Chapter 183
Arya nodded when he heard that, and without needing to be asked, he picked up the second Qur'an that still lay on the floor.
He gripped it with the same gloves, with the same care, with the same conflicting emotions—a mixture of wanting to protect it and wanting to destroy it.
Then he placed it inside a small bag hidden beneath his robe, a bag that had remained empty for years because he never took anything from a crime scene.
He knew that every object taken without permission became a trail that could be followed.
But this time, he chose to take the risk because some risks, if not taken, would eventually become regrets that no timeline could ever repair.
"And what about the other Qur'an?" Arya asked, his eyes fixed on Nirma with a gaze too sharp to be mere curiosity.
"What are you going to do with the one in your hands?"
Nirma smiled—a smile that never reached her left eye, a smile born not from happiness but from the realization that sometimes the only way to protect the truth is to hide it in the most unexpected place, somewhere no one would ever think to search, somewhere that did not even have a name in any language of any world.
"I'm going to keep it," she replied.
Her voice was quiet but firm, firm like a decision that no longer needed to be questioned.
Their footsteps left the semi-cave dwelling in the same way they had entered it—slowly, carefully, like shadows unwilling to disturb the light.
Behind them, the open field once used for herding goats had fallen silent again because the agents of the Temporal Cross-Police, who had briefly been deceived by Arya's six pebbles, had returned to their positions.
Their faces were tenser than before.
Their weapons were more prepared than before.
Their fear was greater than before.
They knew someone had entered a place that should have been impossible to enter.
But they did not know who.
They did not know how.
They did not know why.
And ignorance, as a philosopher from an age they had never even heard of once said, is the mother of the deepest, darkest, and most inexplicable fears.
"Next, we head to Sa'd bin ar-Rabi's house," Arya whispered when they were far enough from the valley of Shi'b al-Jahsh.
His voice was barely audible amid the wind carrying news from a future that had not yet been written.
"But before that... Nirma, I want you to know something."
Nirma turned her head.
Her left eye rested on Arya with an expression he could not decipher—not curiosity, not concern, but acceptance.
Acceptance like the surface of a lake that knows the water flowing away from it will never return, yet it will never cease to be a lake.
"What is it?" she asked.
Arya smiled.
It was different from his previous smiles.
This one reached his eyes.
A smile that said that even if the world around them felt as though it could collapse at any moment, at least they would not face its collapse alone.
"That summarizing device from earlier," he said, "found something else as well. At the end of every note about Sinta, after the sentence, 'whose veins continuously utter tasbih to Allah SWT,' there was another line. It was written in faded ink, almost invisible, as though someone had written it with trembling hands, or with a pen running out of ink, or with courage nearly exhausted from fear of the consequences of their own words."
Nirma stopped walking the moment she heard that.
Her invisible body became as rigid as a statue.
And when Arya continued, his voice sounded like a whisper rising from a grave, or a prayer that no longer knew whom it was meant for.
"But she never asked to be praised. She only wanted to live like an ordinary human being—without a name, without a crown, without an immortality she never asked for."
Fuuuuh!!
When they finally left the valley of Shi'b al-Jahsh—passing the open field that still carried the scent of goats and dried dates, passing the mortarless stone walls whose coldness still lingered on their palms like remnants of a nightmare unwilling to fade even after awakening—Nirma let out a long breath.
Then her hand moved to the right pocket of her robe and pulled out an object Arya had never seen before.
A mobile phone.
But not the kind of mobile phone known in the twenty-third century, or even the twenty-first.
It was made of fired clay hardened by heat, decorated with carvings Arya recognized from archaeological archives concerning Göbekli Tepe—the oldest civilization in the world, established thousands of years before writing was invented, a civilization that left behind only T-shaped stone pillars and animal carvings whose meanings no one had ever successfully explained.
"What is that?" Arya asked.
His voice nearly cracked at the edges, not from fear but from the realization that Nirma—whom he had always believed kept no secrets from him—still carried strange objects in her pockets that she had never shown him.
And for the first time, he wondered:
What else is Nirma hiding?
Nirma did not answer.
She merely pressed the red, yellow, and purple buttons on the clay device in a sequence she seemed to know by heart.
A soft humming sound emerged from the tiny holes along its sides.
A familiar sound.
A sound that made Nirma smile faintly, although that smile never reached her left eye.
"Ashita, can you hear me?"
From the other end of the connection—which somehow pierced the boundaries of time and space, linking Madinah in 625 CE with Jerusalem in 33 CE, allowing the voices of two women separated by thousands of years and thousands of kilometers to sound as clear as if they were standing beneath the same date palm tree—Ashita replied.
Her voice was slightly strained, like someone who had just run too far or held her breath for too long.
"Nirma? What's wrong? Have you found something?"
Nirma took a deep breath.
Not the breath of someone about to deliver an ordinary report, but the breath of someone about to open a chest whose contents were too heavy to bear alone.
Then she spoke.
Her voice emerged from behind her veil with a clarity like water flowing over stone after a heavy rain, yet beneath that clarity trembled a vibration she could not hide, like a violin string plucked too hard.
"We found something in Mush'ab bin Umair's house: weapons from different years—1990, 2020, 4666—scattered across the floor like toys abandoned after children had finished playing. And in Abdullah bin Jahsh's house, we found something even more terrifying: a fully compiled Qur'an, bound in thick leather and filled with pages that could never have been produced in the seventh century, containing surahs and verses identical to the Qur'an that Muslims will read thousands of years later. But at the end of every surah, there is a small note written in different ink: Sinta Melina Ningsih is the most obedient servant of Allah. She glorifies His name every night before sleep. She is a believer whose veins continuously utter tasbih to Allah SWT."
The silence on the other end of the connection became so heavy that Nirma felt she could hear dust falling inside the clay phone.
Or perhaps it was only her imagination.
The tension had made her hearing more sensitive than usual.
To be continued…