Run: 2026-09-24-01M39WADW5FQ435AAVD1SDT670

The order came through at 23:41, and Yu-Fei rang before Rory had finished zipping the insulated bag. "You're taking it?" The kettle hissed behind Yu-Fei's voice. "Triple fare. Cash on delivery." "Who orders congee at midnight?" "Same gentleman as before. Pen Ponds, Richmond Park, follow the oaks. He leaves coins in the till. Old ones. Silver. The bank takes them fine." A click as the kettle shut off. "Plain congee again. I send chilli oil every time. He never touches it." "Maybe he's boring." "Maybe." Yu-Fei's voice dropped to something meant for a smaller room. "Leave the moped at the gate, love. Don't ride it past the oaks." "Why not?" "Old habit." Rory hung up on the silence that followed and told herself the fare would cover two months of rent to Silas. The pendant under her collar had been warm since Kingston Bridge. Warm meant one thing, and she'd promised herself in daylight that she'd stop following it. Daylight made a lot of promises. The gates at Robin Hood were chained. She climbed, hid the moped behind the noticeboard, and walked in with the bag in one hand and her torch in the other. Richmond sat under the Heathrow flight path; planes came over every ninety seconds, dragging their noise across the sky. She counted her steps to the treeline and realised she hadn't heard a single one. No engines. No planes. No city hum at all, the way a room goes quiet when someone in the next room stops moving. The oaks stood out of the dark like pillars in a burnt house. Twelve of them, she noted, marking the gap she'd need on the way back. Bark grown smooth and grey as driftwood. Grass inside the circle green as April, though November had come through here with frost — frost on everything except a ring of ground that steamed faintly, as if the soil had a pulse. Poppies and snowdrops shared the same clump. She looked at that for a while and decided not to think about it. Signal showed four bars. She dialled the number on the order. One ring. "You've brought it." The voice was pleasant, unhurried, and placed its pauses in the wrong spots. "Set it down at the stones. Then go back the way you came." "Name for the receipt?" "Go back the way you came." "The gate's locked, I'll have to—" "Don't count the stones." The line stayed open. Breathing, slow and even, the way you'd breathe in your sleep. She hung up. The dark took the phone's glow and gave nothing back. Somewhere behind her, a twig snapped. Then another, in step with her heartbeat, which was faster than any twig deserved. "Deer," she said, because Richmond had deer, and deer were a thing the world still made. Deer didn't walk in rhythm with her. She took three steps. Three steps answered, a half-beat late, like a sound travelling back up a long corridor. She stopped. The echo took one more step and quit. She turned the torch on the treeline. The beam bent. Not much — a degree, two — the way light leans going through water, curving around one oak as if the trunk were thicker than it looked, or deeper. To her left, between two stones, stood a tall paleness. Not white. The colour the sky remembers after sunset. Her eyes slid to it and slid off, the way a nail slides off glass, and when she forced her head around to look full at the gap there was nothing there but trunks and the honest dark between them. She walked. The space between her and that gap shortened without anything in it moving. "Rora?" Her mother's Welsh, warm, from the kitchen years and years gone. "Dinner's on, cariad." Rory's grip tightened on the bag handle. Isolde had given her three rules once, laughing, as if they were a joke about tourists: never answer, never thank, never give your name. She pressed her lips shut and kept walking. Eva's laugh came next, from behind a stone to her right, at some joke from a night in a Cardiff pub that didn't exist anymore. Then — closer, from the direction she was heading, which was wrong in every way a direction could be wrong — Evan. "You left the door open, Rory." Her breath went shallow. Her hands went cold on the handles, and the bag's steam rose in a thin ribbon and drifted sideways, against the wind there wasn't, curling toward the oaks like something pouring into a mouth. She did not answer. She did not run. Running, she suspected, was a kind of answer. The torch dimmed to a brown ember. She checked her phone: 03:12. She'd checked it at the gate — 23:52. Twenty minutes of walking had eaten four hours, and the battery had gone from 84 to 9 percent, and the moon had crossed to the wrong quarter of the sky, and it was full when it should have been a nail-paring, and she laughed once at all of it, one short bark, and the laugh came back to her from four directions. She counted the stones as she turned for the gate. It steadied her, numbers, arithmetic, the small dry part of her brain that wrote legal briefs. Eleven. She'd entered through a gap between two of them. There should have been twelve. She counted again, slower, touching each trunk with her eyes. Thirteen. The new one stood between her and the way out. It hadn't grown; things that grow don't arrive. It simply occupied the path now, the way a moment occupies a second, and its bark carried a long vertical seam the colour of the inside of an eyelid, and the seam was wet. The pendant burned. Not warm now — hot, a coal on its chain against her sternum, dragging. It pulled toward the gap between two stones on the far side of the circle, where the dark sat deeper than the night had any right to stock, and as she watched, the dark bulged outward, gently, the way a curtain does when someone on the other side leans a palm against it. "Rory." Behind her. Close. Close enough that the word carried warmth against her ear. "You're late." She knew the voice. She heard it every morning of her life, saying her own name into the bathroom mirror. She turned around.