The ambulance rocked them through the outskirts first — rows of wet pine blurring into gas stations, shuttered diners, billboards preaching warmth and safety. By the time the city bloomed bright in the windows, Rafi's eyes ached from trying not to close.
He held the braid girl's hand the whole way. The paramedic across from them smiled when she caught him staring but didn't say a word. Maybe she'd seen worse than two mud-soaked kids clinging like twins cut from the same root.
City lights swallowed the hush's last shadows for a moment. But the hush wasn't stupid — it crawled deeper into his spine, humming under his ribs where no hospital scan would ever find it. He could tell by the braid girl's quick breaths that it still whispered to her too.
The hospital doors split wide like a mouth. White walls waited inside. Bright floors squeaked under plastic shoes. Warm hands lifted him from the stretcher, pinned a wristband on him.
Rafi, M.
DOB: Unknown. Next of Kin: Unknown.
Same for her — though the nurse typed in "Jane Doe" for lack of anything else. The braid girl smirked when she caught sight of the tag taped to her thin wrist.
They stripped off the filthy clothes. Nurses clucked at bruises and scratches. Warm showers stung like nettles but rinsed off the last sticky bits of hush mud. They wrapped him in a blue paper gown. It felt like a costume for a kid he barely remembered.
Questions crawled over him in gentle voices:
How long were you in the woods? Did anyone hurt you? Did you see anyone else? Did you hurt each other?
His throat rasped. His eyes burned under hospital lights. He wanted to say — It's bigger than that. The forest swallowed us whole and we chewed our way out. But his mouth formed only yes, no, maybe.
The braid girl said nothing. When they asked, she only stared, lashes crusted with damp sleep she'd refused to shed. Once, when they left him alone in a tiny cubicle under a blinking light, he heard her voice through the thin walls. A whisper. Or a laugh. He couldn't tell which.
A doctor muttered to a nurse about keeping them under observation for trauma. Isolation if needed. Further psychiatric evals.
A new hush seeped through the hospital vents — cleaner than the forest's version, but still a hush. One meant to keep them calm, quiet, pliant.
They wheeled him down sterile corridors. At the end was a door with a big window, a bed with rails, a soft chair beside it. He didn't ask where she was. He knew she'd be behind the next door down.
Before the nurse shut him in, he caught one last glimpse of her through the glass. She pressed her palm flat against her window. He mirrored it, air thick between them.
No roots. No clearing. Just two feral shapes in white rooms — and a hush inside them too deep for any clipboard to ever write down.