I left her hut with a gun in my satchel and no idea what to do with either.
The revolver wasn't heavy. That was the strange part. I'd expected it to feel like a verdict — some cold, metallic pronouncement from my previous life — but it just sat there against my hip like any other object, indifferent to the significance I was trying to assign it. Thirty-eight years of one life. Ten years of another. And here I was, a boy in leather armor, carrying a weapon that had no business existing in this world, walking through a city that had no business feeling like home.
Mactan was louder in the evening. The warriors who had spent the day training were now gathered around communal fires, eating things that smelled extraordinary and arguing about things I couldn't follow yet. Children ran between t
