When I finished, I sat quietly in the living room, knowing that I had overreacted, overindulged. My body was terribly uncomfortable. I sat gently, hoping I would not lose it all to the carpeting in front of me. So I stayed there, waiting for the overstuffed feeling to go away, waiting for the peace to come, waiting for the warmth, waiting.

But instead of the peace came sadness, a sadness for this family, a sadness that my only associates were music-drugged victims. A sadness that there was nothing else for me in life, and there was no one to share it with. This was not a new feeling, but the depth of it was frightening. The despair immobilized me as I thought through my life, my weird sense of eternity giving it a continuity beyond any previous bouts with nostalgia. I saw the uncanny inevitability of my station—I saw that even the things I read, dreamed, thought, and did as a child were brought forward to their natural conclusion. The logical conclusion was me sitting, gently, sick again, on the sofa of a family of dead strangers.

My eternal vision of the future was warped; it was like looking through layers and layers of glass, each giving the scene its own particular distortion, the accumulation of each partition becoming almost opaque in the distant future, and I knew that my actions tonight, and each moment of my life, determined the direction my life would take in that bizarre funhouse of the future. Nothing was planned out, nothing was predetermined. Tendencies, habits, and preferences were programmed into the life scenario, but the final decisions lay with me.

This was the saddest cut of all, for I no longer had a choice. I could never go back. I could never again adopt the life of a normal human—not even of a crippled human. I had gone over the edge with Sarah months ago, and now even my physical self had altered. I had been given gifts, powers—

No. I had chosen my path, and I would continue.

My stomach settled a bit as I thought again of the four people whose spirits were reunited in eternity within me. I held their knowledge, their cunning. With each new kill, the previous voices receded, but were still heard in my mind—in the chorus of Hades. This kill had been automatic, there was no sport in it whatsoever. I had done it as retaliation to the trap laid for me by the incompetent vigilantes, one of whom was willing to sacrifice a daughter. How offensive.

Offensive, Angelina? Shooting fish in a barrel is offensive to the sportsman as well.

But I am no sportsman. I kill to survive.

Overkill is wasteful. You wasted this night, wasted.