Run: 2026-10-20-01M5C692SSBC8FY0YMP90K2G9S

The gate at Richmond Park’s Robin Hood Gate had been locked at dusk, so Rory went over the wall by the maintenance gap where a fallen branch propped the ironwork an arm’s width off the ground. She dropped into wet grass, scraped her palm, and stood a moment listening to the traffic on the Kingston road thinning into nothing. The pendant hung warm against her collarbone. It had been warm since eleven that evening, when she’d been stacking takeaway boxes in Yu-Fei’s back room and it started pulsing like a second heartbeat. Twenty minutes later it turned so hot she had to fish the chain out from under her jumper to let the air at it. That was the reason she came. That, and the man who gave it to her had said a single sentence when he pressed it into her hand outside the Golden Empress: “When it wakes, follow it.” “I’m following,” she said, to nobody in particular. Her voice fell flat, swallowed by grass. “I look like an idiot, but I’m following.” She walked west by the pendant’s glow, a pink smear of light the size of a thumbnail. The path bent through shaved parkland, then a stand of old oaks, then unshaved grass that caught at her ankles and soaked her jeans to the knee. The Glove Hill car park lights should have been visible behind her, a smear of orange through the trees. She checked twice. Nothing. Just the dark pressed flat and even as black felt. The wildflowers started before she expected them. Bluebells, in September. They came out of the ground in a band across the path, waxy stems and cup heads nodding under their own weight, and she stepped over them out of politeness and found the next ten yards carpeted the same way. The pendant cooled against her chest. Then it went cold. Properly cold — the cold of a tap run over a wrist, cold that seemed to travel into the bone behind her sternum. Ahead, the oaks stood in a rough ring, thick and black, grown in a shape no forester would have chosen. Between the trunks the air had a faint shimmer to it, a disturbance like heat over a radiator, and it smelled of cut grass and something sweeter underneath, like the inside of a church. Rory stopped at the boundary and read the trunks out loud, counting them under her breath. “Nine. Nine trees. That’s a ring.” The grass on the other side of the ring grew short and neat, close-clipped, and the wildflowers there were white instead of blue. Nothing moved. She pressed her thumb against the pendant. It was still freezing. “Right,” she said. “There’s a reason. Find the reason.” She stepped between the trees. The city vanished. Not faded — vanished, the way a door shuts. No traffic hum, no distant siren, no plane. Even the wind noise in the leaves stopped. She got birdsong instead, a thin piping from up in the canopy, and when she tilted her head to find it, the sky above was the soft violet of an hour after sunset rather than the full dark of a September night in London. “That’s not possible.” She said it steady enough, and hated how steady it sounded, as though she were reading it. The clearing opened out ahead, a good forty yards across, and the trees on the far side stood too far away to make sense. She turned to look back at the nine oaks. They were there. She could see the gap she’d walked through, and the grass beyond it, and the path she’d come by, all of it perfectly normal, perfectly visible, and somehow it seemed to be a long way off, and getting longer the longer she looked. Rory turned her back on it. “Eva,” she said, and then louder, because saying it made it a fact rather than a hope: “Eva? It’s Rory. I know you came out this way on Saturday. I know you did.” Saturday. Three days. Eva had left the flat with her coat over her arm, said she was meeting someone about a job, and hadn’t come back. Her phone went to voicemail from midnight. The police had a description and a folder and not much else, and Silas had told Rory, in the flat voice men use when they don’t want to argue, to leave it to them. Rory had been to the grove once before, seven years ago, as a teenager on a dare, and she remembered it as a clearing with a bit of atmosphere and a great many midges. She did not remember the soft violet sky or the white flowers or the way the air sat on her face, thick and still. She walked on. Her boots made no noise in the clipped grass — no crunch, no scuff — so she started stamping, deliberately, childishly, and the sounds came out half a second behind her feet. She stopped. The third stamp still arrived, flat and soft, from behind her left shoulder. “Hello?” She spun. The white flowers nodded. Nothing else. “Eva?” The clearing answered with that birdsong piping again, closer now, and coming from a spot on the ground. She crouched, and in the middle of the white flowers, in a patch of bare soil, lay a cigarette end. A Sobranie, the black paper soaked grey. Eva’s brand. Eva had smoked them for years and complained that nobody in London stocked them. Rory picked it up. The filter was still damp. She turned it over. Then she stood and looked around the clearing properly, and there, at the far edge, where the trees started again, a line of cigarette ends went into the wood, one every dozen paces, like a trail laid for a fool. Her fingers were shaking. She put the pendant in her fist and squeezed. Cold. Colder than the air. “All right,” she said. “All right.” She followed the trail. Ten, twenty, thirty. The trees got wider. On the fourth one she passed too close and stopped, because carved into the bark, at the height of her shoulder, was a crescent. Just a crescent, a shallow gouge of a shape, freshly made — the wood pale and weeping at the edges. She lifted her left wrist, where her own crescent scar sat pale against the skin. The carving matched it. Not approximately. Exactly. “This is a joke,” she said, and her voice came out wrong, thin and breathless, so she said it again with her chest behind it. “This is a joke.” Something moved at the corner of her eye. She turned her head fast, and there was nothing, only the trees and the white flowers and the violet sky, and she held still and watched that spot for a long count of ten, and on nine, a shadow moved through the wood at the same height as a person’s head, and it moved without the sound of a footfall, and it moved wrong — in a smooth unbroken line, the way a camera slides on a track. The pendant went warm. Warm, then hot, then burning, and she yelped and let go of it and it swung out from her chest on its chain, glowing crimson, throwing red onto the roots and the bark and her hands. “Rory,” someone called, from deep in the trees, in Eva’s voice. “Rory, don’t come this way.” Rory dropped into a crouch, pulse in her throat. “Eva?” The wood stayed quiet a long moment. Then, nearer, sweetly, in a voice that had Eva’s lilt but none of Eva’s hurry, none of her smoke and swearing: “That’s not me.”