Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GSGMGP7NDJZKYYWD5CWFDR

Yu-Fei slid the ticket across the counter with two fingers, the way he handled the bins. "Last one. Then lock up behind you." Rory pinned it under her palm and read it twice. Address: The Old Oaks, Richmond Park. Name: Isolde. Tip, printed in the website's cheerful font: £100. "There's no address in Richmond Park. It's two and a half thousand acres of deer." "Card cleared. No note, no phone number." He untied his apron and let it drop into the laundry sack. "Crispy duck, spring rolls, sweet and sour. Bag's on the shelf. Take it or bin it, but somebody paid, and I don't refund ghosts." "Ghosts don't order duck." "This one did." He counted her float into her hand, then held her wrist a second longer than the money required. "Ring me when you're home, eh?" The pendant had been warm the whole ride over. That was new. For three weeks the little crimson stone had hung cold against her sternum on its silver chain — found in her jacket pocket one morning with no note, no box, no memory of buying it — and she'd stopped wondering about it the way you stop hearing your fridge. Tonight, crossing the bridge, it had woken up. By Petersham Gate it pulsed against her skin, faint and steady, like something counting. She propped her bike against the wall and found the pedestrian gate open. The chain lay coiled on the tarmac beside it, padlock still locked, threaded through nothing. The phone rang twice before Eva picked up. "Tell me you're home." "One more. Richmond Park." A pause long enough to hold an entire argument. "It's midnight. The park's locked. What's in Richmond Park?" "An order. The Old Oaks. Some woman called Isolde tipped a hundred quid." "The tip is the bait, Rory. That's how every true-crime podcast starts." "With a hundred quid?" "With the girl who takes it." Paper rustled; Eva was walking, keys jingling, the front door of the pub somewhere behind her. "Stay on the line. I mean it. I'll talk at you the whole way." "Deal. Distract me." "Silas asked about you today. Again. He did that thing where he wipes the same glass for ten minutes and asks whether you eat proper—" Eva's voice doubled. Not an echo. Two of her, the same words laid half a second apart, one pitched too low, like a tape slowed. Then the line went flat. Full bars. No call-ended screen. Just Eva, gone, mid-word. Rory stood at the gate with the phone against her ear and listened to the space where her friend had been. "Ev?" The park gave the word back to no one. She should have turned around there. But a hundred quid was two weeks of food, and the pendant pulled at her like a warm hand on a lead, and she stepped through the gate. The path ran north through bracken, black on both sides. She'd lived under the Heathrow flight path long enough to set her sleep by it — a plane every ninety seconds, a soft rake of engines across the sky. She walked ten minutes and counted none. No distant motorway hum, no owls, no dogs in Peckham. The dark had the quality of a room where someone has just stopped talking. Richmond Park held six hundred deer. She'd swerved around enough of them at dusk to know. Tonight she saw none, until she saw one: a hind at the bracken's edge, thirty feet off, stone-still. Not looking at her. Looking past her, over her left shoulder, ears pinned flat. "Hey. It's all right." The hind bolted. The bracken closed behind it and stayed closed. The pendant pulsed faster. Her map app spun in slow circles, the blue dot skating between three places at once, so she pocketed the phone and steered by the stone's heat instead. Her torch made a small gray room of the path and pushed the dark back a few feet. At the rim of the beam she kept catching a shape — low, patient, upright the way a person is upright. When she swung the light toward it, it slid, staying at the edge. When she killed the torch, she saw nothing at all, which was worse, because she could still feel where it was. The moon hung over the trees behind her left shoulder, so her shadow ran ahead of her along the path. Where the path bent, it had company: a second darkness lying alongside it, thinner, with nothing behind her to explain the first one, let alone two. Behind and to her left, bracken crackled in step with her. She stopped. One more footfall landed a half-beat after hers, then the settling, then nothing. "We're closed," she called, and the park took the words and gave nothing back. The crescent scar on her left wrist ached, an old ache, like weather in a bone. She rubbed it with her thumb and kept her eyes on her boots and counted her steps. She smelled the flowers before she saw them. Honey, and under the honey something turned and cold, like spade-tilled earth. In November. The oaks stood in a ring ahead, six of them, trunks broad as vans, older than the park around them, older than the city, standing the way stones stand. Between two of them, a gap the width of a door. Through it, pale color: flowers, open, under the moon. The pendant flared hot. She cupped it through her jacket and its glow lit her fingers red — one pulse, then another, quicker now, running. "Okay," she breathed. "Okay." The air through the gap was warm, and not a night's warm. An oven switched off an hour ago, door still shut. She stepped between the oaks. Wildflowers covered the clearing to the treeline, thousands of them, open in the dark the way flowers don't open, faces tilted up. Somewhere a stream ran that she could hear but not place. The traffic was gone. The moon sat in a part of the sky it shouldn't have reached for hours yet. She checked her phone. 11:52. A flat stone waited in the middle of the clearing. She set the Golden Empress carrier down on it, and the smell of crispy duck folded into all that honey and cold earth and turned obscene there. "Delivery for Isolde." Her voice came out flat and small. "Paid in full. Keep the change." Nothing. The stream. Her own breath loud in her ears. Then the flowers turned. All of them, the whole field at once, a soft creak of ten thousand stems, pale faces swinging around through the dark. Not toward the moon. Toward her. Rory took a step back toward the oaks. The field of faces followed, leaning. Her phone read 1:36. She stared at the numbers, at the hour and forty minutes the screen insisted on, when the walk from the gate had taken minutes and the clearing had held her for fewer. "You have the food," she told the flowers, the stone, the shape sitting at the edge of everything her eyes could manage. "Someone paid. It's paid." The stream stopped. Not faded — stopped, like a tap shut off mid-splash, and in the new quiet she heard breathing that wasn't hers. Close. Unhurried. Tasting the air the way a deer tastes it. "Ev?" The word left her, and the grove held it the way a held breath holds. Behind her — close behind, at the nape of her neck, where the warm air ended — Eva's voice, and beneath Eva's voice the low, slowed twin of it, both of them gentle, both of them pleased: "You're late, Aurora."