Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRCW6HK6140ZPK9DVRK45S

Rory chose the wrong shoes for mud. The grass in Richmond Park held the day’s damp like a grudge, and it soaked through her trainers before she left the pavement. A lone deer ghosted across the path ahead, headlights without a car, then vanished into a thicket as if someone had folded it between pages. Her breath steamed in the cold and streamed back over her shoulder in a torn ribbon. Night in the park was supposed to taste like earth and leaves. It tasted of coins and old stone. She drew her jacket tighter, tucking her hair inside the collar. Straight black strands clung to the damp. The silver chain at her throat moved when she swallowed. The pendant sat just beneath the hollow of her throat, a red thumbprint of a gem warm against skin. It had been getting warmer since Hammersmith. Now it had a pulse—steady, not her own. She’d told herself it would be simple. Cut through the park, check the grove Eva had texted about, snap a bloody picture, go home. She could ignore the way Eva’s late-night message had read like a dare: Richmond grove. Midnight. Bring the stone. You’ll see it. She could ignore the fact that Eva wasn’t here, that the last tick of her typing bubble had winked out hours ago. Beyond the final band of streetlight, the night closed in and made a house of the trees. Rory slipped between two boles slick with moss and let the shape of the path pull at her memory. She’d seen a map once, only a rumour wrapped in a pub napkin—a ring of oaks out in Richmond where there were no oaks on the official maps. A place with time like chewed gum. If you wanted to lose an hour and find a week or the other way round. If you wanted to step sideways. If she had any sense, she’d have kept to the asphalt, let the deer keep their secrets. But the stone at her throat nagged like a polite host, like a kettle about to boil. Someone had given it to her months ago in an unmarked box, to her flat above Silas’ bar, with a note that hadn’t made sense—You’ll know—and a signature that was no more than a pressed fingerprint. It glowed faintly in the dark sometimes, like something living trying to sleep. Tonight it was very much awake. She reached the edge of the clearing without meaning to, as if a soft hand had taken her elbow and guided. The trees opened into a bowl of grass and wildflowers that shouldn’t have existed in February. Poppies leaned red as if lit from within. White campion and bluebells crowded together, seasonless, reckless. The oaks here weren’t just oaks. They were old; their trunks had twisted in ways wind did not explain and moss had grown over them in tusks and tongues. Some leaned into one another and made gates. Some stood on their own with roots like claws. They formed a circle around the clearing, a pupil around a black pupil. When she stepped between two that leaned, a sensation pressed over her skin like a film of warm water. The fine hairs along her arms found their purpose all at once. She paused and listened. She lived in a world of noise—bar back-knocks from below her floor at half two, scooters wailing through Soho like gulls, Yu-Fei calling orders in a voice that could slice through grease hoods. Here, the quiet was the wrong kind. It didn’t feel empty. It felt full and waiting. It had a grin. A breeze picked up as if it’d been crouched and now rose. It whispered through the wildflower heads and made a sound like a page turned carefully. She thumbed her phone out to check time. Midnight plus five. The screen ate her face and then died, a sudden plunge to black that showed her eyes and the faint line of her scar on her left wrist reflected back. Battery full. Screen gone. She pressed the power button again. Nothing. “That’s not funny,” she said to no one. Her voice went nowhere. It was absorbed the way a rug takes in a spill and leaves no mark. She swallowed. “Eva?” A fox screamed far away. The sound skewered the air and then cut itself off tidy. It felt rehearsed, as if something out past the trees had hissed, Now. Rory picked her way through the flowers. She didn’t want to crush them, silly thought, but their stalks felt like wrists underfoot. The pendant was hot enough that she would have pulled it off if she’d had a way to hold it without burning. She tugged the chain until the gem popped out from beneath her jumper. In the low-spilled moonlight, it held its own color, deep crimson, drop of arterial. It glowed like an ember too long without breath. It pulsed in her hand as if it had known her for years. Heat sank from it into her palm in steady waves. It was stronger to her left. She moved a step that direction, another, and the warmth obligingly increased. She steadied her breathing the way she did before walking up into a flat where someone on the other side of the door had already called her a name. Out-of-the-box thinking: she used it like a divining rod. At the center of the oaken ring the ground dipped. On nights in other seasons, she imagined, dew pooled there like mercury. Now the dip looked dry from a distance and wet when she leaned over it, a sheen you could only see if you didn’t look at it directly. Cold came off it in a shape, a bowl of cold. The air above it shivered as if a bus had gone past. The gem turned to a tiny hearth coals had decided to stoke up. “Hel,” she murmured, surprising herself. The word had a weight she didn’t know she knew. Yu-Fei had a cousin who liked to tell stories after lockup about holes between worlds with the edges bristled, old places that knew your name if you let them. He’d said, Bring an egg or a stone if you must go, something from a friend. Don’t go empty-handed. Don’t go with your own name. She did not have an egg. She had the Heartstone. Someone had wanted her to have it. Maybe this was why. “Eva?” she tried again, quieter, softer, so the word didn’t disturb the surface of the air more than necessary. Something on the far side of the clearing moved. It was only in the way the flowers leaned as a body slid through them. The stalks bent one after another and made a path the way a hand brushed along a curtain. It didn’t break them. It pressed them and then let them spring back up in a wave. She couldn’t see what moved. It did not disturb the mist low to the ground. It did not crunch. It moved at the edge of her vision, perfectly, as if its camouflage worked better if you didn’t confront it with the your full attention. She marked its last bend with the corner of her eye and then kept her eyes fixed on the empty bowl of dark. She crouched and touched the earth. Her fingers looked too pink in the odd light. The skin over the crescent scar on her wrist tightened; a small, involuntary flex. A childhood accident—glass edge and a sink in Cardiff, the sting of iodine while her father said, Show me again where it hurts, baby. The scar puckered shiny now. She dug a nail into the ground. The dirt was damp and cold, as if shadow had weight. She set the pendant over the center of the dip, held it poised. Her palm sang with heat. The chain slid against her neck as she lowered it. Her reflection grew in the sheen, a dark hint—not like a mirror but like she looked into a well and something at the bottom tried to be a picture. Her face was longer, or the shadows pulled the corners down. Her eyes were very bright, too bright, cartoon blue painted on. The other her did not blink when she did. A smile shivered in its wrong mouth and went away as if it had been told to wait. She snatched the pendant back to her throat and made her ribs unlock. Every instinct told her to get up, to leave, to go home and throw the box somebody had left on her doormat into the Thames. The edge of rationality said, You came here for a reason. You leave when you know why. Also, you always run later if you run now. The strange movement along the flowers came again. This time it approached the circle of oaks, and when it reached the boundary, it slowed. Not stopped. Like something tasting glass and pushing its tongue against it, gauging the give. One of the oaks groaned very softly, a sound too old to be mistaken for wind. The flowers trembled and then held still with the careful patience of prey animals. “Rory.” The voice came from behind her, right behind, the distance of a small kitchen between person and person, like a whisper across a bar top. Her nickname, crisp and bright. She did not turn. She put her free hand flat on the ground to steady it. The cold came through skin and into bone. “Laila,” the voice tried, less certain, as if reaching through pockets for the correct coins. Her throat worked, useless. “Who’s there?” The artificial rolling chime of her delivery app trilled from her pocket, clean and merry. She knew that sound; she heard it even in dreams sometimes. Once, last week, she’d woken certain she’d left a bag on someone’s step. The sound was wrong here, anachronism folded into fox-bark and loam. She didn’t move to pull the phone out. She knew better than to pat her pockets when something wanted something. She stared at the black shine of not-water and waited. “Malphora.” The voice found it then. The pet name nobody used outside a joke, a botched pronunciation in school turned into a charm by two girls with plaited hair. It was not a friend’s voice. It had the shape of a man's voice she had once loved who had taken that love and knotted it around her. It had Evan’s rhythm, his habit of smoothing a word with his tongue, making your name into a small private room you had to go into to meet him. Heat surged under her skin as if the stone had crawled inside her veins. Her breath came in two quick pulls and then one long. She let the voice fall behind her like a forgotten coat. “You don’t get to call me that,” she said, very evenly, to the dip in the ground. She spoke to what might hear her and understand rules. The pendant vibrated once against her palm. Not a tremble. A yes. On the edge of her vision, the absence gave itself a shape for a heartbeat and then regretted it. It was tall and thin and the bend of its arm wasn’t right, and where its feet should have touched the earth, the wildflowers bowed away instead of down. “Eva sent me,” she lied, voice steady. “I’m here to look, nothing more. I go when I like.” Silence clicked. Time did a small adjustment, like a slip in an automatic door making and unmaking its decision to stay open. The moon slid out from the clouds and back in, like a coin tossed and snatched again, too fast. The cold from the pit climbed her forearms and made a collarbone ache she hadn’t used since swim team. The heat of the stone answered, an insect sting, a hot little heart beating against hers. In the arena of oaks there was a geometry she didn’t understand. She recognized edges of it the way you know a stranger’s accent belongs to a country you once visited. She needed to leave. She needed not to leave like prey. Executive decisions: she undid one of the hair ties from her wrist and knotted it around a low branch to her right. She took a second from her pocket, orange against bark, and tied it two steps farther along. She plucked a wildflower—sorry, sorry, sorry—and twisted its stem through the elastic. She made marks like breadcrumbs a child might ignore. When she looked back at the first one, it seemed to her the knot looked a fraction softer in focus than it had before, as if she had remembered tying it rather than having tied it. The elastic cut into her nail beds. She kept going. The voice behind her tried again. “Aurora.” It made the word work. It made the syllables into a kiss and then into a bruise. It placed them slowly, finding the way her mother said her name when waking her for school. It threaded the sound with the whisper of paper being turned, the small sigh of a cat deciding a new sleeping place. Without standing, without giving it her eyes, Rory spoke in the tone she used in kitchens when someone wanted to touch her waist to get past her and she didn’t want that to be a conversation. “No.” The cold breathed on the back of her hand and did not cross. The oaks shifted almost imperceptibly, the living kind of shift, a sway that came from a decision, not a gust. The wrong-limbed shape leaned toward the boundary. The flowers beneath its everywhere not-feet held and then creaked. The boundary did what boundaries do when observed and named. It held. A tremor ran through the ground that might have been a truck on far-off road or might have been a change deeper down, where roots fingered into rock. The sheen in the dip thickened. In it, the other her’s eyes were hollows now, and if she looked straight at them, they lost themselves in her face like smoke arranges itself into patterns in air and then stops being smoke at all. Something sidled closer to the other other edge, to her blind shoulder. The fox screamed again, a different direction, and this time its echo came back wrong—two beats later and too sharp, like someone had dropped a glass in a far room and another person on delay had done the same. A susurrus of whispers rose, layered nonsense in the hollow of her ear, words piled up as if they were trying to glimpse themselves over one another’s shoulders. Out-of-the-box thinking: she adjusted her grip on the pendant, let the heat find the lines of her palm, then held it slightly away and watched the air move. The glow, faint as it was, caught motes in the air. It picked out a stain where breath gathered higher than it should have, as if someone very tall leaned. There. Another to her left, closer than breath now, a cold that wouldn’t be filled. And a third, behind, where the voice came from, not exactly at head height but lower, as if it spoke from the idea of a throat instead of having one. She lifted the gem a little closer to the sheen, felt the tug increase, a tide drawing. She thought of standing in the Severn as a child with Eva daring one another to take three more steps. She thought of a hand around her wrist like a cuff, of the sound of glass in a sink, of heat and cold competing so closely on skin that they became each other. “I’m not prey,” she said, and meant it. The oaks were listening. She felt it the way you feel a crowd just before it claps or doesn’t. A bird she couldn’t see winged from one branch to another and set off a chain of small movements through leaves like secret applause. She breathed with the hollow of the grove, a slow in and out, and matched the pendant’s beat with her pulse until they were not the same exactly but not fighting. “Eva?” she asked, one last time, because some parts of you always hope your friend is about to pop out of a bush and shout Boo. A pause happened where an answer could fit, and then something like her friend’s laugh braided through another sound, a different set of teeth, the kind of laugh that asks you to take a step you shouldn’t. She let it die. She stood carefully, knees making their disagreeable notes, and pivoted without taking her feet from where they were. She allowed herself one glance behind. There was nothing there that her eyes would sign for. The sense of more stayed. The flowers to her back swayed as if to make room. Something had written her name in the damp on the bark of the nearest oak, but the letters slid toward unreadable as she watched. Her marks hung on branches—hair ties holding on, little umbilicals to sense. She could follow them out. She could test time when she reached the edge and saw whether the night was older by minutes or months. She set the chain back under her jumper, let the gem make its heat in its covered bowl, and put her shoulders down from their climb toward her ears. “Thank you,” she told the grove, and felt foolish and then not. When something listens, it is rude not to speak as if it hears. “I’ll go now.” The cold did not stop her. The warm did not pull. The wrongness stayed, but it went quiet’s cousin. She stepped to the first mark she’d made. She did not look into the dip again. She did not listen for the voice trying out her names like keys on a ring. She found the second hair tie and then the low gate between two oaks that leaned together like old men. When she crossed, that soft hand that had pressed over her skin on the way in peeled away in a lift, like shrugging off a very light cloak. Behind her, the fox laughed one last time, as if to see her out. A siren sang from beyond the treeline, too far for this hour unless time had done its trick. Her phone lit in her pocket with an innocent little buzz, and the screen came back on to show the time as three nineteen. Three minutes or three hours or three days. On the park path, lights had the yellow sheen of pre-dawn. The air wasn’t metal anymore. It was wet stone, bus exhaust, someone’s frying bacon a mile away. She breathed and found the air had teeth again, but familiar ones—London’s chipped smile. Rory walked until tarmac met road met curb. She didn’t look over her shoulder to see if the oaks had grown legs and were stretching. In the reflection of a dark shop window, her face belonged entirely to her, wrong mouth gone, eyes the normal unforgiving blue she woke up with. The gem under her jumper stopped its urgent pulse and became, once more, a small warm fact that said nothing and waited. Her phone showed messages now, a stack she hadn’t heard. Eva: You there? Another: Don’t go if it’s late. Then: Forget I said. Then silence, the blank space of someone who couldn’t watch the typing bubble anymore. At the bus stop, her fingers shook when she dug coins from her pocket, and she laughed at herself because no bus wanted coins anymore. She set them back with care, one by one, as if the act of inventory could knit her together. Above her, the moon had tipped and picked up a slice. Time had moved. Or she had. When she touched the pendant through fabric, the heat there felt like a kept promise and a warning. The unknown benefactor, whoever they were, had sent her into something that knew her names and was polite enough to say them in order. She would have words for that one when she found them. She would ask why the path had pulled. She would ask why the air had shivered like that, why the flowers had bent. She would ask why the voice had to wear Evan’s fit to speak to her. She looked back once as the bus huffed up, just enough to see the park’s line go on being a line, the trees a black script against a sky that was starting to lighten. The grove held its own secrets now behind a day that would pretend it never happened. Rory climbed aboard and sat in the back and watched the city unpeel itself. She was alone, and she was not. Something had followed her to the edge of what could be said, and it would wait. The Heartstone dozed like a cat in a lap, hot dream under her hand. In the glass she caught the ghost of herself and the faintest suggestion of someone standing behind her shoulder in the aisle that was empty. She didn’t turn. She closed her eyes and listened to the bus engine’s steady hum, ordinary and good, and counted her heartbeats until she could no longer tell whether the rhythm she heard was her own or an echo from the grove, coming home through a door she hadn’t meant to open.