"I did wonder how I ever would. But in the end... I think the question of atonement was getting in my way," he murmurs, turning his hands up in a tiny sketch of a shrug. "Because there's no fair payment that anyone can truly make for a life. And even now, I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay for some of the lives I took; I do think some of them deserved to die."

Others had been genuinely innocent of all but association -- or guilty of things that did not deserve death. But there's no meaningful atonement he can make for the lives that he regrets taking, no more than there is for the lives he doesn't regret.

"Rather than atonement, I needed to learn how to become someone with a better control of my... passions."