He dropped his eyes to the fire and she saw his jaw muscles clench. Now that was good, Sherry. Go ahead, alienate the man. He’s obviously a brute with the social skills of an ape. No need to enrage him. Just toss him a banana and he’ll be fine. He saved your life, didn’t he?

Then again, she wasn’t exactly the queen of social graces either. “You know, the thing of it is, I didn’t choose this. And I don’t mean just this, as in running through the jungle with some . . . Tarzan, but coming to the jungle in the first place.”

He didn’t respond.

“A week ago I was a medical intern, studying with top honors. And then my grandmother convinces me that I have to get to this mission station two hundred miles southwest of Caracas. Something terrible is about to happen, you see. And I’m somehow a part of it. I’m having terrible nightmares about something that’s going to happen. So I rush down here, only to be thrown into a bloodbath. Do you know how many men you killed back there or don’t you count?”

He looked up at her. “Some men need to be killed.”

“Some?”

He held her eyes for a few seconds. “Most.”

The word seemed to fill the enclave with a thick silence. Most? It was the way he said it, as if he really meant it. As if in his opinion, most people had no business living.

“You are right,” Father Petrus said. Sherry turned to see that he’d awoken and faced them. “In fact, all men need to be killed—one way or another. But not by you they don’t. You are the hand of God?”

The corner of Casius’s mouth lifted. “We are all the hands of God. God deals in death as well as life,” he said.

“And to whom do you deal death?” Father Petrus asked.

Casius looked as though he might break off the conversation. He dropped his eyes and stirred the coals. But then he looked up.

“I deal death to who he tells me to kill.”

The fire crackled.

“Who tells you to kill?”

Casius stared, eyes blank. “Your God, as you call him, doesn’t appear to be so discriminating. He slaughtered whole nations.”

“Are you directed by God?”

No response.

“Then, you are against him,” Petrus said. “And in the grand scheme of things, that’s not such a good place to be. But still, we are grateful for what you did. Now, what’s for breakfast?”

Casius glared at him. Looking at the man, a small portion of sorrow spread through Sherry’s chest. There was a whole history there that neither she nor Petrus could possibly know.