I had to kill that poor colt. It was either him or me, and not only in the immediate sense. I don’t like to kill, not if it can be avoided. It’s messy, attracts far too much attention, and with very rare exceptions, is always an inferior solution to a problem. At least with most of the other times I’ve been forced to kill, it’s almost always been overzealous Zhaaneph inquisitors: with them, I could always easily justify it to myself as a matter of survival, of self-defence. But that abada? There was no self-defence. It was cold-blooded murder. The simple arithmetic of risk management dictated that he had to die. And I made it so.