At first, Rafi thought it was just the hush creeping up the walls again — that soft, rattling murmur that never quite left their heads. But as he pressed his back against a corroded medicine locker, he heard it clearly: laughter. Dozens of children giggling, whispering, calling out names that didn't belong to anyone alive.
The braid girl knelt beside the boy, knife balanced on her knee, her eyes darting to every shadow. She breathed so quietly she sounded like a ghost herself.
Rafi gripped a rusted crutch for a weapon. The echoes bounced off the clinic's tiled corridor, doubled back on themselves, then circled him like teeth.
The sick boy stirred. His lips cracked open and he croaked a single word that made Rafi's stomach knot.
Home.
Rafi flinched so hard the crutch slipped in his sweat-slick palm. He stared at the boy's flushed face — pale now, pupils blown wide like he was staring through the ceiling, past the concrete, past the filth and the hush and all of Hollow City.
The braid girl touched the boy's forehead, then jerked her hand back. Her fingers twitched: a silent message for Rafi. She pointed at the far door — the one labeled Children's Ward. A band of moldy caution tape drooped across it like a rotten grin.
Rafi understood. Whatever was giggling in the halls, whatever ghost mouth kept calling Home, come home, it was strongest in there.
He thought of Marrow's threat — Bring back extra or don't come back at all.
He thought of the hush's roots coiling under the floor.
He thought of the braid girl, her eyes saying: I follow you in, I follow you out, or not at all.
Rafi nodded once. He hooked the crutch under one arm and scooped the boy into his chest with the other. His legs felt like candle wax. The braid girl pressed her palm flat against the ward door.
A hush so deep it swallowed even the hush's usual hiss settled in his skull as the latch clicked open.
Inside, the ward was a mausoleum dressed up like a playroom. Dust-choked toys littered the floor: dolls with milky eyes, a rocking horse gnawed by rats, tiny sneakers lined up under the beds like they were waiting for their owners to wake up.
And then the laughter rose, like breath through dead lungs.
From under the cots, behind the curtains, crawling through the gaps in the ceiling tiles — shapes squirmed forward. Children, but not children. Waxy pale. Eyes too wide, too flat. No lips moving, yet giggles spilled from them in chorus.
The braid girl bared her teeth. She raised her knife so slow and careful that her whole arm trembled with the effort. Rafi tucked the boy's head against his chest, trying to hide him from the sight.
One of the things — no taller than a five-year-old, hairless and mottled gray — toddled forward on stuttering legs. It lifted a tiny finger at Rafi's face and whispered through its throat:
He's ours.
Rafi's pulse crashed in his ears. He tasted iron. The braid girl stepped sideways to block the thing's path — knife up, breath shallow.
The hush coiled around them like a curtain drawing tight. The boy whimpered, pressing his fever-hot cheek to Rafi's neck.
He's ours, the echo-children hissed again. Louder now. All of them in unison, a nest of mouthless hunger.
Rafi squared his shoulders against the fear crawling up his spine like ants.
Not this boy. Not again. Not to the hush. Not to the things that pretended to be what they never were.
He adjusted his grip on the crutch. The braid girl met his eyes. She dipped her chin — Ready.
Then the first wrong child lunged.