Chapter 200
Nirma fell into thought—for four heartbeats, long enough for the cold wind of Medina to slip beneath her veil and brush against the bare skin of her neck, long enough for her to inhale and exhale without haste, long enough for her well-trained mind to connect the common thread between the two terms she had just heard.
False Flag Overload—where the perpetrator deliberately scatters multiple pieces of contradictory and entirely fabricated "evidence," like countless false flags raised across different battlefields, leaving investigators unable to determine the true direction because every path appears equally convincing. And Mass Red Herring—where the perpetrator throws far too many red herrings into already murky waters, keeping investigators occupied chasing one after another without realizing that none of them are genuine; that beneath it all, either no crime ever truly occurred, or the real crime remains hidden behind the chaos of evidence that cancels itself out.
"So you're saying... that all the evidence we've found—the sleeping gas in Mush'ab's house, the altered Qur'an in Abdullah's house, the circle of ashes and cloth map in Sa'd's house, the S-I-N-T-A bones and red ink in Amr's house, the portal hole and voice message in Anas's house—that all of it might be nothing more than... a deception?" Nirma asked. Her voice emerged from beneath her veil with a tremor she could not conceal, trembling like the string of a violin plucked too forcefully because the hand that played it had suddenly begun to shake with the realization that they might have been manipulated all along, that they had become puppets running from one house to another, collecting clue after clue without ever stopping to ask why.
"If the Great Abnormal were intelligent enough to plan this kidnapping, then why did they leave behind so many traces? Why didn't they erase everything perfectly? Why did they instead... display it all so openly?"
Arya let out a long sigh, the kind that escaped the chest of someone who had finally decided to voice a thought he had kept buried for fear of being called paranoid. But now he no longer cared, because dawn was fast approaching, and if they failed to change the way they thought, they would remain trapped in the same labyrinth until the Battle of Uhud ended and every Companion had truly vanished without a trace—not only kidnapped, but forgotten, forgotten like Sinta's name, written over and over again on wooden boards yet never truly understood by anyone.
"False Flag Overload," he said. His voice was quiet but firm, as solid as a decision that no longer required questioning. "It's when the perpetrator deliberately creates an excessive number of 'false flag incidents,' each one leaving behind evidence pointing toward a different enemy, overwhelming investigators until they can no longer focus on a single direction. In Mush'ab's house, the evidence points toward temporal chaos—weapons from different years scattered everywhere. In Abdullah's house, the evidence points toward theological manipulation—the altered Qur'an. In Sa'd's house, the evidence points toward an ancient ritual—the circle of ashes and the cloth map. In Amr's house, the evidence points toward a psychological experiment—the S-I-N-T-A bones and the red ink. In Anas's house, the evidence points toward portals and non-human entities—the portal hole and footprints without toes. Five houses, five different kinds of crimes, five conflicting directions of investigation. There is no coherence, Nirma. No pattern truly unites them except one: every trail leads to the name Sinta, but each in a different way, leaving us unable to tell which one actually happened."
Hearing that, Nirma bit her lower lip—not out of anger, but because she was beginning to notice the crack that had always been hidden beneath the mountain of evidence they had gathered with such difficulty, a crack like light slipping through a fractured wall, like a breath between two heartbeats, like a question that had never crossed her mind before.
"So you're saying that all of this evidence—so abundant, so varied, so dramatic—isn't the trail of the real crime at all, but... bait? That the Great Abnormal wants us occupied following these false trails while they're doing something entirely different in a place we've never even suspected?"
Arya drew another long breath.
It was not the sigh of exhaustion, but the breath of someone carefully choosing his words because he knew that what he was about to say could easily be misunderstood as claiming that all of their hard work had been meaningless. Yet that was not his point. Every piece of evidence they had collected, every drop of sweat they had shed while searching those five houses, was real, legitimate, and worthy of consideration in any investigation.
"Don't misunderstand me, Nirma," he said, his voice emerging from beneath his unseen veil with a gentleness absent from before, gentle like someone aiming a knife without wishing to wound.
"I'm not saying I doubt any of the evidence we've found. The sleeping gas was real—I smelled it myself, sweet, unnatural, lingering in my nose like a terrible memory that refused to fade. The altered Qur'an in Abdullah's house was real—we touched it, we copied it, we took it with us. The circle of ashes and olive oil in Sa'd's house was real—we saw it with our own eyes, we felt the dampness of stones that did not belong to the seventh century. The S-I-N-T-A bones in Amr's house were real—we read Latin letters that should never have existed in Medina in the year 625. The portal hole in Anas's house was real—we threw a stone into it and heard nothing, as though the stone had been swallowed by a void that could never be satisfied."
He paused, looking at Nirma with a gaze he could not conceal—not one of doubt, but of cold conviction, a conviction like a blade that knew exactly where it needed to strike—before continuing.
"But because all of this evidence is connected to one another—because every piece points to the name Sinta, every piece points to the kidnapping, every piece points to something greater than a single house or a single Companion—why don't we try simplifying the pattern we've encountered every time we visited one of those five houses? What do they all have in common, Nirma? Not what's inside the houses, because every house contains something different. But what's outside them. Their locations. The map."
Nirma fell silent. Her left eye turned toward the east, where dawn was beginning to split the darkness with a thin line of orange. In the stillness, broken only by the wind weaving through the date palms that had begun to rustle impatiently in anticipation of the rising sun, she started recalling every clue she and Arya had uncovered together.
Not their contents. Not their messages. Not Sinta's name written everywhere. But their locations—the positions of the five homes belonging to the Companions and relatives of the Messenger of Allah, names she had memorized so thoroughly because she had repeated them countless times throughout the night.
Mush'ab ibn Umayr at the center, Abdullah ibn Jahsh to the northeast, Sa'd ibn al-Rabi' to the southwest, Amr ibn al-Jamuh to the southeast, and Anas ibn al-Nadr to the south.
To be continued…