Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2CHMKVAETK4KA11DBK4PC

The order slip had said *Richmond Park, Pen Ponds car park, 11:40 p.m.* Yu-Fei's handwriting, block capitals, the way she wrote when she was in a hurry. Rory killed the bike's engine and let the silence settle around her. She pulled out her phone. One bar, then none, then one. "Yu-Fei, it's me. I'm at the car park. There's nobody here." She turned a slow circle, the headlamp swinging its white beam across bracken and bare trees. "The customer's name is blank. Just a phone number, and it goes straight to a dead tone. Ring me back, yeah?" She hung up. The voicemail would reach Yu-Fei eventually, or it wouldn't. The slip had a second line, in smaller writing: *Follow the path to the stones. Customer will meet you.* Rory read it twice. Yu-Fei never sent her past a front door. She slung the insulated bag over her shoulder, took the torch from the pannier and walked. Gravel gave way to packed earth, and earth gave way to grass that hissed against her boots. Her breath smoked. Frost had silvered the ferns on either side of the path, and every blade cracked when she stepped near it. Except the ones ahead. Those stayed green. She stopped at the tree line. Beyond it, a low hill sloped toward a ring of grey-black oak trunks, each one taller than her and worn smooth as river stones. Wildflowers crowded the ground between them: foxglove, cornflower, poppies the colour of a fresh cut. In November. "Right," she said. Her voice sounded thin, as if the air had thinned it. "Nope. That's not a thing." The pendant against her breastbone had turned warm. She pressed two fingers to the silver chain and felt the stone pulse under her jacket, slow, like a second heartbeat set a little behind her own. She had felt that warmth twice before, and neither time had ended with her home for supper. She could go back. Chuck the bag in the bin, tell Yu-Fei the customer never showed. The bike was two hundred metres behind her. She could see the pale rectangle of the car park through the trees. She looked back. The trees had closed over it. The path she had walked, packed earth and frost, ran on behind her for about ten paces and then dissolved into ferns. "Fine." Her thumb found the crescent scar on her left wrist and rubbed it, an old habit. The scar was itching. It had not itched in fifteen years. "Fine. Deliver the food. Get the tip. Go home." She stepped through the ring. The cold stopped. It did not fade, it stopped, as though someone had shut a door on it. The air inside smelled of cut grass and hot copper. She lowered the torch. The beam looked weak here, a torch in a room already lit, though she could find no light source at all. The flowers glowed faintly at the edges, like the last coals of a fire. "Hello?" She held up the bag. "Golden Empress. Order for..." She checked the slip. The name line was still empty. "Order for someone. Hello?" Nothing answered. A breeze moved through the grove, and it carried a sound with it. A kettle. The rising whistle of a kettle coming to the boil, thin and domestic, somewhere behind the far stones. Rory's mouth went dry. She swung the torch toward the noise. Oak, shadow, poppies. The whistle climbed, held its note, and cut out mid-breath, the way a recording cuts when someone lifts the needle. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay, okay." She checked her phone. 11:41. She watched the numbers for a full minute, and they did not change. Something moved on her right. She spun, and it stopped. A stalk of foxglove was nodding, as if a hand had just brushed past it. Nothing stood near it. When she looked at the next stem, that one nodded too, and then the next, a slow ripple travelling around the ring behind her, staying just outside where the torch reached. She backed toward the centre of the circle and kept the beam on the ripple. Every flower it lit went still. Every flower behind her stirred. "You're the customer," she said, louder. The words came out flat and reasonable, a voice for a doorstep. "Right? That's you. I've got prawn crackers, I've got a chow mein that's going cold, and I'd like to go home. So come and take it." Behind her, in the space her voice had just left, something repeated it. *...take it.* Not an echo. An echo would have come back from the stones in her own pitch. This came from low down and close, a few words dragged out through a throat that did not know their weight. It mimicked her rhythm, the small lift on *take*, but it had no breath under it. Rory did not turn. Her hand had gone to the pendant, and the stone burned against her palm now, hot enough to leave a mark. "That's not funny," she said. *...funny.* Closer. She counted the stones because counting gave her something to do with her mind. Twelve. She had counted twelve from outside. Now she counted eleven, and again, and the gap sat on her left, a black slot between two trunks where a thirteenth might have stood. A thin grey shape leaned in the slot. It might have been a birch. It might have been the space where a birch would go. When she looked directly at it, she saw only bark and dark. When she looked away, it grew tall. She set the bag down. She did it slowly, one strap at a time, and kept her eyes on the gap. The foil lids rattled as the bag touched the grass. "I'm leaving this here," she said. "It's paid for. It's yours. I'm going." The whistle started again, and now it came from directly behind her, at the height of her ear. She smelled the copper, hot and sweet. She walked. She did not run, because her whole body understood that running was the thing it wanted. She walked toward the gap in the stones where the path should have been, and the grass slid past her boots, and the flowers turned on their stalks to follow her. Every bloom faced her. Every one had been facing her for a while. Five paces from the edge, her footsteps doubled. She stopped. The second set of steps stopped half a beat later. Her breath left her in a white plume. Behind her, at the base of her neck, another breath left too, and it was warm, and it was not smoking at all.