Run: 2026-09-10-01M25DVMA44S8KJD5R6VX7F942

The gate at the Roehampton end of Richmond Park was meant to be locked after dark. Rory put both palms on the ironwork and pushed. The hinge gave with a long complaint that travelled down the railings and out into the dark on either side, and she stood in the gap with the cold of the metal still on her hands, listening to it finish. Nothing answered. No dog, no cyclist, no night guard. Just the trees, standing in rows, and the road behind her with a single lamp burning over an empty bus stop. She pulled the gate to behind her and left it unlatched. Six months of climbing fire escapes for Yu-Fei had taught her that a clean exit mattered more than a tidy one. The pendant sat warm under her jumper. It had hummed like that since Clapham, a steady heat that grew when she turned east and cooled when she turned west, so she had walked the whole way with her palm flat against her sternum, steering by it, and now, past the gate, it burned. Eva's text sat unread at the top of her phone. Two lines, sent at half nine. Grove is a pocket. It's not always where it was. Don't go alone. Rory had gone alone. Eva worked nights and Rory was not going to stand in a doorway with a mug of tea and wait for permission to follow a stone that had been leading her halfway across London for a week. The path past the pond ran straight. She could see maybe ten yards of it before the dark closed the rest. Gravel, a bin, the low black shoulder of a bench. Her boots made a sound she liked — crunch, crunch, an anchor — and she fixed her eyes on the pale strip of trail and counted gates. The first wrong thing was the quiet. Richmond Park at night sounded like a city pretending to be a field. Planes, always, stacked over Heathrow, one after another, a low growl that never quite stopped. Foxes shrieking. The wind through a hundred thousand leaves. She had walked it before, with Eva, in summer, and it had been noisy as a motorway with a deer problem. Now the sky was empty. No planes. No wind. Her own steps, and the blood in her ears, and that was all. She stopped. A bird would have been a comfort. Even a pigeon. She tilted her head back and looked for the orange smear of light pollution over the city to the east, and it was there, dim and low, so the city was still there, so this was only a park being a park, and a park at two in the morning could be quiet. Except it was only half eleven. She checked. 11:47, said the phone, and the clock had said 11:47 when she unlatched the gate, and she had been walking for longer than a minute. She took four steps and looked again. 11:47. Rory slid the phone into her jacket and kept walking. On her left, thirty feet off the path, something moved at the top of a hawthorn bush — a black shrug of motion, gone as soon as her eye went to it, the way a deer's ear goes, the way a coat on a hook is only a coat. She watched the bush for twelve steps. It did not move again. The pendant was hot enough now to feel through wool and cotton, a small round coin of heat, and it had stopped steering her. It only burned. The standing stones stood further in than she had expected, past a rise and down into a bowl of land that shouldn't have existed in the middle of the park, because she had come in low along the pond and she had not climbed. She stopped at the lip