Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPWCJNZZT6A0V4EHX7JKEK

Molly spread the blueprints across the hood of the van, though calling them blueprints was generous — she'd sketched the layout of the Pemberton backyard on the back of a pizza menu, complete with a bouncy castle rendered as a lopsided rectangle labeled DANGER ZONE. Bill leaned in, chewing the last of a sausage roll he'd bought at the petrol station forty minutes ago and had been rationing ever since. Crumbs snowed onto the paper. Molly brushed them off with the patience of a woman who had worked with him for eleven years. "Piñata's the distraction," she said. He nodded slowly, as though this were tactical wisdom passed down through generations of criminals rather than something she'd invented in the shower that morning. The presents, she explained with her finger tracing a route past the trestle table, would be stacked beneath the gazebo, unguarded except by grandparents, and grandparents were slow. Bill wrote *GRANDPARENTS = SLOW* in his notebook, underlining it twice. Somewhere beyond the hedge, thirty children shrieked in unison, a sound like a kettle boiling in hell. Bill flinched. "You scared?" He considered the question honestly, watching a balloon drift skyward, and decided that yes, deeply, he was.