Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GSAXSWGSMFWVSYRZQJFM05

The order came through at eleven-twenty, which was the first wrong thing. The Golden Empress stopped taking deliveries at eleven, and Yu-Fei Cheung did not bend her rules for anyone — Rory had once watched her refuse a cardiologist with a hundred-pound note stapled to the receipt. But this order wasn't from a customer. It was from Isolde. One pot of jasmine tea. Honey, on the side. Two porcelain cups, the good ones from the shelf behind the till, wrapped in paper. The address field held no street and no postcode, just: The old oaks, Richmond Park. Midnight. And a tip that would cover two months of rent above Silas' bar. Rory packed the bag anyway. She told herself it was the money. The truth, which she examined sidelong, the way you examine a dark staircase, was that Isolde did not eat, and Isolde did not own a phone. The order had come through the app. She pedalled north through streets gone glassy with frost, and somewhere near the boundary road the pendant woke against her sternum. It was a thumbnail of crimson on a silver chain, and it had a faint habit of warming near doors it shouldn't. She had learned its moods the hard way. It had never once warmed in Richmond Park. Body heat, she told herself, and did not believe herself, and kept pedalling. Sheen Gate was locked. She went through the gap beside the gatepost with the delivery bag on her shoulder and her breath hanging in front of her like smoke. Richmond at night was a different animal from Richmond by day — black hills of trees, bracken silvered, the ponds holding scraps of moon. Halfway along the track she caught the deer: thirty of them in a dark field of ferns, every head aimed away from her, toward the water. Not one turned. Richmond deer were bold, half-tame, forever begging chips off tourists. These were statues with heartbeats, and something about the set of their ears made her ride faster. The night was wrong in its quiet. There should have been traffic surf from the A316, a fox screaming somewhere, a plane dragging its light toward Heathrow. There was nothing. The silence had weight, like snow about to fall. The twin oaks rose out of the dark exactly where they always were, and she leaned the bike against a fence post that was not quite a fence post and stood a moment with her hand on the bag strap, listening. Then she stepped between them, and it was June. Heat lay against her face like a held-open oven door. The smell changed — hay, warm sap, crushed green things. Wildflowers opened in the darkness, pale as peeled fruit, each one carrying a faint light of its own, as if the ground were running a low fever. In November. In frost. Her torch beam slid over them and found nothing it could explain. The standing stones were oaks — seven of them, so old they had gone grey and fluted and stone-hard, ringing the clearing like sentries that had forgotten how to leave. The pendant was glowing now. She could see its light through her jacket zip, a red star at her throat, and its pulse was slower than her heart. Patient. Whatever it was warming to, it had all the time in the world. "Isolde?" Her voice went out and did not echo. Then, a half-second late, from behind her left shoulder when she had faced right, it came back — s'olde? — flattened, curious, like something repeating the word to learn the shape of her mouth. She set the delivery bag on the flat-topped stone with hands she was proud of. "Food's here," she said to the empty ring. "Jasmine tea, honey on the side. You paid extra, so — whoever you are, I hope you're happy." Isolde's rules, given once, lightly, the way you'd tell someone not to feed the swans: never come after dark. Never come alone. Never say thank you inside the ring. Two down before she'd even arrived. She turned to go and the way in was gone. Where the gap between the oaks had been, brambles stood knitted together like a badly healed wound. Rory stood very still and made herself breathe. Panic was a luxury; she'd left it in Cardiff. She chose the widest gap on the far side, kept the stones to her left, and began to count her paces aloud, because a voice in an empty ring was better than no voice at all. "Three. Four. Five." She checked her phone. 12:04. She walked what should have been ten minutes and checked again. 12:03. She stopped and watched the seconds unwind. The colon blinked. It blinked like it had all the time in the world. Something droned past her ear — fat, unhurried, half-drunk on the flowers. A bee. At midnight. In November. Every sensible part of her said bees slept; everything else said not here. She made herself look back at her own footprints pressed into the flower-dew, the way she'd check a delivery route, and her stomach dropped. Beside each of her prints was a second print. Longer than hers. Narrow in the heel. It matched her stride exactly, placed exactly where her stride would fall — and it had been matching her, she understood, for some time. Behind her, porcelain clinked against porcelain. She turned. The delivery bag sat open on the stone, paper unwound, both cups out and steaming. As she watched, the level in the nearer cup lowered, a fraction, between one blink and the next. She had not heard anyone cross the grass. There was nothing here to hear it with. The grove was the kind of quiet that doesn't carry footsteps because it doesn't need to. "Rory, cariad." Her mother's vowels, warm as the kitchen in Cardiff, soft as Sunday. Then, sliding underneath it, another voice, from a flat with a broken door: "You were always quick, Rory. Quicker than me. That was the problem, wasn't it." Her thumb found the crescent scar on her left wrist and pressed down, an old anchor. It wears what hurts, she thought. It's wearing what hurts because it doesn't have anything of its own. She said nothing. Between two stones, at the edge of her vision, a shape stood — tall, shoulders wrong, the suggestion of a head inclined toward her like a listener. When she looked at it fully there was only oak-shadow. By the far stone, another. At the treeline, several more, and they stood the way the deer had stood, all facing one direction, and she understood, with a flat quiet clarity, that the deer had not been watching her at all. They had been listening for this. Waiting for it to finish. The pendant burned. Its pulse climbed, feverish, faster and faster, and then went cold all at once, like a wire pulled from a wall, and she could not decide which was worse. "Sit and have some tea, cariad," the voices said together, kindly, in chorus. "You look frozen." And her mouth — stupid, polite, English to its bones — began to shape the words no, thank you, and she caught them between her teeth and held them there, because that was the trap, she knew it was the trap, and the silence around the ring leaned in to listen for it. "Stay for tea, Laila." Rory ran. Nobody in London knew that name. Nobody on this side of the Severn did. The gap she'd chosen opened before her exactly wide enough, the brambles pulling aside like a curtain, and the grove let her go — let her go the way a hand opens, deliberately, having decided she could. Then it was frost, real frost, blackbirds starting up somewhere in the ordinary dark, the distant surf of the A316 rising like mercy. Her legs gave and she sat down hard on the frozen track, breath sawing, hair stuck to her face. She fumbled her phone awake. 4:41. She had been inside twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five. She laughed once, a small cracked sound, and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. Behind her, in a grove that was suddenly only oaks and bracken and moonlight, very softly, porcelain clicked against porcelain.