She only had a moment to make her decision.  She didn’t stop the motion, but rather continued pulling until the door was wide open, exposing a bright hallway on the other side.

Quickly, Eshe snaked a foot around the base to prop it open before discreetly edging her eyes out past the door frame.

The hallway was empty.

And in that moment, Eshe ran.

***

Once again aboard Saad’s private jet, Dr. Layla Abo relaxed in the solitude of utter stillness, reclining in one of the white leather seats within the cabin’s muted interior.  She closed her eyes as she thought through the next trip.  Another six children to last another six days before another trip, and another, continuing until either Saad succumbed to his illness, or Khoury agreed it was time to act.

“The needle would reveal the child,” Saad had told her.  Which she still didn’t understand.

What needle?  What did it look like, and how would it reveal the child?  And when?  Or how?

Most importantly, why?

Each child taken into the desert, to the glass, came away in a profoundly different state.

Damaged.  Sometimes deeply.

At times their experience resulted in their minds being wholly wiped clean to that of an infant.  But minds were plastic, especially young minds.  All had the ability to adapt.  To change.  And even damaged young minds could remold themselves into a brain that could eventually learn again.  Function again.  Limited perhaps, but functional.

Their lives would never be what they had been.  Or could have been.  Abo knew that.  But they could still lead an adequate existence with the help of a loving family, which was the one thought that still allowed Layla Abo to sleep at night and live with what they were doing.

What she was doing.

The truth was that simple minds were usually the happiest.

It was enough psychoanalysis to allow her to look beyond what was happening to the children to the high likelihood that most of those children would have eventually died anyway without her and Saad’s help—from disease or starvation or some other terminal malaise, suffering for years through a slow, spiraling decline through a terrible system that would never really change.

Poverty was the greatest destroyer of all—not just of the body but of the soul.

In a very real sense, Abo was saving the children from that terrible fate, from the certainty of suffering and misery.  From their own tortured lives.  The only trade-off was a portion of their mental acuity.

Sometimes difficult decisions had to be made for those too young, too naïve or too uneducated to make for themselves, those who could not understand the cruel and immoral long-term consequences of existence on this planet.

The truth was, there would always be those who suffered.