AI Richmond Park after midnight made a liar of London. The city was still there beyond the trees—Rory could hear its low electrical murmur, the occasional sigh of tyres on a distant road—but beneath the branches it seemed diminished, something she had imagined while walking alone. Wet grass soaked the toes of her boots. Her torch picked out dead bracken, the pale trunks of birches, and small, unexpected deposits of mist.
She had finished her last delivery for the Golden Empress at eleven. At half past, with the smell of ginger and frying oil still in her coat, she had ridden across London to meet someone who might not exist.
The invitation had been slipped beneath the door of her flat while she was at work.
Midnight. Richmond Park. Follow the north path until the oaks stand in a ring. Come alone, and learn who gave you the heart.
The pendant had arrived three weeks earlier in a plain brown envelope: no sender, no explanation, only a deep crimson stone on a silver chain. It was roughly the size of her thumbnail, dark except when light struck some depth within it. Then it glowed faintly, as though a coal had been sealed beneath its surface.
She had worn it tonight because leaving it behind had started to feel like pretending it wasn’t there.
She hadn’t come stupidly, at least. There was a copy of the invitation beneath Yu-Fei’s till, with the time and place written on the back. She had a torch, a spare battery, and ninety seconds of recorded video showing the deserted park gate. It had all seemed sufficiently sensible while she was standing under a streetlamp.
The north path ended at a wall of bracken.
Rory checked the map on her phone. No signal now, but the downloaded map showed the path continuing for another half mile. She swept the torch left, then right. The beam caught two upright stones where there had been only darkness a moment before.
They stood on either side of a gap, their surfaces furred with moss. Ancient oaks leaned above them, roots knotted around their bases. Beyond lay a clearing.
She had not seen it. She had been looking directly at the bracken, and she had not seen it.
“All right,” she said softly .
Her voice did not travel. It seemed to stop an arm’s length from her mouth.
She should have gone back. Later, she would try to reconstruct the exact moment at which curiosity had become a physical pressure behind her ribs, but there was no moment. There was only the pendant against her sternum, suddenly warm.
Rory stepped between the stones.
Wildflowers covered the clearing. White, yellow, and violet heads lifted from grass so green it might have been June. Beyond the boundary, November had stripped everything to stalks. Here, the air smelled of rain and crushed stems. No wind moved the flowers.
Her foot pressed into the soft ground.
Behind her, a second footstep pressed into it too.
She stopped.
The silence was complete. Not the hush of a large park, with its rodents and sleeping birds and branches settling overhead. This silence had edges.
Rory turned slowly . The opening between the stones was empty. Her torch illuminated the path she had taken, the same wet bracken, the same two trees beyond it. Nothing stood there. Nothing withdrew.
She pressed her thumb against the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist and held it there until the old skin hurt.
“I'm here,” she called.
No answer came.
She set the stopwatch on her phone and walked into the clearing.
The stones formed a wide ring, with oaks growing between several of them. Their trunks were so broad that three people could have stood behind each one. She kept catching herself inspecting those hidden spaces, although there was never anything to see. At the centre of the clearing, the grass gave way to a circle of black earth.
The pendant pulsed once.
Rory stopped so abruptly that the chain swung against her collarbone.
The warmth had not been imagination. It came again, gentle as a fingertip touching her from inside her clothes.
She lifted the stone out. Crimson light moved in its depths .
“No,” she whispered, though whether she meant the light, the clearing, or the entire enterprise, she couldn’t have said.
Somewhere far behind her, a small brass bell rang.
She knew that bell . Yu-Fei had tied it above the restaurant door with red string because the old electronic chime had sounded, in his words, like a hospital giving bad news. It had a bright, slightly cracked note. Rory heard it twenty times a shift.
She heard it now in Richmond Park, in a clearing that did not appear on any map.
The sound was cut off halfway through.
Her stopwatch reached eight minutes. She gave the invitation until ten, then decided that anyone who wanted to speak to her could do so under the streetlamps.
A meeting was something two people could end. She was ending hers.
She walked back towards the stones. The gap between them seemed narrower, but she was angry enough to find that almost reassuring. Fear made a poor cartographer. She kept the torch fixed on the opening and went through it without looking at the flowers.
After thirty paces, the path brought her into the clearing from the opposite side.
Rory stood still.
The stopwatch read eleven minutes and forty seconds.
The flowers nearest her trembled . One patch at a time, they bowed as something passed among them, moving from left to right along the edge of her vision. She turned her head quickly .
Only the oak trunks. Only the stones.
At the very limit of sight, something pale stood upright beside the nearest tree.
She did not look at it directly. That was the thought that came to her, absurd and absolute: do not look at it directly. She stared at the black earth instead and shifted the torch until its beam should have touched the tree.
There was nothing pale beside it.
When she moved the torch away, it was closer.
Not much. Perhaps the width of the clearing. Perhaps only far enough that she could now tell it was not quite vertical.
Rory backed towards the centre. Away from the thing, she told herself, though backing towards the centre was exactly what she had been trying not to do.
“Rory?”
Eva’s voice came from among the trees behind her.
It was so precise that Rory answered before she could stop herself—not a word, only a small intake of breath. Eva’s tired voice, Eva’s upward turn on the second syllable, the way she had said Rory’s name when they were children and one of them had done something magnificently unwise.
“Rory, where are you?”
Rory closed her eyes for one second.
Eva was not here. Eva did not know about the clearing. Eva could not have followed her without a bicycle, a car, or an interest in cross-country running that she had never displayed.
When Rory opened her eyes, the pale shape was gone .
The black earth at the centre of the clearing was no longer empty.
A narrow darkness stood above it. It had the proportions of a doorway, though there was nothing around it to make a frame. Her torch beam reached towards it and stopped. Not faded. Stopped. Beyond its edge there was no grass, no opposite side of the clearing, not even night. There was an absence so complete that looking at it made her eyes ache.
The Heartstone pulsed harder.
Once. Twice. A slow, deliberate rhythm that did not match her heart.
Rory took the pendant off. The chain slithered over her fingers, and she held it away from her body as if that might reduce what it was doing .
“You wanted an answer.”
Her own voice spoke from the other side of the darkness.
It was almost right. It had her pitch, her Cardiff consonants softened by London. But it had no breath in it. No small machinery of throat and chest.
Rory’s mouth had gone dry. She swallowed.
“Not especially,” she said.
The silence that followed felt attentive.
She looked down at the stone. It was hot enough now that she had to shift it against the chain. Its glow had strengthened, staining the links red.
Heat near the doorway. Cold when she had entered. Warmer each time she had been returned to the centre.
A compass, then, if she was willing to accept that it pointed towards the worst thing here.
Rory turned off her torch.
Darkness jumped closer. For one panicked instant she could not tell whether her eyes were open, and she nearly switched the torch on again. Instead she held the pendant by the end of its chain and walked.
The first direction made the stone warmer within six paces.
She stopped, turned a quarter circle, and tried again.
“Don’t,” Eva said from directly in front of her.
Rory’s foot hovered above the grass.
The pendant cooled.
She put her foot down.
Behind her, something moved through the flowers. It made no sound in the grass, but each blossom it passed gave a tiny, papery rustle. The sound kept pace with her. When she went faster, it went faster. When she paused to test the stone’s warmth , it paused too.
She tried to think about the ordinary geometry of the park. Paths had lengths. Trees had roots. A person walking in a straight line eventually reached a road, a fence, or at the very least a different sort of tree. These were not controversial propositions. She repeated them silently as the pendant cooled by degrees.
“Rory,” Eva whispered. This time the voice was frightened . “Don’t leave me here.”
Her eyes burned. She kept them fixed on the place where the ground must be.
The thing beside her stopped imitating Eva.
“Open your eyes,” Rory’s own voice said.
It was nearer now. Near enough that she should have felt breath on her cheek.
A warning was worse than a threat. She discovered that with her next step, and the next. A threat only told her what something wanted. A warning made her wonder what it knew.
The chain had gone cold.
She took three more steps and crashed shoulder-first into an oak.
Bark scraped her coat. The impact knocked a grunt out of her, and the ordinary, undignified pain brought tears to her eyes. Rory fumbled around the trunk, found bracken instead of flowers, and pushed through it.
Sound returned all at once.
Wind. A car changing gear on a distant road. Something small rushing away from her through dead leaves.
She switched on the torch.
She was standing twenty metres from the north path, facing the wrong direction. There were no standing stones behind her. No clearing. Only bracken and trees and a length of rotting fence half swallowed by ivy.
Her stopwatch read fifty-three minutes and twelve seconds.
The lock screen beneath it said 00:08.
Rory looked from one set of numbers to the other. Then she turned off the stopwatch, put the phone in her pocket, and walked back to her bicycle.
Her hands had begun to shake. She was cold through, and her hair hung damp against her cheeks. The pendant remained cool in her fist. She did not put it on again.
At the bicycle, she allowed herself one look back. The park was empty. Mist lay in shallow bands beneath the trees, silver where the moon touched it. Nothing pale stood beside any trunk. Nothing bowed the grass.
She unlocked the bicycle with exaggerated care, because doing it quickly seemed likely to make her drop the key. Then she wheeled it towards the gate.
Her boots crunched once, twice, three times on the gravel.
She stopped to pull her collar up.
Behind her, after a small and considerate pause, something took the fourth step.