The first mile was breath and heartbeat and wet leaves slapping their faces. The braid girl ran just ahead of him, braid flicking mud in his eyes when the wind caught it wrong. Rafi didn't care. His lungs burned, his elbow throbbed where he'd shattered the window, but none of it could touch the hard light humming in his chest: freedom.
Behind them, sirens wailed on the road. An ambulance maybe — or a cruiser — but too late. The forest swallowed sound fast, thicker here than the clipped bushes outside the hospital fence.
They didn't speak. Every word would've been dragged out of them by the trees anyway. Better to keep it inside, let the hush between trunks wrap around it like bark.
It rained harder. Drizzle turned to sheets that matted Rafi's hair to his forehead. He tasted sweat and sky and the rot of last season's leaves underfoot. Somewhere above the canopy, thunder muttered.
The braid girl stumbled once, feet slipping on a root slick as bone. Rafi caught her by the wrist and yanked her upright so hard she gasped. She didn't say thank you. She didn't need to.
When they finally stopped, it was at the foot of a slope where the ground sank soft and black, swallowing every footstep like a promise.
Rafi bent double, palms braced on his knees. The braid girl crouched beside him, bare toes sinking into the loam.
She pointed, breathless but sharp-eyed: deer trail. Faint, but real. No tire tracks, no boot prints. Just a slit through the underbrush where something lighter than them moved at dusk.
Rafi didn't trust deer anymore. Not after what they'd seen once near the clearing — the doe that looked at him with the same pale pupils as the counselor did when he babbled in the hospital bed.
But he trusted her. So he followed when she slid along the trail, one hand brushing the low branches as if greeting old ghosts.
Time bent strangely here. A moment felt like an hour, or maybe an afternoon vanished behind a single blink. The rain hissed off leaves and into his collar, warm now that he was soaked to the skin.
Somewhere to their left, something big moved. A buck maybe — or worse. Neither looked back.
He thought about the smallest boy then. How quiet he'd gone in that bed. How maybe a piece of him walked here too now, barefoot and bone-white between the trunks.
A branch cracked under his heel. The braid girl hissed at him to keep lighter. He couldn't. He was heavier than her, and the forest knew it, pressing its wet weight into his spine until he felt ancient.
When they paused again, dusk had turned to full-blind night under the canopy. Rain still whispered, softer now, like a lullaby.
The braid girl squatted in the mud, tracing lines with a stick: the clearing. Their camp. The place the counselor talked about — the "door."
Rafi didn't want to see it drawn in dirt, but he did anyway.
She tapped the stick against the circle she'd scratched. Then at the slope they'd just crossed. Then at her chest. Then at his.
They were bait. Both of them. And they both knew it.
His teeth chattered, not from cold but from the hunger that came when the hush crept too close — the itch for answers big enough to break them.
Above them, branches shivered. A single drop fell on his nose, warm despite the chill. It smelled faintly of iron, not rain.
He wiped it away. The braid girl didn't look at him, just pressed her thumb against his knuckles.
In the dark, her eyes caught the faintest glint when lightning bloomed behind a cloud. She was smiling — not because she was brave, but because she was so tired of fear she'd traded it for something worse: resolve.
He forced a breath through the knot in his throat. They'd keep moving until the clearing found them, or until they found the heart of what rooted all this wrongness into the soil.
No more grown-ups. No more fences. No more mercy for the forest or for themselves.
Together they rose, shaking off the rain, and pressed on into the deeper hush.