AI “In and out, Rory. Five minutes.”
Her breath came white in the dark as if the park had kept some winter for itself. Metal clicked with her thumb checking the snap on the small torch. The beam crawled over wet grass, found the break in bracken Eva had sworn was there, and bled into a tunnel of oaks that leaned like listening giants.
“You weren’t supposed to bring me here,” she told the pendant against her chest.
The silver chain lay colder than the gem. The Heartstone held a dull heat of its own, a thumbprint of warmth on her sternum. It made her skin itch like a lie.
The city clung to the edges. Tyres on a distant road hissed. A dog barked twice and went quiet. Beyond the iron fence, Richmond wore its lights like a halo. In the small path between trees, the glow died quick. Wet earth muffled her steps. Each acorn seemed placed to snap with more noise than it should.
“What do you want?” She pushed a branch aside with the back of a wrist. The old crescent scar flashed pale. “A look? Fine. One look.”
The clearing announced itself with a hush. No leaves rubbed. No hidden owl fussed at the intrusion. The beam snared the standing oaks ahead — ten trunks grown close and wrong, bark hardened into ripples, roots exposed like a line of toes. They had always felt like that to her, the way stone circles pretended to be quiet until a voice hit them.
Wildflowers pushed through winter mulch and frost. White cups and purple bells held beads of water that didn’t drop. They glowed on their own, not with light but with attention . She swept the torch past them and away. The petals leaned back to her.
A phone vibrated in her back pocket with the phantom twitch her brain liked to throw when nerves pricked. No notification waited when she pulled it and checked. She flicked open the timer app and set it to seven minutes, thumb jittering until she relented and made it five.
“Silas will shut the door if I don’t get back,” she told the trees . “And Yu-Fei will have me washing rice for a year.”
No bars. She tried for a call anyway, out of superstition more than hope. Eva’s number rang without ringing, then died. Fine. She shoved the phone into a coat pocket closer to the sound of her own heartbeat and walked forward.
The space between the oaks had always been there. It had not. It had always waited for anyone who knew to look. She stepped through. The world ticked, the way a candle flickers when someone walks past it too fast.
The garden in her mother’s hand-me-down storybooks had nothing on this. The Grove sat between. That much felt true as a bruise. The oaks enclosed a dish of earth filled with night. The moon perched low, too large, its edges licked by smoke. The scent came wrong — crushed clover and iron, as if someone had bled a pocketful of coins into the soil.
“You wanted a delivery or you wanted me.” Her whisper scratched as if it had learned from bark. “Pick.”
The Heartstone warmed. A steady pulse touched her skin. Not her pulse . Something else’s. It beat toward the left, toward a dip shadowed by two oaks whose limbs braided like wary fingers. She held the gem outside her jacket. Silver scraped her neck. The crimson stone hummed. The faintest inner glow peered through like an eye behind a curtain.
She checked the timer. Four fifty-one.
“Good,” she told it . “Good.”
A twig snapped behind her left shoulder. Not her foot. Not an echo . She rolled her weight to her right, torch already cutting back.
The beam hammered a trunk. Beyond it, nothing. Between the trunks, something pulled back. She held on the gap. Leaves stirred in a breeze that didn’t touch her coat. A ribbon of mist unthreaded itself from a clump of foxglove and slid under a root, then puzzled its way back out as if it had changed its mind.
“You’re not clever.” Her voice wanted to go high. She forced it low. “You’re old.”
Light swung over the flowers. Each blossom turned its throat to the torch in an obedient swivel. When she killed the beam and let her eyes adjust, the flowers watched her by feel. She stepped to the left to break whatever line had formed between her and the gap that pulsed .
“Don’t make me talk to you like you’re clients,” she said. “You don’t tip.”
Another snap answered. It came from the ring’s edge, where the oaks groaned in a tone too low to hear with ears. She planted her boot on a root, scuffing it as if the tree might flinch. Her hand dug inside her pocket, found the nub of chalk she’d lifted from Silas’ pool table. She drew a quick line on bark where her fingers reached. Her nail skinned and stung.
“Left,” she told herself. “Always left out.”
She tied a takeaway receipt to a low branch. The paper had a grease stain shaped like a small continent. She tucked the pendant under her shirt. The skin beneath it prickled. Heat slid up her throat to the base of her tongue.
A voice came from the dark patch. It rode on the silence like a paper boat on the skin of a pond.
“Rory.”
She wanted to throw the torch. That impulse, reckless and clean, had been Evan’s gift to her in the end: break something first, break someone after. She ground her molars and bit down on the old name behind the name.
“Not buying it,” she told the trees . “Find another trick.”
“Rory,” the voice repeated. Softer. Closer. It tickled the inside of her left ear. “Hey. You there already? Don’t go in. Wait for me.”
Eva in tone and rhythm; Wales in the vowels; the small scoff she did before she laughed.
“What did we name the cat we didn’t adopt?” She dug the torch into her palm until triangles of light chewed her glove.
“We don’t have a cat.”
“What. Did. We. Name. It.”
A beat. The air wobbled as if something ran across it on small invisible feet.
“Banjo.”
“Wrong.” She let herself stand into the breath she’d been taking in short bites. “Banjo was the hedgehog. The cat was Macduff.”
She waited. The flowers tilted to some unheard wind.
“Macduff.” The voice tried again. “Right.”
“You copied my right.” She turned her shoulder to the darkness and walked along the inner curve, chalking each trunk as she went. “Don’t follow lines you didn’t draw.”
Something kept pace in the gap between her and the oaks, where the shadow stayed thick as oil. It made no noise, but the space it occupied pressed against her teeth. She counted steps in Welsh for her mother and in English for herself. She reached the low twin oaks that braided their branches. The Heartstone kicked under her shirt like a small heart that had woken with a start.
She pulled it free. The gem’s glow lifted, thin and mean. When she held it toward the seam where the trees touched, the air whitened, not with light but with un-age, the kind of pale she had met under hospital lights when she had stitched her own knuckles because the A&E had not wanted to see Evan’s work again.
“Is this Hel?” Her voice bruised against the trunks. “Are you here or do you just breathe on the door from that side?”
The tear that wasn’t a tear ran up, not down. A wet of cold slid from root to branch. The wildflowers at her boots stopped watching and lowered their faces. The heartbeat in the stone sped up. Her own stayed stubborn and slow. She had trained it that way after Evan. Watch. Think. Move.
“Who gave it to you.” The voice changed. It hadn’t found Eva now. It tried for her mother, failed, then drifted into a hybrid that sounded like neither and both .
“Post.” She nudged the seam with the gem. Heat flared and went frostbitten. “No return address.”
“He did. He said. He wanted. He is.”
Words broke over the membrane between worlds like soap bubbles. They popped into wet on her cheek.
“Pronouns won’t help us,” she muttered. “You know mine.”
The oaks shivered. Leaves let go without falling. They hovered a handspan below the twigs that had birthed them, then winked back to place as if embarrassed.
Her timer ticked. She fished it out.
Two minutes, forty-nine seconds remained.
She pulled a chopstick from her pocket and used it to pry at moss near the seam. Wood came away in a sheet. Beneath it, a depth of black opened. Not absence — hunger. It reached without moving. The top of her fingers felt licked. She crouched and put the Heartstone into the air-to-air gap.
“This belongs with you?” She leaned in. “Or with whoever hates you enough to throw me at you.”
“We do not hate.”
“Everyone hates. You just use different names.”
Something moved in the corner of her eye. She kept her head still. A figure stood where the first chalk mark had gone. She did not look. It used her height. It wore her dark coat. It lifted a hand whose palm glowed with a white crescent scar on the wrist.
“Cute,” she said. “You went on Facebook.”
The figure took a step. It kept its features out of the idea of light that hung on this place. It carried her frame with a wrongness that hurt her eyes — the way a dream uses a verb in the wrong tense.
“Stay over there,” she told it . “I’m not proud. I’ll throw this.”
A laugh answered, not from the figure but from behind her left knee , where something no taller than her thigh had crouched. She jerked, smashed her knee on a root, and groped with her free hand. No fur. No skin. The laugh wafted off like breath into winter.
“Don’t touch,” she told the thing that didn’t sit there.
“Rory.” The shape at the chalked trunk made a smile she could feel but not see . “Come home. We don’t have to—”
“We never had a home.” Her throat locked around old glass. She coughed it clear and crouched again at the seam. “Not with you.”
The tear in the air narrowed. The cold lessened, not with warmth but with refusal .
“Right,” she breathed. “Trade? You sneaked your way into my voice, I put this up to your door like a parcel, and we stand here. Boring.”
“We are not a door.”
“You look like a door.”
“We are a mouth.”
“That tracks.”
She pulled out her phone again and lifted it so the screen caught the moon. The face lay too large. A second one hung faintly in the reflection on black glass, wrong phase, wrong scar of light.
She snapped a photo out of habit. The phone decided to oblige her with a soft fake click and then displayed a black square that smelled faintly of wet stone.
“OK.” She tucked it away. “No tourist shots.”
Leaves stirred near her ankle with the sound of paper handled in an empty bank lobby. She glanced down. The takeaway receipt she had tied flapped on the branch across the clearing. It shouldn’t have reached that far. It hung by two strings now, as if something had chewed it a second tether.
She stood. The figure at the chalked trunk leaned and touched the mark with a finger. White dust drifted to the forest floor and landed without landing. It arranged itself into a line that crept toward her boot.
“Stop,” she told the dust.
It listened. It shivered into a pile that mapped her footprint from fifteen seconds ago. The way the Grove kept records made her skin crawl.
“You’re nosy,” she told the place itself now. “I’m nosy too.”
She moved around the ring in leftward steps, swift and neat. Her ankle rolled once on an unseen hollow. She hissed and lifted, chased space with her foot until it found steadiness again. Her mouth filled with the taste of graphite. The chalk had left smuts where she must have touched her lip. She wiped it off with a sleeve.
“You want the stone, you open,” she called to the seam. “No open, no stone.”
“We do not want.”
“What do you want then.”
The pause that followed felt like a man descending stairs in a house she used to live in, step by step, each tread finding the squeak she had always meant to fix and had never fixed.
“Witness.”
“Hard pass.”
“We want you to know.”
“Know what.”
Another wrong laugh. It slithered up the bark of the nearest oak, crossed over onto branches, came down an opposite trunk like a drop of pitch.
“We were invited,” the thing that had been speaking through borrowed voices said. “You drew this with your walking. You walked around and you left and you came and you left and you came and you had the small thing on your skin and you kept turning.”
“I chalked it,” she shot back. “You don’t get magic from my gym steps, sorry.”
“We do not take from you. We take the space you ignore.”
“Good for you.”
Her timer chimed. The sound landed flat, as if the air didn’t have corners to bounce noise against. She glared at the screen. Five minutes had passed in slices she couldn’t count. Sweat had bloomed under her arms without wetting her shirt. Her left boot had mud on it now she didn’t remember stepping in.
“Five minutes,” she told the trees , the seam, the figure, herself. “No penalty.”
She pocketed the timer. Fingers shook. She rolled them into a fist and knocked three times on the twin oaks, knuckles ringing on bark that did not feel like bark.
“Service door?” She leaned her head near the seam. Her hair, black and cut to her shoulders, tickled her jaw as if it were reaching for something she couldn’t see . “Take the parcel and sign.”
The Heartstone flared. A thin line of colour ran from it into the seam like the first dribble of syrup when you pour it. Her tongue thickened. She tasted copper. The cord’s pull tried to convince her to step.
“Ah.” She backed a fraction. “No. I see you.”
“Rory.”
The new voice made the skin on her forearms crawl in a neat wave. He had always sounded like that when he’d got the words right. Evan stood in the gap in her peripheral, wearing the grin he had used on bailiffs and bartenders. He would look like he did the night she left, scar on his cheek from her keys, shirt front damp with the pint he had thrown that hadn’t hit.
“I am not a taxi,” she told his fragment. “Stand in your own story.”
He took a slow step. Even without a face she could see his jaw work, the clench and release and clench of someone choosing a tone. “Give it here, Rory. Let me help. Let me hold it and—”
She lifted the stone as if it were a prayer. The glow threw a colour on him he had never worn. His confidence stumbled and broke like glass under a tyre. He stood between two oaks and became trunk, then shadow, then disappeared.
“Thought so,” she breathed.
The seam thinned into a laugh that never reached sound. It drew the light in around it. Even the moon gave a kind of shrug. The oaks leaned half an inch inside themselves. The hollow in the clearing deepened. The wildflowers went still as bone.
The Heartstone burned now, not with heat but with effort . It wanted. She felt that want with her bones. An answer gnawed the inside of her teeth: yes. Yes, step, press, push. She held her own yes like a small animal trying to bolt. She let it knock against her ribs and didn’t let it go.
“You get one,” she told the tear. “One look.”
Her knees bent without her telling them. Her neck stretched. The pendant reached first. The glow lipped the seam and slid along it like ice across iron. Cold shot up the chain and bit the back of her throat.
In the seam something moved. Not shape. Not light.
“There you are,” she whispered.
Leaves whispered back from everywhere and nowhere. The chalk across the circle fanned into powder and lifted off the ground in a lazy upward rain. The pendant’s pulse leapt. Heat and cold fought under her skin in a private storm.
A footfall landed behind her. Soft, measured . Human weight on damp soil.
She did not look. She kept the Heartstone against the seam and let her voice walk where she did not.
“Don’t.”
The steps stopped. The next breath in the clearing belonged to more than her.
“You came alone,” a voice told the back of her neck. It sounded like the person had scraped a handful of gravel over their tongue to find the words.
“No. I brought a rock.”
The cold sharpened. The seam thinned. Her teeth ached. The new presence leaned, warm as the inside of a mouth.
“That is ours.”
“Then open.” She swallowed. It stuck. “Open and take it. I won’t step.”
Silence rolled thin and taut. The oaks pressed against it as if pushing at a drumhead .
The warmth behind her shifted a fraction left. The light that had not been there let her see a hand in negative, not light but outline, reaching . Fingers hovered near her shoulder, patient as a spider testing for tremor.
She held the Heartstone steady and did not blink. She did not give the new thing her face. She kept the seam and the small running colour of the gem the only truth she looked at.
The hand moved nearer. A single drop of water released from a flower’s lip and travelled upward toward the fingers. It hung below them, close enough to touch without touching. The pulse in the stone counted, measured , waited. The Grove listened. The city beyond the fence held its own breath and would not share.