They crawl until they can't tell skin from soil.
Roots brush their faces like skeletal fingers. Rafi's elbows are raw, his breath fouled by the hush's sweetness that coats his tongue thicker with each shuddering gasp. Ahead, the braid girl keeps moving, her braid dragging through damp rot, her shoulders hunched under the hush's weight that presses the tunnel narrower with every heartbeat.
Then the tunnel coughs them into a chamber so wrong it halts even the hush's whispers for a heartbeat.
It is a hollow sphere, the size of a small room, ribbed with roots glowing faintly from some hidden pulse. In the center squats a bulb of twisted wood and stone, slick with sap that drips in slow tears. It beats — slow, deliberate, the hush made flesh.
The hush does not speak now. It shows.
Behind Rafi's eyes, memory unfolds like skin being peeled: his mother's laughter before she left the kitchen and never came back; his father's blank eyes the day they dropped him at the camp gates — the promise of just for now, be good, we'll come back that soured into years.
Next to him, the braid girl stares past him. Her lips part — a sound rasps out, the first since he's known her, but it dies half-born. Her throat works as if the hush has its roots sunk in her vocal cords. Tears cut trails through the grime on her cheeks.
The hush shows her something he can't see, but he knows it's the day her words broke. Maybe fists, maybe betrayal, maybe loss so sharp she stitched her own tongue with silence to keep it from telling.
He reaches for her hand. She doesn't flinch. Her fingers close around his, cold and damp and shaking.
The hush surges in them, inside them, around them — a cradle of rot and comfort: I can keep you here. I can feed on you and feed you back forever. No more hunger. No more nights alone. You are mine and I am yours.
Rafi wants to say yes. It would be so easy: let go, dissolve, become something root-bound and safe. A forever forest child with no more holes in his chest where family should be.
But another memory shoves through the hush's warmth: the braid girl's laugh before they ran. Her eyes when she trusted him enough to limp beside him instead of ahead. The nights they pressed their shoulders together to fight the hush's hum with the fragile truth of each other's breath.
He knows then — clear as a knife: to stay is death that pretends to be comfort. To leave is pain and loss, yes, but real. Real means scars and hunger and his mother never coming back. But real means the braid girl's hand in his, a heartbeat that's his alone, not the hush's echo.
Beside him, her eyes flick open — and for the first time, she speaks. Just a word, torn raw from the place she buried it: No.
She looks at him — asking if he will stand beside her even if the hush rips their memories apart to punish them.
Rafi bares his teeth at the hush — a wild, small thing challenging the oldest shadow in the woods. He whispers nothing, only tightens his grip on her fingers until bone grinds bone.
The hush snarls through the roots — a thousand broken lullabies shrieking at once. It claws through their minds, dragging up the taste of abandonment, the ache of empty beds, the cold slap of hunger when no one came.
But they do not let go. They have chosen ruin and bruises over forever sleep. They have chosen to remain theirs, not its.
Roots shudder around them. The hush bellows in a tongue older than language. Sap sprays the walls, dripping like black rain as the chamber cracks and the forest above groans with the echo of something dying — or being born different.
Rafi screams against the hush's last pull. The braid girl screams too — her voice ragged but hers. Together, they drag themselves backward through splitting wood and coughing soil, pulling each other free, refusing the hush's cradle one torn inch at a time.
They are breaking free.
Even if freedom tastes like blood and dirt and everything they never wanted to remember.