Free The Sopaths by Piers Anthony

left hand. Bunty kissed him. “You had no choice,” Bunty said. “We knew that from the start.”
    He hoped they were right, but he needed convincing. “Maybe I could have disarmed him.”
    “Then what?” Clark asked. “Let him go to kill someone else?”
    “Leave him to rape someone?” Dreda asked.
    They were right. The sopath could indeed have killed someone else, and even as a child, as Dreda knew so well, he could have molested a terrorized girl. The sopath had had to be killed. But Abner still hated the necessity. “There has to be a better way.”
    “Let’s figure that out now,” Bunty said. “Clark, didn’t you have an idea?”
    “Sure. Dump them in a cellar.”
    “They would just climb out,” Abner said, intrigued by the boy’s participation. Actually it was hardly surprising, because the children had had thorough experience with sopaths.
    “A deep cellar,” Clark said. “Locked.”
    “Then we’d have to feed them.”
    “Why?”
    “Because they may be sopaths, but we aren’t. We can’t simply imprison children and let them starve. We have to treat them decently. Otherwise we’re no better than they are.”
    The two children exchanged a glance. This was a new concept to them. Slowly they nodded, assimilating it. Souled folk did not act like unsouled folk.
    “Feed them candy,” Dreda said. “Enough for one.”
    “They’d kill each other for it,” Abner protested.
    Dreda just looked at him.
    Bunty whistled appreciatively. “Girl, you have a deadly little mind!”
    “I learned from our sopath.” The one who had destroyed her family.
    Abner considered it. Two sopaths confined together. Candy enough for one. There would be only one survivor in short order. Especially if the two had knives.
    “We wouldn’t have to kill them ourselves,” Abner said.
    “But we would be setting them up for it,” Bunty said. “Unless--” She broke off thoughtfully.
    “Unless we gave them enough food for both,” Abner said. “So they could share, as normal children would.”
    “Sopaths don’t share,” Clark said.
    “Exactly,” Bunty agreed. “We set them up for peaceful coexistence. But they fight anyway, because greed has no limits. We could put any number in that cellar, with a mountain of food for them all, and only one would remain. Our hands would be relatively clean.”
    Abner shook his head. “The line between ethics and cynicism becomes obscure.”
    The children looked blank. “He means it’s hard to tell right from wrong,” Bunty translated.
    “Awful hard,” Dreda agreed. “But we’re learning.”
    “What about the bodies?” Abner asked.
    “Put them in the sewer,” Clark said.
    “That leads to the fertilizer processing plant,” Bunty agreed. “No mess.”
    “The police would know,” Abner said.
    “And pretend not to,” Dreda said. She was a sharp study on pretense.
    They worked it out, and soon had a plan to present to Pariah. Abner’s horror receded. Faced with an implacable foe, they were doing what was necessary, ugly as it was. He doubted he would ever be entirely at ease with it, but it did seem to be the most viable of nasty alternatives.
    It came to pass. There was a deserted house in the neighborhood with a large deep cellar with barred windows. It even had a toilet and shower stall. They set it up with bunks, cushions, and blankets. It would do as a detention chamber. Now all they had to do was use it.
    They set up a neighborhood watch, with special attention at the times the charter school children were coming and going. They checked any strange children, verifying identification with survivor children, who had extremely sharp senses with respect to sopaths. They set up honey traps baited with candy that the regular children knew to stay away from.
    And the sopaths came. They cruised the streets, looking for things to steal, trying to avoid adults. Experience had shown them that adults tended to interfere, and it was easier simply to sneak in when they