“Excellent, but I need to know, how did those events make you feel?”

Normally he would think through his answer carefully and tell the doctor exactly what she wanted to hear, but not today. “I find joy in the suffering of humans,” Kurst told the doctor.

Dr. Bhaskara looked up from her notes. “What?”

Of course she was surprised, the doctors were not used to their Nemesis prototypes giving such honest answers during their debriefings. She had probably expected Kurst to give his usual, expected, unimaginative, boring answers about how he felt. Obviously, the humans needed to feel like they had their genetically modified killers under tight control, so obfuscation had always been necessary. Of course, that had been before the Gift.

Honesty was so refreshing.

“I enjoy watching humans suffer,” Kurst explained patiently as the reports came flooding into his head. The guards were being eliminated ahead of schedule. None of them had had a chance to raise an alarm. “The way you flail about uselessly amuses me.”

Dr. Bhaskara had conducted many interviews like this before, but he did not need to read the note pad in front of her to know this was the first time one of them had told her anything like this. “Why would someone suffering like that amuse you?”

“Because I hate you all.”

She had been so discreet about hitting her panic button that Kurst would not have even realized she’d done so if his brother in the command center hadn’t informed him of it.

When no guards came bursting in to help, the doctor quietly composed herself, and then tried to continue as if she was in control. “Hate is a very strong term. I don’t know if that’s the word you are looking for.”

“I understand hate very well. In fact, it is a concept which I am familiar with above all others. I had thousands of years with nothing better to dwell upon than my hatred. My hatred for your kind was the one spark I could cling to in the darkness of the Void. You humans are so profoundly ignorant of reality, yet inexplicably proud of yourselves. Mortals are pathetic. You are bugs to me. I want to squish you. I want to compose a symphony from your piteous wails of agony.”

He could smell the sudden fear in her sweat. “Uh . . .” Dr. Bhaskara wrote a quick note on her legal pad. Kurst followed the cursive movements of the pen and could tell that she had written the word troubling. “I find it interesting that you are referring to yourself as if you are separate from humanity.”