AI "Triple fare, cash up front, and the customer asked for you by name."
I braked at the park gate and let the bike lean into the rail. "By which name?"
"The receipt says Laila." Yu-Fei's voice came down the line thin and skipping with static. "So. Explain to me why my strangest customer knows my most private driver."
"Explain to me why you're still taking orders."
"The till doesn't sleep, Rory. Money's already in the tin. Do be memorable." A click. Yu-Fei never asked a question she couldn't bill for.
The name sat in my ear. My thumb found the crescent scar on my left wrist and pressed until it stung. Three years since anyone had used that name . Three years of being Rory, delivery girl, keeper of thermal bags and no history.
The park gate stood open. Richmond Park chains its gates at dusk, wardens treat that chain like scripture. Tonight the chain lay coiled on the grass, neat as a dropped scarf.
Three rules for midnight deliveries. Cash first. Questions never. Gone before the door opens. The tin held three hundred quid, and rent was overdue.
I wheeled the bike through and the dark closed behind my wheels.
The deer path took over where tarmac surrendered. Bracken snagged my ankles, wet and brown, and cold found every gap in my jacket. Ahead, a herd of fallow deer stood between the trunks. Dozens. All facing me. Not one of them moved, and the night gave none of their noises back: no hoof-scrape, no snort, nothing. I walked closer. They turned as one, poured between the trees and left without a sound, like water finding a drain.
I checked the map on my phone. The blue dot span in circles, then marched off the path and kept going through open dark, unhurried, as though it knew a shortcut I didn't. Battery: forty per cent. I looked again. Four. The clock read 00:14, then 00:13, then 00:12, unwinding like a dropped reel of film. The screen died mid-flicker .
Fine. Deliveries need legs, a bag and the sense to leave. Two out of three so far.
The pendant shifted under my shirt and tapped my sternum with each stride, warm as a coin left in the sun. It had run warm all week. Tonight it drummed.
I knew this park. I'd run its perimeter in daylight, dodging dogs and pushchairs. There were no stones on the deer path. These stood across it in a ragged ring: oaks grown into standing stones, trunks gone grey and rigid, bark worn smooth and pale as knucklebone. Frost-coloured seams of moss climbed them like veins. Between the first and second stone, the air changed.
Warmth spilled over me like bathwater. The smell arrived after: honey and crushed green stems, and under it iron, sharp as an old penny held too long. November stayed behind me. Ahead, wildflowers crowded the path edge to edge, buttercups and campion and others I had no names for, all in bloom at once, drunk on light that didn't exist.
I crossed the boundary because the money was in the tin. I told myself that twice. The second time, the words tasted like the iron smell .
Far off, a fiddle played three notes of a wedding tune. Someone's happy night, years ago, other side of the world. It stopped mid-note and didn't come back.
My footsteps kept me company. Then they stopped matching. A half-beat late, soft, out in the bracken to my right: same boots, same rhythm, worn by somebody else. I stopped. It stopped.
"Delivery," I said, to hear something ordinary.
The word came back to me before I finished saying it.
Somewhere north, hooves: clip-clop, clip-clop, patient, keeping level with me through trees that held no road. No horses ran Richmond at midnight. No road ran there either.
The first time, I caught it between two trunks: a shape taller than the gap allowed, broad through the shoulders, crowned with branches, still as furniture. I kept my eyes forward. Looking gives things permission.
The second time it had drifted closer, leaning round the edge of my vision to get a better view. The third time there was no shape at all, only breath on my neck, warm and slow and sweet with honey. I spun, bag swinging. Nothing. At my feet the wildflowers bent outward in a tidy circle, pressed flat, as though something large had sat down to watch me pass.
My watch ticked against my wrist. Tick. Tick-tick. It caught up with itself, ran ahead, then ticked backwards, patient as a spider reeling silk . I stopped listening to it.
I turned back the way I'd come. Flowers covered the path from trunk to trunk, unbroken, as though no one had walked it in years. No tyre tracks. No footprints. My own boots left prints going forward and none coming back, which was a trick I decided not to think about too hard. The trees behind me had drifted, shoulder to shoulder, a crowd in poor coats. Somewhere in that crowd my bike waited by a fence, and the gap between me and it had stopped being a gap.
So. Finish the delivery. Rule one, cash first, and the cash sat ahead of me, in the dark, in a ring of grey oaks.
The trees ended without warning. The clearing waited, round as a held breath, walled by the great grey oaks. At its heart stood the largest of them, wide as a door, grain running vertical, knots bulging like muscle under skin. An iron ring hung at shoulder height, grown into the wood. Somebody had rubbed it bright over the years. Rain doesn't do that.
A printed slip hung where it had been tucked into the bark, no name, one line: LEAVE THE BAG. KNOCK ONCE. DO NOT WAIT.
I set the bag at the roots. It sloshed. Thermal boxes don't slosh. I unzipped the top to check the order: dumplings, noodles, tea. Steam rolled out, thick and hot, though I'd cycled forty minutes through November. I counted the containers. Twelve. I'd packed six. Every lid sat warm as a heartbeat. I closed the bag and gave up counting.
The pendant flared against my breastbone, hot enough to bite through cotton. The scar on my wrist woke with it, itching, then burning, in time with something bigger. Under my boots, slow and vast, the ground pulsed . One, two. One, two. The stone in its silver setting beat against my skin, a small heart answering a large one through the soles of my feet.
Professional courtesy. That's what I called it. I raised my knuckles to the iron ring, thought about triple fare, and knocked. Once.
The sound fell into the wood and made no echo . The clearing held its breath. Every wildflower turned toward me at the same moment, smooth and exact, like a crowd noticing a dropped glass.
Something knocked back.
Three times, from behind the bark, deep in the grain. Patient. Unhurried. The sound of knuckles that had waited years for the chance.
A seam of amber light split the trunk from knuckle-height to the roots, widening a breath at a time with every pulse of the pendant. Warm air breathed out of it, honey and iron and old wood, and under those, faint as a fingerprint, the smell of my mam's kitchen. Sunday gravy. Burnt toast. A smell that had no business being alive in a hollow tree in Richmond Park, and that my body knew before my mind could argue.
The wood creaked, settling, and a voice came through the seam, closer than the light, closer than my own skin:
"You're late, Laila. We've kept your seat warm."