Run: 2026-09-10-01M25DHPZBWH4EE19BC9KHJSPB

The padlock on the Sheen Gate was new. Rory clocked it under the streetlight: bright steel, dry of rust, the shackle still greased from the shop. The chain underneath had gone orange with years. Someone had come out here to change the lock and left the rest of the gate to rot. She should have been riding east. The last delivery sat finished two streets back, pad thai, extra lime, an old woman who paid in coins and counted them twice. Rory had walked off the step with the bag still on her back and stopped on the pavement, because the pendant under her shirt had turned hot. Hot for three days now. Ever since the padded envelope with no return address and no letter inside, nothing but the stone on its silver chain in a nest of bubble wrap. Tonight it had gone past warm. It pulled at her like a hook behind the ribs. South to the corner, west along the road, south again at the bus stop. Every time she turned away from the park wall the heat died. Every time she turned back it bit. So she left the bike in the hedge, found the crumbled brick, and climbed. The grass on the inside came past her knees. Water soaked through her jeans at the first step. She took out her phone and kept the screen low, a square of white light on the dirt ahead. The park at night had no lights at all. The orange rim of the city stood behind her shoulder and a black nothing stood ahead. Oak trunks went up like columns. Underfoot the deer had worn a soft ribbon of path through the bracken, and she followed it because the pendant told her to, because the heat swelled with each step until it lay against her sternum like a coin left all day in the sun. Ten minutes in, she stopped. The A3 should have been audible from here. She knew it was, because she'd walked this edge of the park in daylight with Eva more than once, and the road had hummed the whole time like a trapped fly. Now she stood in the middle of the path with her head up and listened and got nothing. No planes stacking over Heathrow. No deer. No owls. No fox screaming somewhere off in the bracken the way foxes did, badly, like children. The canopy shifted above her. Leaves shuffled dry against each other, and the wind came down off the branches and touched her cheek. At her feet, the grass did not move. She pushed up her sleeve and rubbed the small crescent scar on her wrist with her thumb, the way she always did when her skin told her something her brain had not caught up with. Then she walked on. Three steps, four. A fifth footstep landed behind her. She stopped. The sound stopped with her, half a beat late, a shoe coming down on wet grass and settling. Rory turned her head. The path behind her lay empty, the grass unbent, her own prints pressed dark into the dirt. She held the phone up and swept the light across the bracken. Nothing standing. Nothing crouched. The light reached the treeline and died there. She put her foot down. The step came again, half a beat late, matching her, and she did not turn round this time. She kept walking, and the pendant kept its heat, and the second set of footsteps kept its distance. A shape moved at the edge of the light. Not the centre. Never the centre. Off to the left, past the phone's reach, where the bracken met the dark, something the size of a person stood between two trunks. She snapped the light towards it and found a trunk. Just a trunk, ridged and grey, with a fold of ivy down one side. She turned her head again, slowly, and this time the shape was on her right. Her thumb found the pendant through her shirt. It had gone cold, colder than the night, colder than her fingers, and the cold spread up her hand. It had never done that before. Warm near the gate, warmer all through the walk, and now cold — which meant she had walked away from whatever it was for and into something else. The oaks opened. She came out of the trees into a clearing ringed with trunks grown so thick and so old that their roots had fused into a floor of knuckled wood, and the pendant lay on her chest like a stone pulled from a river. Twelve of them, or eleven, or twelve. She tried to count and lost the thread twice. Wildflowers covered the ground between the roots. Foxgloves. Bluebells, out of season. Something white and low that she had no name for. All of it in bloom, heads lifted, no wind in them. She crouched and put her fingers under a bluebell stalk. It was warm. The whole clearing was warm. Her phone buzzed in her hand. A notification she had not wanted or asked for. She looked at the screen. Twenty-three forty, it said. Then the numbers changed, 23:40 to 02:17, and the battery dropped from eighty-one to four in the space of one breath, and the screen went black. Rory stood up in the dark. She could not see her own hands. She could see the ring of trunks because they were darker than the dark, and between them, somewhere past the standing boundary, something walked. Not matching her this time. Its own pace. Steady, unhurried, the way a person walks when they know the ground and do not need light to cross it. Her breath went out of her and she made it come back in. The footsteps stopped at the edge of the clearing. Grass bent. She heard it bend, the wet green crush of it, close enough to touch, and nothing, nothing, nothing, and then a voice from behind her left shoulder. "Rory." A woman's voice. Familiar in a way that made her stomach drop, and wrong in a way she could not name, and the pendant went hot again against her ribs, hot enough to hurt, hot enough to brand her. "Rory," it said again, closer, the way someone says a name they have been practising. She did not turn around.