Chapter 17
In every era where they prepared to interrogate victims of temporal chaos, Nirmala would spirit away their target before it could be touched.
She became a shadow darting along the edges of their operations, a ghost that could never be captured, a disruptor that could never be predicted.
Nirmala never directly asked Arya why he chose to join her.
Not because she did not care, but because the answer always arrived in small fragments she gathered over time, like assembling shards of glass scattered across the floor without ever being able to restore them into a whole mirror.
She knew Arya had once been part of the Temporal Cross-Police.
She knew he had held a rank high enough before suddenly vanishing from their radar.
She knew something had happened in that year that made him choose to defect and hunt his former colleagues.
But the details were always blurred, always vague, like the memory of a dream slowly fading when the sun rises.
What Nirmala understood was that Arya's reasons were complex, tangled between old wounds and new convictions, between resentment that never fully extinguished and hope he continued to fight for despite its near impossibility.
"Sometimes I think," Nirmala murmured inwardly, her eyes still closed, "perhaps you joined because you saw something in me that you did not see in them. Or perhaps you were simply tired of being part of a machine of destruction you knew would one day destroy you as well."
She imagined Arya in that year, several years younger, still brimming with idealism, standing at a crossroads between loyalty to an institution and the realization that the institution had become a monster.
What had happened then?
Whom had he been forced to sacrifice?
What decision had compelled him to choose a path he could never retrace?
Nirmala did not know, and she had never forced Arya to tell her.
For in their world of pursuit and hiding, sometimes what mattered most was not honest confession, but the quiet trust that they would protect one another without needing to question each other's past.
After allowing herself to sink into the silence for what might have been hours or centuries, Nirmala finally opened her eyes.
The layers of time around her remained the same, still breathing softly, still waiting patiently.
She drew a long breath, feeling the strange sensation of the air in this silent space filling her lungs—cool yet not cold, humid yet not damp.
Then, with slow but deliberate movement, she began to stretch.
She raised both hands high above her head, standing on her toes as far as she could, feeling every muscle in her body pull and release the tension she might have gathered over hours—or perhaps centuries, she could not be certain.
For ten seconds that felt like ten minutes, she allowed her body to remember what it was like to be physical, to move, to stretch, to live.
When she finally lowered her arms and stood upright before Arya, who still slept in his strange slumber, Nirmala smiled.
Not a broad smile, but a small one that curved only at the corners of her lips, the kind she wore when she felt everything would be all right even when logic insisted otherwise.
"Arya," she called softly, her voice like velvet brushing against glass, "wake up. Our journey is not finished."
She waited a moment, watching for any response from her loyal companion.
"Our next destination is approaching, and you would not want to miss it, would you?"
In the timeless silence, among the breathing layers of years, Nirmala Surdaya stood upright awaiting Arya to open his eyes, ready to leap into another era, ready to hunt again, ready to do what must be done to keep history on its path even if the entire world regarded them as criminals.
Arya moved his arms like the slow rotation of mill wheels, releasing the stiffness that might have settled into his joints while they remained in that space between time.
His movements were methodical and measured, like a soldier accustomed to stretching routines even in the midst of a battlefield.
After several rotations, he returned his arms to his sides and kept his eyes closed for a few more seconds, feeling awareness gradually refill every corner of his mind.
When his eyelids finally lifted, slowly like theater curtains drawn back with care, his gaze fixed immediately upon Nirmala standing before him.
"What year this time?" Arya asked, his voice rough from the long silence he had just left.
There was no greeting, no small talk about how he had slept.
In their world, time was far too precious a commodity to be wasted on such things.
There was only the direct question, focus on the mission, on the next objective they had to reach before the Temporal Cross-Police caught their scent and ruined everything again.
Nirmala offered a faint smile, almost imperceptible unless observed closely.
In the dim glow cast by the layers of time, Arya noticed something different about her.
Her hair, usually black with a bluish sheen like the surface of the sea at night, was slowly changing color.
A silvery gray spread from root to tip, replacing the darkness with a molten metallic luster that seemed almost mystical.
Unnoticed, it had grown longer as well—or perhaps it only seemed so because of its new color—until it covered both her ears, framing her face in soft silver.
"We will arrive in the year 1101 CE," Nirmala answered, her voice calm yet certain.
She did not say it aloud, but inside her mind the murmur continued to revolve like an unending mantra.
She remembered clearly the report she had discovered years—or centuries—ago while traversing the secret archives of the Temporal Cross-Police scattered across eras.
In the year 1101 CE, in a remote valley in the Middle East, an event occurred that official manipulated history recorded merely as "a desert storm that swallowed hundreds of soldiers from both sides."
But Nirmala knew the truth.
She knew that behind that false record lay the story of how rotten the organization claiming to safeguard time truly was.
An abnormal they had failed to contain, one that slipped from supervision because an officer had been too occupied with his promotion report, had rampaged across the battlefield and slaughtered hundreds within hours.
And when it was over, when the bodies began to rot beneath the desert sun, the Temporal Cross-Police arrived not to correct their mistake, but to conceal it with a beautiful tale of an unforeseen storm.
Arya nodded without asking further questions.
He had been with Nirmala long enough to know that every decision she made was grounded in deep reasoning, always based on facts that would never appear in official Temporal Cross-Police reports.
His agile fingers began to move across the temporal watch encircling his wrist, setting coordinates, adjusting frequencies, ensuring that this jump would land them precisely on target without leaving a trace that could be tracked.
To be continued…