Run: 2026-09-23-01M37PMJMTW98RSGRGQA8BQS7G

The order had come through at 11:52, and Yu-Fei had held the ticket out between two fingers as if it might bite her. "Prepaid. Cash tip in the envelope. Fifty quid." She'd tapped the address line. "You tell me what that says." *Richmond Park. The oak stones. Ask for Laila.* Nobody called her Laila. Nobody had called her Laila since Cardiff, since a boy in Year Nine had mangled Aurora into something softer and it had stuck for one wet summer. Rory had stared at the ticket long enough for the kitchen extractor to cycle twice. Then she'd taken the bag. Now she stood at the edge of the deer paths with a carton of salt-and-pepper squid going cold against her hip and the scooter ticking behind her in the dark. Richmond at night wasn't London. The city's orange haze stopped somewhere back at the gates, as if it had hit glass. Out here the sky was a bruise with no stars in it, and the grass stood knee-high and silver where her torch touched it. She'd walked this park in daylight with Eva, two summers ago, eating chips on a bench and watching stags lock antlers. She didn't remember it being this big. She thumbed her phone. One bar. She rang anyway. "It's gone midnight, you absolute menace." Eva's voice came thick with sleep and television. "If this is about Silas and the boiler again—" "I'm in Richmond Park." A pause. The telly went quiet. "Why are you in Richmond Park?" "Delivery." "To who? The deer?" "Someone who knows my name. My old name." Rory swept the torch across the slope ahead. The beam snagged on a shape, dark and upright, then another beside it. "I think I can see the stones." "Rory. Turn around. Get on your bike and turn around." "Fifty quid tip, Eva." "I'll give you fifty quid." "You owe me eighty already." She stepped off the path. The grass swished against her jeans. "Stay on the line, yeah? Just talk to me." "About what?" "Anything. Your shift. The bloke from the gym." Eva started talking. Rory let the words wash over her, a warm tide of ordinary nonsense, and kept walking. The stones weren't stones. She saw that when she got within twenty feet. They were oak, or had been once: trunks cut or grown into rough pillars taller than her, grey-skinned, whorled with knots that looked like they'd been pressed into wet clay by thumbs. Seven of them. A ring. Inside, the grass gave way to something shorter and softer, and the torch lit up flowers. Bluebells. Foxgloves. Poppies, red as a cut. Something white and starry she had no name for. It was the second week of January. "—and he just *stood* there with his protein shake, like I was meant to—Rory? You've gone quiet." "There are flowers." "What?" "It's January and there are flowers." She crouched at the boundary. She didn't cross it. The air coming off the clearing smelled of June, of cut grass and warm soil, and it pressed against her face like breath. "Loads of them." "Okay. That's weird. That's a *leave* kind of weird." Against her sternum, beneath her hoodie, the pendant warmed. Rory's hand went to it without her deciding. The Heartstone sat beneath the fabric, no bigger than her thumbnail, and it had never done more than glow faintly in the dark of her bedroom. Now it throbbed. Slow. A second heartbeat, out of step with her own. "Eva." Nothing. "Eva?" She pulled the phone from her ear. The screen said *Call Connected: 00:04:17*. Then *00:04:17*. Then *00:04:17*. The seconds weren't moving. The clock at the top of the screen read 00:31. She'd pulled up at the gates at 00:24. That felt right. That felt fine. She watched it, and it flickered, and it read 03:08. "No," she said to it. "No, you don't." She hung up and dialled again. It didn't ring. It didn't do anything. The little wheel spun and spun. Somewhere behind her, the scooter's engine ticked as it cooled. Rory turned. The slope ran down to the path, grey and empty. She couldn't see the bike from here. She'd walked maybe two hundred yards. Hadn't she? The ticking came clear, metallic, patient, and she realised she shouldn't be able to hear it at all. *Tick.* She faced the stones again. "Hello?" Her voice went out flat and came back from nowhere. No echo, no give. As if the dark had swallowed it and not bothered to chew. "Delivery for Laila." The flowers moved. No wind. She'd have felt wind. The foxgloves nodded, all of them, the whole ring bowing inward toward the centre as though something had passed through and they'd leaned to watch it go. Rory held the torch steady. Her grip made the plastic creak. "I've got your squid," she said, and hated how thin it sounded. She set the bag down on the grass outside the stones. Right on the line. The polythene rustled and settled. She took two steps back. The grass hissed behind her. She spun. Nothing. The field lay silver and still in the torchlight, every blade upright. She swept left. Right. A tree, far off, black and fingered against the black sky. That was all. When she turned back, the bag had gone. Not moved. Gone. The grass where she'd put it lay flattened in a neat rectangle, the shape of the carton pressed into it like a footprint. "Right," Rory said. "Right. Payment's been received, then. Lovely. I'll be off." She walked. Didn't run. Running meant admitting something was worth running from, and she wasn't ready to give it that. Down the slope, torch on the path, counting her steps under her breath the way she used to count stairs in the house with Evan, when she'd needed to know exactly how far the door was. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Her footsteps whispered through the grass. Fourteen. And again, a half-beat late. *Swish.* She stopped. The second step landed. Then nothing. Rory didn't turn around. She knew, the way you know a stair's missing in the dark before your foot finds air, that if she turned around there'd be nothing there, and that nothing would be worse. She fixed the torch on the grass ahead of her and made herself breathe through her nose. At the edge of the light, low to the ground, something pale drew back. A hand. It could have been a hand. Long, long fingers, the colour of the white starry flowers, sliding out of the beam and into the dark as neatly as a cat tucking in its tail. "I can see you," she said. The pendant beat against her chest. Hot now. Hot enough to sting. From the stones behind her, soft and fond and perfect, came her mother's voice. "Laila, love. You've forgotten your change." Rory's scar itched. The little crescent on her wrist, from the garden gate when she was six, from the day her mum had held her hand under the cold tap and sung to her until she stopped crying. She pressed her thumb against it, hard. "My mum's in Cardiff," she said. "Come and get it, cariad. It's only a few steps." The torch beam trembled. She steadied it with both hands. Ahead of her, the path should have been there. The path had been right there. Instead the grass ran on and on, unbroken, silver, all the way to a horizon that had no business existing inside the M25. She looked down at her feet. In the soft ground beside her trainers, a second pair of prints was sinking into the earth, slow and deliberate. Her size. Her tread. Pointing back toward the stones. The grass swished again, close enough to feel it against her ankle. Rory didn't move.