Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2AXD78N7PZWJNGYVCY58B

The last bus to Richmond had dropped Rory at the Petersham gate at half past eleven. The driver had watched her step off with the expression of a man who wanted to ask a question and had decided against it. Now the park swallowed her. Her boots crunched over frost, and her breath hung in front of her face, gray against the black. She thumbed the note out of her jacket pocket and read it again by phone light, though she'd memorized it on the Tube. The paper had come tucked between two cartons of Yu-Fei's crispy duck, in handwriting she didn't know. *Isolde's grove. Midnight. She will not wait.* "Cheerful," Rory muttered. Her voice sounded flat. The cold seemed to press it down into the grass before it travelled anywhere. She walked. The path narrowed to a deer track, then to nothing, and she navigated by the pale trunks of the oaks and the blue smear of her torch. Somewhere behind her a branch cracked. She stopped. Listened. A deer, probably. Richmond had hundreds of them. The branch did not crack again. That bothered her more than if it had. At the crest of a shallow rise, the stones appeared. Five of them, maybe six, ancient oak trunks petrified to the color of old bone, each taller than she was. They stood in a rough ring with gaps between them like missing teeth. Beyond them, the dark looked thicker. The pendant at her chest went warm. She pressed her palm over it through her jacket. The Heartstone had never done that in her flat, or on the bike, or in the walk-in freezer at the Golden Empress where she'd once stood for a full minute out of pure spite. Warmth spread through the crimson stone in slow pulses, like a second heartbeat set slightly out of rhythm with her own. "Right," she said. "Noted." She stepped between two of the stones. The air changed. It didn't warm so much as soften, as though she'd walked through a curtain of breath. The frost stopped at the boundary. Under her boots, the grass gave way to something springy and dry, and her torch caught the color of flowers: poppies, foxgloves, a drift of bluebells, all open and nodding in the middle of January. They smelled wrong. Sweet, but with something beneath the sweetness, the way a fridge smells when the power's been off for a week. "Hello?" She kept her voice level. "I got your note. Whoever you are." Nothing answered. The clearing spread out before her, a wide bowl of blossoms under a sky that held no stars. She turned her head and checked. No stars anywhere. No orange glow of London either, and there was always an orange glow of London. She checked her phone. 11:52. She watched the display for ten seconds. It read 11:52. She watched ten more. 11:52. "Brilliant." She pocketed it and walked toward the center. Flowers brushed her shins. One foxglove bent as she passed, following her, and she told herself it was the wind, although nothing else moved. The bluebells hung dead still. The foxglove leaned after her, slow as a sunflower tracking noon. Rory stopped. The foxglove stopped. She had a good head for these things. Her mother called it her barrister's blood, her father called it stubbornness, and Evan had called it something else, during the last year, whenever she'd pointed out a hole in one of his stories. She did not scream at plants. She breathed in for four, out for four, and kept walking. The sound started at her left. Soft. Rhythmic. A wet, patient *tk… tk… tk…* like a fingernail tapping against a hollow gourd. She swung the torch. Poppies. Grass. The nearest standing stone, thirty feet away, its shadow stretched long and wrong across the ground. The tapping stopped. "Not funny," she said. It started again on her right. She turned, and the light slid over the ring of stones, and one of them was not where it had been. Or every stone was where it had been and the gap she'd walked through had moved. She counted. Six stones. She had counted five. Her mouth went dry. She counted again, slower, touching each one with the beam. Six. Something moved at the edge of the light. She snapped her head toward it and found nothing: a long stalk of cow parsley, swaying. But the swaying belonged to no breeze. It kept a beat, and the beat matched the tapping, and the tapping matched the pulse of the stone against her sternum. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay. Out of the pool, Rory." She backed toward the gap she'd entered by. Three steps. Four. Her heel caught on something soft and she looked down to see a scatter of small white shapes half-buried in the petals. Hazelnut shells. Dozens of them, cracked open and licked clean, arranged in a spiral that spun around her feet. She had stepped into the middle of it. She lifted her boot slowly, as if the shells might notice. Behind her, very close, someone breathed out. She did not turn. Every hair on her arms had risen, and she felt the exhale as a shift in the air along the back of her neck, cool and faintly damp, carrying the sweet-rot smell of the flowers. She held the torch rigid. The beam trembled anyway, and the poppies in its circle trembled with it, and she realized the trembling in the poppies did not match her hand. "Laila," said a voice. It was her voice. Not an imitation. Not a cousin of it. Her own tone, her own Cardiff vowels sanded flat by four years in London, coming from a point six inches behind her left ear. Nobody had called her Laila in this park. Nobody in the world knew to call her that except a few people, and none of them lived. "Laila," it said again, with the exact weight she'd give a friend across a crowded pub. "You're late." Rory closed her eyes for one second. Behind the lids, the pendant's warmth throbbed hot enough to sting, and the tapping had stopped, and the whole clearing had gone so quiet that she heard the blood in her own ears. She opened her eyes. The light in her hand had dimmed to the color of weak tea. Ahead of her, at the far side of the bowl, where the flowers grew thickest, a figure stood between two of the stones. It stood too still. It had the height of a woman and the outline of a woman, but the torchlight passed over it without catching, the way it might slide across a hole. Long hair hung to the shoulder. Straight. Black. Rory lowered her hand from the pendant, slowly, and let it hang at her side. "That's a hell of a trick," she said. The figure tilted its head. The gesture came a half-second after hers.