The roots close behind them like a mouth swallowing the last light. In this new hollow, there's no tunnel, no floor, no sky — only a drifting fog thick as milk and soft as a mother's sigh.
Rafi blinks, and the braid girl's hand slips from his. Gone.
The hush folds him inside its mind, dream pressed to bone. He stands now in a memory so real it suffocates him: a cracked walkway outside his parents' old house, the concrete littered with the ash of their last argument. He is seven again, hiding behind the dented trash bin, listening to voices that should have been warm but instead broke against each other like stones in a grinder.
"You said you'd stay—"
"You said you'd try—"
"I can't—"
He covers his ears but hears it in his ribs, in the echo under his tongue. A soft wind rattles the garden gate; the hush leaks through the gaps, whispering: See? You never had them. Only me now.
He spins. He is ten now, a new camp uniform too big for his shoulders. Adults tell him he's safe here, but the hush already wriggles in the walls. He remembers nights staring at the ceiling, wishing his mother's voice would crawl back from the cracks.
The dream shifts — and he's older, the moment just before he found the braid girl for the first time, alone in the storage shed. But now she's wrong: her braid is snakes, her face blurred by static. She holds out her hand and when he reaches for it, it's root and thorn.
The hush laughs through her mouth. Stay here, boy. Stay where it's soft. Where no one leaves you. Where you can't fail.
He falls to his knees. The ash drifts down — not from parents' cigarettes, but from a forest burning, the hush's veins catching fire in some distant real tunnel while his mind rots here.
In that collapse, he feels her: a pull like a hook in his chest. The braid girl — the real one — is still fighting, clawing at his sleeping body in the waking world, refusing to let the hush keep him.
Rafi sucks in breath that tastes of burned leaves. He presses his palms to the dream's skin.
I was alone once. I'm not alone now.
The hush squeals as he tears at its seams. The garden gate explodes into cinders; the dream gutters like a candle smashed under a boot.
And just like that, the fog is gone. His eyes crack open to wet moss, blood on his tongue, and the braid girl's hands slapping his cheeks raw.
"You're back," she rasps, forehead pressed to his.
He clutches her braid like a rope to the surface.
This mind war isn't over — but together, they can finish it.