The night nurse found him curled in the visitor's chair again. She frowned but said nothing, only straightened his blanket and checked the drip line by the counselor's bed.
Rafi pretended to sleep, eyes half-lidded in the dark room. The machines hummed around them, steady and indifferent. The counselor lay propped up by pillows, breathing through his mouth, a crust of dried spittle at the corner of his lips. His eyelids twitched behind purple bruises.
When the nurse left, Rafi crept closer. He could feel it — the same hum he'd heard in the forest, that itch behind the ears when the trees were listening. It coiled now around the counselor's heartbeat, buried under the hospital's antiseptic hush.
The braid girl watched from the doorway. She'd slipped out of her own room again, bare feet silent on the tile. She didn't come closer yet. She knew this part was for Rafi alone.
The counselor's lips moved. A rasp at first — then a soft growl. Not a word, but a shape of one. Rafi leaned in until he felt the man's breath ghost across his cheek.
There, again — a single word slurred by pain and painkillers, but sharp enough to pierce the hospital walls: Root.
Rafi's hands balled into fists at his sides. He remembered how the man had fought to lead them back, dragging them out from that choking darkness with torn palms and bleeding feet. This broken thing in the bed was not the same man — but the forest had left a splinter in him, too.
The braid girl stepped closer at last, standing just behind Rafi's shoulder. Her braid brushed his arm. She bent lower, trying to catch more of the muttered pieces.
He spoke of branches like veins, soil like a mouth. Names the forest knew before birth. How the clearing opened itself wider the longer they stayed. How it drank hope first, then bones.
The words tangled and broke apart, floating away on exhalations that rattled through cracked ribs.
Rafi's skin crawled. The braid girl's breath hitched again, but she didn't flinch or step back. Her eyes glittered under the harsh bedside lamp, seeing the same truth in the counselor's ruin: what waited for them outside this room wasn't finished with them. Not even close.
When the counselor fell silent again — deeper this time, drifting somewhere no nurse could reach — Rafi pressed two fingers lightly to the man's wrist. A faint pulse answered back, stubborn and slow. He wasn't dead. Not yet.
Behind them, the hallway lights flickered once. Rafi didn't dare look at the window. He didn't want to see if a branch was tapping the glass.
The braid girl touched his elbow, grounding him before panic could take root. She pulled him out into the corridor where the air felt too clean, too bright.
In a corner behind the vending machines, they crouched together like conspirators, knees pressed to cold linoleum. They didn't bother whispering — they knew the adults wouldn't believe them if they heard.
They planned in broken phrases: when the counselor woke fully, they'd make him tell everything. Not to the police, not to the suits, but to them. They'd record it if they had to. Then they'd decide if they'd run, or fight, or burn the clearing down to the roots.
Somewhere deeper in the hospital, the smallest boy wailed in his sleep. A nurse's soft hush did nothing to muffle the sound.
Rafi closed his eyes. He pictured the clearing under moonlight, remembered how the branches parted for them like a sigh, remembered the rough bark under his palms as he hauled the smallest kids over roots that wanted to swallow them whole.
No amount of fluorescent light could bleach that out of him. Not ever.
Beside him, the braid girl rested her forehead against his temple for a heartbeat. Neither spoke the promise out loud: they wouldn't let the forest have the last word. They'd cut out its heart if they had to — no matter what it cost to stand in the dark again.
In the hall, a monitor beeped steadily behind a curtain. Somewhere under the floor, the pipes rattled — or maybe the roots just remembered how to reach them here, under tiles and drains and whispered prayers.
For now, the hospital slept. But Rafi knew the real story was only pausing — waiting for the children to grow tired of pretending they were safe.