They moved like deer startled by distant gunfire — not running, but alert in every muscle, ready to vanish behind the next thicket if the search teams pushed too close.
By midmorning the sun burned steady above the dripping canopy. It made everything smell raw: wet bark, churned mud, the faint, sour stink of the hush rotting deep in the clearing behind them. Rafi and the braid girl wore its ghost in every scrape on their legs, every fleck of grit under their fingernails.
They climbed a low rise where the trees thinned into scrubby brush. On the other side, the forest simply stopped — replaced by a rough firebreak, then a gravel track that curved toward a distant ranger shack and the first hints of tidy trails and signs with polite warnings about bears.
Rafi froze at the sight. He'd dreamed so long of an edge. A line he could cross and be safe again. But now that it opened at his feet, his stomach twisted.
Cars sat crooked near the ranger shack — big trucks with state logos, a couple of parked ambulances. People milled around, some pointing into the trees, others hunched over radios.
No hush here. Just rules. Forms. Gentle hands pushing him into a warm van while questions rained down faster than the storm ever had.
He glanced at the braid girl. Her eyes squinted against the sunlight, mouth a straight line, mud dried on her jaw like war paint. Her hair tangled free on her shoulders — no braid to tuck her back into her old shape.
For a heartbeat he wanted to laugh. How would they explain it? Two kids crawling out of the hush's throat with nothing but each other and stories no adult would ever believe?
She stepped forward first, stones shifting under her bare soles. He caught her wrist — not to stop her, just to feel that pulse, that proof that whatever the world did to them next, the hush didn't get everything.
Below them, a woman in an orange vest turned and spotted them. She shouted, arms waving.
Another figure broke from the group — a counselor maybe, or someone from the hospital, face blurred by distance but voice slicing the bright air. Rafi!
The braid girl didn't flinch. She tugged him down the slope, straight toward the open arms waiting at the track's edge.
He let her lead. Not because he wanted to be found — but because this time, whatever came next, they would stand inside it together.
The hush was gone. But some part of its shadow flickered behind his eyes as he stepped onto the gravel: a promise that he'd never be only lost, only found, ever again.
When the first grown-up reached them, breathless and babbling, Rafi squeezed the braid girl's hand so hard she winced — then squeezed back harder, dirt and all.