Chapter 210
And when Arya raised the clay phone to his ear, a tiny object crafted from the very same clay as Göbekli Tepe, clay engraved with inscriptions unreadable to ordinary people, clay that preserved the vibrations of thousands of years in the past and thousands of years in the future at the same time, the world around them instantly changed, not physically but audibly, not in Medina in the year 625 but upon a frequency that could only be perceived by ears trained to hear sounds from different timelines.
From within that clay phone, from its pores cracked by an age no one had ever counted, from its carved inscriptions that no algorithm could decipher except one created by Arya himself in an underground laboratory that was perhaps nothing more than ruins by now, came a sound impossible for the seventh century to produce, impossible for any era before humanity learned how to make metal fly. It was the roar of a jet aircraft from the year 5600 CE preparing for takeoff at one of the ten locations suspected to be where the seven disciples of Christ had been abducted. The sound was so deafening that Nirma felt her eardrums vibrate in a way she had not experienced since the last time she stood near the temporal runway at the headquarters of the Temporal Cross-Police. It was so foreign that even Arya, who had heard it countless times before, still felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end whenever it filled the space around him, not because he was afraid, but because he knew it was the sound of a future that should never have leaked into the past, the sound of machinery that should never have been activated in an age when people still believed the earth was a flat disc supported by a giant whale.
The sound lasted for several seconds, seconds that felt like years to Nirma, whose heart pounded not from fear but from imagining what it must have felt like to be one of Christ's seven disciples, abducted from the first century, pulled away from the silent land of Jerusalem by unseen hands, transported to a place that existed on no map, imprisoned within darkness untouched by light for centuries.
And when the sound finally faded, leaving behind a silence that suddenly felt heavier than before, Arya lowered the clay phone from his ear and stared at it for a moment with an expression Nirma could not decipher, the look of someone trying to convince himself that what he had just heard was real and not merely a waking dream.
Ashita, who at that very moment remained in Jerusalem in the year 33 CE, about six or seven days before the crucifixion of Jesus, far from Medina where Arya and Nirma were making their way toward the area that would one day become known as Masjid Dhirar, stood frozen among the shadows of stone walls and narrow alleys slowly filling with the light of morning.
Her hand still gripped the necklace that Nirma had previously entrusted to Arya for safekeeping, a necklace bearing a pendant shaped like an unfinished map whose borders constantly shifted whenever someone stared at them for too long.
Through the temporal channel connecting them, through the narrow gap between two centuries that should never have touched one another, she heard the echo of Arya's voice and the roar of the future jet leaking from the Göbekli Tepe clay phone.
Ashita let out a long breath, one that escaped her chest like wind trapped inside a cave without an entrance for far too long, and when she finally spoke, her voice reached Nirma and Arya as a whisper distorted by interference across timelines, carrying a tremor she could not conceal, a tremor like the vibration of a string left untouched for too long before being plucked by weary fingers, like someone who had witnessed hope collapse so many times that they no longer dared place complete faith in it.
"Nirma, there's something I need to tell you," Ashita whispered, her voice soft and hushed, like someone who wished to be heard by no one except the intended listener, like someone who knew that what she was about to say might change everything, or perhaps change nothing at all, yet still had to be spoken because remaining silent was an even heavier burden than speaking.
"Out of the ten places suspected of being possible locations where the seven disciples of Christ, Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, were taken, we've investigated nearly all of them. Arya, the agents of the Temporal Cross-Police, and I, back when we still believed we were doing the right thing, before everything unraveled, before everything descended into the chaos we're living through now."
She paused, swallowing as bitterness suddenly filled her throat, bitter like Sinta's name repeatedly carved onto a wooden board that no one dared erase, and when she continued, her voice became even softer, more like the whisper of someone with nothing left except a hope that was fading as gradually as the mist along the eastern horizon beneath the coming dawn.
"The small cave near the Monastery of Saint Theodosius east of Bethany, the rooftops of abandoned houses in Bethphage, the ruins of a Herodian palace near the Pool of Siloam, the burial cave in the Valley of Hinnom, the underground passageways along the walls of Jerusalem, the abandoned house in Bethany with its low-roofed courtyard, the ancient cistern beneath the City of David, the underground chamber of the former Hasmonean fortress near the Western Wall, the cave complex on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives, and the underground chamber beneath the remains of an old temple or house in the Kidron Valley, we've visited every one of them, Nirma. One by one. Armed with the most advanced temporal trace detector we took from the armory of the Temporal Cross-Police. And the result..."
Ashita fell silent again, this time for much longer, long enough for the dawn wind to change direction twice, long enough for the moon above Medina to drift slightly farther west, long enough for Nirma to feel her chest tighten with something she could not name, something that might have been a foreboding, or perhaps the certainty that what she was about to hear next would make her life no easier.
"Almost all of them showed no indication whatsoever that the seven disciples of Christ had ever been taken there. No temporal traces, no energy anomalies, no fragments of memory lingering in the walls, the floors, or the ceilings. Nothing, Nirma. Silence. As though nothing had ever happened there. As though no one had ever been abducted, no one had ever been transported, no one had ever been imprisoned in darkness waiting for something that never came."
Nirma closed her left eye, the only eye that still faithfully granted her light amid the darkness steadily retreating before the impatient dawn, and within that self-made darkness she heard the sound of her own blood flowing through her temples, the rhythm of her own breathing rising and falling unevenly, the pounding of her own heart like a war drum beaten by hands that never grew weary.
When she opened her eye again, her gaze was no longer uncertain, no longer burdened by questions without answers, but instead carried the look of someone who had decided that the only way to avoid drowning was to stop asking how deep the ocean was and simply begin to swim.
To be continued…