“Give him to me and I’ll make this easy on you, Mukisa. You have my word as God’s representative on earth.”

Odongo just smiled at that. He remembered the school-age Auma in terms somewhat less grand.

But in one thing he was right. Quick would be better.

Odongo reached for the knife hidden down the back of his pants. The one that Auma’s children had sloppily missed.

He charged and, as expected, the sound of gunfire erupted from behind. The impacts of the rounds in his back produced no pain but had the unintended consequence of propelling him forward. Auma jerked unnaturally and Odongo would have laughed if he’d had the time. The man’s untrained troops had panicked and shot him.

His blade penetrated the rain hood, getting tangled in the material before it could reach Auma’s throat. More gunfire, more disorienting flashes. More impacts.

Odongo’s body had gone numb by the time it landed unceremoniously in the mud. He could no longer breathe, but he wasn’t sure if it was because his mouth had sunk into the wet earth or because his lungs had been destroyed by the gunfire.

Not that it mattered anymore. He’d done what he could.

Gideon Auma scooted away from the knife in Mukisa Odongo’s lifeless fingers. He looked down at his own arm and saw the blood streaming from where a bullet had grazed him. The pain was sharp—that of a trivial wound and not the deep ache of a mortal one.

Someone lifted him to his feet and he found himself able to stand without difficulty. A further examination of the wound would have to wait. Concern over the flesh-and-blood shell that contained his spirit would be unseemly under the adoring gaze of his disciples.

“Bullets can’t harm me,” he shouted through the beat of the rain and wail of the alarm reverberating through the hospital doors.

His men broke from their stunned silence and cheered as he took a machete from one of them, wielding it with his uninjured arm. Auma didn’t recognize the boy who had shot him, but he recognized the panic in his eyes. He recognized the power of it and how it turned the rest against him. They shouted demands for the blood of the boy who only moments ago had been their comrade.

He swung the blade into the boy’s arm in roughly the same place he himself had been wounded.

“Pick him up!” he shouted when his victim’s knees buckled.

Two men obeyed and Auma continued his work with the machete. It was poorly maintained, making the effort greater than it should have been. Eventually, though, he was rewarded with a severed arm lying in the mud.

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And an arm for an arm.”