Chapter 201
"Arya," she said suddenly, her voice emerging from beneath her veil as clear as water flowing over stones after a heavy rain. Yet beneath that clarity was a tremor she could not hide, a tremor like the string of a violin plucked too forcefully because the hand that played it had suddenly realized something that had been hidden in plain sight all along.
"Don't you want to give me a hint? Or would you rather I discover it on my own?"
Arya smiled—a smile that never reached his eyes, a smile born not of happiness but of relief that Nirma had finally begun to see what he had seen all this time, that he was no longer alone in his madness, that the two of them now understood that these five houses—with all the evidence scattered within them—were connected not only by the common thread of the kidnapping narrative, but also by a geographical thread, one that linked point to point, house to house, name to name, until it formed an irregular polygon surrounding something, something they had never suspected because they had spent all this time looking inside the houses instead of beyond them, focusing on the evidence instead of the map, chasing red herrings instead of seeing where the current truly flowed.
"I only want you to remember, Nirma," Arya replied, his voice quiet yet deep, deep like a well that had never seen the sun.
"That in every investigation, the easiest thing to see is often the easiest thing to overlook. And we've overlooked something painfully obvious from the very beginning."
Nirma closed her left eye—only one, because her right eye had long since gone blind—and within the darkness she created for herself, she began to picture the map of Medina in the year 625 CE, a map she had memorized during one of her infiltrations into a small outpost belonging to the Temporal Cross-Police, a map that marked every road, every date grove, every well, every marketplace, every house, every mosque. Within that mental image, she saw the five houses they had just visited as five points scattered across five different directions.
And somehow—perhaps because their locations were not random, perhaps because the distances between them were too orderly for an ordinary settlement, perhaps because whoever designed the cloth map in Sa'd's upper chamber had deliberately chosen those houses not merely because their occupants were targets, but because their geographical positions formed something, something she had been looking at all along without ever truly noticing—the five houses seemed drawn toward one another, like stars forming an unnamed constellation, like prayer beads strung together by an invisible thread, like an irregular polygon enclosing a single point, a point absent from the cloth map because it was not a house, not a building, not a residence, but...
"Al-Masjid an-Nabawi," Nirma whispered, her eye widening, and within the gaze of her remaining eye, Arya saw something he had never witnessed before.
Not anxiety.
Not fear.
But understanding, an understanding like lightning splitting apart the darkest night, illuminating everything that had previously existed only as a shapeless darkness.
"The network of orchards, roads, and wells connecting those five houses—they all converge on Al-Masjid an-Nabawi. It's the central point, Arya. Not the old well in the middle of the marketplace like we assumed before. That well may have been nothing more than another lure, another red herring deliberately scattered to divert our attention from something greater, something closer, something more... sacred."
Arya nodded, and within that nod lay a cold certainty, a certainty like a blade that knew exactly where it needed to strike. He had recognized this pattern ever since they searched Sa'd's house, ever since he hacked into the agents' data showing that the five houses formed a circle. But he had refused to be certain until Nirma reached the conclusion herself, because conviction that did not emerge through one's own reasoning, as one of his teachers had once told him, was the kind most easily shattered when the storm arrived.
And the storm would come.
It had already come.
It was coming.
Because dawn would soon break, and the agents of the Temporal Cross-Police would begin moving with complete awareness.
More importantly, if they failed to find the hiding place of the five Companions before the Battle of Uhud came to an end, everything would be too late, too late like Sinta's name, written over and over on wooden boards with no one daring to erase it for fear of committing a sin, when in truth the greatest sin was not erasing the name, but allowing it to remain even though it had never been invited there.
"So... is there a place, or perhaps several places or areas near Al-Masjid an-Nabawi that could serve as a hideout?" Nirma asked. Her voice emerged from beneath her veil with a clarity far too pure for a situation that was anything but clear, like the calm surface of a lake concealing a current powerful enough to drown anyone who could not swim.
"Because I'm beginning to believe, Arya, that you've already found it. That deep within your heart—in the same place where you've hidden every suspicion you've never dared speak aloud for fear of being called paranoid—you already know where Mush'ab, Abdullah, Sa'd, Amr, and Anas are being held by the Great Abnormal."
Arya looked at Nirma with a gaze that was no longer uncertain.
Not because he had finally decided to speak, but because the secret he had carried inside his chest like an ember he had never dared let ignite had already been sensed by his companion, whose single eye possessed greater sharpness than a thousand ordinary ones.
"Masjid Dhirar," he said, his voice quiet yet dense, dense like the carved stone of Göbekli Tepe engraved with inscriptions unreadable to all but a select few. "Or more precisely, the area where that mosque will eventually stand in the year 630 CE, after the Battle of Tabuk—four years after the Battle of Uhud, which we have yet to experience. But right now, in the year 625, that land is still empty. Silent. Forgotten. And beneath it lies a hollow, Nirma. An underground chamber that was never recorded by any historian, because no one knew that the land had a belly—a belly that can be reached through a well, a well belonging to an ordinary resident who never realized that at the bottom of his dried-up well lay a tunnel leading into a darkness untouched by light."
Hearing those words, Nirma felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end—not because of the cold, for the wind blowing through the date palms of Medina was nowhere near cold enough to pierce her thick jacket—but because she understood exactly what that information meant.
"Where did you acquire such extraordinary knowledge, Arya?" she asked, her voice trembling beneath her veil, trembling like a string that had been left untouched for far too long before finally being plucked by shaking fingers.
Arya let out a long breath, the breath of someone making a confession, before answering.
"Back when I was still with the Temporal Cross-Police, before everything fell apart, before I chose to defect, I infiltrated their internal communications center. At first, I wasn't there to steal anything. I simply wanted to know how deep the rabbit hole went. And there, among billions of files encrypted with codes that no one but machines from the thirtieth century could decipher, I found a file with no name, no owner, and no timestamp—as though someone had deliberately thrown it into the system without leaving a trace. The file contained coordinates. Coordinates pointing to an empty plot of land in Medina in the year 625. Coordinates for a dried-up well. And a marginal note written in a language I had never studied. But when I translated it using an algorithm I created myself, it revealed only one meaning: 'The mosque that was never finished conceals something that was never allowed to begin.'"
To be continued…