They wrapped them in blankets that smelled of cedar closets and stale mothballs. They loaded them into the back seat of a dented pickup, the heater rattling and gasping as if the engine feared the forest clinging to their hair.
The braid girl rested her cheek against the window. Frost painted soft flowers on the glass. Her breath melted them into runnels that wept down the door frame. Beside her, Rafi counted the miles not by the road signs but by how tightly the hush coiled behind his ribs: smaller, quieter, but never gone.
The town was a bruise on the horizon — crooked streets, sagging roofs, tired neon flickering in the cold light of day. The truck pulled up to a squat building marked TEMPORARY SHELTER in faded paint. An old playground rusted behind a chain-link fence, its swings creaking though no wind blew.
Inside, everything buzzed too loud: the hiss of radiators, the hum of a soda machine, the low drone of grown-ups explaining rules in kind voices that dripped worry like slow honey.
A woman with a clipboard pressed a juice box into Rafi's hand. He turned it over, reading the cartoon animals like runes. He didn't drink. The braid girl touched his sleeve once — a question: Do we trust this? He didn't answer aloud. She understood anyway.
That night, they lay in twin cots pushed too close in a dormitory crowded with other kids. The ceiling dripped shadows like wet leaves. Somewhere a boy snored, ragged and hoarse.
Rafi stared at the dark and imagined the hush sifting through the floorboards — tasting the softness here, the softness it could devour if they ever called it back.
The braid girl pressed her cold feet against his shin under the thin blanket. He didn't flinch. Her breath was an anchor. He drifted under it, half-dreaming, half-remembering roots pressing into his soles, the hush's voice still folding secrets inside his bones.
He wondered if the grown-ups would notice when they bloomed wrong again — when warmth and safe beds sprouted thorns under their skin. He almost hoped they wouldn't.
Outside the shelter walls, the forest slept under ice and moonlight. But even sleep couldn't bury its seeds deep enough.