Free I Am Margaret by Corinna Turner

slightly and curved thumb and forefinger into the Fish. Keep the faith, Uncle Peter .
    His eyes moved quickly on again, pausing on other faces as well, and a fresh knot of fear relaxed inside me. He wasn’t going to betray me by accident, even in these ghastly moments. Again he raised his hand slightly, tracing the sign of the cross over us. I could almost hear his voice in my head. Keep the faith, Margo .
    “What’s he doing?” asked Caroline, in a hushed voice.
    “I think it’s called a blessing,” volunteered someone else.
    “Is it magic?” asked Harriet.
    “Well, I imagine it’s supposed to be… or something like that,” replied the more knowledgeable someone.
    “ The EuroBloc don’t think so, do they,” sneered Jane.
    “We could use some magic,” said Harriet wistfully. “But… why’d he do it to them too? They’re going to… kill him… aren’t they?”
    “Priests will bless anything if it holds still long enough,” retorted Jane.
    “Margo, why’d he bless all of them? It is good magic, isn’t it, not a curse or something?”
    My mouth was so dry I wasn’t sure I could answer, but I had to try.
    “It’s an important thing for them, Harriet.” How had I managed to speak so normally? “He’s supposed to forgive everyone, no matter what they do to him.”
    “ But why ?”
    I mustn’t sound too knowledgeable...
    “I think they love absolutely everyone as a brother or sister, or something like that. I don’t quite understand it myself.”
    No lie. I believed in the theory with all my heart, but right now I really was having trouble understanding how I could ever love Richard or Sidney or the judge who’d just condemned my dear friend to one of the slowest and most agonizing deaths ever invented by mankind. My heart just didn’t feel as though it could ever expand enough to accept such monsters into it.
    Syringe in hand, Richard was finding the vein on Uncle Peter’s arm. Uncle Peter’s trembling hands knotted into balls again and his chest heaved, but he closed his eyes firmly and lay very still. With a sound of satisfaction, Richard slid the needle in and drove the plunger home, then withdrew it and dropped the syringe into the sharps bin held by a hovering minion.
    Whether Uncle Peter fought the drug’s paralyzing effect or not, his hands relaxed, his breathing grew slower and more regular, and his head fell to one side as his muscle control drained away. A minion stepped forward to fit a brace to hold his head upright as Richard and Sidney set to work, and the other two converged, armed with an assortment of utensils for clamping blood vessels.
    I watched with a kind of sick fascination, unable to look away, unwilling to look away, for irrational as it might be, to look away felt like to desert him. Perhaps it was. To look away because I couldn’t bear it, when he could do nothing but bear it…
    Skin. That was first. The largest sheets of it, carefully packed away into those bags and placed inside the medical cooler.
    Eyes, second. They lifted his lids and hooked them back with a gentleness that was hideous, mere care not to damage the merchandise…
    Tongue, third…
    It went on and on and on. I’d never realized how many parts there were in the human body. Bones, muscles, organs... And always the suffocating horror, the knowledge that Uncle Peter was quite conscious, that he could feel every slice of those cruel blades…
    My own helplessness crushed me. I wanted to rush down there and save him… yet I could not. It simply was not possible . Guards and card-locked doors blocked my path; my solitary, unarmed, untrained self simply could not save him. I wanted to scream, shout, howl out my grief and horror, but I couldn’t do that, either, for how many others would I condemn to Uncle Peter’s fate, and for what?
    Still I watched and still they sliced and cut and packaged.
    When they finally cut out his still-beating heart, I began to shake, long spasms that I couldn’t