They don't leave the Silent Camp without leaving something behind — a promise that it won't just sink into moss and memory like so many lost voices.
Rafi gathers what scraps he can find: a splintered signboard that once named the bunkhouse, a rusted nail, a coil of old wire. The braid girl kneels in the cold dirt, clearing a patch near the center of the clearing. Together they set stones in a careful ring, circling the spot where the communal fire pit once burned.
He tries to shape words in his head — an inscription, a prayer, anything worthy — but his tongue sticks to his teeth. In the end, he just takes the signboard and scratches into it with the nail, pressing so hard the tip snaps. He switches to a sharp stone to finish. The braid girl holds the plank steady, eyes fixed on each letter.
He carves:
"FOR THE LOST WHO FOUGHT TO BE FOUND."
When he's done, his knuckles are bloody and the sign is ugly as sin — crooked letters, splintered edges — but it stands. It stands because they do.
The braid girl adds her mark at the bottom: the same loop and line she scratched beside Rafi's old name on the cabin stoop. Beneath it, she drags the nail through her palm until blood beads, then presses it against the sign. A red smear, human and real.
No one told them to build a grave. No one asked for a shrine. But the forest watches now in mute, indifferent approval. Maybe it knows even it can't swallow everything if a human heart insists on remembering.
Rafi gathers a handful of stones, each one representing a face he half-remembers: the boy who taught him to tie snares, the girl with the limp who never missed roll call, the angry kid who bit a counselor's ear and laughed about it for weeks.
He stacks them carefully inside the circle. With each stone, he murmurs a name or just a shape of one: This was you. This is yours. This stays.
The braid girl adds her stones too — he notices she uses smaller ones, more of them. Maybe for all the runaways who came before either of them. Maybe for all the children who still sleep in hidden corners, hoping not to be found by anything hungry.
When the circle is complete, they stand side by side, filthy and bruised and alive. Wind hisses through the trees but doesn't dare form a voice. The hush is gone.
Rafi wipes sweat and dirt from his face and tries to imagine what this place would look like if a real family found it one day — not a band of lost kids or desperate escapees, but a mother, a father, a child laughing at squirrels in the branches. Maybe impossible. Maybe not.
Beside him, the braid girl threads her hand into his. No words. Just warmth.
They step back, leaving the stones to speak for them. A name for the lost. A promise for the living.
They walk out of the clearing and do not look back.