I stared at him, amazed.

“How can that be?”

Graham shrugged. “You’re talking about beings that can rework the world itself. Reworking their bodies seems like small potatoes next to that, doesn’t it?”

It made intellectual sense when he put it like that, but on a gut level, the idea of living forever felt profoundly wrong. Like they were ignoring a law so fundamental that it should’ve been unbreakable. I mean, the world changed. That was the way of things. Everything that happened changed it. But mortality itself? No.

“Isn’t the S-Em overpopulated?”

“Not so far as I’ve heard. Keep in mind we’re only talking about the most powerful Seconds, here, not your run-of-the-mill S-Em shopkeeper.”

I popped a snail in my mouth and chewed slowly, contemplating this new wrinkle.

“I guess I don’t understand why they’re so worried about humans finding out about them. Remaking the world, living forever — they seem more like gods than people. Surely they don’t have anything to fear from us.”

Graham turned and looked out the window. At first I thought I’d strayed into something he couldn’t talk about truthfully, but eventually he spoke.

“I saw a nature program a few years back. There were these big birds — toucans, or something — that laid two eggs in a hole in a tree. When the chicks were old enough to stick their heads out, some ants crawled up the trunk. The chicks killed every one of them. The narrator said that if even one ant got back to its nest with news about the chicks’ hole, all the ants would come. Later in the program, they showed the nest again. One of the chicks had fledged and flown away, but the ants had gotten the other one. It was still there, sticking its head out of the hole, but it was skeletal, picked clean.”

Graham turned back from the window. “The ants were so tiny, and the chick was so big, but it only took one getting away.”

“And the Seconds are like that chick? Trapped in a hole? Defenseless?”

“It wasn’t defenseless. It killed hundreds of ants. But in the end, when they came back by the millions, it couldn’t kill them all.”

I had to admit it was a shudder-inducing image.

“Okay, yeah, I get it. But what beings like Lord Cordus can do — it’s way beyond having a big beak, or whatever that chick had to work with.”

Graham shrugged. “You say they’re godlike. Maybe so. But humans kill their gods.” He looked up at me. “Humans kill everything. They’re nature’s own weapon of mass destruction.”

The way he said it gave me goose bumps.