“You’re dead,” I told her for probably the tenth time since we’d started this broken conversation through the wall.

“I was just lost.”

“Where am I?” I’d asked this so many times now, first with a frantic screech to the words. Now it was more of a challenge to her voice. It always went unanswered in any real way. It was like trying to map a forest without true north.

“With me, Francis. You’re with me.”

“Yeah, yeah. A lot of good that does either of us. And why is it you right now? Why couldn’t it be Dad? At least I know he’s still above ground.” Oh god, I hoped he was still aboveground. Who knew what had happened out there.

A darkness like this was a place full of lost and found. Every fear you’d ever had found you, and you lost your entire mind in return. I counted my fingers and toes over and over as a way to know I was actually real, because I was worried that maybe I was not. I tried to piece it all together, to remember every detail that had brought me here, to this non-place where my mother was now singing an old song about a girl sleeping in the pines.

The last thing I remembered was going on a mission to intercept strangers who’d come near the camp. I’d slung the rifle, pulled my courage out like a prayer ribbon, and run toward the danger. But instead of Recruiters or those Natives who pretended to be refugees but who turned out to be school informers, we’d found real community. And among them, there was Isaac, long lost to the schools. Those last starlit moments outside of this dark cell had been in the clearing where Isaac and Miigwans were finally reunited.

That night, I had sat in the grass and cried. At that moment, there was only Miigwans and Isaac in the entirety of the broken world. I saw joy and the hope for more. I had laughed when they embraced, each searching the other’s face with hands and mouths, because I’d needed to feel the biggest I could, and that was with laughter, especially out here, right now. Laughter made space. And after a while, when they’d gathered enough sense to return to camp, I’d stepped out of the clearing for just a moment to relieve myself in the woods. Just one moment—alone and caught up in that elusive joy…and then a sound, like a cedar trunk being hit with a bullet, and then nothing. Everything went away. I remembered only the feeling of my limbs folding up like cracking knuckles, and I’d woken up here, in this place, in this impossibly dark room, more alone than I’d ever been in the bush.

I thought maybe it had been a bullet after all. Again, I considered that maybe I was dead. That would explain Mom being here.

“The magic of the entire machine is in the marrow; that’s where cells snap into existence and can become anything to anybody.” The voice sounded dry, so the words were like a coughing hacked up a parched throat.