Back Into the Woods

When Rose was young, the government took both of her parents away for their experiments, and Rose went to live with her granny. Later, she joined her great-uncles, William and Jonas, on a trek to the wilderness. After six years of walking, Will died. She and Jonas kept walking. They didn’t talk much, but he taught her to defend herself, to trust no one, and how to hunt. Eventually, Jonas also died, and that is when Rose buried him and joined Miigwan’s group.

Wab’s mother was an alcoholic. She had a rotating cast of men around and some of them tried to sexually abuse Wab. Wab was an excellent runner, and when the water and power went out and cell phone service was blocked in Toronto, Wab begun to run messages and packages in exchange for food. Business was good and she was in demand.

But after a year, a gang caught her. They wanted to make her stop working so that they could control the business of providing communications in the city. So they got a Native man who was addicted to opiates to commission Wab for a run in exchange for danishes. When Wab arrived she followed men with baseball bats to meet a man with kinky, red hair. He showed her that the envelope is empty and explained that he wanted to put her out of business. The men forcibly took Wab to a broken freezer. There the red-head slashed her eye and the men gang-raped her. The Native man who commissioned Wab for that run is the same man she saw in the woods.

The Recruiters took Minerva’s grandson, raped her, and left her for dead. Wab was alone for two years before joining the group, which she followed for six weeks, unable to trust they wouldn’t hurt her. RiRi and Slopper each lost their parents to the Recruiters. A colony of townspeople experimented on and physically abused Tree and Zheegwon in an effort to extract their dreams. And Miig lost his husband, Isaac, to the schools.