Fannami’s mother told him that many villagers from Baga had escaped and made their way to Maiduguri. But she cautioned him not to tell anyone what had happened to him. All the boys had to be wary of the military and the Civilian Joint Task Force, a vigilante group the government authorized in 2013 to fight Boko Haram. Any involvement with insurgents was treated as abetting. Adults and children with any association with Boko Haram are taken to the notorious Giwa Barracks, where they are detained indefinitely in squalid conditions. Boys whom I interviewed told me they had been crammed in cells with between 50 and 100 other children, forbidden to speak to one another and unable to contact their families until the military decided, seemingly at random, to release them. Human rights groups speak of extrajudicial killings by the Civilian J.T.F. as an open secret.

Once children were released from Giwa, the Nigerian government considered them “cleared.” If they moved into an official camp, there were free schools and sporadic psychosocial support programs, but the need far outpaced the response. For former abductees who moved into the community, there were even fewer options. Children were essentially left to fend for themselves. Aid agencies descended to assist with famine, acute malnutrition, education and peer-to-peer counseling, but none of these efforts had reached the boys I spoke to. When I asked, they said they didn’t even want the help. They thought they’d be turned over to the military and to Giwa Barracks. They had reason to fear. The Nigerian government has been keeping the Chibok girls who were rescued from captivity in custody for the past eight months.

For those who avoided Giwa, life became uncertain. Fannami didn’t know what to do with himself when he returned. “In the morning, I would quickly come out of the house as if I’m going to do something important. But what really used to bring me out was to watch children going to school. Then I would look at the road. I would see people of different ages, including young men, driving cars. I would say, Have I lost out? Can I ever be like these people? Is the opportunity still there? Why did I make this mistake? If I had left the whole of this area when insurgency started, before I was abducted, wouldn’t it have been better?” Fannami, more than anything, wanted to go to school.

During Eid al-Adha, the feast of the sacrifice, Fannami ate chicken for the second time and went to the zoo. He was entranced by the lion. He is seeing us like meat, but he has no right to come out of his cage and catch us, he thought. On his way out, he passed Kolomi. The boy with the dogs! He went back and introduced himself. When they pieced together that they had both been in Malam Fatori at the same time, Kolomi felt relieved that someone else had passed through this trouble. Fannami was angry. If he’d been around people from home, perhaps he could have escaped sooner. Kolomi was living with his older sister and going to school. He had forgotten many details about his time in Malam Fatori and didn’t know why. It was as if someone had scrawled an eraser through his memory at random.

Fannami later saw Zanna at the barber shop where he worked sweeping the floor. “I know you from Baga!” Fannami said. “Yes, it’s true,” Zanna said. Fannami also saw Mustapha on the street, but he never spoke to him. Mustapha looked the same in and out of the bush — his eyes hadn’t changed. Fannami did not want anything to do with him.

When Mustapha arrived in Maiduguri, he waited a week before going to find his grandmother. It took two more days for him to see his older sister. He told them that Boko Haram detained him in a house for a month, until soldiers had liberated them. “I know how society is,” he explained. “I know how they are treating the parents of children that joined Boko Haram. Why should I put my relations in that situation?” He moved out of his grandmother’s house as soon as he could — he did not feel free there — and started washing cars and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws, called keke Napep. The owners left their keys so the washers could park the vehicles when they were done, and so Mustapha finally learned to drive. Mustapha decided to hang around the drivers, pulling shifts, and soon he got a vehicle from someone with a fleet and started driving full time. Sometimes, without warning, he remembers, and he is back in Malam Fatori. If he’s carrying passengers, they will notice and ask: “What is wrong? You look so worried, you have changed.” He will tell them, “It’s nothing.” But when they are gone, he will park on the side of the road and pretend to be repairing something until he comes back fully to his senses.

I met these boys in hotel rooms that felt in turn like safe houses and prisons. None of the boys know their exact age. Fannami and Zanna estimate they are now 15, Kolomi says he is 14 and Mustapha thinks he is around 18, but looks younger. They all chose the names that were used in this article. Day after day, they returned to tell me about things they had all tried to forget. They came before or after work, between jobs, after school, on the weekends. I began to wonder why. Unlike the abduction of the Chibok girls, which briefly turned into a global sympathy saga, no one seemed to care about the boys from Baga. These children walked out of hell into a world that didn’t seem to want them. The stories they told me about rituals like infant slaughter and bathing your hands in blood have not been previously reported as part of life under Boko Haram. But their stories were consistent, and rumors of such acts have circulated around northeast Nigeria.