Free Pygmalion Unbound by Sam Kepfield Page B

that led to an afternoon and then an evening together and that had turned into two years together.
    Roni listened to Des gripe about the latest inflictions of torture by the senior staff that passed as internship, and when it was her turn Roni ran down a few of the child neglect cases she’d had to deal with as part of her Child Protective Services caseload.
    “I mean, he shook the poor thing, she wasn’t more than twelve months old, nearly killed her, she’s in the hospital, and mom’s wondering why we won’t let her have the baby back unless she throws out her ex-con boyfriend who nearly killed her. Ugh!” She blew a gust of air into her bangs, slumped back in the chair. “How do you help someone like that?”
    “The kid, the ex-con or the mom?” Des asked, wiping the plate with jalapeno-laced cornbread. He’d been raised in New England, from a long line of Cranes in Connecticut that traced back to the Great Migration of the 1630s, grew up with johnnycakes and chowders and every kind of fish recipe there was, but he was taking a real liking to Roni’s Cajun style, the way the peppers and spices made him sweat in the dead of winter.
    “The ex-con’s going back to prison where he belongs. The kid needs a doctor. But the mom — how do you reach someone that oblivious? It’s a real bag of nails,” her daddy’s backcountry way of describing a bad situation, sticking your hand blindly into a sharp-pointy-filled bag.
    “Maybe you don’t,” Crane said flatly. “Maybe she needs to lose the kid. And the ability to have any more.”
    “Involuntary sterilization’s been unconstitutional for years now, Des,” Roni said, horrified.
    “‘Three generations of idiots are enough,’ to quote Justice Holmes. The Constitution can’t change that.” He got up, put his plates in the sink, began running water to wash them.
    “You’ve got a strange idea of help, Des,” she said, joining him at the sink.
    “You don’t help someone by protecting them from the consequences of their bad decisions,” Crane said. “You think I enjoy the idea of pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into finding a way to keep an eighty year old asthmatic chain-smoking diabetic who’s already lost two legs alive for a couple more months just so the family can say ‘we did everything we could?’ There’s plenty of other ways to accomplish life extension. But you have to start before you get a length from the finish line.”
    “I guess I’m not as tough as you are,” Roni said defensively.
    “You’re plenty tough, honey,” he shut off the water, turned and held her, kissed her forehead. “But you’re also very compassionate. And being tough means learning how to ration it. Feel sorry for every hard-luck case that comes in and you’ll burn out, honey.”
    Roni kissed him, on the lips, long and lingering. “I’m damned if I know how we manage to stay together.”
    He tugged on the zipper to the dress. “Let me remind you.”

    Maria took out four more positions in the next hour. The squad that concealed itself in a stand of heavy weeds was the hardest; she’d caught scent of them on the faint breeze and doubled back around a low hill, creeping up on them with her reflexes on a hair-trigger until she leaped up and took them out with two shots each in less than three seconds and they never saw it coming. The squad that hid in a ravine was the easiest, having trampled the grass on the way; she entered the ravine a quarter mile down and caught them in an enfilading fire. Two hours and ten minutes after she began, Maria stood on top of a rocky outcrop and gently took the small flag from its stand.

12
    “This is a serious deviation in her programming,” Crane said with suppressed fury, sitting in his office the next day, “Maria was only supposed to do a simple evasion routine. Instead, she took out fifty Army Rangers. How did she acquire the knowledge to do that?”
    They were watching the videos taken from the small