The prints pulled them down a narrow gully where the canopy thickened until daylight thinned to a swampy dusk. Each step down sank their shoes into slick, cold mud that oozed up around the soles and tried to swallow them whole. Branches snagged on sleeves. Brambles scratched bare skin. Nobody complained. There was no room for that now.
Rafi focused on each footprint the way he once focused on the edge of a trail when hiking with his father — one step ahead, eyes locked on where the ground dipped and rose again. He counted each impression in the mud, told himself it meant the counselor had kept moving, alive, in one piece. That promise pulled him deeper than fear could push him back.
The forest here felt wrong. Too quiet. Not just storm-silent, but hollow, like the wind had found a different path and refused to touch this place. Every so often, Rafi's breath caught when he thought he heard a crack in the underbrush. But it was always nothing. Always just their own ragged breathing, their sneakers squelching in the soaked earth.
Then the trees opened a little — not a clearing, exactly, but a flattened dip in the slope, where roots arched out of the ground like ribs. And in the middle of it, half-hidden by ferns, lay something bright blue against the brown tangle of leaves.
A nylon jacket.
One sleeve buried in the mud, the other trailing like a limp flag. Rafi stepped closer, motioned for the others to hang back. His heartbeat slammed against his ribs, sharp and stupidly loud. He crouched and touched the fabric. Cold. Wet. But it hadn't been here long — the color was too clean, too bright to have sat in the rain for days.
He looked around the hollow. No footprints here. No sign of the counselor himself. Just the jacket, torn at one shoulder as if it had been yanked off while struggling to stand or crawl.
Beside it, half-sunken in the muck, lay the counselor's radio. Cracked open. Useless.
One of the other kids — the tall girl with the braid — stepped closer and pointed past the roots. There, a few feet away, something else broke the pattern of leaves: a piece of torn trail tape, bright orange, tied to a sapling but mostly hidden behind a curtain of brambles. A marker. Or maybe a warning.
Rafi's chest tightened. It didn't make sense. If the counselor was hurt, why crawl deeper instead of back toward camp? If he'd marked the sapling, why here, in the middle of nothing?
A cold wind crawled through the hollow, rattling the ferns. The silence felt heavier now — as if the woods wanted them gone.
He stuffed the jacket under his arm and beckoned the others closer, pointing to the broken radio and the tape. They didn't ask questions, but he saw it in their eyes: doubt, fear, that thin line of panic waiting to snap.
He couldn't let it.
He gestured for them to spread out — a slow, careful sweep. If the counselor was hurt and hidden under the brush, they needed to find him before cold and night finished what the storm had started.
For a while there was only the sound of them pushing through wet undergrowth, parting ferns and prodding beneath roots. Rafi's fingers went numb from digging in mud. He kept listening for a voice, a groan, anything. Nothing answered but the drip of water off the trees.
Minutes bled into more minutes. The wind shifted. A crow shrieked somewhere far off — the first animal sound they'd heard in hours — and the echo stabbed the quiet apart.
One boy, the lanky one, called for Rafi. He had found a boot print pressed into a soft patch of moss leading away from the hollow, curving uphill and east — the direction of the old boundary fence that circled the far edge of Camp Grit's property. Beyond that fence was private land: dense, unmarked woods that no one was supposed to enter. It was easy to get lost in that stretch, even on clear days.
Rafi's stomach knotted tighter. He could see the choice laid out like a map in his mind: follow deeper into the woods and risk losing daylight, or turn back with what they knew and regroup before night trapped them outside the safety of camp.
He looked at the boot print, then at the kids beside him — muddy, scratched, their eyes raw with cold. He thought about the smaller kids back at the fire pit, waiting without knowing they were waiting.
He couldn't split everyone up more than they already were. If he dragged them too far, they might not all make it back before dark. And he had learned one truth, over and over, every time his world had broken: you keep what you can keep alive, and you don't gamble what you can't replace.
So he made the call.
They would head back with the jacket and the broken radio. They would watch the path behind them. They would be ready to return tomorrow — better prepared, with more help, more light, more time.
One by one, they turned back toward camp, the forest swallowing their footprints as quickly as they laid them down.
Behind them, the hollow kept its secrets, silent under the dripping trees.