Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GQKB18Y7TAXXV1EZJDM19E

The order came through at 23:14. Spring rolls, a happy family, a house special, delivered to a pin in the middle of Richmond Park. Prepaid, twenty-pound tip, name of I. GROVE. The note said: 'Wait at the standing oaks past the ponds. I will come to you.' Rory had taken stranger orders. A penthouse with a shark tank. A lock-up in Peckham where a man paid in coins, counted out one at a time. So she chained her bike to the railings at Petersham Gate, hoisted the insulated bag onto her shoulder, and set her phone torch swinging ahead of her down the path. The pedestrian gate screeched when she pushed through it, and the sound carried further than it had any right to. Then there was nothing. No drone off the A3. No plane sliding down toward Heathrow, though the flight path ran straight across the ponds and the sky stood cloudless to prove it. London hummed at night — she had lived above Silas' bar long enough to know the hum came up through the floorboards and into your sleep if you let it. The hum stopped at the gate. The silence past the railings had a pressure to it, the sort you felt in your eardrums on a long descent. Frost sugared every blade of grass along the path. Her boots went across it, tak, tak, tak, and half a beat behind them, softer, on grass instead of frost, a second set of footsteps kept pace. She stopped. The second set stopped one stride later. She turned the torch on the path behind her. Empty bracken, empty grass, the railings a pale line in the dark. Nothing to hide behind, nothing to echo off. Frost didn't echo. The bag strap, she told herself. The strap slapping her back as she walked. She shrugged the bag off her shoulder and carried it in both arms, awkward, the foil boxes hot through the canvas. The footsteps carried on. Under her coat and jumper, the Heartstone had gone warm on the bus over — she'd noticed it at the traffic lights by Eel Pie Island and blamed the heated seats. At the gate it had warmed further. Now it lay on her sternum like a coin lifted off a stove. Not burning. Working out how. Past the first rise the torch found eyes at the treeline. Six pairs, low and green, floating in the black. Deer. The park crawled with them; she'd braked for a stag in October and sworn at him with affection. Deer bolted from people. It was the one thing they did well. These stood in a line, all facing her, and not one of them chewed. A deer's whole life was chewing. She stood there until the cold climbed inside her sleeves. The eyes never blinked, never swung away. When she stepped forward, they followed her, all together, like beads sliding along one string. The ponds lay black and still. The moon sat whole on the water and never wavered, though the reeds along the bank stirred and bowed against a wind she could not feel on her face. Her phone said 23:52. The pin sat a few hundred metres on, in a stand of trees past the water. She walked. When she checked the phone again, it said 02:16, and the moon had crossed the sky to agree with it. "Okay," she told the dark, and her voice came out smaller than she'd sent it. "Okay." She rang Eva. One ring, then voicemail — strange; Eva slept with the phone under her pillow. "Ev. It's me. Work thing, long story. I'm in Richmond Park, of all places, and it's — just ring me back, yeah? Ring me back." She lifted the phone from her ear to end the call, and the speaker was still live, and through it, small and tinny, she heard frost crackle. Footsteps. Her own breathing, half a second late. She turned. The torch beam crossed bare path, bare reeds, black water. The phone kept playing the footsteps from somewhere behind her, patient, unhurried, until she killed the call with her thumb. The log said the call had lasted fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds. The battery had been over half when she'd dialled. Four per cent now. The trees came up out of the dark all at once. Nine oaks in a ring, too tall and too straight, trunks grey as picked bone. The park's own oaks grew fat and crooked, pollarded and storm-broken. These stood like columns. Like they'd been stood there. Frost ended in a clean line at the ring's edge — one step, and the grass outside wore white; the next, green and dark and growing. The air inside came warm as a greenhouse. Wildflowers stood open in the dark, celandine and violet and pale things she had no names for, every bloom lifted as if the sun sat somewhere beneath the ground. The smell was honey and cut grass, and under that, faint, something sweet that had turned. Her breath stopped fogging the moment she crossed the line. "Hello?" The flowers soaked her voice up. No echo, no birds startled off anything. "Golden Empress delivery. I've got an order for — Grove? Groves?" The torch beam thinned as it went into the ring, as if the dark there drank it a metre out from the lens. She held the bag out in front of her, the smell of soy and sesame climbing off it into all that honey, absurd, obscene. "Prepaid," she tried. "Twenty quid tip, so somebody's expecting food." "Leave it between the stones." The voice came from nowhere she could point to. Not loud. Pleasant, even — a woman's voice, unhurried, the kind that took your order at a counter. Rory turned a full circle with the torch, and the beam found flowers, flowers, oak bark, flowers. "Where —" "Between the stones, Rory." Her thumb found the crescent scar on her left wrist and pressed. The ticket had said I. GROVE. The app showed the restaurant and her first name, Aurora, and nobody — nobody — read Aurora off a delivery ticket and came back with Rory. The Heartstone flared. She yanked the chain out from under her collar with a hiss — the silver had gone hot, and the gem in it sat deep crimson in her palm, its inner light beating. Once. Twice. Quick, out of time with her own pulse, quicker, like something on the far side of the ring had started running. She looked down. The frost beyond the flowers was printed with bare feet. Narrow, human-length, pressed deep, a full circuit of the ring's inside — and the nearest prints had not been there when she crossed the line. Footsteps came between two of the oaks. Unhurried. No frost to crackle under them — they fell soft on the flowers, and the flowers did not bend. Rory backed toward the gap she'd come through, bag held out like a shield, the pendant beating heat into her fist. The footsteps matched her, stride for stride.