Chapter 181
Nirma nodded, and when Arya activated the device—with a faint humming sound that was almost inaudible, with a pale blue light sweeping across every page of the open Qur'an, from the first surah to the last, from the first verse to the final verse—she felt a tightness in her chest.
Not because she was afraid, but because she knew that whatever they discovered from this summary would change everything. It would change the way they viewed their enemy, change the way they viewed themselves, and change the way they viewed Sinta Melina Ningsih—the girl they had never even met, yet whose name had haunted every step they took since the day they left headquarters as fugitives.
It did not take long for the device to complete its task—perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps a minute. Nirma could not be certain because every second felt like a year as the blue light moved slowly across the pages of the Qur'an that should not yet exist in this world.
And when the humming stopped, when the blue light faded, Arya pressed a small button on the side of the device, and from its rounded tip came a flat voice, a voice like that of a machine that had never learned to feel anything. Yet the words it spoke... those words made Nirma feel a coldness that came not from the wind or the stone walls, but from within, from the deepest place in her chest, from the place where she stored every fear she had never allowed to rise to the surface.
"There is nothing unusual in the contents of its surahs and verses," Arya said after listening to the summary recited by the device. His eyes remained closed, as though he did not want to see Nirma's expression upon hearing this news—or as though he did not want Nirma to see his own.
"The Qur'an we found here is exactly the same as the Qur'an known by Muslims thousands of years later. The same surahs. The same verses. Even the number of dots and lines is identical. There are no differences, no additions, no omissions. If we brought this object to the year 2025 and compared it to the mushaf read by millions around the world, there would not be a single letter that differed."
Hearing that, Nirma let out a breath—not a breath of relief, but one of confusion, a breath that escaped her chest like that of someone who had just solved one puzzle only to discover ten more hidden behind its pieces.
"Then what?" she asked, her voice barely audible amid the silence of the cold cave. "If there is no difference, why did they leave this here? What is the purpose of placing a perfect Qur'an in the house of a Companion of the Messenger of Allah who was kidnapped, if it is exactly the same as the Qur'an that Muslims will read in the future?"
Arya opened his eyes, and when he looked at Nirma, there was something in his gaze that she had never seen before.
Not triumph. Not failure. But fear.
Fear that he tried to hide beneath the calmness he had trained himself to maintain for years. Yet fear, like the sweet scent of sleeping gas, could never be hidden completely, for it would always seep through even the smallest cracks.
"Not in the surahs or the verses," Arya replied softly, almost in a whisper, like someone saying something he himself could hardly believe, yet could not deny because the evidence stood right before his eyes.
"The anomaly is in the closing of every surah. At the end, after the final verse, before the basmalah of the next surah, there is a small note—written in a different ink, by a different hand, in a style of writing not found in the seventh century, perhaps from the fifteenth or twentieth century. My device cannot determine it precisely—and its contents... its contents..."
Arya stopped, swallowing with difficulty, and when he continued, his voice was hoarse, hoarse like that of a man dying of thirst in the middle of a desert.
"The note reads: 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."
Nirma stood motionless for several seconds after hearing that. Her left eye remained fixed on the Qur'an lying on the hardened earthen floor, on its thick leather cover that should not have existed in 625 CE, on its pages that could not possibly have been produced without modern printing machines, on the small notes written at the end of every surah—the same notes, repeated over and over like a mantra, like a prayer, like an attempt to plant a single name into the deepest recesses of the mind of anyone who read this mushaf.
Not by altering the verses, not by falsifying revelation, but by inserting praise.
Praise that did not change the content, yet changed perception.
Praise that suggested that among the words of God existed a servant so extraordinary, so devout, so close to Him that her name deserved to be mentioned every time the holy book was closed, every time a prayer was completed, every time eyes closed in sleep and opened once more upon waking.
Nirma moved quickly. Her unseen hand reached beneath her veil and retrieved something—a tiny dark brown seed, no larger than the tip of her little finger, a seed she had kept in her most secret pocket since... since when?
Even she could not remember.
The only thing she remembered was that it had been given to her by someone who once said:
"If you find something that should not exist in this world, throw this seed at it, and it will duplicate itself into two. It is not magic, Nirma. It is not technology. It is simply... faith. Faith that every object has a shadow, and that if that shadow is called upon, it will come."
Arya saw what she was doing, but he did not have time to ask—because before his mouth could open, Nirma had already thrown the seed toward the Qur'an lying on the floor.
And in an instant, with a sound like a leaf falling into still water, the Qur'an... duplicated itself.
Two.
Two identical mushafs, equally perfect, with the same binding, the same pages, the same small notes at the end of every surah, lay upon the hardened earth like twin siblings who had never asked to be born.
Nirma then took a pair of gloves from her pocket—thin black gloves made from a material that left no fibers, no fingerprints, no trace of evidence whatsoever.
Carefully, with movements that were gentle yet firm, she picked up one of the two mushafs, gripped it tightly in her hand, and looked at Arya with an expression that no one could read.
Not because she intentionally concealed her feelings, but because her emotions were too complicated to put into words, too tangled between anger and pity, between fear and determination, between the desire to destroy this object and the desire to understand it before destroying it.
For four seconds, Nirma stared at Arya—long enough for the wind of Madinah slipping through the cracks in the stone to shift from warm to cold, long enough for the drifting dust above the hardened earth to decide where it would settle, long enough for Arya to realize that whatever was about to leave his companion's lips was not an ordinary question, but a conclusion woven from the fragments of a puzzle that had been scattered before their eyes all along without either of them realizing it.
To be continued…