Run: 2026-09-24-01M39X4D1BB3KF5YJ086Y5Z29Q

Rory ducked under the low arm of the boundary oak and the city dropped away behind her like a lid settling over a pot. The clearing opened in front of her, silver-lit, though she couldn't have said where the light came from. No moon overhead, just a smear of cloud. Wildflowers ran to her knees across the whole hollow — foxglove and something she didn't recognize, pale as bone — blooming fat and open in the middle of November. The Heartstone pulsed against her sternum, quicker now, a second heartbeat layered under her own. "Okay." She said it out loud just to hear a voice that belonged to her. "I came. Whoever left this at the Empress, with my name on the box — Malphora, very funny — I'm here. Let's talk." The grove did not answer. It did something worse. It listened. Richmond Park sat inside London, and London never slept quiet. She should have heard the low drone of the A316, a plane peeling into Heathrow, a dog barking two counties over. Nothing reached her. Her boots pressed into the grass and the sound of each step lasted exactly as long as it should and no longer, as if the grove permitted it and then withdrew the permission. She pulled out her phone. 2:14 a.m., no signal. She thumbed the screen dark, raised it again. 2:14. The battery icon read full, then half, then full again while she watched it. "Great." She pocketed the phone and walked to the centre of the clearing, where the grass grew in a perfect ring of bare earth. The pendant burned hotter with every step. Whoever had left it on Yu-Fei's counter — wrapped in brown paper, tied with string, no note but her name — had wanted her to follow it here. Fine. She'd followed it. She was a big believer in confronting a problem before it grew roots. Something dripped, off to her left. A slow, deliberate drip, like water off a tap into tin. There was no stream in the grove. She'd been here in daylight, back in September, when the place had seemed like nothing more than a pretty hollow with too many flowers. She turned toward the sound. The drip stopped. She stood in the dark with her head cocked, counting seconds. At the tenth, it started again — three drops, evenly spaced, patient. Then it moved. Closer. Behind her right shoulder. Rory turned in a full circle, slow, fists up out of a habit she'd thought she'd buried with Evan. Nothing between her and the standing oaks but flowers. Nothing behind the flowers but darkness, and the darkness was the kind that had weight to it, the kind that sat against the eyes like a hand. One more step, she told herself. Then you leave. She took the step, and behind her, half a beat late, something took one too. She froze. It didn't. A single soft sound — grass compressing under weight — and then stillness, the way a person goes still when they realise they've given themselves away. "Hello?" Her voice cracked on the second syllable. She cleared her throat and tried again, steadier. "I can hear you. So let's skip the part where I stand here pretending I can't." The silence stretched. Somewhere in it, faint as a memory of a sound, someone began to hum. A lullaby. Four rising notes, four falling. Her mother used to hum it in the kitchen in Cardiff, back before everything. Rory had never told anyone in London that. She had never told anyone anything. The humming came from no direction. It came from the flowers. She looked down. The blooms nearest her feet had turned — every one of them, every pale open face, angled toward her. She lifted her left foot and stepped sideways, and the flowers moved with her, a slow ripple passing through the whole clearing as hundreds of small faces swung to keep her centred. Rory's mouth went dry. She walked backwards, fast, toward the boundary oaks, and the oaks did not come to meet her. She counted her strides. Twenty. Thirty. The nearest trunk stayed the same size against the dark, a coin held at arm's length. The clearing had grown around her the way a mouth grows around a held breath. Her watch — a cheap thing, analogue, never wrong — said she'd been inside for nine minutes. Her calves burned like she'd climbed a mountain. Her jacket stuck to her back. "Right." She stopped. Laughed, one short ugly syllable with nothing behind it. "Time's funny here. I know. I knew that coming in, didn't I? So that's fine. That's fine." The pendant flared. Not a pulse this time — a sustained burn, crimson light leaking through her fingers where she'd clutched it, and in that light she saw the edge of something at the border of her vision, between two of the standing oaks. A paleness. Tall. The suggestion of a shoulder, a tilt of head, cloth or skin or petal. She snapped her gaze to it and the space held nothing but the dark between the trunks. "I saw you." Her voice came out flat and small. "I saw you, so you can stop with the — the games. I'm not the one. Whatever you want, I'm not—" "Laila." The name arrived inside her ear, not at it, a whisper with the warmth of breath and none of the sound. Only one living person called her that. Eva's voice, but wrong — Eva's voice slowed down and stretched thin, like a recording played at half speed, like Eva's voice remembered second-hand by something that had only ever heard it through a wall. Rory ran. The grass grabbed at her ankles. The flowers turned faster than she could move, a wave of pale faces sweeping ahead of her, marking her path as though the grove had already decided where the path went. The Heartstone blazed through her shirt, and its warmth spread outward, down her arm, into her ribs, and with it came a feeling she had no name for — a recognition, a rightness, the grove and the stone and the dark agreeing about something, and her name, her other name, in that agreement. She hit the tree line where the oaks stood. Her palms slapped bark. She looked up into the branches, hunting the gap she'd ducked through, the crooked arm she'd used as a doorway. The branches overhead wove shut and seamless, a ceiling, a lid. Behind her, in the middle of the clearing, four notes rose and four notes fell. Then the humming stopped, and a voice she knew — her own voice, word for word, from minutes ago — said: "Okay. I came." "Laila." The whisper came from directly behind her this time, from the bark itself, from under her feet, from the pendant against her chest. "You kept it warm. We kept you warmer."