Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNG13E8SFRG5M4B9KJYXQGC

The lock clicked open before she'd even touched it. Aurora stood on the gravel path, key still between her fingers, and stared at the door of the flat above Silas's bar. It hadn't been locked when she'd left — she was certain of that — but the deadbolt had turned. The knob had turned. She watched the gap beneath the door. No light inside, no shadow. Just the ordinary dark of a room where no one had been. She pushed it open anyway, because there was nowhere else to go. The flat smelled wrong. Not like someone had been inside. Like something had been inside and tried to smell like a person and gotten it almost right. Citrus and old wood and the ghost of the lavender she'd kept on the windowsill — all there, but thin, like the scent had been stretched across too large a room. She switched on the light. Everything was where she'd left it. The mug on the counter. The laptop open on the table. The jacket on the back of the chair. Nothing out of place. Nothing missing. She locked the door behind her and stood in the middle of the room, and the wrongness didn't leave. It had started on the walk home. She'd come through Richmond Park because it was faster, even though the park was dark by nine in January and the paths were empty and the streetlamps gave out halfway through like they always did. She'd taken the path that cut through the old stand of oaks — the ones that always looked too large, too dark, too close together — and she'd felt it then. The first flicker. The sense that something in the trees was watching her with more attention than a person should be watched with. Not aggressive. Not even distinctly present. Just — aware. A presence folded into the space between the trunks, patient and quiet, like a held breath. She'd walked faster. The path had stretched. Not literally — she wasn't foolish enough to think the laws of distance could simply break — but the trees had kept pace, the gaps between them staying constant no matter how quickly she moved, the darkness at their edges remaining exactly the same distance from her shoulder. She'd broken into a jog and the park gate had come into view, and she'd told herself that was all it was. Fatigue. The dark. The cold. She hadn't told herself that the Heartstone pendant was glowing. She didn't tell herself now, either. She unzipped her jacket and looked down at it, pressed flat against her sternum beneath her shirt. The faint inner glow was there — a dim, deep red pulse, like a heartbeat made of light. It had been doing that for days now, off and on, usually when she was near Richmond Park. She'd asked Yu-Fei about it once, and he'd gone very quiet and told her not to go looking for answers to questions she hadn't asked yet. That was how Yu-Fei was. Helpful in the way a locked door was helpful. She took the pendant out and held it in her palm. The warmth was gentle, steady. It didn't feel threatening. It felt like a reminder — the stone equivalent of a hand on her arm, telling her to slow down, to pay attention. To what? She put it away and made tea, because tea was what you did when you didn't know what else to do. The kettle boiled. The mug warmed her hands. She sat at the table and opened her laptop and stared at the half-finished application for the paralegal position in Hammersmith, and the words refused to resolve into meaning. The window was behind her. She hadn't noticed the curtain was open. She noticed it now. The glass was dark, and in the dark there was a reflection — her own face, blue-lit by the laptop screen, and behind her, in the window, something that was not the street and not the brick of the building next door. A deep green darkness. A suggestion of canopy. The shapes of branches that didn't belong to any tree she could see from the flat, because the flat faced the car park, and the car park faced the road, and there was no grove at her window. She didn't turn around. She sat very still and watched the reflection and waited for it to make sense, and it didn't. The green dark moved, barely. A slow shift, like something breathing. Like something leaning closer to the glass to look in. Then the kettle clicked off, and the light from the laptop shifted — a small fluctuation in the power — and the reflection was just the window again. Just the dark. Just the car park, maybe, in the distance. A streetlamp, faint, through the glass. She turned. The window showed the car park. The brick wall beyond it. The sky, starless and low. She got up and closed the curtain and went back to the table, and she didn't finish the tea, because she'd lost the appetite for it somewhere in the space between sitting and standing. The phone buzzed. A message from Eva: *You ok? You seemed off today.* Aurora typed: *Just tired. Early night.* She put the phone down and it buzzed again almost immediately. *Rory, it's 9:47.* She looked at the clock on the laptop. It said 9:47. Then she looked at her phone. It said 9:47. Then she looked at the microwave clock, the one with the cracked digit that she kept meaning to replace, and it said 10:12. She sat with that for a while. Time was wrong. Time had been wrong since she'd walked through the park, since she'd felt that patient attention among the oaks. She thought about the hour she'd lost on the bus last week, the one that had arrived empty and waited while she checked her phone twice and looked up to find the driver watching her in the mirror with an expression she couldn't name. She thought about the morning last month when she'd woken at five and gone to the window and seen daylight streaming across the rooftops, golden and thick like late afternoon, and then the sun had slid back below the horizon and it had been dark again and she'd sat on the edge of her bed with her heart knocking and told herself it was a trick of the clouds. She'd been telling herself a lot of things lately. The flat was too quiet. She could hear the refrigerator humming. She could hear the low murmur of the bar below, Silas's voice and another one, maybe Danny, the regular who stayed until last call. Normal sounds. Safe sounds. But layered underneath them was something else — a silence that was too dense, too deliberate, like the room was holding its breath around a sound it didn't want her to hear. Her phone buzzed again. She didn't pick it up. She went to the window instead. She pulled the curtain back an inch and looked out at the car park and the streetlamp and the road beyond. The road was empty. The lamp was the only light. And standing in the far corner of the car park, beneath the one tree that grew there — the stunted sycamore that never quite died — was a shape that was not a person and not a shadow and not a thing she could name. It was dark. Darker than the dark around it. It stood very still and it faced the bar, or it faced the window, or it faced her. It had no features she could discern, no outline she could fix in her mind. It was an absence given form, a gap in the light that had decided to stand in one place and wait. Aurora let the curtain fall. She pressed her back against the wall beside the window and breathed and counted the seconds. One. Two. Three. The pendant pulsed against her chest, warm, warm, warm, and the warmth was almost an apology, almost a reassurance — almost. Like the stone knew something she didn't and was sorry about it. A knock at the door. She didn't move. The knock came again — three short raps, light, patient. The sound of someone who had all the time in the world. The sound of something that was not in a hurry because it already knew she would open the door. "Sil?" she called, and her voice came out thin and wrong. No answer. The knocks came again. The same three. The same pressure. The same pause between each one, precise and measured, like a heartbeat. She stayed against the wall. She stayed very, very still. The knocks stopped. Silence rushed in to fill the space they left behind, heavy and total. She could hear her own pulse in her ears. She could hear the faint, wet sound of her own breathing. She could hear, beneath everything, a sound that might have been the door handle turning — slow, exploratory, testing — or might have been nothing at all, the house settling, the wood expanding and contracting in the cold, the small ordinary sounds a building makes when it is just a building and nothing more. She stood there in the dark, the pendant warm against her skin, and she waited for morning, and the night stretched out around her like something with teeth.