Chapter Thirty-Five: City Shadows

They slipped away from the hospital's fenced edge just before dawn, paper gowns torn and smeared with the city's grime by the time the sun found them.

No one cared who they were. The streets were too busy with early buses and sleepy workers clinging to hot coffee cups. Two barefoot kids were only background noise in a city that knew how to look the other way.

Rafi stayed close to the braid girl's shoulder. She seemed to breathe the city's stale air like she was searching for a scent beneath the exhaust and old brick walls. Once, at a crosswalk, she stopped so abruptly that a car horn screamed behind them. She didn't flinch — only watched the rusted subway entrance across the street, deciding something that she didn't need to say out loud.

They crawled down into the underground like rats slipping into old burrows. Down here, the hush felt distant — but not gone. It curled against the curve of Rafi's spine, a soft pulse in the stale warmth of the tunnels.

They found corners where no one bothered to look: an unlocked storage closet behind a disused platform, a concrete alcove beneath a staircase where light bulbs hadn't worked for years. They curled up there when the shaking in their bones outweighed the hush's restless urging.

Once, an older boy in a ragged hoodie found them half-asleep. He asked their names, offered stale crackers in exchange for a promise to keep watch for police. They didn't speak back. He laughed, called them ghosts, and moved on when they stayed silent.

Nights in the city tasted different than the forest. The hush no longer howled in the treetops — it hummed in humming streetlights, in the scuttle of rats behind trash bins, in the shadows that clung to the braid girl's hair like dark threads.

Rafi dreamed of his parents more often now. Sometimes they stood at the bus stop across the street, waving him over with bright smiles and kind eyes that never matched the way he remembered them. Other times they lay in hospital beds of their own, eyes closed, machines breathing for them. He woke every time with the hush pressed tight against his teeth, muffling the sob he never allowed himself to make.

The braid girl would be awake too, eyes open and unblinking, tracing invisible shapes on the concrete with her finger. Neither asked what the other saw.

One morning, he found a scrap of old newspaper folded beneath her palm. A headline about two missing children from a secure ward. A blurry photo of him. No photo of her — she'd always slipped under names and papers too easily.

He crumpled it, shoved it deep into a broken vending machine slot, and looked at her as if to ask: What now?

She pointed her chin toward the narrow mouth of a service tunnel. There was always deeper. There was always somewhere darker to hide.

And the hush, patient and slick, coiled closer — promising that whatever they thought they ran from, it was never far behind.