The path turned mean as they climbed. Roots clawed at their ankles, slick moss betrayed their footing, and branches whipped back to lash cheeks and arms. Somewhere behind Rafi, a boy gasped as a bramble snagged his hair, but nobody dared to speak the complaint out loud. The forest pressed in too tightly for words.
They reached the crest of the hill just as the sun — what little of it there was — sank behind a smear of cloud. At first Rafi thought the trail ended in nothing but more thicket. But the girl with the braid, a step behind him, tugged his sleeve and pointed. Between two leaning birch trees, the undergrowth thinned to a narrow slit of open space.
He ducked under a drooping limb and pushed through. A breath later, the woods broke open around him.
It was a clearing, but not like the muddy ring of Camp Grit. This place felt older than the camp, older than the fence they'd crossed, older than the paths they'd trudged since dawn. It wasn't a circle hacked out by humans — it was a wound in the forest, a low bowl where nothing dared to grow except a carpet of sickly weeds and mushrooms blooming like bruises.
In the center, half buried under a collapsed tarp, lay the missing counselor.
Not moving.
Not dead — Rafi could see the chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged pulls. But close enough to the edge that for a moment, he forgot how to breathe himself. He stumbled forward, the others bunching behind him like nervous shadows.
Up close, the counselor looked worse than any of them had feared: skin waxy and pale under days of grime, a gash above the eyebrow crusted dark with dried blood, lips split from cold and thirst. One arm was strapped to his chest with strips of cloth torn from his shirt — a makeshift sling.
A notebook lay open by his side, pages damp and curling like dying leaves. Beside it, a small plastic container rattled with the sound of pills when Rafi brushed against it. Empty.
He knelt, pressing his fingers to the man's neck until he felt the faint but stubborn thud of a pulse. Relief burned through his veins like fire after frostbite. He almost laughed, but the clearing swallowed the sound.
The girl with the braid crouched beside him, eyes darting from the wound to the empty pill bottle to the notebook. She flipped a page. Water-smudged scribbles ran down each sheet — rambling fragments of thoughts, numbers, dates, names none of them recognized. At the bottom of one page, in a hand more desperate than the rest, a single sentence clawed at the paper.
It's here. Watching. Don't trust the trees.
A shiver skittered down Rafi's back. He scanned the clearing again, trying to see it like the counselor must have: a place that didn't belong, ringed by trees too close together, too tall and gnarled to let light or hope slip through. It felt wrong in his bones, like standing too close to the edge of a deep, black well.
One of the boys stepped closer, whispering that they should carry the counselor back now — now, before dark swallowed the trail again. Rafi nodded. They would have to rig a stretcher from branches and the tarp. They would have to move fast.
He glanced once more at the notebook. The pages fluttered in a breeze that didn't touch his face.
Somewhere, far back in the woods, something cracked — a branch splitting, or maybe something heavier shifting its weight between the trees.
The kids froze. Rafi swallowed the spike of fear and forced his voice steady. He told them to gather sticks for a stretcher, tie the tarp tight, watch the trees but don't look too long.
They worked fast, hands trembling but sure. The counselor moaned once as they lifted him onto the crude bed of sticks and fabric, eyes fluttering open just long enough for Rafi to see something wild behind them — a terror that didn't seem to fade even when he fainted again.
They turned him toward the path they'd come from, toward the fence, toward the thin promise of safety.
Above them, the wind rattled the canopy like breath caught in a dying throat.
Below, the clearing lay behind them — undisturbed, except for the weeds that leaned back upright as if to erase any sign they had ever come.