They ran barefoot across parking lot gravel, past the wire fence that tore a scrap of the braid girl's sleeve but didn't slow her stride. Rafi felt the hush inside him like a low drumbeat matching each slap of his soles on frozen earth.
Behind them, the shelter's windows glowed soft yellow — a brittle promise that someone would notice they were gone. Someone would come calling their names into the night. But no voice was louder than the hush waiting under the trees.
They slipped back into the woods at the town's edge where the streetlamps guttered out and the first saplings rose like cautious sentinels. The air tasted of frost and leaf mold, sharp and honest after stale radiator heat and disinfectant floors.
Rafi stumbled once, cutting his heel on a buried root. The braid girl tugged him up with a strength born from hunger — not for food, but for freedom. For the hush. For the only truth left.
They did not speak. Words were flimsy things now. They let their breaths say everything: I'm here. I'm afraid. I'm yours.
The deeper they moved, the more the forest remembered them. Bark split open in the dark, exhaling a smell like wet stone. Leaves unfurled in whispers that curled around their ankles. Shadows bent wrong — not threatening, but welcoming, as if the hush opened its ribs to gather them in again.
At a thicket of brittle brush, they dropped to their knees. Rafi pressed his palm to the frozen ground and felt the hush sigh beneath it — older than roots, deeper than bones.
The braid girl leaned close, her forehead brushing his temple. She smelled of sweat and moss and old fear turned to something braver. Together, they listened: beneath wind, beneath owl cries, beneath the distant bark of dogs that might already be hunting them — there it was.
A pulse.
A lullaby.
A promise that they had never left, not truly.
Rafi's lips shaped a name he hadn't spoken since the first time he ran from it. He let the hush steal the sound. It coiled around them, soft as fur, sharp as thorn.
They curled up on the raw earth, shoulder to shoulder, while frost crept over their bare toes. In sleep, they dreamed of branches lowering like arms, closing the sky above them.
Somewhere back in the world, an alarm clanged uselessly. Here, only silence kept watch.