Clare considered: was it a matter of tracing lines of influence to objects rather than personalities? Difficult, when influence was a matter of motivation, which was not possible with inanimate objects. So many times their tasks would have been easier if they could change someone’s mind. But that was like bringing a sledgehammer down on delicate glasswork. So you changed the thing that would change someone’s mind. How small a change could generate the greatest outcome? That was her challenge: could removing a bottle of ink from a room change the world? She believed it could. If it was the right bottle of ink, the right room. Then perhaps a letter wouldn’t be written, an order of execution wouldn’t be signed.
(..)
“I never did this for you. I never did this for history. There’s no great sweep to any of this. (..) I just wanted to help people. To try to make the world a little better. I like to think that if I weren’t doing this I’d be working in a soup kitchen somewhere. In fact maybe I’d have done more good if I’d worked in a soup kitchen.”

“You can’t do any good alone, Clare.”

“I think you’re the one who can’t do any good alone,” she said. She looked at him. “I have saved four hundred and thirty-two people who would have died because they did not have clean water. Because of me, forty-three people walked a different way home and didn’t get mugged or pressed into the army. Thirty-eight kitchen fires didn’t reach the cooking oil. Thirty-one fishermen did not drown when they fell overboard. I have helped two dozen people fall in love.”

His chuckle was bitter. “You were never very ambitious.”

“Ambitious enough,” she said.


//Carrie Vaughn, Game of Chance