Freedom is never as quiet as you dream it to be.
By the time they reach the open clearing — grass stubby, rocks like ancient teeth jutting from the dirt — Rafi knows the hush did not die without leaving scars behind. It hums inside him sometimes, a flicker behind his ribs, a phantom echo when the wind sighs through the weeds. He catches the braid girl watching him each time he pauses to listen to nothing. She knows. She feels it too.
They stand there, skin tight over bones lean from hunger and nights without rest, faces ringed with ash and new sunburn. They could pretend it is over, but both know better: freedom is fragile, a shell around something rawer than any hush.
Beyond the clearing, old fence posts lean drunkenly in the tall grass — the rusted edge of the world they once knew. A road cuts across a rise, empty except for the shimmer of heat already climbing the morning air. Civilization waits past that ribbon of tar, houses and people and rules.
But before they can cross it, the forest murmurs behind them one last time. A breath or a warning — neither can tell. Rafi stiffens, hand tightening on the braid girl's wrist. A shape stands among the trees: lean and shifting, its outline shivering as if it's made of all the voices they thought they'd burned to ash.
He wants to run. But he won't. Not now. Not after everything.
The braid girl steps forward first, braid swinging behind her like a shadow come alive. Her voice cracks the silence, raw from disuse and screaming in tunnels. It's not a command, not a prayer. It's just truth, hurled at the hush's ghost:
You can't have us anymore.
Rafi feels something break loose in his chest. The shape at the trees' edge doesn't lunge or hiss. It only drifts backward, unraveling into drifting cinders that vanish among the leaves. The hush does not roar. It does not beg. It just… releases them.
Silence fills the space where the monster once pulsed, but this silence is clean — not the hush's lie, but the true quiet of wind and waking birds. Rafi turns to the road. The braid girl turns too, and when their eyes meet, there is no fear left to share.
They step onto the road. Their shadows stretch long before them, thin children shadows growing longer still. They have no home waiting. No parents. No camp. Only each other, and the ash on their tongues, and the fragile hush of freedom that they will guard fiercely — this time, on their own terms.
Behind them, the forest holds its breath. Ahead, the world stirs awake, unaware that two children have broken something ancient and cruel and are walking toward it with the wilderness still alive in their blood.
They do not look back. Not even once.