At first there was only pressure. Soil packed into his ears, grit grinding between his teeth, the weight of the entire forest pressing his ribs flat. No air, but somehow he breathed — or the hush breathed for him.
He thought he heard the braid girl sobbing nearby, but when he turned his head in the darkness, the soil slipped like water and he floated through it as if his bones were reeds.
Light flickered. Not sunlight, but the old firelight they'd once huddled around in camp — lantern flames reflected in children's eyes wide with stories. Rafi drifted past them, past a circle of boys and girls, past his own smaller self giggling when the counselor made ghost noises with a stick and a blanket.
None of them saw him now. They were caught in their loop — laughing, then shivering when the hush rose behind the counselor's back.
He sank deeper. Roots brushed his cheeks like fingers checking for fever. A tunnel opened, ribs of old tree trunks arching over him, dripping sap that smelled sharp and sweet like rotting fruit.
He saw the braid girl ahead, caught like a moth in amber. Her braid drifted weightless around her face, her eyes wide open but unseeing. She mouthed something — his name maybe — but her voice coiled out as mist instead of sound.
Below them, the hush pulsed. It wasn't a beast exactly. It wasn't a spirit or a curse or even a lie. It was a hunger stitched from every frightened whisper they'd fed it: a chorus of campfire stories, bedtime threats, counselor warnings not to stray too far after sunset.
He saw it all at once: the hush drinking their secrets, growing teeth every time a child shivered, wrapping itself tighter around the roots and rocks until there was no difference between fear and soil.
The braid girl reached for him, her fingertips brushing his wrist like an echo. He clutched her hand — surprised he still had hands to clutch with — and the hush writhed at their touch.
Around them, fragments of other kids drifted past: the smallest boy, half-smiling, drifting with a bedtime toy clutched to his sunken chest. A counselor's shape, eyes rolled back white, mouth stitched open with wet moss.
Rafi squeezed the braid girl's fingers so hard that something inside him cracked. He whispered her name — or tried to — but only a gust of breathless hush slipped between them.
The forest's veins tightened. Mud squirmed like worms around his ankles, tugging him deeper into the hush's throat.
He thought of the hospital bed, the neat hallways, the "placements" they were promised. He thought of the braid girl's braid coiled on his shoulder, smelling of sap and home.
He would not vanish nameless in this belly. Neither would she.
He pressed his brow to hers. He let the hush rush through his mouth and nose and ears — not fighting it, but biting down hard on its taste so he'd remember exactly what it was.
The hush snarled. Roots splintered above them.
Something cracked like a dry branch at dawn — the hush flinched.
Rafi dragged the braid girl close and kicked off the bottomless muck, forcing their joined bodies upward through pulsing roots, up and up toward a tremor of pale light that leaked between the ribs of the buried forest.
They didn't swim. They clawed. They tore pieces of hush free with every wriggle toward the surface, leaving bits of themselves behind in the mud to keep its belly full.
Above them, somewhere, the storm still roared. And they rose into it, burning through the hush like a match in swamp gas — half alive, half ash, all theirs.