Let me tell you where he stood, because it explains the choice he made next.
He leaned against the trunk until his shaking slowed, and when he finally lifted his head he could see two things through a gap in the leaves. Far across the fields, a cluster of warm orange lights glowed on the horizon, and in front of him the forest lay black and silent. His body voted for the lights at once, since lights meant crowds, crowds meant bread, and bread was all his empty stomach could think about.
"Where is the nearest place where I can rest and hide until my strength comes back?"
~ The nearest shelter is the forest you are standing in, and the best place inside it is a hollow beneath the roots of a fallen tree about two hundred steps ahead. ~
"Why would I stay in a forest at night when a city is full of people who might feed me?"
~ The forest is called Grave Forest because the compound's people throw their dead into it, and large predators now live among those trees, so almost nobody walks in willingly. Anyone hunting a wounded child will search the city first, because that is where wounded children usually go. ~
He stood very still, with the cold wind brushing the bandage on his forehead and the smell of wet bark filling his nose. He turned his back on the lights, which felt like walking away from a warm room, and stepped between the trees.
The dark inside was thick enough to feel against his skin, and the ground was a tangle of roots and soft rot that sucked at his bare feet. Somewhere deep within the trunks something large shifted its weight and made a slow, wet sound, and he held his breath until it passed. He counted his steps the way he had been told, and at two hundred his hands found a wall of cold, curved wood, with a hollow beneath it just large enough for a small body.
He crawled inside, curled up against the damp roots, and tucked his knees tight against his chest. He did not believe he could sleep in a place like this, yet exhaustion took him anyway, quietly and completely, like a hand closing over a candle.
---
Pale grey light woke him, falling through the roots above in thin, dusty lines.
His body felt twice as heavy as it had the night before, and even breathing seemed to require effort. A hollow ache sat in his stomach, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and when he sat up too quickly the throb in his skull returned so sharply that he had to wait with his eyes shut until it faded.
The bandage at his head had dried stiff and crusty, and when he touched it, the flakes of old blood scraped against his fingertips.
He crawled out into the morning, and the forest looked very different now that he could see it properly. Grey trunks rose in every direction, packed so closely that the light reached the ground only in scattered patches, and there were no birds, no insects, and no wind, only the sound of his own breathing.
"I need water and food, but I do not know the first thing about surviving out here."
Then he picked the direction that sloped slightly lower than the rest and began to walk.
The walk was long and miserable, with roots grabbing at his toes and dizziness washing over him every few minutes, so that he often had to hold a trunk until the world stopped tilting. Thirst scraped his throat like sand, and his stomach had moved past hunger into a dull, constant ache that made every step feel heavier than the last.
For one strange moment he remembered the teenage boy from the cellar, with his shaking hands and his clumsy knot and his panicked plea not to die. That boy had probably been more afraid of blame than concerned for him, yet his was still the only human voice anyone had spoken to him, and out here even that was gone.
Then he heard it, faint and soft, beneath the silence of the trees.
Water, moving over stones.
He stumbled forward faster than his legs wanted to go, tripping twice, and the sound grew until the trees opened onto a narrow stream running clear and cold over smooth dark pebbles. He dropped to his knees and drank with both hands, spilling half of it down his chin and onto the collar, and it hurt going down, a sharp cold that made his teeth ache. He did not care at all, and he kept drinking until the ache in his head loosened and his hands stopped trembling.
When he finally sat back, a few steps farther down the stream had slowed into a calm pool beside a fallen log, so still that it held the grey sky like glass. A face looked up at him from the surface, and he froze.
It took him a moment to understand that it was his own.
A thin boy stared back, with hollow cheeks, dark hair with dried blood on one side, and a clumsy bandage tilted across his forehead.
The metal collar sat around his small neck like a cold ring, and the eyes above it belonged to a stranger who happened to be wearing his face. No memory stirred, and no flicker of recognition came, which was the strangest part of all.
He lifted a hand and touched his cheek, and the boy in the water did the same.
I am still here, alive, whoever I was and whatever I am now.
He did not cry, because he was not sure he remembered how, but he knelt there longer than he needed to, letting that quiet moment be the one gentle thing that had happened to him since he opened his eyes on packed dirt. Then his stomach reminded him that water was only the first need, so he drank one more slow handful and pushed himself to his feet.