Rafi's eyes stung before they opened. He felt the braid girl's breath first — ragged in his ear, soaked with rain and mud and something sweeter that tasted like freedom if freedom ever had a taste at all.
They broke the surface together. Not smooth like water — more like tearing through a soaked blanket, skin scraping bark and grit. Roots snapped behind them, flinging clumps of black soil across the clearing.
Rain washed their faces raw. Thunder split the sky so close it rattled his molars. He gasped and almost retched when air crashed back into his lungs. Beside him, the braid girl vomited mud, clutching the clearing's slick grass with both fists so the hush couldn't drag her back down.
The clearing looked the same and not the same. The circle was wider now, raw earth quivering like an open wound. The trees leaned away from it, bent as if the hush's belly had been ripped out by force.
Rafi sprawled on his back, blinking rain from his lashes. He couldn't hear the hush anymore — not the same way. Its whisper still lingered under the crackle of rain on leaves, but faint, like a radio too far down a hallway to understand.
He turned his head. The braid girl stared at him through matted hair. Her braid was gone — ripped loose somewhere in the roots, maybe, or maybe she'd left it behind on purpose, a piece of herself to choke the hush from within.
She grinned. Not soft or brave — feral, cracked wide open by what they'd done together in the dark throat below.
She crawled to him on all fours, collapsed on his chest, and didn't move. He felt her heartbeat thumping wild against his ribs, echoing his own.
Around them, the clearing steamed. Mud bubbled where they'd clawed up. Small things — crickets, beetles, a mouse half-buried — fled from the raw hole in the earth as if it still breathed poison.
Rafi wrapped his arms around her back. His fingernails were black with grit and streaks of blood where he'd ripped them free from roots. He didn't care. She was here, warm, heavier than he remembered because they were real again, all the way real and all the way alive.
A branch above snapped under storm wind. He flinched but didn't pull away.
In the hush's absence, other sounds rose: distant sirens again, human voices echoing at the forest's edge — rescue teams maybe, maybe the counselors who'd once locked him in rooms too bright to sleep in.
He didn't want to be found. Not yet. Not while the storm scrubbed them clean and the hush shriveled under the weight of its own spoiled secrets.
The braid girl lifted her head. Rain slid off her cheek, mixing with the raw line where a root had scratched her from temple to jaw. She licked the blood from her lip and laughed once — a sharp bark that bounced between trees.
No more hush. No more looping nightmare in the roots.
Only them. Alive. Dirty. Starving. Free enough to decide what they'd become after this forest finished spitting out the last pieces of its children.
Rafi cupped her face, mud and all. Neither flinched when another thunderclap cracked overhead. The hush had been louder. They'd lived.