5. The Incident

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"What am I supposed to do then?" he had asked her.

Groaning out of frustration, Ai squeezed her eyes shut and buried part of her face into her blanket. For the past week, those same desperate words had echoed almost continuously in her mind. She kept seeing his dull blue eyes pleading to her from behind his large fake glasses. But she'd already given him his precious antidote (that which solves all problems and brings forth happiness) yesterday morning, dammit. Why wouldn't it go away?

Because you're the one asking the question, her inner voice scolded. Naturally, if you've been chewing on some thought that's been bothering you for the past couple of days, it'll be haunting you. Duh, her American self added nonchalantly. Sighing, Ai turned to rest on her back, opened her eyes, and looked at the ceiling of the tent as if it would provide her with the answers if her stare burned through it. People did say answers were hidden in the stars, didn't they? So if there were a hole in the tent's ceiling, she'd see the night sky through it and...

What am I supposed to do, she asked herself again, exasperated. She rolled her eyes and wrapped her blanket tighter around her neck. Everyone else was sound asleep, she noticed as she threw a quick glance around the inside of the tent. The professor snored. Kojima drooled. The other two slept without interesting habits. Not that snoring or drooling in one's sleep were interesting.

This is a different time and a different situation, she told herself, attempting to think rationally. So why am I still asking the same question? She closed her eyes and her mind raced.

Option A: Because she hadn't found the answer yet, stupid. It had nothing to do with when or what or how or why. It was coincidental. But then... what would the question be addressing? Just life in general? "Where from, where to?" as Socrates had asked. Of course it had to do with the antidote.

Option B: Because she was so in love with him that – whoa. Who was in love with whom? Ai's eyes shot open and she fumbled for her watch. 3:07am. Perfect. It was the time when chemists would pick up a bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid and say, "Oh gee. I wonder what that tastes like." No, her mind was not functioning properly, thank you very much. Think antidote!

Option C: Because before she gave him the antidote, she was thinking about what she should do with his request. Accept or deny it? Fair enough, that sounded reasonable so far. And? Now that she'd given him what he wanted – her duty accomplished – she had no more reason to hang around and be a burden. Oh. So the question became, "What am I supposed to do with my life?"

And Socrates won yet again.

Disgruntled, Ai sat up on the mattress. After staring off into space for a few minutes, she rose to her feet and exited the tent. A cool breeze passed through her pajamas and she shivered. Fully awake now, she strolled toward the woods, hugging herself to keep warm, and paused at times to look at the sky. It wasn't her first time stargazing. But at least this time, there was no Kudo Shinichi around to attract dead bodies falling off cliffs and bloody murders. She spotted the Summer Triangle, but she could recognize nothing else. Either they all kind of looked like the Big Dipper, or they all just looked like specks of light scattered about randomly in the sky. But it wasn't like she knew a lot about constellations anyway.

Then at a distance, she noticed a glow of light. At first, her eyes tricked her to believing that it was the moon. But it was new moon these two days. Therefore, there should be no moon. That is, besides the fact that the color, the size, and the location of the light wouldn't have matched the moon's if it was out in the sky.

She increased her pace and, after almost tripping on twigs and logs twice, she arrived at the droplight that emitted the pale orange light. She found herself staring at a wooden cabin. She shivered visibly, felt the chill in her bones intensify, and tried very hard to prevent her teeth from clattering. Against her will, her feet ascended the stairs that led up to the door. The wooden stairs creaked under the pressure of her steps.

The first thing she noticed when she stood before the large door was the lock. The door was locked from the outside. Her eyebrow went up a millimeter. This must be a tool shed or something. She confirmed her conjecture when she realized that there were no windows in the cabin. Nothing interesting, she thought. Yet, she had the strong urge to remove the lock and open the door. The key-lock was simply latched onto the door; it wasn't fastened.

Standing on tiptoe, she removed the lock with soft clanks and was about to open the door when she thought she heard slight movement within the cabin. It was probably the wind or her imagination. She swallowed and rubbed one leg against the other. Why did it suddenly become so cold? She couldn't stop trembling. She pulled the door open.

There was a shout.

Conan's "Things might just work out fine" were the last words that entered her mind before it registered intense pain down in her abdomen. It happened so quickly that Ai didn't even realize that the girl had shot out of the cabin, stumbling once before her, until she heard the girl whisper, "Oh god. It's a child. Oh god."

Their eyes met momentarily. The girl was in her late teens, with her dark hair up in a messy bun. There were shock and fear and regret in the girl's eyes. Ai managed to look down at where she felt pain before everything went black. The girl had slashed and stabbed a small knife into her lower right abdomen. The girl's hands were shaking, and they pulled the knife out of Ai's abdomen as Ai crumpled onto the doorsteps.

There was a desolate cry. And then a second body fell limp beside Ai's.

It wasn't until ten minutes later that a black Porsche arrived near the cabin. The owner of the vehicle had come with the intention to silence a member with peculiar police records. She – the peculiar member Saruwatari Miharu – was informed that someone would come pick her up from the cabin at 3:30am. She knew she would die at that time, regardless of what they had told her. Therefore, she'd made up her mind to fight with all she got with a pocketknife that she'd managed to hide in the pocket of her jeans. Once the door cracked open – the door that allowed a thin line of light into that complete darkness and kept her sane – she would run up and do as much damage as she could with the knife. She would fail, no doubt, against a gun.

But it wasn't Gin who opened the door. It was Ai.