By late afternoon, the clearing felt smaller than ever. The kids worked in pairs, dragging back branches and fallen logs to feed the fire that had become their only fragile shield. They stacked stones in a crude circle, praying it would help hold the heat and the light through another night.
Rafi hadn't eaten more than a handful of stale crackers since yesterday, but he didn't feel hungry — only stretched thin, like the forest had found a way to chew on his insides instead of his flesh.
The counselor slept in fits. Sometimes he jerked awake with a choking gasp. Each time, Rafi tried to speak to him, but the words tangled behind dry lips or broke apart into delirious mumbling.
Dusk crawled up the trunks of the pines, painting them with slow bruises of purple and gray. The mist rolled back in, thicker this time, pooling in the hollow at the base of the fence. A few of the younger kids cried silently, huddled close enough to the flames to singe their sleeves.
Rafi checked the counselor's pulse for the thousandth time — slow but stronger than before. He pressed a tin cup of boiled water to cracked lips. This time, the man swallowed. His eyelids fluttered open and didn't roll away. For the first time since they'd dragged him from the clearing, his eyes focused — bleary but aware.
Rafi leaned so close their foreheads nearly touched. He asked what it was. How to stop it. How to keep the others alive.
The counselor's breath rattled — sour and wet — but his voice scraped out, a hoarse rasp carried on desperate lungs. He said it wasn't just a thing in the trees. It was the trees. The soil. The water they thought was safe. Years ago, before the camp was ever built, people had dug too deep looking for something to bottle and sell — mineral springs, he said, the kind rich tourists would pay for. Instead they found a pocket of earth so old it remembered every root ever buried in it, every creature that ever died feeding it.
It fed on them now. On fear. On blood spilled in the wrong clearing. A sacrifice by accident. A cut that didn't close.
He tried to laugh but choked instead. It can't be burned out, he croaked. Fire only feeds it more stories to swallow. It moves under their feet. Waits for dark when the mind is soft.
Behind Rafi, the braid girl appeared, silent as always, her shadow stretching huge against the tents as dusk swallowed the last daylight. She heard enough to understand: no fence would hold it. No running would outrun it.
They needed to leave the woods altogether — but they were deep inside, with no sure path, no food, no way to carry the sick man far enough before dusk thickened to midnight.
The counselor's eyes rolled back again, mouth working without sound. His heartbeat thundered under Rafi's palm, then quieted into a stubborn pulse that refused to quit.
Branches cracked somewhere just beyond the ring of the youngest kids. The crack didn't sound like a falling stick. It sounded like ribs breaking.
A boy stumbled back into the firelight, dragging a branch half as tall as he was, eyes wide as a deer's. He said something had moved behind him, breathing his name in a voice that sounded like his mother's.
Rafi grabbed the biggest stick from the fire, flames licking up bark and singing the hair on his knuckles. He planted himself at the edge of the ring, daring the shadows to test him first.
Around him, the kids fell into a trembling hush, all eyes on the forest's mouth where dusk yawned wider and wider.
The braid girl knelt by the counselor, pressing rags against his brow as if she could coax him back to full strength by will alone.
Rafi didn't look away from the dark. He forced his feet to root deeper than the thing under the soil.
Tonight it would come closer than ever. And either they'd break through the trees at first light — or they'd be roots for it to drink next.