Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPXHT26BR2EK7C4P56E09P

The gate at the Richmond Park boundary had been locked since dusk, which meant Rory had gone over the wall by Ham Common with her boots slung round her neck and her phone torch clamped between her teeth. Sixteen minutes of walking after that. She'd counted, because counting was better than thinking. Now she stood at the treeline, and the counting had stopped being any use at all. The oaks came up out of the bracken like something built rather than grown — eight of them, spaced too evenly, their trunks scored with grooves that the local guidebooks called "erosion patterns" and the internet called nonsense. Standing stones made of wood. Rory had seen them twice before, both times in daylight, both times with someone else beside her. In daylight they had looked old and tired and a little sad. Tonight they looked like teeth. She thumbed her phone dark and let her eyes adjust. That was the first thing that was wrong, and she noticed it immediately without understanding it: her eyes didn't need to adjust. The clearing beyond the oaks had its own light. Not moonlight — the sky above London in November was a low orange lid, no moon anywhere in it — but a thin silver wash lying over the grass like frost that had forgotten to be cold. It came from nowhere. It cast no shadows. The pendant against her sternum gave a slow pulse of warmth. "Not now," Rory murmured, and pressed her palm flat over it through her jumper. The crimson stone was the size of her thumbnail and it had been warm on and off for three days, and three days was exactly how long it had been since Eva had stopped answering her phone. Isolde's grove. That was the last message. Meeting I. at the grove, back by ten, don't be dramatic. Sent Tuesday, 6:41 p.m. It was Friday. Rory stepped through the gap between two oaks. The air changed the way water changes when you go under: a pressure against the ears, a shift in what sound was allowed to be. The distant hum of the A308 cut out entirely. So did the wind, though she could see the grass at the far side of the clearing moving in it, long stems bowing and rising in a rhythm that had nothing to do with her side of the grove. Wildflowers everywhere. Cowslip and foxglove and something pale blue she couldn't name, all of them in full bloom in the second week of November, all of them turned to face her. She was almost sure they hadn't been facing her a second ago. "Eva?" Her voice went out and didn't come back. No echo. The clearing was maybe forty metres across, ringed in trees — there should have been an echo, some small return of herself. Instead the word just left and kept leaving. Rory made herself walk. She walked the way her father had taught her to enter a room she didn't like the look of: slowly, hands loose, eyes moving. Left first. The ring of oaks, the black between them. Then centre — a patch of bare earth, roughly circular, where nothing grew. Then right. Something moved at the right edge of her vision. She turned her head and there was only foxglove, shivering. "Okay," she said. Out loud, because out loud made it a statement and not a fear. "Okay." She crouched at the bare patch and put two fingers to the soil. It was warm. Not sun-warm, which was impossible anyway; warm like the flank of an animal. She pulled her hand back and wiped it on her jeans and did not look at her fingers for a moment, and when she did look there was nothing on them at all. That was when she heard the bell. One note, high and small, from behind and above her — the exact sound of the brass bell over the door of Golden Empress, the one Yu-Fei rang with her knuckles when an order was going cold on the counter. Rory knew that sound better than her own ringtone. She had heard it four hundred times. It did not belong within nine miles of Richmond Park, and it had come from somewhere in the canopy. She stood up very slowly. The second note came from the opposite side of the clearing. "That's not funny," she said, and hated how thin it came out. Sixteen minutes of walking. Sixteen back. She could turn around. There was a version of the next thirty seconds where she simply turned around and went back over the wall at Ham Common and rang the police in the morning and let it be someone else's clearing, someone else's friend. Except that Eva had come here for her. Two years ago, when Rory had turned up at Paddington with a bin bag of clothes and Evan's fingerprints still fading on her upper arm, Eva had been on the platform. Nobody had asked her to be. Rory went towards the far side. Halfway across, the grass began to hold onto her boots. Not tangling — nothing so obvious. It simply took a fraction of a second longer than it should to let each foot go, a soft reluctance, like walking through something with a mind about it. She kept her pace even. She kept her breathing in fours, in and out, the way she did on the bike in traffic. The pendant pulsed again. Hotter this time. Almost sharp. Something was standing between the two oaks directly ahead of her. She stopped. She looked at it and it was a stump — obviously a stump, four feet high, split at the crown, wrapped in ivy. She could see the ivy. She could see the pale scar where the trunk had come away. It was a stump and it had been a stump for fifty years and she had walked past it in July with Eva and a bag of chips. It was closer than it had been when she looked away. Rory stood absolutely still and did the arithmetic. She'd been fifteen metres out. She was now perhaps nine. She had not moved. Her boots were where she'd put them, both of them, planted in grass that had gone entirely, unnaturally quiet. "I know you're there," she said. The clearing considered this. Then, from the ivy, from the split crown of the stump that was not a stump, came a sound she had heard through the wall of her flat above Silas' bar every night for two years: the small dry click of Eva's lighter, thumbed three times before it caught. Click. Click. Click. No flame. Rory's hand closed around the pendant hard enough to feel the setting bite her palm. Behind her — and she was certain of this in a way she would never be able to explain, certain the way you're certain of a stair in the dark — behind her, close enough to touch, the grass let something set its weight down and take it up again. She did not turn around. "Eva," she said, to the stump, to the ivy, to the whole silver-washed wrongness of it. "If that's you, say my name." The clearing breathed in. And a voice she loved, warped only very slightly — like a recording of a recording — said, from somewhere much too high in the trees: "*Rory.*"