The question begged all sorts of answers, none of which Sal thought she liked the sound of. The answer that unsettled most was the one she decided to write down. Does that mean we’ve been here before?

She looked up from her scribbling. The removal truck was still trying to inch past the taxi, and both men were still enthusiastically haranguing each other, their Brooklyn voices lost beneath the frenetic whir of tumble dryers in the laundry. She turned to look at the round porthole of the nearest of them, spin-drying her and Maddy’s clothes. They were all clothes from 2001 now, garments that allowed them to blend in. Her eyes were drawn to a pale green ankle sock spinning round and round, pushed up against the window, caught in a spiral of forces it couldn’t escape.

Like us. Her, Maddy and Liam, three unfortunate souls unknowingly stuck in an endless loop they were doomed to live over and over again.

She looked down at the biro in her hand. At the diary, a nondescript notebook of lined pages that you could pick up in any stationery store. She leafed through the pages, realizing she had filled more than a quarter of it with her small, tidy handwriting and sketches and doodles. And before the first of her entries, written months’ worth of ‘time-bubble days’ ago, right there… the torn edges of dozens and dozens of pages ripped out by someone.

A thought suddenly occurred to her that left a chill running down her back, like a ghostly finger tracing her vertebrae, making the flesh on her bare arms pucker into goosebumps.

Oh shadd-yah. Was that me?

She wondered if the pages of this diary had been used by her… before.

Another me? A previous me?

She felt sick. Hadn’t Foster said something about the fate of the previous team? Something about ‘being torn to pieces’, something about ‘there being little left’. She remembered that first day vividly. Being awoken on her bunk, meeting Maddy and Liam for the first time, seeing Foster’s old face leaning over her and realizing it was the same face she’d seen just before she’d died, just before her home in Mumbai had collapsed into a raging inferno.