Though it had been a reaction to the latter part of his comparison, Sabine doesn't need to question that he'd taken it personally, that seems to roll pretty seamlessly into the rest of the self-fixated points of this. It also says— no, no, she is n-o-t. Not that she wasn't not saying the earlier wasn't equally so, but no one needed lateral and hypocritical extermination zealotry regardless of who was holding the lead.

"I wouldn't go that far," Sabine says, and maybe, just maybe, it's the first faint twist to her tone. "Some of the people—" and beings "—everywhere are pretty unanimously shitty in the mix, as well. But we don't 'baby with the bathwater' a whole species, or universe, because of it."

She lived in the South. It was a testament to those people not dying every time they opened their mouths. There was a reason she'd only cared for the forest and her books until she'd stumbled on to the child insanity couldn't touch. She might be a Keeper for The Rift—and the whole planet, and even the human race, through that—but it didn't mean she actually had to like any of them.

She just had to agree they didn't deserve an eternity of pain solely for existing.