The tunnel after the bonebridge is narrow enough to scrape their shoulders raw. It breathes a wet chill, and the hush's pulse crawls through the rock like blood behind cracked skin.
When it widens, they find them.
Lantern-light flickers from Rafi's stolen lighter — a pathetic flame in a place too deep for dawn. The glow lands on shapes hunched along the cavern walls: children, or what's left of children.
The Hollowed Kin.
They sit cross-legged or lie curled on the stone, eyes open but clouded, bodies wrapped in roots and moss as if the hush is knitting them into its own flesh. One twitches when the flame brushes his cheek, mouth splitting in a gummy smile. A girl hums a note that rattles the walls, voice thin as bat wings.
Rafi presses his palm to his mouth to choke a sob. They wear tattered camp clothes — some shirts bear the same badge he once scrubbed clean on laundry day back when adults still lived behind locked doors.
The braid girl kneels in front of one of them, a boy not much older than Rafi himself. His braid is rotted into vines that burrow into his scalp. She reaches out, hesitates, then lets her fingers hover inches from his cheek.
"He's alive." Her voice is rough iron. "And dead."
Rafi shivers. The hush in the tunnel trembles as if listening, pleased. It wants him to kneel too. To accept this fate: root and moss and lost songs forever humming.
He can feel it tugging at his own scars — the grief that's never scabbed over. His parents' voices, the rough hush of a mother's goodnight kiss. He wants to lie down and let moss seal the wound.
The braid girl snaps her fingers in his face, hard enough to sting.
"No." She stands and lifts her braid like a whip. "We are not the hush's kin. We're not seeds. We're storm."
She tips her head at him. Time to move. No more pity. No more roots.
Rafi forces himself to look each hollowed child in the eyes as they pass — a silent vow that he won't join them, won't feed their parent-hunger.
At the far end of the cavern, the hush has left them a door: tangled roots like ribs pulled apart. Beyond it: the deepest chambers. The heart, the mind, the dream that eats them from the inside.
Rafi grips her hand. Together they step through, leaving the hollowed kin to their humming grave.