The first day in the hospital passed in pieces that didn't fit together.
Rafi floated in and out of rooms with white walls and metal rails, drifting between voices that clashed like distant thunder. One nurse said they were heroes. One doctor said they were lucky. A social worker called him sweetheart and patted his shoulder so gently he wanted to shove her hand off and roar like the forest had taught him to do.
He didn't roar. He just sat there, legs swinging off a high exam table, fingers tracing the pattern of scabs on his knees.
Outside his curtained cubicle, grown-ups traded theories in tight, nervous knots: a bear attack; some cult rumor from an old map; a tragedy nobody could have foreseen. Always tragedy. Never horror.
Between each polite lie, the children stared at each other across open doorways, the braid girl's braid trailing over the back of a plastic chair, the smallest boy clutching a juice box so hard it buckled in his palm. No one slept without jolting awake screaming. No one ate more than a few spoonfuls at a time.
When dusk came, and the fluorescent bulbs flicked on in buzzing rows, the hospital turned into a different sort of forest. Doors shut too quietly, and shadows bloomed behind carts and wheelchairs. In his room, Rafi lay with the blankets pulled to his chin, watching the ceiling tiles for cracks — not hairline splits in plaster, but cracks like splintered bark, ready to widen and let something crawl through.
He must have dozed off, because the next thing he felt was warm breath at his ear. He flinched awake, heartbeat skidding sideways. A shape hunched at his bedside — not the forest, not roots or teeth, but the braid girl, her eyes dark in the half-light.
She pressed a finger to her lips, then pointed to the hallway.
They moved silently, slippered feet padding over polished linoleum. They paused at a nurse's station, where a TV murmured weather updates no one watched. Through a half-open door they saw the counselor, half buried under wires and tubes, lips moving in a nightmare no doctor could cure.
Past that, near the end of the hall, a cluster of grown-ups argued in hushed tones: the investigator with the crooked glasses, the CPS lady who smiled too wide, two local cops pretending not to look bored.
Rafi leaned closer to hear. He caught enough: the kids needed counseling. Medication. Quiet homes far away from each other to break "the collective fantasy."
Behind him, the braid girl's breath hitched. She tugged at his sleeve, drawing him back around a corner where the hallway smelled like floor wax and cheap coffee.
She said nothing for a long while, just leaned her forehead against the cool wall, eyes squeezed shut. When she turned to him, her face was raw with salt tracks.
She didn't have to say it. He knew it the same way she did: the grown-ups would break them apart to erase the story. One by one they'd tell them they'd imagined it. One by one they'd press pills into their palms, hush their questions, and hope the forest's voice would fade under hospital chatter and polite therapy rooms.
But he also knew what the braid girl was thinking — because it burned in him too, hotter than any fever.
They couldn't let that happen.
When the hospital cafeteria opened for breakfast, a nurse brought him eggs on a tray. He pushed them around with his fork, stomach twisting. In the next bed, the smallest boy whispered through cracked lips that the forest had followed him here. Beneath the floor. In the vents. In the vines painted on the wallpaper.
Rafi didn't tell him he was wrong.
Outside the window, the sky was scrubbed clean by dawn. The town lay flat and harmless beyond the parking lot — tidy fences, rows of parked cars, the hills rolling soft and green in the distance.
But he knew the tree line beyond those hills wasn't empty. Not really.
When the braid girl slipped into his room again, she carried a paper coffee cup she'd lifted from an unattended cart. She handed it to him with hands that trembled only a little. Then she sat on the end of his bed, daring the world to stop her.
For a while they didn't talk. Didn't plan. Just sat there side by side, two kids waiting for the sun to crawl high enough to blind the shadows for another day.
But deep under the white floors and humming lights, the forest rustled in the crawl spaces of their thoughts — whispering that safety was never real. Only distance. Only breath and walls that wouldn't stand forever.
Tomorrow they would have to choose: bury the truth with the doctors and nurses, or rip it open and face it again — together, if nobody else believed them.
Rafi already knew what he would choose. He saw the same answer in the braid girl's eyes when she finally looked at him and didn't flinch.
They would not be prey again.