Men. Always so aggressive. Sal wondered for a moment what a world free of testosterone might be like. Surely a better place without men beating their chests and acting like apes.

She looked down at her notebook again. That thing. That stuffed toy. The bear. Somehow that’s at the heart of everything. I’m sure of it.

The man that came through, that poor, twisted mess that was once a human being, she was sure he’d been trying to tell her something about the blue bear as he died. Something for her ears alone. She wondered how a stuffed toy, a threadbare, scruffy-looking one at that, could ‘mean’ anything to anyone — except comfort for some child.

She scribbled again in her diary. And then there’s Liam’s tunic.

Sal was certain of one thing: that she could trust her own eyes, what she actually saw. She’d taken a close look again at the tunic that was hanging in a closet just outside the nook where their bunk beds were. The clothes they’d all been wearing the day they’d arrived in the archway hung in there. No longer worn because they were so precious, a last link to the lives they’d lived before this. Before becoming TimeRiders.

She’d unhooked Liam’s tunic, the very same one he’d arrived in the night the Titanic had gone down. The tunic, complete with two rows of brass buttons and the White Star Line’s star symbol on its purple collar. And yes… there it had been, the thing she was looking for, that ever-so-faint, comma-shaped red wine stain on the right shoulder. So faint. Somebody had once gone to a lot of trouble to try and remove it and failed.

And here’s the thing. The exact same stain… the exact same stain

… was on the tunic hanging in that odd little antique and costume-hire shop a few blocks away. An exact duplicate of Liam’s tunic. Sal scribbled the obvious question in her diary. So, how come there’s a duplicate of what he was wearing hanging in that shop?