Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRNWSTNQ95348JRSMQ4D3P

The gate at Sheen Lane had been chained, which Rory took as the park's opinion on visitors at half eleven at night. She went over the wall instead, the way she'd gone over the wall behind her parents' garage at fifteen, and landed in wet bracken with her phone torch already dying. Fourteen percent. She turned it off and let her eyes adjust. The note in her pocket said *the turn of the night, the oaks that stand like men, come alone and bring what was given you.* No name. No handwriting she recognised — the letters too even, as though someone had copied them out of a book about how letters were shaped. It had been folded inside a takeaway bag at the Golden Empress, tucked under a carton of salt-and-pepper squid, and Yu-Fei had sworn on her mother's grave she hadn't put it there. Rory had told herself all the way here that she was being sensible. That she'd rather walk into a trap she'd chosen than wait for one to walk into her. That was the version she'd say out loud, anyway, if Eva ever asked. The truer version was that she had been wearing a stranger's pendant against her sternum for eleven days and it had begun to feel less like jewellery and more like a hand. Richmond Park at night was bigger than Richmond Park in the day. That was the first thing that struck her as wrong, and it wasn't even properly wrong, just the ordinary lie darkness told about distance. She walked south-west across grass that soaked her trainers through in the first two minutes, past the black humped shapes of the deer, who did not move. Not one of them lifted a head. Three hundred fallow deer in this park and she passed nine of them and every one of them stood facing the same direction, towards the trees, like a congregation. The pendant was warm. It had been warm since she came over the wall. The standing stones weren't stones at all, whatever people called them. Eight ancient oaks in a rough ring, four of them dead, their bark gone silver and smooth as bone, trunks split into shapes that the eye insisted on reading as shoulders, hips, a bowed head. She'd found them once by accident, in daylight, in October, and had felt her whole body go quiet like a room when someone unplugs the fridge. She stopped at the boundary. Her breath fogged. Beyond the oaks, it did not. That was the second thing. Inside the ring, the grass was dry. Wildflowers stood open — cornflowers, red campion, things she couldn't name — in the middle of a February night, petals wide as if the sun were on them, and the air over them shimmered very slightly, the way it does above a hot road. "Right," she said, and her voice came out flat and small and wrong, like she'd spoken into a wardrobe full of coats. She stepped through. The temperature changed. Not warmer, exactly — *milder*, the way a September evening is mild, and the cold behind her closed like a door. She turned around. The park was still there. The lights of Roehampton glittered through the branches. But they didn't flicker, and Rory watched them for a long moment before she understood: they weren't twinkling. They hung there, fixed, like beads of solder. She crossed the grove to its centre, where the ground rose slightly. The flowers brushed her ankles. There was no sound at all. That was the third thing, and the worst so far, and it took her a full minute to identify it because absence is harder to notice than presence. No planes. There were always planes; Heathrow's approach ran a lane of noise across this whole side of the city, one every ninety seconds, a sound so constant Londoners stopped hearing it before they'd lived here a year. No traffic hum from the Kingston road. No wind, though she could see the tops of the oaks moving. She checked her phone. 11:47. She watched the screen until it changed to 11:48, which took roughly, she estimated, four minutes. "Okay," Rory said. "Whoever you are, I'm here. That's the arrangement kept. So come on." The flowers stirred. There was no wind, and the flowers on the far side of the grove bent, one line of them and then the next, a slow smooth furrow travelling towards her through the grass like something moving just beneath the surface of water. She stood still — cool head, cool head, she'd stood still while Evan screamed six inches from her face, she could stand still for this — and the furrow reached her feet and stopped and the campion straightened up again. Nothing touched her. Then, from somewhere behind her left shoulder, out among the trees, she heard the *put-put-put* of a moped. She knew that sound the way you know your own name. It was her moped, the Golden Empress moped, the shot exhaust and the miss in the second cylinder that Yu-Fei's nephew kept promising to fix. It came closer, throttled down, idled. She heard the little metallic tick of the pannier lid. Rory did not turn around. She had thought she would; she had thought a lot of things about herself, in the years before this year. What she actually did was close her hand very tightly around the pendant, which was hot now, hot as a mug of tea, and keep her eyes on the flowers in front of her. "That's a good trick," she said. "But it's parked in Kew, so." The engine cut. In the silence afterward, something exhaled — a small, satisfied sound, like a person setting down a heavy bag. "*Rory.*" Eva's voice. From the trees on her right, low and warm and delighted, exactly the pitch Eva used when she was about to make Rory laugh in a room where laughing would be a disaster. "Rory, don't be a cow, come here, I've been waiting hours." Her body wanted to go. That was the horrible part — the animal in her, the part that had been ten years old in Cardiff with grass-stained knees, turned towards that voice like a plant to a window. She felt her weight shift. She felt her mouth begin to shape *Eva*. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted iron. "Eva's in Hackney," she said. "And she never once in her life said *don't be a cow.*" Silence. A long one. The kind you get on the phone when you've told the truth to somebody who didn't expect you to bother. Then the voice again, from a different place — behind her now, close, close enough that she should have felt breath on the back of her neck and did not — and this time it was her own. "*Eva's in Hackney,*" it said, thoughtfully, testing the shape of the words. "*And she never once in her life said—*" It stopped mid-sentence, the way a recording stops. At the edge of her vision, something tall stood among the dead oaks, and it was so nearly the shape of a bowed and silver trunk that she could not have sworn there was any difference at all, except that she had walked past that gap ninety seconds ago and there had been eight trees and now there were nine. Rory made herself breathe out slowly through her nose. The pendant burned. Not warm now — *burning*, a coal against her breastbone, and its light came up through the weave of her jumper in a deep crimson pulse, once, twice, the rhythm of a heart that was not hers, and every flower in the grove turned its face towards it. Behind her, all around her, in a voice that was no longer pretending to be anyone, something said her name. Not *Rory*. Not *Aurora*. Something else. Four syllables, spoken with terrible fondness, a name she had never heard in her life and recognised instantly, the way you recognise your own handwriting on a note you don't remember writing. She turned to run and found that the oaks had closed their ring, and that the lights of Roehampton had gone out, and that overhead there were no stars at all — only a wide, soft, waiting dark, and a shape in it that seemed to be leaning down. Rory ran anyway.