[Encryption active] Morrow counsels me that I am, perhaps, wrong. He tells me he thinks I have misunderstood Interrogator Rannick’s caution the other day. The fear is that my obsession with the Karnak Twins will make me weak, or sloppy, or rash.

I refute this, but I value Morrow’s opinion. Morrow says that my personal knowledge of Tertium is, and always has been, a great asset to the warband. It was why I was recruited. Further, he states that my emotional response, my heartfelt need to save and free my home hive, is an asset too: a vital passion that secures and drives my loyalty to this cause and, by extension, drives the determination of the warband members. Seeing my passion, the rejects come to learn and share it.

But, he asks me, what really fuels my rage? Love of Tertium? Loyalty to the cause? Devotion? Hatred of the turncoats in whom I see so much of myself? 

All of these things. But what else, he asks me.

I have dwelt on this since we spoke. Morrow is a wise man, a fine student of human psychology. One does not lead men into war as well as he does without that knack. He worries, I think, that I have become obsessed with the Karnak Twins not for those obvious reasons. Those acceptable reasons. He wonders if it is not the points of similarity and connection between myself and those monsters that fires me, but instead the difference.

They are of Tertium, like me, yes, but they were high-born where I was but a poor child of the lower zones. They were wealthy, privileged and entitled.  They were, once, exactly the sort of people that my kind despised. The people that lived lives of excess and luxury and treated us all like chattel. Indeed, their wealth and status was built on the toil and suffering of people like me. 

I hate them as they are now, yes. I hate them for their treachery. But perhaps my personal engagement is born from the fact that I have always hated them. I hated them long before they turned to darkness. Growing up, the Twins, and people like them, were the very kind I learned to loathe. In the Torrent, we all did. They were the scum. The scum that floated at the very top, blocking the light and stealing it for themselves. 

Perhaps Morrow, in his quiet wisdom, is correct. Perhaps, in truth, my hatred for the Karnak Twins comes not from what they are now, but from what they once were.  [Recording ended]