Chapter 146
Nirma felt the pull—a pull that did not come from gravity or air pressure or any anti-gravity technology she had ever used, a pull that felt more like something drawing from within her, from the blood flowing through veins she had never considered special, from something that might have been a memory passed down through generations without ever being written in any book—and she let that pull take her, let her exhausted body, her hand still gripping a pistol from the 16th century, and her chest still tight from the three liturgies that had not fully left her mind, sink into the ground that was suddenly no longer ground.
From above, from outside the circle that was beginning to fill with the sound of gunfire coming from a hundred directions at once, Ashita saw how the door handle—that small object no larger than a palm—began to pulse with a colorless light, a light like water flowing toward a lower place, a light like something pulling all reality around it into an unseen vortex.
She saw how Nirma and Arya—two figures who a second ago had still stood with weapons in hand and threat in their eyes—began to blur, began to lose form, began to become something indistinguishable from the dust drifting between them, and she raised her sword, raised it with the intent to cut, to stop, to do something that could alter the course of everything happening before her—but before the blade could reach the distance it needed, before her feet could even move a single step from where she stood, the first bullet from the hundred weapons surrounding the place finally arrived, arriving precisely as the door handle had already begun to fade, arriving exactly when Nirma and Arya were no longer visible to eyes that only recognized light captured by the retina, arriving and striking the ground that a second ago had been the last foothold of the two people who had just stolen an undying creature from beneath the noses of the agents deployed by the Temporal Cross-Police.
The bullet hit nothing—did not strike the door handle that had vanished before the heated metal could reach the surface, nor Nirma or Arya who were no longer in the same dimension as the dust and stone and ruins of Heraclea Cybistra—it only struck the ground, striking with enough force to carve a hole in a place that no longer needed to be guarded.
And after the first bullet came the second, the third, the fourth—dozens, hundreds—all from different weapons, from different years, from different directions, yet all striking the same point, the point where the door handle had last been seen, the point where two people who had just escaped from a circle with no possible exit left behind nothing but drifting dust, deepening craters, and the echo of gunfire reverberating through the ruins of an ancient city long forgotten.
Shuuuuh!
Shuuuuh!!
The air within that space felt like water that was never truly still, as though unseen walls pulsed with an unpredictable rhythm—a rhythm born from the awareness that this was not a real place, that the floor they now sat upon could be the sky of a year not yet born, that the walls they never touched could be an endless abyss from a time that had died before language was ever found.
Nirma felt all of it in every breath she drew too quickly, in every rise and fall of her chest still unsettled by dust and blood and the three liturgies that had not fully left her mind, yet she did not move—did not shift her weight to the left or right, did not allow even an inch of her body, still clad in clothing of Constantinople in the year 1101 AD, to leave the position she had set the moment her knees touched the nameless surface.
Arya, in front of her, did the same—his larger body sitting cross-legged with an unforced calm, his breathing steady through nostrils that never stopped observing everything around him, even in a space that held nothing to observe except darkness moving in ways that defied logic.
They did not look at each other, nor did they nod, because in this place—in a room accessible only to two people who had learned that desire was the map and the body its key—one unnecessary movement could send either of them into the middle of the Second World War, or to the brink of Krakatoa's eruption, or into the final moments of a king who should have died of illness but instead fell to a dagger never recorded in any history book.
So they sat—sat with spines touching nothing, sat with hands resting on their thighs, palms facing upward, sat like two people trying to convince their own bodies that exhaustion could come, but movement could not.
Nirma finally exhaled, a breath leaving her throat with a sound closer to a sigh held too long than the simple release of air from her lungs, and she allowed her head—held upright all this time with sleepless vigilance—to tilt back as far as she dared without shifting her tailbone more than half an inch from its original position.
"We did it," she said, and her voice sounded strange in that space, sounded like something that did not belong in a place without echoes—a sound that emerged only to be swallowed instantly by a silence that was never truly empty, "we managed to take that creature out of Heraclea, from right under their noses, from a circle of a hundred weapons that I don't even know when they set up around us."
She exhaled again, quicker this time, more like something she released because she did not know what to do with the excess air filling her lungs, and her single eye—her left eye, witness to every cruelty she could never forget—shifted from a nonexistent ceiling to Arya's face, who sat before her with a calm that was almost unsettling.
In her mind, fragments of information still spun like shards of glass that never stopped falling.
The Crusaders who never reached Jerusalem, the Seljuk forces that never returned to their lands, the whirlwind recorded in ancient manuscripts as punishment from the heavens—and behind it all, the five-headed Abnormal now silent within the dimensional cage that had remained in Arya's grasp throughout their escape, a creature that for centuries had been the cause of two great armies vanishing without a trace, a creature that should have been captured by the Temporal Cross-Police hundreds of years ago but was allowed to roam freely because—perhaps—for the same reason as everything else that was wrong with that institution.
Because it is easier to rewrite history than to admit they were never capable of protecting it.
To be continued…