In the closet, time dripped like water from a cracked pipe. Somewhere beyond the door, nurses fussed over empty beds and whispered to each other that the missing kids must still be inside, that no one could just vanish from locked wards.
Rafi and the braid girl knew better.
The hush didn't roar like it did in the forest. It purred, soft and sly, sliding under doors and along the baseboards. It pressed its cold nose into their palms as if asking permission.
She opened the closet door first. Her eyes gleamed in the dim spill of the corridor lights. Her hair, matted and half braided again by restless fingers, brushed his shoulder as she led him out.
They didn't run. Running was noise, and noise was what the hospital expected from desperate kids. Instead they drifted — a breath here, a shadow there, slipping behind supply carts and into staff bathrooms when footsteps creaked too close.
Once, Rafi flattened himself against a vending machine, the hush coiling behind his teeth like a laugh he dared not let out. A security guard lumbered past, too busy cursing into his walkie-talkie to notice the small tremor of stolen freedom in the air.
They ducked into a back stairwell. The braid girl touched the railing, her fingers skipping over the chipped paint as if reading a map only she could see. She turned to him once on the landing — a question in her eyes, sharp and brittle: Are you sure?
He didn't nod. He didn't need to. He reached for her hand instead, pressing his thumb into her wrist until he felt the hush there, too.
They pushed through the stairwell door onto a back hallway lined with laundry bins and mop buckets. No cameras. No curious eyes. Just the soft hum of machines behind heavy doors.
They followed the hush's scent through a dented service door that squealed once before swinging wide. Cold night air slapped Rafi's face so hard his eyes watered.
Outside, the city sighed in its sleep — orange streetlamps flickering over dumpsters and loading docks slick with rain.
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. The hush rustled against the back of Rafi's skull: Run. Or don't. But know you could.
He looked at the braid girl. She tugged him down the steps, bare feet splashing through a shallow puddle that mirrored a thin cut of moon.
Alarms didn't blare. Doors didn't slam shut behind them. The hush held all of it quiet, a secret just for them.
They vanished into the gap between the hospital's back fence and the alley weeds, swallowed not by forest this time — but by concrete shadows and the promise that the hush, once tasted, never really let its creatures go back to cages.