The yard never felt permanent, but the way it ended still caught them off guard.
Rafi woke to shouting — harsh, panicked voices too steady to be street arguments. The braid girl was already up, crouched by the boxcar door, her head tilted like a stray dog testing the wind.
Floodlights split the night open. One swung across the steel hull, throwing silhouettes of kids scrambling over fences and under train wheels. A rough voice barked orders through a megaphone, each word a hammer striking the hush coiled in Rafi's chest.
Police. Or security. Or worse — adults who thought runaway kids were pests to be swept into cages and cold beds.
He grabbed the braid girl's wrist. She didn't flinch — only pushed the door wider and slipped into the yard's shadows, pulling him with her.
The floodlight nearly caught them once. They ducked behind a stack of pallets soaked in rain and oil. Rafi could taste metal on his tongue; the hush tasted it too, sliding up the back of his throat like a secret he might choke on.
Nearby, someone screamed. The boy with the blue scarf shoved an officer backward and bolted into the maze of boxcars — a brief blaze of freedom that ended with a hard tackle and angry fists. Rafi looked away. The braid girl didn't. Her eyes reflected the chaos like a pond reflecting a lightning bolt: clear, but untouchable.
They crawled under a railcar, knees scraping gravel, breath loud in their ears. Rafi could hear the hush clearer than ever: it praised this panic, fed on it, stretched around his ribs and purred go deeper.
The braid girl pressed her palm to his chest. For a heartbeat, the hush stuttered — a leash tugged taut. She nodded once, and together they rolled free of the hiding place, sprinting low across the open yard.
Behind them, orders barked. Boots pounded metal stairs. But they were smaller than the gaps between fences, faster than grown hands.
They scrambled through a tear in the yard's fence, dropped into a shallow ditch thick with trash and wet weeds. A dog barked, dragged by its owner on the other side of the street. Cars hissed by, indifferent.
No one cared what two filthy kids did in the city's gutters.
Rafi lay on his back in the muck, chest rattling. The braid girl knelt beside him, hair plastered to her cheek, one knee bleeding where she'd scraped it on wire.
She smiled then — small and tired and too wild for any hospital or shelter to keep.
Above them, the hush curled tighter, no longer pretending to be just a whisper. It had their scent now. It knew the way home.
And when she helped him up, they didn't speak about the yard or the bruises or the cracked fences. They only looked toward the distant black line where concrete met treeline — and they knew, without words, that they would not stop until they found the root of it all.