Somewhere in the middle of the undoing, I fell asleep, curled fetal, my broken head resting on the podium of a knee bent like a plastic army man. And I dreamed; the other thing besides pain that assured me I was alive, truly alive, all-the-way-dialed-up alive.

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I opened my eyes back into the black, scrambling to my feet before I remembered I was inside. The back of my messed-up head shrieked from the movement, and I sank back to the bed. I smelled wet rot and metal rust—the mineral waste of my own blood. Every muscle hurt, and I was cold. I didn’t know if I was shivering or if the room was vibrating, as if a large vehicle were revving nearby. I folded myself so small my hands were sandwiched between the crescent bones of my ankles. All over, my skin was slippery. Had I pissed myself again? No, I was sweating. I could taste it on my lips, salt and sick.

“Not dead. Not dead,” I reminded myself.

And then I knew where I was. There was only one place I could be. If I was with my family, Miig and Wab and the others, I wouldn’t be inside, and I certainly wouldn’t be hurt, and I would never, under any circumstance, be alone. I knew then that I was in the place we ran from, the place where Indigenous people were brought and never seen again—I was in one of the new residential schools, just like the old ones the government stole us away to, where they conducted experiments, where they tried to kill the Indian in the child. The realization hit me like a punch to the stomach, and I struggled to breathe, each gasp sending shards of pain into my head and down my neck.

Then I did something I hadn’t done in years, something I really had no memory of ever doing: I called out for the one who had left so long ago, the one whom I hadn’t seen since she climbed down from the roof beside the Friendship Centre looking for supplies. Leaving Mitch and me alone and hunted in the middle of a splintered city to run until we found the tree house, where only one of us would be left to continue that run.

“Mom! Oh, Mom. Pleeease…” It didn’t make sense to try, and it did nothing but amp up the panic pouring into my lungs.

There was the sound of metal turning on metal and a click, loud and sure like fingers snapping. The solid air in the room shuddered; I felt it in my ears.

A slice of light appeared, so clear it made me squint, so electric and pitched I could hear it. It grew so massive I lifted an arm across my face and sucked in my breath. There were footsteps. I pulled my arm away and only opened my eyes enough to see that the door was swinging wide open.

My first response was shock, then an almost hysterical relief. I could see!