Night fell so thick the rain seemed to float inside it instead of falling. Their shoes made no sound now, only a hush of wet cloth against bracken. Even the deer trail had vanished behind them.
Ahead, the slope flattened, the trees widened. The braid girl's steps slowed first — she smelled it before Rafi did: that sweet rot, a low pulse in the damp air.
They'd come back. The clearing.
Rafi wanted to stop. He wanted to turn and claw his way backward through brambles until the hospital's white lights swallowed him whole again. But there was no backward anymore. Every breath pressed him forward like a hand between his shoulder blades.
The braid girl turned to him once. In the dark her braid stuck to her neck like an old scar. She didn't smile — not this time. She just pulled him by the wrist through the last fringe of saplings until the hush swallowed the last dripping branches.
There it was. The same circle they'd slept inside months ago, back when counselors told stories by lantern light and dared each other to speak of ghosts.
Now no one spoke. The storm above bent low over the clearing, thunder mumbling like an old man in his sleep.
Rafi stepped onto the clearing's soil and felt it breathe under him — a sigh, a heartbeat, something deeper than tree roots and wetter than grave dirt.
The braid girl circled him, tracing the edge with her toes like she was testing a fence she no longer believed could keep anything out.
Behind them the forest had gone so quiet he could hear the rain only when it struck his own hair. The trees leaned in, branches tangled like fingers clasped in prayer.
He remembered the smallest boy's laugh once — when they were all new, when games still tasted like freedom and not doom. He remembered how that laugh died in the hush.
Now he heard it again, faint, weaving through the undergrowth: a giggle without breath. The braid girl flinched but didn't cover her ears. She was done pretending the hush would respect that.
Lightning burst overhead. For one breathless flicker the clearing glowed — a bowl of mud ringed with stone lumps and the black bones of last year's campfire.
But in that flash he saw more: something pale and wet coiled near the far side, half hidden by a stump. Not roots. Not exactly. But not human either.
The braid girl grabbed his sleeve. Her voice — what was left of it — rasped out in a question: did he see it too?
He nodded. He didn't trust his throat to hold steady if he spoke.
Another flash. The pale shape writhed, split by a slit like an eye that didn't blink.
Rafi's stomach folded in on itself. He almost fell but the braid girl caught him, dug her nails so deep into his elbow that blood warmed under his rain-soaked sleeve.
He found words at last. Ugly, broken things: door — the counselor's word. Not a door you opened and closed but one you crawled through, backwards if you weren't careful, forwards if you were brave or too broken to know better.
She turned him to face her. Her lips moved but the hush drowned them. So she didn't try again. She just pressed her forehead to his, breathing him in like he was the last true thing she owned.
Thunder cracked so close it shook water loose from the canopy. Drops the size of coins splattered the clearing, drumming the soil flat.
The pale shape shuddered once, tasting the rain, tasting them.
Rafi didn't know if he was shivering or if the clearing was shaking him like a dog with a bone. All he knew was the braid girl's hand in his, bone-tight, warm despite everything.
They had come back. The hush had waited. The door was open.