Scene 2a: Haruspex
Skillfully moving through layers of skin and muscles Ai laid bare Sally's secrets.
The sliced arteries on Sally's throat, chest and wrists were clean, no ragged edges, nothing to indicate an organic origin. The pattern of the cuts suggested they were made with bladed claws, about 3 centimeters long, on each of the fingers.
Ai confirmed the burned skin was due to the fire that burned down the top three floors at first but there was something .. off. Ai plucked small sedimentary fragments from some of the wounds, pebbles, shards, 3 larger fragments of about half a fist's size embedded deeper in the charred skin. The tissue around the sedimentary fragments appeared deeply charred, almost turned to coal. Ai recognized the pattern from somewhere specific ..
Ai wandered through her mind palace, hundreds of medical pictures on burn wounds passed her by, one more gruesome than the other .. she remembers the smell of barbecued pig and jasmin flowers .. it is hot outside and there are a lot of big people .. most of them are nice to her, some try to ignore her but Ai's inquisitiveness knows no bounds .. a bald headed man is argueing with .. daddy .. ?
This isn't my memory .. I am Ai, she thought to herself. The vision started to slip away. The .. was that the doctor .. he looks so young .. so happy .. Then the baldheaded man throws the contents of the bottle in his hand on the barbecue and it explodes in his face.
Ai finds herself staring at the baldheaded man in the grass, his skin charred, coal fragments buried into his skin, like carbon pockmarks .. the skin around it ..
Ai snapped out of her fugue state. The sedimentary fragments had been burning hot when they'd embedded themselves into Sally's skin, she concluded. Heat and flame damage and molten shards of rock ..
.. How long had she been standing over the corpse, remembering the barbeque ..
Ai turned around to look at the clock and froze.
"Is everything alright, Ai?", mister Light asked, standing under the clock, stroking his chin, staring at her with his cold blue eyes.