Run: 2026-09-23-01M36TZSH1SYXF1EW34Z95NW9G

The oaks began where the park map stopped. Rory ducked past the last of the railing and the London sound fell away behind her, the distant siren thinning to nothing as if the trees swallowed the note whole. She checked her phone. 23:47. Eva's message glowed on the screen, three days old, the words so short they read like a code: The grove. Moonrise. Come alone or don't come. Rory killed the screen and slid the phone into her jacket pocket. The cold bit at her fingers. She still smelled of chilli oil and lemongrass from the last delivery of her shift, and the golden foil bag sat crumpled in her other pocket like a nervous habit she couldn't shake. Between the two nearest oaks, stones stood in a rough arc, taller than her, pale as bone under a sky the colour of bruises. Wildflowers crowded their feet. February, and they bloomed anyway — foxglove and something blue she didn't have a name for, open and shining with dew. "That's new," she muttered, and the words came out small. She stepped through the gap in the stones. The air changed on her skin. Warmer. It carried the green stink of turned earth and a sweetness underneath, the kind of sweetness that sat at the back of the throat like a swallowed secret. She pulled the Heartstone free of her collar. The crimson gem held its dull glow against her palm and she closed her fist around it and kept walking. The grove opened ahead of her, a bowl of grass ringed by trees so old their trunks had split and grown back around the damage. Moonlight pooled in the middle of it. She had a torch in her pocket and she left it there. Whoever had answered Eva's last message would take a bright light as a threat. "Isolde?" Her voice reached the far tree line and stopped there. "It's Rory Carter. You wanted me." An owl called somewhere above. She slowed, counted the beats between it and her heartbeat, and the owl called again — the same sound, the same length, the same stutter at the end of it. A recording played twice by a machine that didn't understand birdsong. She stopped walking. "I came alone." Silence stretched. Then a sound behind her, low and long, the creak of a trunk giving weight to something climbing it. Rory turned. The oaks stood in their ring, the stones beyond them, the gap she had come through. Nothing moved. But one of the standing stones wore a shadow that pointed the wrong way, west, while every other shadow in the grove leaned east under the same moon. She looked at that shadow for a long time and then she looked away from it. "Eva's been gone eleven days," she said to the trees. "Her flat still smells of her tea. Her mum's called me four times. I need to know what you did with her." A petal fell from somewhere and landed on the back of her left hand, warm as a fingertip. She flicked it off and it drifted down and settled among a hundred others, and when she looked at the grass where the petals gathered, they lay in a shape. Not a pattern. A shape. Two arcs and a line, like a mouth held open. She moved her boot through it and the petals scattered and did not come back together. The Heartstone stirred against her chest. A slow pulse, one she had felt twice before — once in the alley behind the Golden Empress, once on the platform at Bank — and both times the air had opened somewhere close and something had come out of it. Her fingers found the scar on her left wrist, the old crescent, and she pressed her nail into it until the small pain steadied her. "Play fair," she said. "I'm not here to cross anyone." The whispering began so faint she mistook it for the river. Then her ear caught the shape of it — a voice counting, dropping the numbers and picking them up again, skipping the ones that came after seven the way a child skips stones. Behind the counting, another voice underneath, slower, saying her name in a shape that was almost Rory and not quite. "Who's counting?" she asked. The counting continued. Closer now, past the stones, in the grass at the edge of the moonlight. Rory took three steps sideways so the widest oak stood between her and the sound. Her back found the bark and the bark gave a little, warm, like breathing through a coat. She did not pull away. Cool-headed, Eva always said. Cool head, warm heart, no sense. "Ten," said the counting voice, and it had a smile in it. "Ten, ten, ten." Numbers lay across the grass where nothing had lain. Footprints filled with moonlight instead of shadow, the size of her own boots, printing a path from the far tree line to the spot where she now stood. Her path. Her tread. The wear on the left heel matched the sole she'd bought at the market in Camden last spring. But they started before she arrived. They ended where she stood and continued past her, four more sets, into the dark between the oaks. Rory breathed. She counted her own numbers and did not say them out loud. Her thumb rubbed the Heartstone and it answered with a heat that climbed the silver chain and pricked the hollow of her throat. "One more," she said, "and I'm gone. That's the whole deal. One answer for one question." The air in front of her shimmered. Nothing came out of it. Something stood just behind the shimmer, tall and thin and made of the same wrong angles as the shadow on the stone, and it regarded her the way a person regards a word they are about to mispronounce on purpose. "Eva," she said. "Where is she?" The mouth-shape in the petals reformed at her feet, wider now, and the counting voice said seven and meant it, and the whisper underneath turned her name into two syllables that were not hers. The Heartstone flared against her chest, hot enough to make her gasp, and the shimmer in front of her leaned closer.