Chapter 196
"The other four friends were scheduled to meet here, at Anas's house, on the night before they were all abducted. Mush'ab, Abdullah, Sa'd, and Amr all received the same invitation. Perhaps it came from someone they trusted, perhaps from someone impersonating Anas's messenger, or perhaps from Anas himself, who had unknowingly become bait because he had already been hypnotized beforehand."
Hearing that, Arya gripped Nirma's shoulder, not to comfort her, but to keep himself from falling into a pit of conclusions too deep to climb out of.
"So Anas's house was never the primary target of the abduction. This house was the trap. The Great Abnormal released the gas here first, at the highest concentration and with a two-layered method, before spreading it simultaneously to the other four houses. And when Mush'ab, Abdullah, Sa'd, and Amr came to Anas's house in response to the invitation, they had already entered the contaminated zone. There was no need to abduct them one by one from their own homes. They came on their own. Willingly. Fully convinced they were gathering with fellow believers to discuss the Qur'an and prepare for the Battle of Uhud. Yet behind those thin woven walls, so easily pierced, beneath the uneven roof where the cool night breeze drifted through, creatures that did not breathe were already waiting. The sweet-smelling gas was already waiting. A bottomless portal was already waiting."
They left the multipurpose room with unsteady steps.
Not because they were exhausted, but because they had realized they had been reading the pattern incorrectly all this time. What they believed to be four separate crime scenes was actually a single coordinated trap centered around the home of an ordinary young man who had never asked to become the center of anything. He had only wanted to be a gracious host to his friends, never knowing that his hospitality would become the weapon used to destroy both himself and everyone who answered his invitation.
As Nirma raised her head one last time before leaving the house, her eyes caught sight of a loft above. It was not an elegant 'aliyah like the one in Sa'd's house, but a simple open loft commonly used for drying dates. Its roof was uneven, partly covered with palm fronds and partly exposed to the night sky, where countless stars shone with complete indifference to the suffering of the people below.
"I have to go up there," Nirma said, her voice carrying the certainty of a decision that required no questioning.
Before Arya could say anything, she had already climbed the rough wooden pillar with movements so swift they were almost invisible. Her shadow-like figure drifted between the dried palm fronds, and when she reached the loft, in its darkest corner among piles of dates that had been left to dry for too long, she found a metal capsule. It was tiny, no larger than her little finger, yet unexpectedly heavy in her hand, as though it contained something that had no place inside the open loft of a young Khazraj man's house in Medina in the year 625 CE.
Arya followed more slowly and with greater caution.
When Nirma opened the capsule, her fingers trembling because she had no idea what she would find inside, they discovered two objects.
One was a single strand of long black hair, gleaming as though it were still wet after being washed. It could not possibly have belonged to Anas, his wife, or his daughter. Its color was too deep, too lustrous, too youthful to belong to anyone living in such a modest house with its thin woven walls and chilly night breeze.
The other was a microscopic chip, smaller than a sesame seed. The moment Nirma brought it close to the Göbekli Tepe clay phone in her pocket, it lit up with a pale blue glow, the very same light Arya had used to analyze the red ink on Amr's wooden board.
A voice emerged from within the chip. It was not Sinta's voice, nor a woman's. It belonged to an old man, hoarse like someone who had run out of water in the middle of the desert. His voice was quiet, yet it thundered inside Nirma's ears because his accent could not be identified. It belonged to no century she recognized and to no civilization she had ever studied, whether at school or at headquarters.
"He does not need to be awakened. He does not need to return. He only needs to be remembered. And you, Nirma... Arya... you are memories given form. So do not die before your mission is complete."
They left Anas's house with steps that were no longer unsteady.
Not because their burden had grown lighter, but because every new discovery, every puzzle piece that finally slipped into place, made their feet feel more firmly planted upon the earth, stronger and more prepared to walk wherever the next clue led them, even if it pointed toward a bottomless portal or the mysterious voice of an old man whose accent no one could identify.
As the moon above Medina gradually tilted westward, just as it had when they first arrived at Mush'ab's house hours earlier, Nirma took the Göbekli Tepe clay phone from her pocket. She felt its rough carvings, still warm against her palm, before pressing the red, yellow, and purple buttons in the sequence she had memorized by heart after repeating it countless times that night. Again and again, like someone calling home after years away, only to discover that home no longer existed. The only thing waiting on the other end was Ashita's voice, weary yet still determined to remain firm, composed, and every bit the professional agent who refused to reveal that she, too, was human, capable of exhaustion, fear, and longing for a home that no longer existed.
"We've finished investigating Anas's house," Nirma reported, her voice muffled beneath her veil, flat and steady like an official report that had to be delivered despite the weight pressing against her chest.
"And what we found here is different from everything before. The portal in the courtyard wasn't a miniature portal like the one at Sa'd's house. It was a massive portal, large enough for dozens of creatures to pass through at once. The footprints surrounding it weren't human. And in the loft, we found a metal capsule containing a long strand of hair and a microscopic chip carrying a message from an old man whose accent we couldn't identify. The message said, 'He does not need to be awakened. He does not need to return. He only needs to be remembered. And you, Nirma... Arya... you are memories given form. So do not die before your mission is complete.'"
Standing beside Nirma, Arya heard Ashita let out a long sigh from the other end of the connection.
It was not the sigh of exhaustion, but of someone who had just accepted that the puzzle she believed was nearly solved still contained layers she had never imagined. Layers like an onion that made you cry with every peel, yet you could never stop because you needed to know what lay at its center, even if you feared that the center was empty, that there was nothing there except the same darkness you saw every time you closed your eyes.
When Ashita finally spoke, her voice sounded clearer than before, clear like water flowing over stones after heavy rain. Yet beneath that clarity lingered static, static like a telephone connection stretched across a thousand years, static like the sound of time itself.
To be continued…