Hunting by Stars E-Book

Cherie Dimaline

• Herausgeber: Jacaranda Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: The Marrow Thieves Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 530

Beschreibung

The thrilling follow-up to the bestselling, award-winning novel The Marrow Thieves, about a dystopian world where the Indigenous people of North America are being hunted for their bone marrow and ability to dream. Years ago, when plague and natural disasters killed millions of people, much of the world stopped dreaming. Without dreams, people are haunted, sick, mad, unable to rebuild. The government soon finds that the Indigenous people of North America have retained their dreams, an ability rumored to be housed in the very marrow of their bones. Soon, residential schools pop up and are re-opened across the landscape to bring in the dreamers and harvest their dreams. Seventeen-year-old French lost his family to the schools and has spent the years since heading into the north with his new "found family"-a group of other dreamers, who like him, are trying to build and thrive as a community. But then French wakes up in a pitch-black room, locked in and alone for the first time in years, and he knows immediately where he is-and what it will take to get out. Meanwhile, out in the world, his found family searches for him and dodges new dangers-school Recruiters, a blood cult, even the land itself. When their paths finally collide, French must decide how far he is willing to go-and how many loved ones is he willing to betray-in order to survive. This engrossing, action-packed, deftly-drawn novel expands on the world of Cherie Dimaline's award-winning The Marrow Thieves, and it will haunt readers long after they've turned the final page.

Leseprobe

Praise for Hunting By Stars

“A harrowing glimpse into a future all the more chilling because it’s rooted in history. Our marrow holds many stories. The best ones are of love, hope, and resistance. Miigwech to Cherie Dimaline for this story! Hunting by Stars is a revelatory must-read.”

—Angeline Boulley,

New York Times bestselling author of Firekeeper’s Daughter

“Spellbinding. Straight from the heart of resilience—Dimaline shows how Indigenous people hold on to dreams even when trapped in nightmares.”

—Wab Kinew, author of The Reason You Walk

“What a brilliant and utterly gripping book this is. Beautiful on a sentence level, kinetic, and possessed of a deep humanity. Cherie Dimaline is one of the finest worldbuilders working in fiction today, and here she has crafted something truly profound on the nature of survival, community, and the resurrective power of a story carried and told. To live up to the legacy of one of the best dystopian novels in recent memory is no small talk—Hunting by Stars does that and more.”

—Omar El Akkad, author of American War

Praise for The Marrow Thieves

WINNER, GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD

FOR YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE (2017)

WINNER, KIRKUS PRIZE FOR YOUNG READERS’ LITERATURE (2017)

SHORTLIST SELECTION, SUNBURST AWARD (2018)

SHORTLIST SELECTION, CBC CANADA READS (2018)

FINALIST, TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD (2018)

FINALIST, ONTARIO LIBRARY ASSOCIATION WHITE PINE AWARD (2018)

LONGLIST SELECTION, SUNBURST AWARD (2018)

A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK (2017)

A SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (2017)

“Miigwans is a true hero; in him Dimaline creates a character of tremendous emotional depth and tenderness, connecting readers with the complexity and compassion of Indigenous people. A dystopian world that is all too real and that has much to say about our own.”

—starred review, Kirkus Reviews

“A timely and necessary read... powerful and endlessly smart, it’s a crucial work of fiction for people of all ages.”

—starred review, Quill & Quire

“Dimaline writes elegant prose that grabs the reader and carries them into this dark and passionate world. The author has created a rich work of postapocalyptic fiction without the dense exposition often found in the genre.”

—starred review, School Library Journal

“The brilliance here is that Dimaline takes one of the most well-known tropes in YA—the dystopia—and uses it to draw explicit parallels between the imagined horrors of a fictional future with the true historical horrors of colonialism and residential schools. It’s as beautifully written as it is shocking and painful—a legitimate must-read.”

—The Globe and Mail

“There’s a quality in Dimaline’s writing that reached from the page, into my being... That’s a specific reference to the residential schools of the past, where so much was taken from Native children. It is one of many points in The Marrow Thieves where—painfully or with exquisite beauty—Dimaline’s story resonates with me. It will resonate with other Native readers, too, especially those who are Anishinabe. Several tribal nations are mentioned in here, too... There’s so much more to say... about Miggs and Isaac, about Ri, about Minerva, about French. But I’ll stop and let you be with these achingly dear characters. I highly recommend The Marrow Thieves.”

—Debbie Reese, author of American Indians in Children’s Literature

Other books in the series

The Marrow Thieves

This edition first published in Great Britain 2022

Jacaranda Books Art Music Ltd

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London WC1N 3AX

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Copyright © Cherie Dimaline 2022

The right of Cherime Dimaline to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781914344077

eISBN: 9781914344084

Cover Art by Chief Lady Bird

Typeset by Kamillah Brandes

For Lydea, Miles, Tarquin, and every kid in, or running toward, community. And for the grown-ups working to make sure it’s there for them to find.

The last thing I remember is standing on the edge of the clearing looking up. The tops of the pines looked like black lace over the full yellow moon, the constellations stitched into velvet. The whole sky was dressed for a feast. Around me, the calls of crows reported on the darkness, a mocking song of reunion with pauses full of loss. I should have listened harder to the crows. Anything that when gathered is called a murder is bound to speak prophecy.

CHAPTER ONE

PROOF OF LIFE

French

I DREAMED ABOUT MY BROTHER.

In the dream, we were still kids—the same age we were the last time I saw him, gangly and uncoordinated. We were sitting on the wooden floor of a tree house, the walls buckled and thin, the same tree house he was stolen from all those years ago. I tried to speak, to warn him that the Recruiters would be coming and he was going to be taken and I would be left in a tree like a forgotten ornament. But I couldn’t make a sound, just empty speech bubbles like an unfinished comic that popped around my head. Mitch was laughing as if I was telling the best jokes.

“Frenchie, you’re hilarious,” he said, his words swooshing through the air, shaped like paper planes folded out of weekly flyers.

Set between us on the floor was a small green figure of a plastic army man, one knee bent, a crooked rifle held at shoulder height. The swoop of the word hilarious tumbled to the ground and knocked the man over. That small violence of plastic on plank sounded like lightening bursting an oak to wood chips.

Outside, the world was sped up, the sun and the moon exchanging seats like a game of musical chairs set to fiddles. I saw us in the tree house, and then the tree house in a field, and then the field in the middle of a forest, and then the towns and highways beyond, haphazard like a snapped string of beads over green fabric. Water slid down mountains clotted with pines, and soil rushing after like black vomit. Hail the size of dinner plates bounced over cracked pavement and smashed into buildings. People blipped onto the land like faults in film and then disappeared just as fast, leaving shadows and holes. Lakes, poisoned useless, glinted like coins in the sunlight, then moonlight, then sunlight again. Icebergs melted, and everything warped as if the ice had been the solid frame of it all. Trash in the oceans was beached in tall waves, leaving deserts of water bottles and decorating the trees with the confetti of faded wrappers and pull tabs. Disgorged grocery bags spun down wrecked roads like the crinkly ghosts of tumbleweeds. This was the world now. And that wasn’t even the worst part.

Then we weren’t in the tree house anymore. We were outside, in a brick-and-vinyl suburb with dandelions to our knees poking out from cracks in asphalt like bristle on hide. I was holding Mitch’s hand, and we were standing on a street in front of a row of emptied houses, their windows dark as punched-out teeth. People walked by us coughing blood onto their shirts, clutching their bellies and heads and sides, medical masks hanging from their ears like hand-me-down jewelry. They had the plague. The trash cans at the end of each driveway were heaped with syringes, so many vaccinations and cures thrown out because none would work. The people stumbled into one another, knocking over cans and crunching through the needles. They had that look, the one that let you know they were dreamless, that they were halfway to crazy, that they were the most dangerous animals in the field.

Fear pinched my guts, and I squeezed Mitch’s hand. Now the dreamless were starting to walk different, stooped, their fingers held strange, always in mid-grab. They had nowhere to go now. They’d stopped showing up for their shifts on rebuilding projects. They’d stopped loving their spouses. They hung themselves from the confetti trees like heavy ornaments. At the edge of my sight, I could see them now, bloated faces pointed down, sightless eyes like coins in the sunlight, then moonlight, then sunlight again. I heard their shoes hitting against each other, hollow chimes in the breeze. The people on the street were starting to notice us, turning on awkward feet to amble over, fingers flexing open and shut. I closed my eyes and buried my face in Mitch’s shoulder. I could hear his breathing loud in my ears, but I had no words to calm him or myself. They saw us now for what we were: dreamers, providers, fuel. I knew what they wanted. I’d watched a pack of dogs once, breaking bones apart in a parking lot and snarling over the marrow, chewing and growling through exposed teeth at the same time, a cacophony of glut. A woman in a beige sweat suit approached, her long hair pulled back tight in a high ponytail, head held at an odd angle, her face twitching. She took small steps toward us on white sneakers until I could feel her breath on my cheek. I closed my eyes. I could hear her teeth snapping open and shut and then the low rumble of a growl, like a spool of ribbon uncoiling up her throat. That’s when my voice returned and I screamed and…

My eyes opened.

There was no light. I lifted my hands in front of my face but couldn’t make them out. I touched my arms, stomach, the front of my pants, wet down to the knees. A sting of humiliation when I realized I’d pissed myself, even now in the heavy dark, even through the massive weight of the headache, there was room for this small embarrassment.

Then pain swept in, cutting through my scalp and stabbing into my brain. I pulled my chin to my chest and slouched my shoulders, trying to back away from it. Eventually, it spread to a thud and pull, matching my pulse, and I knew that my heart was still beating somewhere under the dull throb of bruised ribs. Living, as it turns out, is the ability to ache.

What had happened? Where was I?

I sat up and assessed the back of my head. There was stuff stuck in my hair, like I’d been rolling around in the bush. I hissed through closed teeth, trying to untangle the mess. I grabbed what felt like a leaf and started to pull.

“Jesus Christ!”

There was a kind of tearing that I heard from the inside of my skull. It wasn’t a leaf; it was dried blood and the beginning crust of a large scab. I dropped my hand to my eyes to look for evidence of the bleeding I knew was there, but there was only darkness.

Standing on wobbly legs, cold pushed through the holes in my socks. Where were my shoes? And why was the ground so even? There were always branches to step over, roots bubbling under the soil, making walking a careful dance. I’d been out in the woods and on the run for so many years that my feet didn’t recognize a floor. I shuffled forward, arms outstretched, the ground smooth under each step. Seven slow paces forward and my fingers crunched into a wall. I flattened my palms and followed it until it met another at a ninety-degree angle.

That’s when the panic settled into the bottom curve of each throb; I was inside. I’d spent the last eight of my seventeen years outside, running, trying to stay on the other side of walls. Walls only slowed you down. Walls left you without options. Walls kept you still. And these days, stillness was death.

I called for the others. “Miig? Rose? Rose, are you there?”

I followed the wall all the way around, my shaking fingers, sticky with drying blood, making out the seams of a door, a sink, a toilet, my clumsy feet ramming into the metal frame of a small bed. I collapsed there on the thin mattress and whimpered, winding up like a kettle into shrill. The only thing that made capture more certain than walls was noise that would give your location away, anything from a heavy footstep to a loud cry. But I had no sense, not then, not trapped in this room in the complete blackness.

Hearing yourself fall apart makes it happen faster. Back when I was with my family—maybe hours or even days ago, who knows—we worked hard to hold each other up. Tree and Zheegwon, they had a special way of doing this for each other; maybe it was a twin thing, but something as simple as a glance or a hand on a shoulder and they were brought back to calm. It was dangerous to be anything but calm. Calm is strength performed. Weakness is like a loose sweater string caught on a nail and you’re running in the opposite direction. Eventually, you unravel the whole thing and you’re left naked.

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.

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!

And then a dark figure appeared in the light, a hieroglyph of a man blocking the way out. His shoulders were broad, the hair on his head short and bristled, and the outline of a holster at his hip came into focus. And I understood that not being dead could be a very temporary state after all.

I wanted to sit up, but I had no way to operate the joints and muscles needed to move. Then a voice, unmistakable, one I’d heard since the very beginning, whispered from somewhere close to my head, as if I had tucked her under my pillow like a worry doll.

“Without the magic in the marrow, we’re just machines,” my mother said. “And you can’t reason with mechanics.”

I tried to call out but only managed to exhale all the breath out of my body. I closed my eyes, eager to get back to the certainty of the complete darkness. It came right away. And this time, there was no dream.

CHAPTER TWO

LOSING THE FINDER

The Family

THE FIRE WAS SURROUNDED BY THE TIRED AND hysterical, all of them breathing heavy from exhaustion or frustration, each of them finding it hard to keep their eyes focused without jumping to the trees all around them. Not one of them had slept.

“What in the hell happened?” Miig sat as close to Isaac as possible, their arms threaded, fingers braided at every bend. Even now, the spots where their skin connected was electric distraction. But he was a leader, an Elder in his group, and he needed to stay focused, now more than ever, even with his newly returned husband, someone he had thought long dead in the schools, beside him.

“Not sure. He was there, and then he just wasn’t.” Bullet, a long-time member of the resistance camp Miig’s group had found weeks ago, rubbed her palm across the top of her shaved head. “I saw him in the grass, and then everyone came out of the camp, and then…” She motioned with the same hand, lifting it to the sky with her last words. “And then he was just gone.” She was crouched in the grass, bouncing slightly against her heels. She hung her head, pressing her fingers into the back of her neck.

“I should have been paying attention. I should have noticed French was missing before we left the clearing.” Miig was beating himself up, the dark bruises on his face from the absence of sleep like black eyes. Frenchie had been in his family since they’d found him in the woods at ten, half starved and all alone after his brother was taken. How could he have lost him? The weight of his guilt was almost unbearable. If he hadn’t been so distracted by finding Isaac—by Frenchie finding Isaac for him—he would have been paying more attention.

“We all should have been more careful.” Wab was pacing, a hand on her lower back, her swollen stomach pushed forward.

Chi Boy, always the doting partner, shuffled down the log and patted the space beside him for her to sit. She shook her head and paced. He kept his mouth shut but his eyes open, taking in each line on her face, every falter in her step. Not that he spoke much to begin with. This last month had been difficult now that the baby was asserting its presence. He wasn’t sure she’d make it to full term, not with all this stress: the regular day-to-day stress of being hunted in a broken world, and then this new anxiety over a missing relative.

“But what are we going to do?”

Rose was frantic, had been since the scout had jogged back with news of a Recruiter van sighting and they’d realized French hadn’t made it back to the camp. They had all been laughing, dancing almost, at Miig’s miracle, the return of his Isaac, and what that meant for all of them, the beautiful possibility of it all. Now she was rushing around the outside of the circle, all twitch and adrenaline, checking and rechecking the sharpness of the blade on her belt knife with her thumb. “We need to do something… and now!”

“No, that is exactly what we shouldn’t do,” Wab answered.

“That’s how we make mistakes.”

“Oh, like misplacing a whole boy, you mean? That kind of mistake?”

Her black eyes flashed, her curly hair bouncing at her shoulders with each movement of her head. Rose was always quick to any emotion. It was one of the things French loved about her, this intense and deep ability to feel, even when every hour was filled up with just getting by. She was just sixteen, but she’d already lived a life made long with grief. She switched directions, exasperated at her own inability to do anything of use. Her heart was breaking at the potentials of what might have happened. They had been ready to be a real couple—finally, after all the careful dancing around each other, all the running that stopped conversation short. And now he was gone.

“’S no one’s fault, Rose.” Chi Boy spoke just louder than a whisper.

“It’s everyone’s fault!” Rose shouted back. “Every one of us.”

She’d unsheathed her knife in one quick motion and used it to point at the group around the fire—Miigwans, Isaac, Chi Boy, Wab, Bullet, Derrick—pausing at each one so they understood they had been implicated. She placed the tip of the blade over her own heart to include herself in the accusation before pushing it back into its case.

“French would never have left one of us behind. He never did. Ever!” Tears broke loose and made tracks down her cheeks, cutting through the dust and dirt of a frantic search.

She swiped the back of her hand across her face. There was no time for tears. There was never time for tears. Not out here.

“Things don’t happen right away,” Isaac spoke up. His voice was melodic, made deeper by fatigue. “In the schools, I mean. If they have him, he should be okay… for a while.” He shivered, and Miig rubbed his arm. The school would probably never leave him, even though he had escaped with the help of a network of nurses for whom harvesting humans was just not an option.

“Has anyone told his dad yet?” It was Rose’s turn to almost whisper. When his makeshift family had found the camp, French had been reunited with his father, a reunion neither had dreamed was possible after so much time. And now, in one moment of dropped defense, there were miles and maybe the boundary of death between them again.

“I did,” Derrick answered. Like Bullet, Derrick wasn’t a part of the original family who’d wandered into their camp, but he, like Bullet, felt close to them. He felt especially close to Rose—or at least, he was hoping to get closer. “He’s lying down. Spent the whole night in the bush, looking.”

During their time apart, French’s dad had lost a leg after taking a bullet from vigilantes. That, coupled with age, diabetes, and life on the run, meant he had to rest often. Put grief on top of all that, and the group wasn’t sure he’d ever leave his cot again. And for a moment, that seemed to Rose like a perfectly reasonable response. Maybe she should just lie down… just for a moment, or maybe until this was all over, regardless of how it ended.

“Fuck this.” She slapped her hands against her thighs and spun on one boot, stomping off into the trees.

“Where’re you going?” Derrick looked up from braiding his hair. Chi Boy held Wab by the forearm lest she get any ideas about following the girl. Rose had joined them years into their never-ending journey to evade capture, but she was, without a doubt, one of them.

“The road,” Rose tossed over her shoulder, moving fast.

Derrick sighed, let his hair fall down his back, the thick strands loosening from the design, and picked up his rifle. He spoke to Miig. “I’ll keep an eye on her.” Then he jogged into the shadows, leaving the depleted group to their worry. Derrick’s concern was amplified by his feelings for Rose, even though it had become clear she and French had a thing.

“Rose… Rose… wait up!” he called out to her, but she didn’t slow down. Finally, he reached out and caught her shoulder.

Her round face was dark, all angles with anger. “Don’t try to stop me, Derrick. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“I don’t understand? Just because I wasn’t with your little crew until you stumbled into our camp doesn’t mean I don’t understand family.” He refused to let her go, making her stop for a moment. “Rose, you’ve gotta calm down a bit.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down! I need all this—all of this.” She patted her chest and her arms to show the twitch and tightness of her muscles. “This is how I get shit done.”

“Yeah, and it’s also how you get caught.” He looked at his feet. “Or worse.”

She paused. Derrick had been there when they’d tried to rescue their Elder Minerva, the one who carried the language, the one who had burned down an entire school with her words. That had ended in the old woman bleeding out in the road from a Recruiter gunshot. Things hadn’t been the same since. Rose just couldn’t find the right ways to mourn. She cried, she cut her hair, she spent hours focusing on everything Minerva had ever told her, every word she’d pushed into her vocabulary, but it wasn’t enough. A loss like Minerva was monumental. A loss like Minerva these days was unimaginable.

Still, maybe Derrick was right. Maybe rushing headlong into another confrontation with the Recruiters would only mean another one of them—maybe her this time—lying in the road, failing lungs grasping at breath like a fist already clenched.

He took the pause as an opportunity to continue. “Just sit for a minute. After that, if you really want to head off on your own with no direction and no backup, well, then, I’ll let you go.” Still holding on to her, he directed her to a tree trunk snapped near the ground and lying horizontal by moss and splinters. She allowed herself to be lowered, and their weight pushed the wood to creak.

Sudden rest filled her limbs with fatigue, and she couldn’t hold out anymore. She leaned over and put her forehead on Derrick’s shoulder, the tradecloth of his jacket rough against her skin. And then she began to cry. He put his arm around her and pulled her closer, eyes trained on the expanse of forest around them, just in case.

With this beautiful, broken girl finally soft against him, Derrick couldn’t help but wonder if maybe French leaving wasn’t such a bad thing, an opportunity instead of just a loss. He’d been out here on the run with other Natives since the government had started hunting them, since people had gotten raddled enough by the Plague sickness and the inability to dream and started believing that Indigenous people were the answer. And he’d been alone, even in the increasingly crowded camp. There had never been someone who had moved him the way Rose did, who had reminded him that life in this apocalypse was more than just survival, or at least it could be.

He shook his head, swearing to himself under his breath. No, that’s not how he should be thinking right now, not ever. It was them against the world, and every man counted. Every man deserved to be found. But still, Rose’s body against his made thinking… complicated.

The last flames were flickering orange in the mid-morning grey. Chi Boy put an arm at Wab’s waist and guided her back to their tent to rest. She shouldn’t have been up all night, walking around, but Wab was not the kind of person you directed. She was always in charge, especially of herself. When he’d suggested she lie down, she’d fidgeted with the beaded patch covering her permanently closed eye, then run her finger down the heavy brocade of a keloid scar that split the side of her face. She should organize another wave of searchers. She should find those who could climb as well as French could to take to the trees to get a better look at the landscape. It was foggy, but there might be something. Maybe she should gather the Council again to see if they could call in their informant. It’d been a long night, and many were just now grabbing some sleep, but she could rouse them. Finally, though, the baby made the decision for her, sucking the last bit of energy from her muscles, and she allowed herself to be led away, back to camp. She’d rest, but only for an hour, and then they’d set out again.

Bullet took over pacing when Rose left. She was uneasy in her skin. As one of the founders of the resistance camp, she felt responsible. Years ago, at the height of the hysteria, she’d traveled across the border from her Menominee community before the schools had started opening. Back then, she knew only that she had to get to family, and that meant finding her partner in southern Ontario. She had arrived too late to save Olivia, but she had stayed once border crossing became impossible, and by then she had found others who were building a place of safety. It was empowering to have a plan and like-minded people to carry it out. Now she felt diminished. Not quite weak, but less than she should be. Once Miigwans and his small group had been welcomed into the camp, they’d become her responsibility. It was one of the most important teachings, that they all looked out for one another without hierarchy, without question. And now one of them was gone. It had been hard enough to lose an Elder after the failed rescue mission, let alone one who carried an Indigenous language in a time when so much was lost or in danger. But now a youth? It was almost too much.

She sighed. “Gonna do another perimeter check, then grab some supplies and recheck where we last saw him.” She turned into the trees, leaving just Miigwans and Isaac at the fire.

The men sat quietly for several minutes, watching the embers, holding on to one another in this small, damp clearing. It was the first time they had been alone since the night before, since Frenchie had brought them back together. The group Isaac was travelling with had set off an alarm, and French set out with the scouts sent to find them. He was the one who had recognized Isaac’s tattoo from Miigwans’s stories. He was the one who had run back to tell Miig that his love wasn’t dead after all, that he was right here. And any reunion in this time was a miracle for all of them. If Isaac was alive, anyone could still be alive, could still be out there breathing, searching.

“How long since you got free? How long have you been out here now?” Miig needed to know more, needed to get caught up on the time since he’d last seen his husband being dragged out of a Recruiter van and into a school while he sat, zip-tied and frantic, under guard in the cargo section until it was his turn to be “enrolled.”

“A few weeks, maybe. Hard to say.”

“Time is different now, eh?”

“I’m not sure it exists anymore.” Isaac sighed, dipping his head to fit on his partner’s shoulder. “But we exist. At least there’s that.”

Miigwans turned his face to the side, and Isaac lifted his head to meet his gaze. “Do we?”

“Yeah, baby. We do. And we’re together. And I’m going to take whatever minutes we have to be grateful for them.”

They leaned together and kissed, breaking apart only to gasp at the power of that small act of resistance: love despite it all, love because of it all.

Eventually, they walked back to camp, to Miig’s small tent set at the far side of the circle, to lie, grateful, in each other’s arms, but only for a few hours. Only long enough to give their bodies the sleep they needed to search again.

CHAPTER THREE

PRISON

French

I WAS BACK WITH MY FAMILY.

Miigwans lit a sprig of white sage and placed it to burn on a rock in front of the small fire. White sage was precious because it wasn’t from this territory. It was one of the ways we knew how important we were, even now, especially now. We were worth that cumulous smoke. We were as necessary as this medicine. We leaned in closer, our shoulders touching, reminding us we were a circle, no matter how much smaller that circle had become.

“It’s time for Story.”

I sat beside Rose, the only girl who’d ever made my chest expand so much I could breathe bigger, which meant I could be bigger. Maybe even better. I pushed my knee up against the outside of her leg.

She kissed her teeth. “Move, na?” Her father was from Barbados, and in some moments she borrowed his cadence. She was missing him, and his words brought him a little closer. It was a luxury for her.

Beside her, Slopper slouched, his chin resting on his chest. He drew foliage in the dirt with the tip of a branch. He was still a child, but he was working to carry language, and the words he had memorized made him taller. He was becoming a giant and deserved the respect one affords a giant.

Wab rested her head on Chi Boy, who rubbed her pregnant stomach while staring into the flames. She absentmindedly stroked the lines on the ruined side of her still-beautiful face, feeling the memories raised and scored into her skin.

Tree and Zheegwon, identical in every way save the hand-me-down clothes they wore, kept all four eyes on the near distance, on the trees where they turned to shadows and sway. They were posted lookouts for the next five hours, and that job didn’t end, even during Story. Their fifteen-year-old bodies were lean to the point of sharp beauty. You had to look close to see that one of them was missing the outer shell of an ear, or a pinky finger, or to make out the dents in their legs, the painful movement of a badly healed elbow, all injuries suffered at the hands of people looking for a cure, trying to dig one out of these remarkable boys and their fragile skin.

Miigwans was elegant even in mourning, even in dirty pants, even without adornment. He was our Elder, the only one we had left in this found family, though there had once been two. He was elegant in his rupture and repair. He spoke now:

“Story is a home, it’s where we live, it’s where we hold everything we’ll need to truly survive—our languages, our people, our land. And you could say, but we’re out on the land, now more than ever. So why worry about it? Because we are not all one people, and this land that we walk, we are so often guests in these territories. We are different people. Even though now we are one group—Dreamers—we are still also separate nations. Lumping us together makes us easier for the outsiders to catalog, easier to dismiss, to devalue, until we are only single-colored containers for the thing they want the most. We are one box to check and stack.

“Like any home, Story has to be renovated—extended or repaired or even torn down from time to time. For us, the repair and renovation is not always pretty. Sometimes it’s unsound, but we do it the best way we can when the time comes. We do it with sticks if we have to. We hold them together with blood when we have to. Now, here are those sticks, and to it we add our own blood.”

I stretched my arm behind Rose, not holding her exactly, but just letting her know I was there, that I had her. In truth, I may have needed her more than she needed me right then. All I saw was Minerva’s blood on the road. My mother lying face-down in a ditch. My favorite uncle bleeding from the ears and nose, alone on a cot.

“Earthquakes in fracked landscapes. Tornadoes through pipeline-riddled fields. Tsunamis across poisoned waters. The coasts broke and sank. The weather turned manic. And the sicknesses were released. A virus, a pandemic of plague, a cure, and then another would step up to replace it. Depression as the markets crashed. Despair as the young and old died. Desperation when they could no longer rest at night with no dreams to hold them together. Madness, madness everywhere, and not a dream in sight. Until they saw us—maybe for the first time in a long time, really saw us. And suddenly, we were needed. Or rather, the marrow where they thought we kept the dreams. That was what they thought they needed. The very marrow from our bones. The very dreams from our heads.”

He turned to me, quiet but louder than I’d ever heard him speak out here in the green expanse of our world. “Don’t let them take them, French. We’re counting on you.”

Something tickled my face, like I was walking through a spiderweb. I couldn’t lift my arms to brush it away. I heard an electric buzz and felt a weight being dropped and pulled against my head. Each time it was lifted, more webs fell on my face. It took a minute before I realized it was my hair. Someone was cutting my hair. I fell back asleep.

I woke up with tears in my eyes. Had I fallen asleep crying? I tried to speak, but there were no words. My throat was too dry to drag one up. There were voices. Then I was gone again.

I opened my eyes. A man in a white lab coat stood at the foot of the bed. He glanced up once to regard me, then went back to scribbling on a clipboard.

The next time I came round, there were two men. One of them was hanging an IV bag of clear liquid from the pole at the side of the bed. I moved my head, trying to shake the sleep off, and he spoke.

“Don’t fuss. You’ll loosen the bandages,” he said, his voice small and tight, the words too close together. I had to concentrate to force them into sequence so I could make sense of the message.

Everything was soft around the edges, like the room was backlit by moonlight. I smiled, then closed my eyes again, remembering a yellow moon cut through with pine lace.

I finally woke up, back in the dark.

“No.” It was a croak. I felt the shape of my body tucked under a rough woolen blanket. “No!”

I was back in my godforsaken room, back on the small bed, back in the dark. Had I ever even left? I reached up and felt the stubbly contours of my shaved head. My skull, just above the neck to the top curve, was covered by a large padded bandage. My hand was sore; I felt the edges of a smaller Band-Aid above my knuckles. I remembered the IV needle, now gone. So I had been out of this room—that much was true. How long had I been here? And then I wondered if I was the only one here. Oh, holy shit, had the others been brought in? That pushed adrenaline into my veins, and I jerked into full consciousness.

I yanked the blanket off, the cool air rushing to replace it. I was wearing a T-shirt and loose cotton pants with a drawstring waist. There were different low socks on my feet, ones without holes. I felt like a baby learning how to control my movements as I swung my legs off the side of the bed and stood. I turned to the right and, with arms stretched out, felt my way to the door. I knew it was delusional, but I tried the handle.

Locked. I pushed and pulled, and there wasn’t the slightest give.

Then I knocked.

“Hello?” I coughed a few times and tried again, louder. “Hello, is anyone out there? I need to speak to someone.”

Hearing my voice, small and beseeching, just made me angry. What if my family was here—Chi Boy and Slopper and Rose… oh god, Rose. I had a quick vision of her in a dark room with a faceless man in the doorway. I banged again with my fist, then two fists.

“Answer me, goddamn it!”

Anger decanted into my limbs, thick and powerful. It made me slam into the metal, to kick and yell. “You cowards, you fucking cowards! Why don’t you show yourselves?”

And that’s when my mother came back.

“Oh, my boy. What is all this yelling around?”

The sound of her voice shoved me to the ground as sure as if it had grown hands to push me. “Mom?”

“You know what marrow looks like under the microscope? Like the entire universe, just full of planets.”

“Mom? Where are you?”

I stretched my arms out and rushed around the space like a frightened bird in a cage, crunching numb fingers against the walls, slamming toes against the toilet. I was frantic.

“I am right beside you, my boy.”

After scratching the paint off the bricks, crawling around on my hands and knees and searching the ground, I knew she was being figurative. She meant “beside you” the way other people said “I’m behind you.” They were rarely ever at your back, even when they said they had your back.

“Mom, I can’t find you!” I was sweating, and I couldn’t get on my feet, so I sat hard and leaned against a wall, trying to even out my breath. Lethargy was pouring cement over frustration. I must have been concussed or drugged… maybe both.

“Here. I’m right here.”

“Where?” I couldn’t stay awake, my sore head tipping toward my shoulder.

“I’ll reach for you. Reach back.”

I slid down until my cheek was on the floor. I turned to face the wall and stretched out my hand. And there she was. She grabbed my hand and laced our fingers together. There must have been a vent between rooms, hers and mine. Maybe that was how she’d found me. I brought her hand to my face and rubbed my lips against the cold metal circle of her wedding band.

“Why are you here? Where’s Dad? I found him, you know. He’s alive. We’re alive. We’re alive, right?” I couldn’t project past a whisper, getting softer with each word.

In what I can only assume was morning—there was no way to tell time and no sunlight to suggest an hour—I woke up knowing she wasn’t really there, that there was just me and the memory of her, the massive want of her. Cold and stiff on the ground, I woke up holding my own hand, one inside the other, under my cheek. I dragged myself back to the bed, pulled the blanket up to my chin, and understood that until now, I had never truly been helpless. Out in the bush, I could hunt if I was hungry, I could run if I was being chased, I could stand my ground and take a life if that’s what was necessary. I had done all of those. But in here, what could I do? For now, I just closed my eyes and counted the stars that bloomed and arced across my lids, praying on each one that I was really alone, that no one else from my family was locked in here.

My mother returned every now and then in the innumerable dark hours. Eventually, her voice stopped breaking my heart.

“Hey, Frenchie, did you know there are eight hundred billion more cells in your body than there are galaxies in the known universe? Can you imagine that? You’re bigger than everything we know.”

“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 aboveground.” 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.

“Shut up, please.” I turned on my side and toward what I knew was the wall only because my fingers had traced it so many times. My breath was sour in that space. I used a ragged nail to scratch plaque off my fuzzy teeth.

“A tooth is not a bone. Did you know that?”

I paused, hand near my mouth. Could she see me in here? I pulled my knees up toward my chest. No. No one could see anything in here. And she wasn’t real, I reminded myself. “You’re not real.” I said it out loud so the facts would stay straight.

I opened my eyes, slow and without hope, and besides the physical push of air against eyeball, there was no change in sight.

“A tooth can’t be a bone. It’s just a sharp thing that tears and rips. Because it has no marrow.”

“Neither do you.” It came out weepy, wavering under another surge of panic. I tried to breathe through it. “Your marrow is gone, s’been sucked out. So all you can do now is rip me to bits.”

Tinny laughter from the corner of the room. I stood up and paced. It kept my mind off the hunger. I had water from the sink and a toilet, but so far, there’d been no food. It was getting desperate. The last time I’d bitten a broken fingernail off, instead of spitting, I’d swallowed it.

“Hey, Ma, you got any grub up there in my head?” I laughed at my own joke. There was no answer, which was even funnier to me. I laughed until tears squeezed down my cheeks, until there were no sounds coming out, until I had to hold my sides to keep from busting wide open.

I was losing my damn mind. And then it hit me: the only people I knew who couldn’t control themselves, who did things like scream at nothing and have conversations with the dead as if they were sitting beside them, were the ones who couldn’t dream. I tried to remember the last time I’d had a dream, but everything was one continuous sigh in the dark. Then I remembered waking up in the bed, getting my head shaved, the man in white writing on the clipboard, the man hanging that bag, tubes going into my arm. Maybe the liquid wasn’t going in… maybe it was being sucked out…

“They took it.” I was sure of it. They’d taken my marrow. And without my marrow, how could I dream? That’s where they said it was hidden, in our bones, like sleepy bees in a hive. “I’m empty.”

I had to go, one way or the other. I had to get out. I searched the room again, looking for anything loose or sharp—a broken brick, a bed spring, a cup I could smash into a cutting edge. All the while, the tears I’d laughed loose kept falling. I would get out of here, even if it meant leaving in a body bag.

After a while, I lay down, hugging myself and pretending my arms were someone else’s. “It’s okay, Frenchie,” I whispered into my pillow. “It’s okay. You’ll be okay.”

There was a fire, the kind of fire that we never would have made—high and hot. We built Dakota-style fires in holes with tunnels underneath so the smoke was pushed away from the camp and no bark on the wood so it burned cleaner. I watched the flames jump and fume. The abandon was beautiful. I walked toward it, waiting for the waves of heat against my skin, but there were none.

Stepping over the ground, my feet made no noise. Noting its absence, I listened for the cracks and hum of the fire eating wood. Again, there was nothing. I tried my voice. “Hello?” It echoed around the clearing.

“Hello.” This time I was louder, almost yelling in the comparative silence of everything else.

I was at the edge of the fire, bright orange and burning tall. Still, no heat. I tipped forward, pushing my face closer. Nothing. I reached out, tentative and ready to pull back as soon as the heat jumped against my skin. Eventually, my fingers were directly in the flames. It was as if it wasn’t there, like the whole thing was a projection. I put my other hand in, then sank them up to my elbows. Finally, I pushed my head in.

Not a sound or a change in temperature. What kind of fire was this? I looked up; miles away, the sky blazed blue. I looked down. Beyond the top flames in shades of yellow and orange, the bottom burned blue, as if reflecting the sky itself. And below the blue was the fuel—wood chewed to solid grey ash, and there, in between the branches and burn, was something else. What was it?

I crouched down, getting on my hands and knees, still submerged in the pit from the shoulders up, nothing but my own breath in my ears even though the flames were jumping and the wood was breaking apart. What was it?

Something round and charred black, almost carved with dark filigree. I grabbed it—it was light—and turned it around in my hands. On one side it was like an egg where the fire had eaten it smooth. Then it got bumpy, and then there were odd formations. It was a skull, a human skull, the teeth and orbital holes intact. In my shaking hands—I couldn’t drop it—the clotted mess stuck on the front started to grow back and reshape: a nose, then a chin, then lips to form a smile around the edges of the teeth.

“No.” It was becoming familiar. “No, please, no.”

Eyes molded themselves back into the holes like blown glass, so dark they shone maroon.

“No!” I stood, the skull fused into my palms.

The ears spiraled out like seashells. Hair—loose dark curls—pooled out of the restretched scalp like vines.

“Please stop!”

Finally, I was left with the head of Rose, my beautiful Rose, staring up at me. Her eyes found mine, focused in and glinting with life, and for a second, I was happy. And then her eyes changed, her brow pulled up, her mouth opened wide, and she began screaming. And that’s when the heat returned to the fire, and I was consumed.

I sat straight up in bed as if I’d heard a gunshot, covered in sweat.

“Oh god, oh good frigging god.” I put a hand on my chest and tried to slow my breathing, throwing myself back against the damp pillow. “Good god, no.”

There are images and words and memories you can’t recall without getting gut-punched. They’re the things that haunt you for years, the feelings that get trapped despite your best efforts to set them loose so you can run away from them. They are the most horrid things, because they come from inside you. This—Rose being burned alive, nothing more than a piece of herself, in pain—this was as bad as it could get, and I couldn’t find a way to shake it off.

And then I realized what it really was. I clasped my own forearms where the veins were the bluest. They hadn’t taken it, not yet. After all, a nightmare is still a dream, isn’t it?

Click.

I spun to face the door, and sure enough, a line of yellow light appeared. I should have jumped to the side, ready to spring out at whoever came through. I should have been exercising, keeping limber, pumped up for action. I could hear Wab—“Stay ready, Frenchie. As a wise sage once said, if you stay ready, you ain’t gotta get ready.” But the sad truth was, I was grateful—grateful that someone was coming, that someone was even out there, and hopeful that they had a granola bar in their pocket. So I cupped my hands over my brow to shield my eyes from the harsh light and waited.

Once the door was fully open, I had a hard time looking up, so I took in as much of the room as I could before hands grabbed me.

I was dragged down a hallway. Not that I didn’t want to go just about anywhere if it meant being out that room, but the lighting out there was too bright, and I couldn’t see past a squint and blur and needed to be held up and pulled ahead. Toward what, I couldn’t have imagined. And that was saying a lot, since I had been imagining my long-gone mother in this place.

What did I know at that point? I knew from the small glimpses I’d seen before leaving that my room was white—white walls, white bed, white sheets, white toilet, white sink. Only the blanket had color, a soft blue that didn’t match the rough scratch of its texture. And fingerprints of dirt and old blood smeared on the walls.

I knew that the hallway was painted a light grey, that ahead, every ten feet or so, there was a bright fluorescent light buzzing on the ceiling, and that the floors were cement buffed to a high polish. I knew that my escort was not a Recruiter. He was some kind of new danger we hadn’t named yet. Instead of shorts and a windbreaker, he wore a black coat and dress pants in the same material. His shoes were black and low heeled. I couldn’t keep my eyes focused long enough to consider his face.

“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.

“Thanks,” I told him. I was genuinely grateful, but then immediately angry with myself for feeling gratitude. I should be fighting him, pushing him, tripping him down the stairs; Wab would have, and Chi Boy probably would have snapped his neck already. But here I was, meekly being led without so much as shrugging off his grip, with a “thank you,” even. The shame of it made me timid.

Two flights, and then through another door, opened with the same card, into another area watched over by two security guards behind glass. I was sluggish, weaving a bit with every step. We took a left and walked down a hallway wide enough to have little sitting areas outside the rooms, one chair and a round table each. We stopped in front of a closed door with a small plaque on the front: MEETING ROOM 3.

My escort rapped on the door, and we waited. I started seeing spots and shifted my weight from foot to foot. I needed food or I was going to pass out.

“Come in,” a voice called out.