SATe [✔]

[16] sanguine

She'd been dead for less than two hours. Less than two hours ago she had been wishing me off and running off to a job where she'd be helping to do what was being done to her. There wasn't time to process any of it at that time. I'd been ushered into the morgue despite my vague protests; all energy I had maintained depleting the more I thought about her collapsing to the ground.

They all stood arms-crossed on the balcony that ran around the morgue, watching as Cassiel investigated every nook and cranny of her brain. There was little to be heard from any of them, not a single complaint or groan to be found. Smith looked bored, Franklin merely curious and Priestley had modified her usual persistent anxiety into a more palatable cross-over of nerves and concern.

"I would say a man-made brain haemorrhage," He said as he took a step back from the body and placed the scalpel he'd been using to the side, staring at the blood coating his blue gloves. There was little recognition on our faces or not enough for him to leave it at that as he continued, "It's a type of stroke caused by an artery in the brain bursting and causing bleeding. In this case, multiple arteries burst at once, so the blood pooling occurred at a faster rate. Whoever engineered this must have spent a long time researching the human brain; it's sort of astounding."

He sounded almost impressed. Whoever had done this had impressed him. Whoever had murdered this harmless, do-good woman had impressed him. He had said it so forcefully, not pausing for a moment to understand what those words meant; or what he was buying into by saying them. I forced myself to bite my tongue; an action the team had followed as they shifted uncomfortably in place.

Perry had begun to walk down the stairs back into the main ring of the morgue, taking each step with ease as he allowed Cassiel to read the room. He'd gone sheepish quickly, going back to staring Georgia in the face, the pride vanishing as Perry stood beside him. Luckily for him, Perry was quick to continue the conversation, "How would you achieve something like that without her knowing?"

Cassiel pauses, his eyes darting over the body quickly as he ponders the answer to the question. It wasn't necessarily the first question I would have asked; I couldn't help but wonder if there was a way, I could have saved her; I felt I could do nothing but hold onto her tightly. But what if I could have done something?

He begins to cover her upper body with the sheet, he'd long ruled out any effects on anything but her head, "There's a good chance she did know." There was a slight smile as he spoke. The kind of smile that was born out of pure apologetic energy; I couldn't help but feel the two would've meshed well had they met.

"There were probably signs of elevated anxiety in her day-to-day life that wasn't picked up. When you consider where she worked, there's a good chance everyone around her had either vanished or been replaced," I couldn't help but swallow hard as he said this, knowing fine well that even I'd noticed an almost heightened anxiety permeating from her; I'd just assumed it was a fear of authority figures.

Cassiel had gone back to his tray where he'd thrown the scalpel and picked up a small set of copper tweezers and carefully began to, as best as I can describe it, dig through her brain, "In regards to how though, this is the culprit right here," He carefully pulled out a small chip, and as he held it up to the light I could see it barely matched the size of a phones SD card. I could feel myself squirm under the harsh lights of the room, I'd never felt more uncomfortably violated; there was a reason the medical profession had never been my destined path, and this exact situation was one of the reasons.

"Why would they do that?" Priestley manages to squeak out a question, her complexion pale and uneasy. I imagine the more she watched, the more she worried something to this effect had happened to Matthew. There was something more human in that than I first realised.