AI
The platform tiles were the wrong color. That was the first thing that bothered her.
Harlow Quinn stood at the base of the dead escalator and swept her torch beam across the abandoned station, cataloguing details with the same cold efficiency she'd honed over eighteen years of service. The Metropolitan Police had sealed both access points an hour ago, but the forensics team was already down here, their white suits ghostly under the portable halogen lamps. Camden Town hummed with Saturday foot traffic thirty feet above their heads, and none of those people had the faintest idea this place existed.
Officially, this station didn't exist either. Not on any current TfL map, not in any municipal database she could access. The borough planning office had looked at her like she'd grown a second head when she'd called. And yet here it was — a full platform, curved ceiling, tile work that might have been Victorian if it weren't for the color. The tiles were a deep, arterial red where they should have been cream or green or the dingy off-white of every other decommissioned station she'd ever cleared. Some of them were cracked. Some of them had symbols cut into the glaze that her torch caught at odd angles, little grooves that seemed to drink the light rather than reflect it .
She adjusted the worn leather strap of her watch and descended to the platform level.
The body was near the far wall, between what appeared to be two market stalls. The stalls themselves were another problem. They were constructed from mismatched wood and draped in fabrics she couldn't immediately identify — silks that shimmered with an oily iridescence, heavy canvas printed with star charts she didn't recognize. One stall had been selling jars of something viscous and faintly luminescent. Most of the jars were shattered now, their contents pooling across the tile in thin, glowing rivulets that the forensics team was giving a conspicuously wide berth. The other stall was full of books — old ones, hand-bound, their spines cracked and their pages thick as card stock.
Detective Sergeant Okafor met her halfway, his notebook already out. He was young, thorough, and visibly unsettled .
"Body's a male, late thirties, no ID," he said, falling into step beside her. "Preliminary cause of death looks like blunt force trauma to the posterior skull, but the pathologist flagged some irregularities."
"What kind of irregularities?"
"She said his core temperature was wrong. Too low by about fifteen degrees for the estimated time of death. And there's some kind of residue on his hands and around his mouth — silver-grey, almost metalite. She's never seen anything like it."
Quinn crouched beside the body. The halogen lamp threw hard shadows across the man's face. He was thin, hollow-cheeked, wearing clothes that looked expensive but outdated — a waistcoat with bone buttons, trousers with a high waist, boots that had been resoled more than once. His hands were open at his sides, palms up, and she could see what Okafor meant about the residue. It looked like tarnished mercury had been painted across his fingers in deliberate lines, tracing the creases of his palms.
She leaned closer. The residue didn't smear when she pressed a gloved fingertip to the edge of it. It was dry. Hard, almost. Like it had crystallized .
"Who called it in?" she asked.
"Anonymous tip. Burner phone, routed through three different cell towers in under a minute. Tech's trying to trace it but they're not optimistic."
"And how did the caller know this place was here?"
Okafor said nothing. That was the right answer, because there wasn't one.
Quinn stood and turned in a slow circle, taking in the full scope of the space. The platform extended further than it should have — twice the length of a standard Tube station, at least. The stalls went on into the dark beyond the reach of the halogens, dozens of them, maybe more. Some had been abandoned in haste, their wares left scattered. Others looked like they'd been packed up with care, only bare tables remaining. The air smelled like copper and something older, something botanical and vaguely sweet, like dried flowers left too long in a closed room.
"This was a market," she said.
"That's the working theory. Black market, probably. The stalls have goods that don't match any known suppliers. Some of the substances in those jars — the guys in hazmat gear are saying they can't even identify the base compounds."
Quinn walked the perimeter, her torch sweeping the ground in controlled arcs. The blood spatter was wrong. She'd worked enough blunt-force cases to know what a head wound looked like when it hit the floor, and this wasn't it. The spray pattern radiated outward from the body in a near-perfect circle, equidistant on all sides, as though the impact had come from directly above — from the ceiling, twenty feet up. Or as though the blood had been flung outward from the body by some centrifugal force at the moment of death.
She dropped to one knee beside one of the spatter marks and examined it under the torch. The blood had dried in raised lines, almost calligraphic. Not pooled. Not splashed. Drawn. As if it had moved with intention across the tile.
The sound of footsteps echoed from the escalator end of the platform, and she looked up sharply .
The woman who approached was small and conspicuously out of place. She wore a corduroy jacket over a rumpled blouse, round glasses perched on a freckled nose, and she carried a leather satchel so stuffed with books that the clasp had given up and hung open. Her red curls were barely contained by a clip that was losing its war with gravity. She was flanked by a uniformed constable who looked like he'd rather be anywhere else .
"Detective Quinn?" The woman tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear. "I'm Eva Kowalski. I was told you requested a consultant from the British Museum."
Quinn hadn't requested anyone. She looked at Okafor, who shook his head slightly .
"I didn't."
Eva Kowalski blinked, then recovered with the particular stubbornness of someone used to being turned away at doors. "Then someone in your department did. I received a call forty minutes ago asking me to come to this location and bring my research on Camden's — " she paused, choosing her words, " — historical subterranean spaces."
"And you had research on this specific location?"
"I had research adjacent to it." Eva clutched the strap of her satchel. "Can I see the scene?"
Quinn studied her for a long moment. The woman was nervous — the hair-tucking, the white-knuckle grip on the bag — but not the kind of nervous that meant guilt. This was academic anxiety, the fear of being sent away before you got to see the interesting thing. Quinn had seen it in every expert witness she'd ever worked with.
"Stay behind the tape. Touch nothing."
Eva nodded rapidly and ducked under the cordon with more eagerness than Quinn was strictly comfortable with. She watched the researcher move between the stalls, her eyes wide behind those round lenses, her lips parting slightly as she took in the scattered wares. When she reached the body, she stopped. Her face went pale beneath the freckles, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.
"First body?" Quinn asked.
"In person." Eva swallowed. Then her gaze moved past the dead man to the stall behind him — the one with the books — and something shifted in her expression. Recognition.
"These are grimoires," she said quietly . "Seventeenth century, maybe older. This binding technique — this is shadow-pressed vellum. I've only ever seen it in the restricted archives." She was reaching for one before she caught herself and pulled her hand back. "Detective, do you know what this place is?"
"I know what it looks like."
"It's called the Veil Market." Eva said it without hesitation, as though naming it cost her something but she'd decided to pay it . "It's a — it moves. Every full moon. It requires a specific token to enter, a bone token, usually carved, usually obtained through contacts within certain communities." She glanced at the body. "This man was a vendor. Or a buyer. Either way, he was part of this world."
"What world?"
Eva met her eyes. "The one your evidence isn't going to explain."
Quinn let the silence hold for three beats. Then she pointed to the blood spatter pattern. "Tell me what you see."
Eva crouched — carefully , well behind the tape — and studied the dried blood. Her brow furrowed . "It's geometric. Almost ritualistic. That's not natural spatter, is it?"
"No. It's not."
"Could someone have arranged it post-mortem?"
"The blood dried in position. Forensics says the coagulation pattern is consistent with live bleeding, not repositioning. So either this man's blood moved on its own after leaving his body, or something moved it."
Eva was quiet for a moment. Then she reached into her satchel and pulled out a leather-bound notebook, flipping through pages dense with handwriting and sketched diagrams. She stopped on a page that showed a circular pattern of lines radiating from a central point — almost identical, Quinn noted with a crawling sensation at the back of her neck, to the spatter pattern on the floor.
"This is a dispersal seal," Eva said. "It's used to — well, the historical texts describe it as a way to scatter the essence of something. To break it apart and spread it thin so it can't re-form. It's old. Pre-medieval. And it's not the kind of thing someone does to a person." She looked up. "It's the kind of thing someone does to a spirit."
Quinn processed that and filed it in the part of her mind that didn't flinch. Three years ago, she would have dismissed it. Three years ago, DS Morris had still been alive, and the world had still made sense, and she hadn't spent fourteen months trying to explain how her partner's body had been found in a locked room with no entry point, no weapon, and frost patterns on the walls in the middle of July.
She turned her attention back to the body's hands. The silver-grey residue. The deliberate lines. She looked at them again, and this time she didn't see contamination or an unknown substance. She saw writing. Tiny, precise characters traced along the fate line, the heart line, the head line — markings in a script she didn't recognize but that Eva Kowalski almost certainly would.
"Kowalski. Look at his hands. Don't touch, just look."
Eva moved closer, adjusting her glasses. Her breath caught.
"Those are ward marks. Someone inscribed protective sigils directly onto his skin. This man was afraid of something. Something specific." She leaned in further, her face inches from the dead man's open palm. "Detective — there's something in his left hand. Under the fingers. Something small."
Quinn pulled a fresh pair of gloves from her coat pocket and snapped them on. Carefully, with steady fingers, she lifted the dead man's curled pinky and ring finger away from his palm. Rigor had half-set, but the fingers gave with gentle pressure.
Nestled in the hollow of his hand was a small brass compass. The casing was green with verdigris, the face etched with symbols that matched the ones cut into the platform tiles. The needle was still moving — a slow, deliberate rotation that had nothing to do with magnetic north. It swung east, paused, swung east again, then locked in position and held, trembling faintly, pointing toward the dark end of the platform where the stalls disappeared into shadow.
"Forensics missed this?" Quinn said, her voice flat .
Okafor stepped forward, frowning. "That's not possible. Patel checked the hands first thing. He logged them as empty."
"Then either Patel needs his eyes checked, or this wasn't here when he looked."
Quinn lifted the compass free. It was lighter than it should have been, warm in her gloved hand, and the needle swung again — east, always east, toward the dark.
Eva had gone very still.
"That's a Veil Compass," she whispered. "It's Shade-crafted. It doesn't point north. It points toward rifts. Doorways. Tears in the boundary between here and — " She stopped herself. "It's pointing at something, Detective. Something down there, past the stalls. Something that's open right now."
Quinn straightened. She looked at the body, at the impossible blood, at the market that shouldn't exist in a station that wasn't on any map. She looked at the compass needle, locked and trembling, aimed at the dark.
In eighteen years, she had learned one rule that had never failed her: evidence didn't lie. Evidence simply was. The trouble started when you decided in advance what evidence was allowed to be.
"Okafor, extend the cordon another fifty meters down the platform. Get additional lighting. And get me a full background on every substance, object, and piece of paper in these stalls." She turned to Eva. "You said this market moves every full moon. When was the last one?"
"Three days ago."
"Then someone set up after the move and was killed before the market opened. Which means our killer knew the new location. Knew the schedule. Had a bone token of their own." She held up the compass. The needle hadn't moved. "And whatever they came here to open, it's still open."
Eva tucked her hair behind her left ear again. Her hand was shaking .
"What do you want to do?" she asked.
Quinn slipped the compass into an evidence bag, sealed it, and slid it into her coat pocket. She could feel the needle through the plastic, still pulling east, still trembling against her ribs like a second heartbeat.
"I want to see where it points," she said, and started walking toward the dark.