“That’s true enough,” he said, a little grudgingly. “So, how’d they get onto you? Oh, the government found them, didn’t they? Those enchantments on your car.”

“They did,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a lie.

“Which agency? No, wait, don’t answer that. I don’t want you getting into trouble. I bet they’ve got you working on all kinds of crazy shit, don’t they?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” I answered. “Listen, unc, I don’t have a lot of time. There’s a whole lot of shit I have to sort through, and I could use your help to make sense of it.”

“Sure, buddy. I’ll do my best.”

I took a breath. I knew it would be irresponsible to go into too much detail, but I would give him the broad strokes. Uncle Phil had been in the military when he’d been my age, and had done some pretty crazy shit himself. Sometimes he’d told a couple stories if he’d had more beer that he should, but I had always got the impression there’d been a lot more to his military service than he let on. He would understand the responsibility I felt, and the conflicted feelings I was having, without needing to hear the details.

“So,” I began, “it’s kind of a research and development role. I’m working with a new asset the agency has, working to use my… special skills to upgrade and develop the project.”

“So far, so good,” Phil said.

“My problem,” I went on, “is that I’m also in a kind of protection role—kind of a bodyguard for this… asset. There’s some bad actors who want a piece of what we’re doing, and if it comes to it, I’m going to be in a position where I’ll have to take them out.”

There was a long pause. “That it?” my uncle said.

“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

Again, the line went quiet, and I could almost hear my uncle thinking what he was going to say.

“Look, Jeremy,” he said, “you know I killed people during my service. Bad dudes, like you say, people who wanted a piece of what we’d got, or worse, wanted to destroy our way of life. Sometimes, it was just stupid people caught up in a cause they didn’t understand. I killed ‘em anyway, and not always in the heat of battle. Sometimes we did it cold and calculated. That was hard, but you gotta remember why you’re doing it. That’s what service is, kid—sometimes, you have to do the ugly work that other people don’t want to do, in the name of something bigger, or better, or higher than yourself. Now, I got just one question for you.”

“What’s that?”