into the dark throat of the maintenance tunnel.
"Hold position," Quinn said. Her training snapped into place—calculated , direct. She rocked back, low, hand resting on the grip of the baton at her belt though she did not reach for it. Her watch brushed against the old concrete.
"Don't follow," Eva said before she could order. Her knowledge was protective now, warning thin as paper. "If it goes to the Market—"
"It isn't going to the Market," Quinn said. She did not sound certain. She sounded like someone falling into a memory . She had had memories like this before: footsteps that stopped, a door closing where there should be light. The chest tightened. Morris's laugh, thin as wire, threaded through her mind and snapped.
A scraping sound came from the tunnel, a low, wet slide. The compass needle, half buried in the dust, swung wildly and then pointed straight at Quinn.
Someone moved behind them, fast enough that she felt the breeze of their body. A hand clamped over Davies's mouth, hard, fingers smelling of oil. A cold weight pressed against his shoulder.
"Don't," a voice hissed, right at her ear. "Back away from the ring, Detective."
Quinn turned. The light hit a face with a scarf over the mouth, eyes cold and black as coins. Bone tokens winked at his breast like badges. Behind him, other shapes paused at the tunnel's mouth, silhouettes like teeth.
"Police," Davies muffled, his eyes wide . The man at his back tugged, leaning Davies toward the ring, toward the chalk, as if the circle itself might hold a promise.
Quinn's hand went for the baton. Fingers closed on nothing. The man pushed Davies forward, and the coins in the salt ring clicked against hard soles. The compass needle whirled again, as if excited, and then, impossibly, the brass face began to hum at a frequency that made the fillings in her teeth ache.
"People make deals they think are clever," the man said. "Tonight, you interrupt the bargain."
Quinn's mouth moved. She had orders, procedure, training. Her voice was a tool she used deliberately .
"Let him go," she said.
"Say 'please' and your friend lives to make a statement," the man said, calm as a metronome.
Quinn swallowed, and the station's concrete seemed to close in. The coins in the chalk ring glinted like tiny eyes. The hum climbed. The man at Davies's back tightened his grip, and Davies stifled a sound that was almost a plea.
Quinn looked at Eva. The young woman's fingers were white around the compass. Her mouth moved without sound.
"Now," the man said. He jerked his chin toward the boarded signal box. "Tell your men to stand down, Detective. Let the Market have its scapegoat. Walk away, and nobody gets hurt."
Quinn felt the old fight stir, the part of her trained to refuse extortion. She felt the other part, the scarred place that had learned some things should be avoided. The hum deepened. The compass needle quivered like a trapped animal.
She opened her mouth to reply. The tunnel seemed to inhale. The boarded signal box shuddered, a sound like an animal's throat being cleared . Nails creaked. Wood split. From behind the boards came a sound not quite ours, a scraping like claws, and a voice, wet and delighted, said something in a language old enough to make her teeth ache .
Quinn's hand snapped outward. The baton found the man at Davies's back. He went down like a struck ax. Others moved, sudden and furious. The ring of salt scattered.
Someone screamed. The compass flew from Eva's fingers, its face catching the light, and spun across the platform, its needle slashing toward Quinn's chest as the board behind the signal box gave way and something enormous, shadowed and wrong, pushed into the station's thin light.