The forest shifts as they go back — not alive the way it once was, but still restless, like an old wound that aches when storms roll close. Rafi knows every step by memory now. The braid girl stays just behind him, quiet but steady. She watches the canopy more than the trail, as if the hush might drip back down from the highest branches if they don't keep it afraid.
By dusk they reach the clearing where the camp once huddled. It's almost unrecognizable. No tents. No smoke curling from tin chimneys. No bunkhouse laughter echoing past curfew. The cabins stand half-eaten by ivy and rot, windows blank as dead eyes. One door swings lazily in the breeze, tapping its frame in a heartbeat rhythm that makes Rafi's neck prickle.
He steps over the scattered bones of a forgotten fence and breathes in the memory: sweat, smoke, stolen bread, whispered stories under thin blankets. So many children here once, living ghosts before the hush found them.
Now silence roams freely among the ruins. Not the hush's silence — just the kind that comes when everything human has fled and nature retakes its debt.
The braid girl touches a wall, flakes of paint lifting under her fingers. She gestures: Look. He follows her hand to a line of scratches near the cabin's doorframe — old, childish marks where some runaway tallied days survived. A record of endurance, or just something to do when there was no food.
Rafi kneels beside the stoop. He wipes away a layer of dirt with his sleeve and finds the first letter of his name carved deep into the wood. He'd cut it there after his parents left him here — proof to himself that someone named Rafi had existed, had fought to belong. Back when he still thought someone might come back for him.
Now he laughs under his breath — dry, cracked, but real. The braid girl watches him, unblinking. She doesn't remember this place the way he does. She drifted through it like a rumor: the mute girl in the corner, the one who never slept near the fire, the one the hush always watched with fond hunger.
She crouches beside him and scratches her own symbol next to his letter: a simple loop and line. Her mark, born after the hush, after the roots, after they burned everything that tried to own them.
For a while they just sit in the dust, back to the wall, staring at the last ghosts of the Silent Camp. No monsters here. No false lullabies. Only wind through ruined rafters, and two survivors daring it to speak.
Rafi knows they should move on before dark — but some part of him wants to hear the walls breathe, to be sure nothing whispers back. He closes his eyes, listening.
Nothing but the scrape of the girl's braid against the wood and the hush of real wind through real leaves.
For the first time, he lets himself believe it: the hush is gone from this place. This silence belongs to them now. Not to fear. Not to hunger. Just two children who refused to vanish.
When they stand, he kisses his fingertips and presses them to his old carved letter. Then he takes her hand and leads her from the shadows.
Let the camp keep its quiet. Let the forest remember.
They do, too.