Chapter 192
They stepped through the unlocked wooden door, another strange detail because Amr, although once a sculptor whose home had always been crowded with customers, had become far more reserved after embracing Islam, guarding his privacy more carefully and growing increasingly suspicious of strangers who might come not to buy statues, but to spy on his newfound faith.
As soon as they entered the living room, where a low fireplace stood at its center, Nirma immediately realized that something had happened here, something that had left no blood behind, yet still carried the unmistakable traces of a peculiar struggle.
Three wooden stools lay overturned in random positions.
They did not look as though someone had deliberately knocked them over, but rather as if someone had collapsed together with them, suddenly losing consciousness while instinctively clutching the stools for support, only to drag them down as their bodies hit the ground.
"There was a brief struggle," Arya said as he knelt beside the stool closest to the fireplace.
His invisible fingers brushed across the surface of the wood, which was still warm.
Not warm from the fire, since the fireplace had long gone cold, but warm from the touch of a human body that had only recently been there.
A body that might still have held its warmth when it collapsed.
A body that may never have even felt the coldness of the earthen floor because its consciousness had already vanished before its head touched the ground.
"But there's no blood. No wounds. They didn't fight back with violence. They simply... fell. Like someone falling asleep while standing, then collapsing the moment their muscles could no longer support their weight."
Hearing that, Nirma approached the cold fireplace.
There, atop the blackened stones that still held the remnants of charcoal from a fire that had died out hours earlier, she saw something that made her breathing stop completely.
The bones of a small animal, perhaps a goat or a sheep, had been carefully arranged to spell five letters:
S-I-N-T-A.
Not Arabic script.
Not Aramaic.
Not Hebrew, Greek, or Syriac, the languages that merchants passing through Medina in the seventh century might have recognized.
Instead, they were Latin letters, a script that no one in the year 625 CE should have known unless they had come from the future.
Or unless they had deliberately left a message for future observers like Nirma and Arya, who knew that in any twenty-first-century language, the sequence S-I-N-T-A could only mean one thing.
A name.
The name of the woman at the center of all this chaos.
A name Amr ibn al-Jamuh would never have spoken because he had never known her.
Yet these bones claimed otherwise.
"They're playing with us," Nirma whispered.
Her voice cracked at the edges like fractured glass that had not yet shattered.
"They knew we would come. They knew we would find this. They deliberately left this message, made of bones, ashes, and letters that should never have existed, not to hide it, but to ensure that it would be found."
Arya bit his lower lip before shifting his gaze toward a shattered water jug in the corner of the room.
The spilled water still glistened, slowly dripping onto the hardened earthen floor.
When Nirma caught its scent, she detected something bitter.
Bitter like a concoction brewed not to refresh but to incapacitate.
Bitter like honey laced with poison.
Bitter like kindness concealing a malice no one could have anticipated.
"This water was mixed with honey and something bitter," Nirma said quietly, though her voice remained firm.
"Perhaps a hypnotic mixture that was given to them before the gas was released."
They left the living room feeling even more uneasy than before.
Not because of the bones spelling S-I-N-T-A.
Not because of the shattered jug.
But because they realized that Amr's house followed a pattern different from the previous two.
A pattern that suggested experimentation rather than execution.
When they entered the small livestock pen on the northern side, where Amr usually kept his goats and sheep, Nirma was immediately struck by an unnatural silence.
Not the ordinary silence of a stable occasionally broken by restless animals or uneven breathing.
Instead, it was the silence of an operating room in the middle of the night, where every patient lay under anesthesia and nothing moved except the machines forcing artificial breaths into lungs no longer aware that they were still alive.
"They're all asleep," Arya whispered.
His voice was barely audible amid the oppressive silence as his eyes scanned the rows of goats and sheep lying on the damp earthen floor.
Their chests rose and fell steadily.
But far too slowly.
Far too peacefully.
Almost like people trapped in beautiful dreams from which no one wished to wake them.
Arya approached a ewe lying closest to the entrance.
His invisible fingers rested against her neck, checking for a pulse.
It was still there.
Still steady.
But when he carefully lifted one of her eyelids, her pupil darted rapidly from side to side, up and down.
Like the eyes of someone watching a film moving too quickly for the mind to comprehend.
Or like the eyes of someone dreaming.
A dream they would never tell anyone because once they awoke, they would remember nothing.
Only the strange feeling that they had once visited a place they had never seen before and met someone they had never known.
"The sleeping gas used here has a different formula," Nirma said.
Her voice emerged from behind her veil, clear as water flowing over stone, yet beneath that clarity trembled a fear she could no longer hide.
"It's gentler. Slower. Designed for long-term testing. They never intended to abduct these animals, Arya. They only wanted to observe how long the gas remained effective, how deeply it could influence dreams, and how likely it was that both humans and animals would remember things that had never actually happened after they woke up. This is a laboratory. And these animals are their test subjects."
Arya nodded before his attention shifted toward the stable wall, woven from wood and clay.
There, on that modest wall, he noticed an engraving that Amr ibn al-Jamuh could never have carved.
Its style was different.
More refined.
More precise.
As though it had been etched using a metal tool that did not exist in the seventh century.
A metal that would not be discovered until thousands of years later.
A metal that a former sculptor who had never once left Medina throughout his life could never possibly have possessed.
The engraving depicted a woman standing atop a pile of sacred scriptures.
Nirma counted them silently.
Six books.
Six different religions.
Beneath her feet, the scriptures were not merely being stepped on.
They were cracked.
Their pages torn apart.
Their covers ripped away.
As though someone had not only stood upon holy books but had deliberately destroyed them, intentionally tearing them apart until they were no longer worthy of being read by anyone who still believed that the words within them were the Word of God.
"Islam. Christianity. Judaism. Hinduism. Buddhism."
To be continued…