Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2D67WWRRDBRZ38ZKA87K0

The gate at Robin Hood Wall was locked, so Rory climbed it, and the first wrong thing was how quiet the park became once she dropped down on the other side. Richmond Park at night was never silent. She had cut through it on the bike in summer, and there had always been something: traffic bleeding in from the A3, the coughing bark of deer, wind working through the bracken. Now there was only the crunch of her own boots on frosted grass, and even that seemed to fall away too quickly, as though the dark were swallowing each step. She checked her phone. 11:42. One bar of signal. Eva's message still sat at the top of the screen. *Grove. Come now. Please don't tell anyone.* Eva never said please. Eva said *hurry up, Rory* and *you're such a snail*, and sent voice notes that ran six minutes and ended mid-sentence. This message had no emoji, no typos. Rory had called four times on the Tube and got straight to voicemail four times, and every time she had told herself that a bad feeling was not evidence. She followed the path Eva had once shown her, past the pond, past the dead oak split by lightning, and into the dense trees beyond. Eva had called it Isolde's grove and laughed when she said it. *Don't ask. Just don't go alone.* Rory zipped her jacket to her chin. Under it, against her sternum, the Heartstone lay cold on its silver chain. Cold was right. She held onto that. The trees closed in. She walked with her phone torch pointed low, and the beam picked out roots, leaf litter, the pale frayed edge of a rabbit run. Behind her a twig snapped. She stopped. The sound had not come from far away. It had come from just behind her left shoulder, close enough that she should have felt breath. She turned, slowly, and swept the torch across the path. Empty trunks. A slick of frost. Nothing. "Eva?" Her voice came out flat and small. "If this is a joke, I'll kill you." No answer. But the silence had a texture now, the held-breath quality of a room where someone has just stopped speaking. She walked on, faster. After a few paces she noticed the echo. Her footsteps were doubling, a soft *crunch-crunch* and then, half a beat behind, another *crunch*. She stopped mid-stride, and the second step came down anyway, unhurried, and then that stopped too. Rory did not turn around this time. She thought about her father, Brendan Carter, cross-examining a witness with the patient courtesy of a man laying out rope. *Establish what you know. Only what you know.* She knew that it was cold. She knew the path was real. She knew a sound had followed her, and that she had not made it. She counted to ten, then walked on, and this time she listened without pretending to be doing anything else. The echo did not come. Instead, off to the right, something moved through the trees, keeping pace with her. She caught it in the corner of her eye: a lean vertical smear of darkness, darker than the trunks, gone the moment she looked at it directly. The next time she glanced that way, it was on her left. *Deer,* she told herself. *It's Richmond Park. It's all deer.* Deer did not hum. It was faint, barely a thread of sound, but it threaded through the trees and settled at the base of her skull. A lullaby. Welsh. Her mother had sung it in the kitchen in Cardiff while the kettle ticked, a tune with no name that Rory had never heard anywhere else. Her mouth went dry. She kept walking because stopping felt like agreeing to something. The standing stones appeared without warning. One moment there was only bracken and black branches, and the next the path opened and they were simply there, a ring of ancient oaks grown so old and gnarled they had turned silver and hard as rock, each one taller than a man and leaning slightly inward like people bent to listen. Eva had told her about them. *They're not stones, technically. But try telling them that.* Rory stepped between two of them. The air changed. It thickened and warmed, and the smell of frost went out of it. In its place came green things, sap and crushed stems and honeyed pollen. The torch beam fell across wildflowers: foxgloves, cornflowers, poppies, a whole hushed carpet of them, blooming in the second week of November. The Heartstone woke against her chest. Warmth spread from it, gentle at first, then insistent, a pulse like a small animal's heartbeat. She drew it out by the chain. The crimson gem, no bigger than her thumbnail, glowed from somewhere deep inside it, and each glow throbbed a little brighter than the last. "No," she whispered. "No, no. Not here." It pulsed harder. Faint warmth, Yu-Fei's friend had said when Rory had shown it once, as a joke. *It only does that when something's close.* She hadn't asked what. The grove was empty. She swung the torch around the ring, over grass and flowers and stone-oak, and found no Eva, no bag, no sign anyone had come here in years. In the center lay a flat patch of moss, faintly depressed, as if something heavy had lain there once and left. She checked her phone. The screen read 11:42. She stared at it. She had been walking for at least fifteen minutes. She watched the display for a full slow minute, and the numbers did not change. Then the message from Eva vanished from the top of her screen. A new one took its place, and the time stamp on it read *Delivered: 11:41 PM*, though she had read it on the Tube hours ago. *Rory, where are you? I'm at your flat. Silas let me in. Are you okay??* Her thumb hovered over the screen. The signal bar had gone. The message sat there, warm and ordinary and full of typos, and it was exactly like Eva. That was the horror of it. It was the one that sounded right. Which meant the other had not been Eva at all. Behind her, very softly, someone said, "Laila." Nobody had called her that in years. It was an old name, a throwaway one, a name she had used in Cardiff to slip out of rooms and men's lives. The voice was warm and patient, pitched to carry exactly as far as her ear. She did not turn. The Heartstone burned against her palm. Around her the wildflowers had gone still, every head bowed the same way, toward the center of the ring where the moss lay pressed flat. Toward her. The humming started again, close now, from all sides at once, from between the standing trees, from the dark beyond the torch's reach. The shape at the edge of her vision stopped darting and stood, at last, quite still. Rory closed her fingers around the pendant and made herself breathe. "I know you're there," she said. It was the steadiest voice she had. "I'm not going to run." The humming stopped. In the silence that followed, she heard what she had been dreading. It was not footsteps, and not breath. It was the small, delighted sound of someone smiling.