“So let me ask the hard and obvious question first—have any of you ever seen anything like what we witnessed at that village before?” Gayle asked, her voice falling low to mask the conversation below the din of diners around them.

All four Shepherds shook their heads in unison, but Eli spoke for the group. “We’ve seen our fair share of carnage, but no, we’ve never encountered anything like that before.”

“That was some for-real Sodom and Gomorrah stuff of nightmares back there,” Bex chimed in, putting into words exactly what Jed had been thinking.

“Medically speaking,” Nisha said, turning to Bex, “what were we looking at there? I mean, what sort of weapon can do that to a person?”

Bex blew a little snort of air out her nose and said, “During my time on active duty as a combat medic, I saw the human body after being shot up, blown up, and burned up, but I’ve never seen it reduced to a pile of char like that. Even a Hellfire missile doesn’t do that to a human being.”

“So nothing in our arsenal or the enemy’s arsenal that you’re aware of can do that sort of damage?” Nisha pressed.

Bex nodded. “I mean, you guys know how incendiary devices work. There’s always a blast radius. Even thermobaric weapons, which would be exothermically capable of doing that to a human body, are accompanied by a tremendous pressure wave. That can’t leave the remains in a tidy little pile, you know what I mean? And we saw no other evidence of a pressure wave on the mountain—no disembodied limbs, no structural damage, no impact craters . . . It was almost as if those people were instantaneously cooked from the inside out while standing in place.”

An uncomfortable silence hung over the table as they all processed the implications. Had they just witnessed a real fire-and-brimstone wrath-of-God event?

“So you think it was supernatural in origin?” Gayle said, her voice low and quiet. “That’s your conclusion?”

“No,” Jed said quickly, before anyone else could answer. He wondered if Gayle had concluded that they were some sort of real-life X-Files task force and resisted a smile. “We’re not saying that. I think what Bex is saying, what we’re all saying, is that we’ve never seen anything like that and we don’t know. That doesn’t mean what happened on the mountain was supernatural. As Arthur C. Clarke once famously said, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ What we saw in that village is most likely technology we’ve not seen before.”

Is that what you really think, Jed? Nisha’s question came to him unbidden and he wondered if she’d pushed it or if he was still tuned to her, like an unchanged television channel playing in the background.

It’s what I hope the truth to be.