And now she was looking at a small blue teddy bear that had absolutely no logical reason to be sitting here in New York in 2001. A bear, unmistakably the same bear, that she’d seen her neighbours’ — Mr and Mrs Chaudhry — youngest boy, Rakesh, always clinging on to and slobbering over.

Unmistakably.

The same teddy bear.

It was the very last thing she’d seen from the final second of her old life of 2026 … that teddy bear, spinning head over heels into flames as the floor had suddenly collapsed beneath their feet and the building shuddered in on itself.

Then she’d awoken here in New York, 2001.

‘It’s the same … I’m sure,’ she whispered to herself, a confused frown stretching from one brow to the other. Her eyes had never let her down. She saw little things, the tiny details: the way the button eye drooped at an angle, the stitching through only three of the four holes; the bear’s pale blue material threadbare on the left arm but not the right, as if the right had been replaced at a later time.

The tiny details. Her eyes and her mind were compulsively drawn to those sorts of things. An obsessive habit. She tucked her drooping fringe back up behind one ear and leaned forward until her forehead thudded softly against the shop window. She’d always been able to spot the little things that others missed, seen patterns in a seemingly random mess. That’s why she’d been so good at playing Pikodu.

‘It’s the same,’ she whispered.

How the shadd-yah is that even possible?