“Aaniin.” I tested out my rudimentary Anishinaabemowin on him. Nothing. It was a long shot, but even now, hope forced me to try.

“Where are we going?”

Again, he didn’t answer. He just tightened his grip on my arm as he picked up the pace.

I tried once more, this time low and quick, because I didn’t want to know the answer. “This is a residential school, isn’t it?”

He straightened his arm so suddenly that I banged into the wall, my head, already tender from the earlier injury, connecting with the frame around a door. Then he yanked me back to his side, never pausing or slowing down.

I hung my head and tried to keep pace. Looking down, I saw that I was wearing a white shirt and socks and that my pants were light green with a yellow logo on the right thigh. I couldn’t make it out with my legs moving and my eyesight wonky. So I concentrated on paying attention to the directions we turned, the length of each hallway, the closed doors we passed. I wondered if there were more Native kids behind them. I wondered if I knew any of them, loved any of them.

There was a smell in here like wet metal and chalk. It brought back the outside world to me, not the woods, but the before time, when I was in abandoned towns and cleared-out cities. It was the smell of industry, of more structure than flesh; it was the smell of a new kind of decay as we inched back through the Industrial Age. It made my stomach hitch up like I had to use the bathroom. Because I knew it as the scent of dark change and brutal theft.

Two right turns, each new hallway the same as the last—empty and lined with closed doors. Then a left into a large space, skylights up top, concrete pillars spaced throughout. I stared up. It was grey out, the kind of grey that falls at midday this time of year. There were no trees in that small section of sky, no birds flying over, no obvious way to escape. There were a couple of brown couches pushed against the walls and a low coffee table in front of each. It felt lived in, but in that way waiting rooms feel lived in: temporary and impatient. In the corner, on the floor, was a ragged teddy bear, one eye missing. It watched us pass with his mouth stitched shut.

We walked through double doors at the other side of the room and into a smaller area. There was a booth with two security guards sitting behind glass. We turned right again, and my escort swiped a card in front of a small sensor on the wall, and a door without a knob slid aside.

We were in a stairwell with white metal railings going up and down. We took the upward set; I almost fell on the first few steps until the man in black decided I’d move better without broken legs and slowed down.