Umutoni stood slowly. She walked to a child—a boy with a shaved head and a fresh scar across his cheek—and placed a hand on his shoulder. “This boy watched his parents burn alive last month. A mining dispute. Foreign money. Local fire. I found him in a ditch, screaming at the sky. Now he can kill a man in three seconds. Tell me, rebel: who is the real chaos? The one who creates monsters, or the one who teaches monsters how to aim?”
She was smaller than he expected. Delicate wrists. A silver cross around her neck. She could have been a schoolteacher or a nurse. But her eyes—those eyes held the weight of a hundred massacres.
“Then you will die here,” she said. “Because I do not surrender. And neither will these children. We will burn this country down to build it again. And you, Baaghi, will either burn with us or become ash alone.”
Niyonsaba laughed—a dry, hollow sound. “You think chaos is a suitcase? A briefcase of secrets? No, my friend. Agasobanuye is a wound that never heals. Umutoni does not carry chaos. She is chaos. To fight her, you must become a wound yourself.”