“But that's
terrible,” I said when Oak had finished speaking. “You can't
just wash away a whole village because of some... some... imagined
problem. There are lives at risk, people will die. Don't you care
about that?”
“What I care about,”
Oak replied, “Has little bearing on the situation. People die
every day. In fact people die every second. Now wait a moment, if
you please.”
“But...” I began,
to be answered with a raised eyebrow which shut me up.
“There,” he said, a
second later. “Two people died in that moment alone, would you
stop those deaths? Would you mourn those deaths.”
“Who?” I demanded,
“Who died, and how?”
“A middle aged banker
in Austen, Texas, suffered a massive coronary overload, and a six
year old in Nigeria was taken by an infection caused by the absence
of clean water.”
“That's different,
and you know it. What the Forest is doing is murder.”
“No, Mary, it isn't,”
he said. “Death is a natural part of the Warp, the Forest merely
turns it to its own advantage.”
