Chapter 175
Tegar, who stood beside her, nodded, although his jaw remained rigid like stone bearing an invisible burden. When he spoke, his voice sounded like that of someone reciting an oath before an altar he had never chosen to approach.
"We'll return as soon as possible. Two hours—maybe three, depending on how quickly our superiors respond to reports of the chaos occurring at two points in time simultaneously."
Just as Ashita and Tegar were about to step toward the portal's light, which still pulsed softly before them—like a heart unwilling to stop beating even though the body containing it had long run out of blood—Nirma raised her right hand with a movement that was neither hurried nor panicked. Instead, it was calm in a way that made Arya tense up, because he recognized that calmness as something that usually appeared right before Nirma did things that could never be undone.
"Wait," Nirma said, her voice emerging from behind her veil with a tone different from before.
It was not an order, nor a request, but something in between—something that might be called an objection that did not wish to sound like an objection, or perhaps merely a pause she created because there was something she had not yet said, and if she did not say it now, she never would.
Hearing that, Ashita stopped. Her body froze on the threshold between Medina and the Temporal Cross-Police Headquarters. As she turned around, her eyes caught sight of a small object floating in the air.
A necklace.
And when it landed in Ashita's palm—with a sound like a whisper that did not wish to be heard by the wind, like a secret that had finally found the right ears after wandering aimlessly for so long—she felt something she had never expected.
The lingering warmth from Nirma's grasp, a warmth like a campfire that had only just been abandoned, whose red embers still glowed even though the bright blue flames had long since died out.
Ashita stood at the threshold between two worlds—one foot still planted on the warm sands of Medina while the other had nearly disappeared into the golden light of the softly pulsating portal. In her open palm, the necklace felt cold in a peculiar way, cold like metal that had spent years resting at the bottom of the sea.
Yet beneath that coldness, something seemed to flow—something that might be called the memory of the object itself, memories of the hands that had once held it, of the prayers that had once been whispered onto its flat surface.
She lowered her gaze, narrowing her eyes as she examined the details of the imperfectly round pendant.
Only then did she realize that the necklace was not made from ordinary metal.
Not silver, not gold, not even the stainless steel commonly used in the twenty-third century, but a type of cast iron with a rough, uneven surface, covered in fine scratches that could only have been made by simple tools from an era before electricity was discovered—an era when people still forged metal over fires that were never hot enough to make its edges perfectly smooth.
"This... this is from World War I," Ashita murmured, her voice half questioning and half reassuring herself. Her eyes fixed on Nirma with a look she could not conceal.
It was neither amazement nor suspicion, but genuine confusion—the kind of confusion felt by someone who discovers a fossil in a place where there should only be sand.
"It looks like the kind of necklace wives used to wear when their husbands left for the battlefield. I've seen illustrations of it in historical archives from the early twentieth century. But why do you have something like this? And why are you giving it to me now, when we're about to part ways and head toward two different points in time?"
Nirma did not answer immediately.
She simply stared at the necklace in Ashita's hand with a strange expression, like someone looking into a mirror after avoiding it for years. And in her left eye, for the first time since this meeting had begun, something appeared that not even Arya had ever seen before.
Not sadness.
Not longing.
But relief.
The relief of someone finally letting go of something they had held too tightly, for too long, afraid to release it because they did not know whether it would fall and shatter or take flight and find a place where it truly belonged.
"You're not wrong," Nirma finally replied. Her voice emerged from behind the veil as clear as water flowing over smooth stones. Yet beneath that clarity was a tremor she could not hide—a tremor like a violin string plucked too hard, causing its sound to crack along the edges instead of ringing true.
"This necklace really does come from the time of World War I. It belonged to a woman who waited at a harbor in the middle of endless rain while the ship carrying her husband sailed farther and farther away, growing smaller at the edge of the horizon until it vanished completely, leaving behind nothing but a thin trail of smoke that was quickly scattered by the sea wind."
Hearing that, Ashita tightened her grip on the necklace. She could feel the rough grooves in the cast iron that, a century ago, had rested against the neck of a woman whose name was never recorded in any history book—a woman who was never important, never changed the course of civilization, never performed heroic deeds worthy of being preserved in archives.
Yet she waited.
And in that silent waiting, she created something that now rested in the palm of a descendant of Ningsih beneath a date palm tree in Medina, nineteen centuries after the necklace had first been forged.
"But why give it to me?" Ashita asked again.
This time, her voice was softer, almost a whisper, like someone afraid that speaking too loudly would cause the object in her hand to crumble into dust because it was far too old to still remain intact.
"I never asked for anything from you."
Nirma smiled—a smile that never reached her left eye, a smile born not from happiness but from the realization that not every question requires a rational answer, that sometimes the most sensible thing to do is something completely irrational.
And when she spoke, her voice sounded lighter than usual, light like the wind moving through the fronds of a date palm, light like someone who had finally decided to stop carrying a burden they had never been asked to bear.
"Think of it as a souvenir," she said.
And for a fraction of a second, behind her veil, Ashita thought she saw a different kind of smile.
Not the Nirma she knew from agent reports and personnel profiles, but the smile of someone sharing a small secret—a secret that did not need to be understood in order to be appreciated.
"Because you're going somewhere I can't reach, to a time I have no desire to enter. And I feel that if you leave empty-handed, you'll lose something you don't even realize you've been searching for."
Arya, standing beside Nirma, stared at his partner with an unusually sharp gaze—too sharp to be mere curiosity.
There was something in his eyes that could perhaps be called concern, or maybe the same confusion Ashita felt. After all, throughout the many years they had traveled together, he had never seen Nirma give anything to anyone, let alone an object she had always clung to during the darkest moments of their journey.
To be continued…