I spun around. The room was empty. One wall was covered in a large mirror, cloudy like polished metal. I was shocked by what I saw. There was a skinny boy—no hair, no color in his skin, eyes wild and mouth open—staring back. I rushed over, stumbling in my panic so that my hands hit the surface.

This was me now: bald, weak, caught. I recognized my eyes, but they too were different. I felt tiny. I felt young. I was the boy who had almost died after losing his brother, in death throes in the dark woods, before Miigwans had found me all those years ago. And then a loud screech filled every molecule of air in the room, so high and so precise I felt it in my throat. I slapped my hands over my ears and dropped to the ground, gasping. After an interminable amount of time, the siren stopped, but I was already hollowed out from it. Gutted. I crawled on hands and knees to the middle of the room. At least the lights were on. Then I realized I didn’t care if the lights were on. Everything had been taken from me. I had nothing left to lose, not even light. They couldn’t reach me, not really, if everything was already gone.

And then the siren started up again.

✦✦✦ ✦✦✦ ✦✦✦

“Shall we begin again?” Agent Mellin asked back in the office. Once more, she waited with her fingers on the laptop keys.

I wasn’t sure if I could talk anymore. There was nothing in my head but the echo of the siren needling my brain. What even was time if it had only been one hour before they’d let me out of that room?

“Mr. Dusome? Do you perhaps need a bit longer in solitude?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“No?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good, then let’s continue. What were you doing for the seven years after you were separated from your brother?”

I went all the way back. Not because I wanted to tell her everything, but because I needed to keep talking. If I stopped talking, they might bring me to the room again.

“The Recruiters came in their white van. Mitch told me to get out of the tree house, to hide. I went out the window and into the trees. I stayed there for…a long time, I don’t know how long, really. Then I got down and ran into the woods. I didn’t have much food or water or anything. So I just kept going. No plan. No solution. No hope. I just moved.”

The sound of her typing was soothing. Click, click. click. Such a small, polite noise. I needed it. It was like Morse code tapping into the memory, reminding me, leading me onward.

“I don’t remember days, exactly, but I do remember pain and exhaustion. And then one day, I woke up, and there were people. Native people. They took care of me.”

“How many, exactly?”

I counted their faces as they pushed through the fog in my mind. The Elders, Miigwans and Minerva; the kids, Slopper and Riri; the twins: Tree and Zheegwon; the older kids, Chi Boy and Wab. “Eight. There were eight then.”