AI
Rain lashed against Detective Harlow Quinn’s face, plastering strands of salt-and-pepper hair to her forehead. Each drop felt like a tiny, icy needle. She hadn’t bothered with a coat, hadn’t bothered with anything beyond function. Just the weight of her service weapon, the slick grip molded to her hand, and the dull throb of annoyance settling in her jaw.
Herrera. Tomás Herrera. She’d been watching him for a week, tailing him from discreet distances, compiling a dossier that was rapidly filling with questions and very few answers. He moved with a quiet efficiency, a knack for disappearing into crowds, blending into the London drizzle. A former paramedic, the records said. Stripped of his license. She’d dug deeper. Unauthorized treatments. Rumors of patients with… unusual ailments.
He’d just exited The Raven’s Nest, the green neon sign bleeding across the slick pavement. Silas’ bar. A known haunt for the city’s underbelly, a place she’d spent enough late nights nursing lukewarm coffee and chasing shadows. She’d been about to move in when he’d glanced back, a flicker of something sharp in his warm brown eyes, and bolted.
Now she was sprinting, boots splashing through puddles, the scent of exhaust fumes and wet asphalt filling her lungs. He was fast, surprisingly so for a man who spent his days patching up cuts and broken bones. He cut a sharp angle down a side street, towards Camden, the music from a nearby club thumping a hollow rhythm against her ribs.
“Police! Stop!” she shouted, her voice swallowed by the rain and the city’s white noise. He didn’t even bother to look back.
He disappeared into a grimy alleyway, a narrow chasm between two brick buildings. Quinn followed, the alley shrinking around her, the air thick with the smell of refuse. At the end, instead of a street, was a steel door, seemingly bolted into the earth. An almost imperceptible green glow emanated from the crack beneath it.
She drew closer, her hand hovering over her weapon. The door wasn’t locked. It swung inward with a groan of rusted hinges, revealing a steep set of concrete steps leading down into darkness.
A blast of warm, stale air rose from the opening, carrying with it the scent of incense, something metallic, and… something else. Something ancient and vaguely unsettling.
She hesitated. The radio on her hip crackled, spitting out static and fragments of a dispatch call. Ignore it. This was her case. This *felt * like her case, a thread she hadn’t encountered since Morris… since everything fell apart.
She descended, her hand brushing against the rough concrete wall for balance. The air grew heavier with each step, the sounds of the city fading until all she could hear was the drip, drip, drip of water and the pounding of her own heart.
The stairs opened into a vast, cavernous space. Flickering gas lamps cast long, dancing shadows on the walls, revealing a sprawling, chaotic market. Stalls crammed together, overflowing with strange and unsettling wares. Dried herbs, shimmering powders, strangely carved wooden figures, and cages containing creatures she couldn’t immediately identify.
This wasn't just a black market. This was something else entirely.
She recognized the architecture: the vaulted ceilings, the ornate tiling, the remnants of elaborate mosaics. It was an abandoned Tube station, all right, but repurposed. Remade. A secret world built beneath a world. The Veil Market. She’d heard whispers of it over the years, dismissed them as rumors, the ramblings of drug-addled informants.
Herrera was weaving through the crowd, his short curly hair dark against the pale faces around him. He wasn’t slowing down. He was headed towards the center of the market, a particularly crowded section near a stall draped in black velvet .
Quinn scanned the faces around her. A motley collection of individuals: pierced and tattooed figures, men in expensive suits, women with eyes that seemed to see too much . They glanced at her with a mixture of curiosity and hostility, their expressions unreadable . She stood out like a floodlight in a darkened room; her sharp jaw, her military precision, her utter lack of affectation.
She adjusted her grip on her weapon, her eyes locking onto Herrera. He was talking to a man with a pale, gaunt face and eyes like chips of obsidian. The man handed Herrera a small, bone-white token.
A bone token. The entry requirement.
She could call it in. Request backup. But reinforcements would take time, and alerting the Met would risk exposing the Market, unraveling whatever delicate balance existed here. She’d lose Herrera, and she had a feeling that losing him now would be a disastrous mistake.
Her gut—a well-honed instinct developed over eighteen years of decorated service—told her this wasn't a simple matter of smuggled goods or black-market pharmaceuticals. This was something… deeper. Something connected to the unsettling pattern of cases she'd been seeing lately, cases that didn't quite make sense, cases that left a lingering feeling of wrongness in the air .
Morris. The case that took Morris. The one she hadn’t been able to solve. The one where the official explanation simply didn't sit right.
She took a deep breath, the metallic tang in the air stinging her nostrils. She could turn back now. Walk away. Write it off as a dead end.
But she didn't. She hadn’t come this far to walk away. She hadn’t come this far to let another case slip through her fingers.
She straightened her shoulders, tightened her grip on her weapon, and stepped into the Market.
The crowd parted slightly , as if acknowledging her arrival . Eyes followed her, assessing, measuring. She could feel their scrutiny like a physical weight .
She focused on Herrera, pushing through the throng, ignoring the whispers and the sidelong glances. She was a predator in unfamiliar territory, but a predator nonetheless.
He was disappearing into the shadows, headed towards a section of the market she hadn't noticed before—a series of narrow, winding corridors that seemed to burrow into the earth itself .
She broke into a run, following him, the flickering gas lamps casting grotesque, elongated shadows that danced around her.
The corridors were claustrophobic, the walls damp and slick with moisture. She could hear voices, hushed and secretive, echoing from unseen alcoves. She passed stalls selling strange artifacts: glass jars containing swirling, luminous fluids; ancient-looking books bound in human skin; and bizarre, unsettling sculptures carved from bone.
Herrera was gaining speed, his lithe frame moving effortlessly through the maze. She pushed herself harder, her lungs burning, her muscles screaming in protest.
He turned a corner abruptly, vanishing from sight. Quinn followed, rounding the bend, and found herself facing a solid wall of wood. A bookshelf. A remarkably ordinary bookshelf, given its location.
But something felt off. The wood seemed too smooth, the books too neatly arranged.
She reached out and ran her hand along the spine of a leather-bound volume. It felt … loose. She pressed against it, and with a soft click, a section of the bookshelf swung inward, revealing a hidden doorway.
A dark, narrow passage.
Herrera had vanished inside.
She stood there for a moment, her breath coming in ragged gasps, the rain still clinging to her clothes.
This was it. The point of no return.
She could turn back now. Report what she’d found. Let the proper channels handle it.
But she knew, with a chilling certainty, that the proper channels wouldn’t understand. They wouldn't believe her.
And she had a feeling, a cold, hard knot in her stomach , that whatever Herrera was involved in, whatever secrets this Market held, were far more dangerous than anything she’d ever encountered before.
She stepped through the doorway, into the darkness. The bookshelf swung shut behind her with a soft, final click. She was alone. And she had a feeling she was stepping into a world from which she might never return. Her worn leather watch ticked on her left wrist, a small, steady rhythm in the suffocating silence . Time, she thought, was rapidly running out.