"No," she agrees. It's hard to mean anything personally when you can't actually mean anything at all. "They can't help what they are. But there are thousands of them out there. Maybe millions."

And hardly any of us. Never mind what it is to look at all those corpses and know they used to be people. You can reason with people on the other side of a war. You can only burn the dead.

But it's not a competition. Both situations are awful, even if she prefers the look of all this pristine countryside. "I guess there are millions of Cetagandans, too."