Chapter 187
"This isn't chaos, Nirma. It's methodical. They're searching for something inside those three chambers, not merely abducting Sa'd, but looking for something they believe is hidden within this house. Perhaps a letter. Perhaps a document. Perhaps the key to something we have yet to understand."
Nirma knelt beside the pile of cold pinkish-red bricks, her invisible fingers brushing against the rough surface that still held traces of dried clay adhesive. Beside her feet, right in the middle of the courtyard, she noticed a perfect circle. Too perfect to have been drawn by ordinary human hands, too symmetrical to be dismissed as a random marking, and far too ominous to ignore.
The circle was made of ash and olive oil. The ash was not pitch black but a pale gray, like the remains of wood burned completely to nothing without leaving behind charcoal. The olive oil still carried a fresh scent, as though it had only moments ago been poured from a jug kept inside the storage chamber at the eastern corner of the courtyard.
"Arya," she called, her voice suddenly quieter, more cautious, like someone who had stumbled upon a venomous snake in the middle of the road and dared not startle it.
"Look at this. You have access to the agents' data, don't you? Check it. Has a circle like this ever been reported at any other crime scene? In Jerusalem, or at Mush'ab's house, or Abdullah's?"
Hearing her, Arya immediately pressed the small tarnished-silver button on his wrist, a device he had brought from the year 4666 CE. The button not only rendered his body invisible but also hacked into the communication frequencies of the Temporal Cross-Police agents stationed around them, frequencies overflowing with classified reports he had no business accessing. Yet he did so anyway, because the circle of ash and olive oil made his heart beat faster than usual.
After several seconds of reading the streams of data flashing across the tiny display on his wrist, he let out a long sigh, the kind that escaped a man who had swallowed something far too bitter to spit out yet far too large to swallow completely.
"Never," he replied, his voice barely audible beneath the wind slipping through the gaps in the shattered chambers.
"Not in Jerusalem, not at Mush'ab's house, not at Abdullah's. This is the first one. And according to the data I stole from the internal communications of the agents handling this location, they don't know what it is either. They've already collected samples of the ash and the oil, but the laboratory in the year 4666 hasn't sent back the analysis yet. There is, however, one agent, the oldest among them, who has handled 473 cross-time kidnapping cases before this, who suspects that this circle is a focal point, Nirma. A focal point for a cross-time message transmission ritual. A kind of miniature portal that can only be used once before destroying itself, leaving behind nothing but ash and oil that can never prove anything, because ash, like secrets, is the hardest thing in the world to trace back to its origin."
They left the circle in the center of the courtyard with a curiosity that prickled along their nerves like thousands of ants crawling across bare skin, yet also with a cold fear, knowing that every second spent there was another chance for the agents to realize that two unseen figures were moving among them. They made their way toward the simple wooden staircase connecting the courtyard to the 'aliyah, the upper room usually reserved for valuables and private rest. It was a place where not everyone was allowed to enter, and according to the agents' reports, the last place Sa'd ibn ar-Rabi' had been seen before vanishing together with that sweet-smelling sleeping gas, disappearing like water seeping into sand.
Without a sound. Without resistance. Without the opportunity to bid farewell to his wife and children, who were likely still asleep in the chambers below, unaware that the head of their household had been taken away by unseen hands from a future that possessed no name in any language.
The wooden staircase creaked beneath their invisible footsteps.
Not because their bodies carried weight, but because the wood itself was old, fragile, and decades past its prime. It had never been replaced because Sa'd, despite his wealth, had never believed in unnecessary luxury. To him, a staircase was simply a staircase. As long as it still carried him safely to the 'aliyah without sending him tumbling to a broken neck, there was no need to replace it, no need to repair it, and certainly no need to show the neighbors that he could afford fresh timber brought from Yemen.
"Here," Arya whispered as they reached the top of the stairs.
Following closely behind him, Nirma immediately realized that the 'aliyah was nothing like she had imagined.
Instead of being a cramped attic with a low ceiling, it was spacious enough for twelve people to sit cross-legged in a circle. Ventilation openings had been intentionally left between the bricks so that the cool desert night breeze could flow inside. On the packed-earth floor stood a small wooden chest that would have attracted little attention had there not been a folded cloth lying beside it. As Nirma approached, she realized it was no ordinary cloth but a map, embroidered with silk thread onto a thick sheet of canvas. It connected five locations in Medina: Mush'ab's house at the center, Abdullah's house to the northeast, Sa'd's house to the southwest, Amr's house to the southeast, and Anas's house to the south.
Arya knelt beside the fabric map. The tips of his fingers, still invisible even as they brushed against the canvas, traced the lines sewn with silver thread. The thread shimmered like metal, yet it was not made of any ordinary metal. It consisted of particles Arya recognized by their scent, the scent of a strange metal nonexistent in the seventh century, a smell he had breathed every day while serving as an agent of the Temporal Cross-Police before defecting. It was the scent of liquid zirconium, used to manufacture conductive fibers for seventeenth-generation combat uniforms.
"This came from the thirtieth century," he said, his voice carrying the certainty of a verdict beyond dispute.
"The threads contain zirconium, a metal that wasn't discovered until the year 2987 CE. It couldn't possibly exist in Medina in the year 625 unless someone from the future brought it here. And look, Nirma. Every house is marked with a different symbol, each stitched with a different colored thread. Mush'ab: an eye, indicating central observation. Abdullah: a knife, indicating isolation. Sa'd: a broken circle, indicating a search. Amr and Anas: question marks, still unidentified. Perhaps this map was never finished, or perhaps its creator hadn't yet decided what would be done at those last two houses."
Hearing that, Nirma studied the embroidered map far longer than she had intended. Her left eye moved from one symbol to another, memorizing details that others might have overlooked.
She noticed that the distance between Mush'ab's house and Sa'd's house was the greatest. She noticed that Sa'd's house alone bore the broken-circle symbol. She noticed that there was no mark whatsoever at the center of the circle formed by the five houses, as though the center had been deliberately left empty, deliberately untouched, deliberately unnamed. Because names, on maps as in life, are power, and to leave something unnamed is to deny anyone the authority to claim it as their own.
To be continued…