AI The order came in at 11:40 on a Tuesday night, four minutes before Yu-Fei usually killed the tablet. Rory was wiping down the counter at the Golden Empress when it pinged, and she leaned over to read it because Yu-Fei's glasses were somewhere in the kitchen and Yu-Fei's reading of delivery apps was creative at the best of times.
Richmond Park. No street address, just a pin dropped in the middle of the dark green mass of it. Cash on delivery. The tip was sixty pounds.
"Richmond," Yu-Fei said, appearing at her shoulder with a tub of fried rice for the staff meal. "At midnight. No."
"Sixty quid, Yu-Fei."
"No."
"Rent's Friday." Rory was already untying her apron. She read the customer name off the screen and then stopped, and read it again. Malphora. She had never seen the word in her life. She knew exactly how to pronounce it. That was the first wrong thing, though she didn't file it that way at the time — she filed it under weird posh names, the way she filed most things that prickled at her, because prickling didn't pay rent.
"Food's not even ours," Yu-Fei said, lifting the insulated bag off the hook. It was already packed. Nobody in the kitchen remembered packing it. They discussed this for perhaps four seconds before Yu-Fei decided it had been the new boy, who had gone home at ten, and Rory decided Yu-Fei was probably right, because the alternative was a conversation she didn't want to have at midnight.
She took the e-bike. The November air had teeth and her breath went ahead of her in small white flags, and for the first ten minutes it was an ordinary London night, buses sighing at stops, a fox trotting up somebody's front steps like it paid the mortgage. Then she reached the park.
The gate stood open. Richmond Park's gates locked at dusk — she'd been turned away by them before, years ago, on a walk with Eva that had ended in chips and grievance — but this one stood open, and the chain hung from it, and the padlock hung from the chain, open too, like a mouth. She told herself: groundskeeper's error. She rode through.
It took her nearly five minutes to understand what had changed about the sound of the world, and when she understood it she stopped pedalling and stood in the middle of the road with one foot on the tarmac, listening to nothing. No planes. Richmond sat under the Heathrow approach; you could set your watch by the low mournful drag of them, all day, all night, every night she'd ever been here. The sky held no planes. The road hummed with no distant anything. The silence had a texture, thick and close, like snow that hadn't fallen yet.
Her phone said the pin was a mile in. The blue dot that was supposed to be her wandered the screen like a drunk.
She found the deer at the treeline past the first rise. A dozen of them, maybe more, standing in a loose rank in the dark, and all of them facing her. Not grazing. Not bolting. Facing her, heads up, and their eyes did not catch her headlamp the way animal eyes were supposed to — the light went into them and stayed there, swallowed. Rory stood very still and looked back at them because some animal part of her understood that looking away would be worse, and then she walked the bike past them at the far edge of the road, slow, unhurried, nothing-to-see-here, and none of them moved, and none of them stopped watching.
"Deer are thick," she said aloud, and her voice came back off the dark smaller than it should have.
The path ran out where the phone insisted she keep going. She left the bike on its kickstand in the wet bracken — she noted herself doing it, noted that leaving her only transport was precisely what people in films did before the audience started shouting, and did it anyway, because the undergrowth would take the wheels off. The bag went over her shoulder. It was heavier than it had been at the restaurant. She did not think about that. She thought about it constantly.
The stones rose out of the bracken without warning, twice her height, and she nearly walked into the first of them. They were stone, but they were stone the way a memory of a tree is a tree: grain ran through them, long grey whorls of it, and where the lichen thinned she could see rings, growth rings, hundreds of them, tight as the rings in a thumbprint. Oak, turned to something older than oak. They stood in a rough circle around a dark she could not read, and between two of them was a gap, and the pin on her phone sat squarely on the other side of it.
The pendant woke against her sternum.
She'd worn the Heartstone for months — thumbnail of deep crimson on a silver chain, left at her flat door in a plain box with no note — and she had learned its habits the way you learn a cat's. It was warm now. It was only ever warm in certain places, and every one of those places had been somewhere she'd later decided, on mature reflection, to never go again. Through her jacket, faintly, it glowed.
"Sixty quid," Rory said, to no one, and stepped between the stones.
Her ears popped. The silence on the other side was not the park's silence ; it was a room's silence , an indoors silence , padded and close, and the clearing beyond was lit like late dusk though her phone said 12:20, and it was full of flowers. Wildflowers, drifts of them, white and violet, blooming their hearts out in November, and the air over them smelled of turned earth and, faintly, of copper.
Her footsteps crunched on the frost-rimed grass. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch-crunch.
She stopped. The last step finished itself a half-beat behind her, gently , the way an echo might, if echoes had weight .
Rory stood very still. Then, deliberately, she took three quick steps and stopped. Three steps came back at her, and then, softly , a fourth.
Her mother's voice came out of the dark at the treeline, warm and Welsh and utterly ordinary. "Cariad? That you?"
Her whole body leaned toward it before her mind got hold of the reins. Jennifer Carter was in Cardiff. Jennifer Carter marked GCSE essays with a red pen and salted the windowsills of the house every November and had never once explained either habit, and standing in that lit clearing with the flowers breathing around her, Rory understood, suddenly and completely , that the salting had not been a superstition. It had been a chore.
She did not answer. She held her left wrist with her right hand and pressed her thumb into the little crescent scar there until it hurt, which was the thing she did instead of answering.
"Rory." Eva's voice now, delighted, from the other side of the clearing. "Rory, oh my God, come and look at this."
Then, from behind her, close enough to fog her ear: "Look at me when I'm talking to you."
Evan's voice. Evan's voice with the particular smoothness it had before the bad nights, and her body — treacherous , well-trained animal that it was — flinched and curled and went small before she could stop it, and that was the moment Rory got angry, and the anger was better than the fear, so she fed it. She turned around slowly . Nothing there. Only the stones, and the gap between them, and in the gap, at the very edge of what she could see, a figure in a hi-vis jacket. Yellow. Her yellow. When she turned her head to look at it straight, there was only a stone. When she looked back at the clearing, it stood one stone closer to the gap.
The pool lay at the clearing's centre, black and round and perfectly still, and the flowers made a ring around it, a single unbroken circle of white blooms, and every path of flattened grass in the clearing led to that ring and none of them crossed it. The bag on her shoulder shifted. Something inside it resettled itself with a slow, wet patience, and the smell of copper thickened, and Rory did not open it. She had delivered a thousand bags. None of them had ever breathed.
"Bring it here," said the voice, and it was her own voice now, reasonable, tired, customer-service bright. "Sign for it. Confirm the name on the order, and take what's owed."
The pendant had gone from warm to hot. Through her jacket it glowed like a coal, like a warning light, like the one honest thing in the clearing, and Rory understood — the way you understand things in dreams, whole and at once — that the order had never been for the food. She was the delivery. She had been addressed , packaged, and sent, and all the voice needed was for her to sign for herself.
"Malphora," said the voice, coaxing. "Confirm the name."
And the terrible thing, the thing she would dream about for years, was that her mouth wanted to. The name sat on her tongue like a key sits in a lock.
Rory took a breath, and pressed her scar, and did the thing four years of terrible jobs had trained her to do: she reached for the script.
"Can't confirm," she said, and her voice only shook on the first word. "Recipient's not present. No one here by that name." She walked forward, eyes on the ring of flowers, careful, so careful, and set the bag down on the frost three paces short of it. "Order's undeliverable. Returning to sender. Sorry for the inconvenience — you'll be refunded within three to five working days."
The dusk-light of the clearing guttered, like a candle in a stairwell. Every voice she loved started talking at once from the trees, and underneath them all, something began to laugh, or to breathe, and the figure in yellow was in the gap now, between her and the way out, patient as a missed delivery.
So she walked backward. She walked backward through the gap in the stones with her eyes on the clearing and the script in her mouth like a prayer, apologising to it, refunding it, wishing it a pleasant evening, and something cold combed through her hair with great gentleness, and she kept talking, and then her shoulder blades hit open air, and the world slammed back.
A plane. A plane, dragging itself over Richmond, glorious and deafening and real. Rain-smell. Traffic, faint as surf.
Her phone detonated with notifications. Forty-one missed calls. Eva's messages stacked up the screen, climbing from where are you to RORY to I'm calling the police, I swear to God. The date at the top of the screen said Thursday.
She had gone in on Tuesday night.
The bike was where she'd left it, kickstand down, and two days of wet leaves had drifted over the wheel. She rode home through the waking city without stopping at any light that would let her, and only when she was three streets from the flat above Silas' bar did the app ping again.
Order complete. Delivered 11:59 p.m. Enjoy your meal, Malphora. Five stars. Will order again.
Then the screen refreshed. New order. Pickup: Golden Empress. Drop-off: her own address, her own door, above the bar. Customer: Aurora Carter. Note: No rush. I'll wait.
Behind her, back up the road toward the park, something completed one last footstep, softly , and stopped when she stopped, and waited.