When the Others kill Waymar, he becomes reanimated as one of them, showing that the ranks of the Others will continue to grow as they come across more humans. That becomes a literal representation of the relationship between humans and climate change. As humans continue to contribute to the rise of heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere, the threat that climate change poses grows larger and larger, just as the ranks of the Others grow larger as they interact with more people. The novel opens with this attack of the Others, establishing the risk they pose as one of the main conflicts of the novel.