“Yep, I’m sure. Look, what if you went back in time and showed some stone-age people a TV with a remote control? It might seem to them that you were controlling the TV with magic, but to us it’s just a piece of technology.”

It occurred to me that I didn’t really know how a remote control worked. I felt myself blush.

Graham smiled. “Even if you can’t explain the details of how a remote works, you know there’s a scientist somewhere who could. You don’t think it’s magic.”

Okay, so people in this other world had some kind of amazingly advanced biotechnology, so advanced it seemed like magic. I could accept that. It was like a sci-fi movie.

But what Graham was saying didn’t seem to jibe with what Callie had told me.

“Callie described the other world in religious terms.”

“Ah.” Graham paused for a few seconds. “Callie has her own way of understanding these things. It’s what works for her, given her beliefs and experiences, but based on what I know, it’s not an accurate picture. What I’m telling you is what the rest of us understand to be true.”

For some reason, that was a big relief, maybe because all that judgment and hellfire stuff didn’t seem to be part of the equation.

“Given your potential,” Graham continued, “it would be better if you had a more precise and nuanced understanding of how the S-Em works.”

I nodded, but the thing about “potential” didn’t sound good. My feeling of relief dissipated. I didn’t want these people to have any more interest in me than was absolutely necessary.

I cleared my throat. “Potential to do what?”

“Be a cop, basically. Humans generally can’t travel to the S-Em, but some Seconds can travel here. That’s where people like us come in — we police the Seconds who come to the human world. If they break the rules, we take care of it.”

So, these people were basically a secret branch of law enforcement? Maybe Williams really was in the FBI — some secret X-Filesy part of it.

Then I thought about the place Williams had taken me.

“By ‘take care of it,’ do you mean you kill them?”

Graham looked a little uncomfortable. “Most Seconds don’t intend any harm to humans. If they come here, they don’t cause any problems. But a few of them are dangerous. Sometimes, the only solution is termination.”

What he was saying was rubbing me the wrong way. Or maybe it was the pile of decayed corpses I’d rolled around in a couple nights ago that had rubbed me the wrong way.

“Do they get a trial?”

“I’m sure there’s a process in place.”

Huh. That was pretty vague.