Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2C5KS38AASWGHK62Y7YSS

The note had been pushed under her door between the second and third lock, folded into quarters, the paper thick as a wedding invitation. *Richmond Park. The oaks that stand alone. Midnight. Bring the stone.* No name. Rory had read it four times over a cold carton of Yu-Fei's egg-fried rice, then pulled on her boots. Now she stood at the edge of the bracken with her bike leaning against a fence post a quarter mile back, the delivery bag still strapped across her chest. It smelled of ginger and soy. Something ordinary to hold on to. The park had no business being this quiet. London hummed even at midnight, a low engine note that lived under everything, and out here it had cut off, as if someone had closed a door on it. She pulled her phone from her pocket. 11:52. The screen lit her knuckles blue. "Right," she said. Her voice came out flat and small. "Let's see who's so shy." She walked. Frost silvered the grass, and each step broke it with a sound like biting into celery. Ahead, the ground rose toward a ring of oaks. She had seen them on the walk up, black against a sky the colour of a bruise, and counted seven. Now she counted them again as she closed the distance. Nine. She stopped and counted a third time, pointing a finger at each trunk. Seven. She let out a breath that smoked in front of her face. "Tired," she told the dark. "You're tired, Carter." The pendant lay against her breastbone, under her jumper, and it had gone warm. Not the warmth of skin. It pulsed, slow, like a thumb pressing and releasing on a bruise. She pulled the chain free and let the crimson stone rest in her palm. A faint light moved inside it, a coal in ash. She stepped between two of the standing oaks. The cold let go of her. It slid off her shoulders like a coat removed by careful hands, and the air turned soft and damp and green. Flowers ran across the clearing in a thick carpet, foxglove and cornflower and something white with a smell of honey and old pennies. In January. Their heads all tilted, as one, in her direction. "Okay," Rory whispered. "No. Okay." She checked her phone. 11:52. She watched the numbers for a full minute, thumb hovering. They did not change. The silence in the grove had a texture to it. Not the absence of sound but the held breath before it, a room where a conversation had stopped when she opened the door. She turned a slow circle. The oaks pressed close, their bark ridged and deep-cut, and where the moonlight touched them the grooves looked like mouths sewn shut with moss. "Hello?" Nothing answered. A moth crossed the clearing, and she followed it with her eyes until it vanished against the black. "I got your note. I brought the stone. Whoever you are, I'd like to get home before my landlord opens up and finds my bed empty." The wind moved through the grass, though the flowers stood still. She took a step toward the centre. Behind her, a second step landed. Rory froze. The sound had been soft, the crunch of a boot in frost, but there was no frost in the grove. There were only flowers, and flowers did not crunch. She waited. Her pulse pounded in the crescent scar on her left wrist, the old childhood mark she had never once felt, and now it itched like a nettle sting. She took another step. A beat later, the second step came again, a half-second behind. Same weight. Same stride length. "Very funny," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word. She cleared her throat. "Nice trick. Echo's brilliant." She lifted her left foot and did not put it down. The footstep did not come. She stood on one leg like a heron, arms out, and counted her heartbeats. Ten. Twenty. The flowers leaned closer. Somewhere, very far off, water dripped into water. She set her foot down. And the other foot, the one that wasn't hers, finished its step. The hair on her arms lifted under her sleeves. She did not turn. Every instinct she owned, the ones that had carried her out of Evan's flat with one bag and a bus ticket, told her the same thing: *do not show it your face yet.* "Right," she said, softer now. "I know you're there. I'm not daft. What do you want?" Something shifted at the edge of her vision. She kept her head still and rolled her eyes left. A pale smear hung between two trunks, tall and narrow, about the width of a doorframe. When she snapped her gaze to it, the smear became a birch sapling, thin and silver, one she would have sworn had not been there. She looked away. She looked back. The sapling had moved a foot closer to her. "Nope," she breathed. She backed up. The sapling stayed where it was, but the shadow beside it did not. The shadow drew itself along the ground toward her, patient, thin as spilled ink finding the low places in a floor. The pendant flared against her palm. She yelped and nearly dropped it. The stone burned bright now, red light leaking between her fingers and painting the flowers the colour of old blood. Where the glow touched the petals, they curled inward, and beneath them, in the soil, something pale flexed. Fingers. Or roots shaped like fingers. "Don't," she told them. Her voice shook. "Don't, all right? I'm just the delivery girl." A sound rose behind her. It began as a hum, a single held note that might have come from a wet finger circling a glass. Then it split into two notes, then three, and she understood, with a slow, cold drop in her stomach, that it was a voice. Many voices, all pitched beneath speech, all rehearsing a word they had not yet learned to say. The word, when it came, was her name. "*Rory.*" It came from her left. Then from her right. Then, warm and wet against the back of her neck, from directly behind. "*Laila.*" She had not told anyone that name in three years. She kept her eyes on the pulsing stone. The light inside it slowed, slowed, then held steady, a red eye staring back. She closed her fist around it until the silver chain bit her skin. "How do you know that?" she asked. The humming stopped mid-note. Every flower in the clearing turned its face away from her at once, and the grove exhaled, a long dry breath that rustled the oak leaves overhead. Then it went quiet again, and this time the quiet had weight. It pressed on her ears and on the backs of her knees. Directly behind her, close enough that she felt the air displace, something drew in a breath and did not let it out. Rory stood with the pendant burning in her fist and her shadow stretched long across the flowers, and beside it, joined at her heels, lay a second shadow with too many shoulders.