Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2DQCHD5XR36YC5QKCYRSD

The order had come in at 11:40, which was late even for a Friday. Yu-Fei had squinted at the ticket, then at Rory, and shrugged. Two containers of crispy duck, a tub of egg fried rice, a carton of the sesame prawns nobody ever ordered. Paid in full, tip included, and the tip was the kind that made you stop reading the address. Richmond Park. *Leave at the oak stones. Do not knock.* So Rory had ridden out with the bag strapped to her back, and now she stood at the Sheen Gate with her bike leaning against a fence post and her breath hanging in front of her. The park was closed. The gate, however, was not locked. It was merely shut, as if someone had done her the courtesy. "Brilliant," she said aloud. Her voice sounded thin in the dark. She wheeled the bike a hundred yards down the path before deciding to leave it. The phone's map showed her as a blue dot floating in a green nothing, no paths, no landmarks. She took the torch from her pocket and walked. The cold was ordinary at first, November cold, the kind that got into the hinges of her fingers. Frost furred the bracken. Somewhere a deer coughed, that hoarse, human bark, and she felt her shoulders unclench. Deer. Fine. She knew what deer were. Then the path bent between two oaks, and the cold stopped. It did not fade. It stopped, the way a sound stops when a door closes. Rory halted with one foot lifted. The air on her face was mild, almost damp, like the breath of a greenhouse. She looked back. The path she had walked was there, pale in the torchlight, but it seemed longer than it should have been. She had come, what, a quarter mile? The gate should have been visible. "Right," she said. "Deliver the food. Go home." The standing stones came up out of the dark in a rough ring, six of them, taller than she was, and they were not stone at all. Oak, black and ancient, the grain twisted in slow spirals as though the wood had been wrung out while it still lived. Between them the ground was thick with flowers. Bluebells. Foxgloves. Something pale and star-shaped she didn't know. In November. They stood perfectly still, and their colours were too clear for torchlight. She stepped between the stones. Her pendant moved against her sternum. It was a small motion, only warmth, a pulse like a thumb pressed lightly to her breastbone. She pulled the silver chain out through her collar and looked at the Heartstone. The crimson had woken. That faint inner glow, usually a sullen ember, had brightened until she could see the shape of her own fingers through it. It was warm when it was near a Hel portal. That was what she had been told, by a voice that had never given her a name, in a note that had never given her a reason. She had not, until now, been sure she believed it. "Not here," she whispered. "This is a park." She crouched and set the bag down at the foot of the tallest stone, and as she unzipped it, the smell of the food rose up, sweet and hot and ridiculous. The duck was still steaming. Forty minutes on a bike, and it was steaming. Behind her, something went *tick*. She turned with the torch. The clearing was empty. The flowers stood in their still ranks. But the sound had been small and dry and exact, like a fingernail tapped once against glass, and it had come from *inside* the ring. Rory stood slowly. She rubbed her left thumb over the crescent scar on her wrist, an old habit, the thing she did when she needed to think. Cool head. Quick mind. Evan used to say she never panicked, as if it were a flaw in her. "Hello?" she said. The grove took the word and did not give it back. No echo. No rustle. Even the small night noises, the tick and drip of a wood settling, had gone, and in the silence she became aware of how loud she was. Her pulse. Her sleeve against her jacket. The wet click of her own swallow. Something moved at the edge of the torchlight. She swung the beam. Nothing. Foxgloves, swaying, though there was no wind. She held the light on them until her hand ached, and they slowed, and stilled, and she had the distinct impression they had been caught at something. "Okay," she said, quieter. "Food's down. I'm going." She did not move. It wasn't fear that held her. It was arithmetic. The path had been behind her, and the path was longer now, and if she was wrong about that, she would know in twenty steps. If she was right, she would know in twenty steps as well, and the knowledge would be worse. The torch flickered. Once, twice. She thumped it against her palm and the beam steadied, but in that half-second of dark she had seen it, or thought she had. A shape between two of the stones, taller than the flowers, thinner than a person. It was not standing so much as *leaning*, the way a tree leans over water. The light came back. The gap between the stones was empty. Her heart went hard against her ribs. She backed toward the way she had come, keeping the beam ahead of her, sweeping left and right, and the pendant burned hotter with every step, until it stung through her jumper. She pressed her hand over it. Nothing helped. Then she heard her name. Not Rory. Not Aurora. Someone said *Laila*, low and warm and fond, from just behind her left shoulder, close enough that she felt the word stir the hair against her neck. Nobody had called her that in years. Only one person alive had ever known to. She did not turn around. "That's not my name," she said. Her voice held. She was distantly proud of it. "No," the voice agreed, and it was gentler than anything in that clearing had a right to be. "But you answered." Cold flooded back into the air, sudden and total, and she understood that the warmth had never been kindness. It had been a held breath. Now something had let it out. The flowers were turned toward her, every one, all their faces tilted like a crowd's. The oak stones seemed nearer than they had been. Closer together. Behind her, the bag rustled. The lid of a container lifted with a soft plastic sigh. Rory ran. The path was where she'd left it, though it stretched on and on, frost cracking under her boots. She ran with the torch jerking wild arcs across the trunks, the Heartstone thudding against her chest like a second heart, and she did not look back. Not when something kept pace behind her, one step late, matching her stride. Not when the footfalls behind her stopped exactly when hers did, and the silence afterward had a listening quality, patient and pleased. The gate came up out of the dark. The bike was still there. Frost had grown on the seat, a thick white fur, as though it had been standing all night. Rory's phone lit in her pocket. She fumbled it out. The screen read 11:43. Three minutes. She'd been gone three minutes. She stood gripping the handlebars, hearing her own breath, and when she finally made herself look back, the path lay empty under the stars. Only at the far end, small and pale and very still, she saw a single bluebell, blooming in the frost where she had never seen one before. It was facing her.