Foster had plucked her from the very last seconds of her life. Given her a choice: to work for the agency or join her family and die in the flames of the collapsing building.
Some choice.
Not that she actually got to choose. Dadda had chosen for her, thrusting her towards the old man … Mama screaming and crying to hold her one more time.
Stop it! Stop it!
Sal bit her lip. She didn’t need to replay the memory again in her head. It was all still fresh enough, thanks. That awful moment was done, her parents gone, dust, and she was here in New York instead of Mumbai. All done. Or, more accurately, yet to be done. Yet to happen twenty-five years from now.
Yet to happen … that at least stole some of the sting of losing her parents, of knowing that they died along with everyone else when that tower block collapsed in on itself. Because – and this is the bit that really messed her head up – they were alive right now. At this moment in time they were children, her age, and they were yet to even meet each other. That was going to happen in twelve years’ time, 2013. They were going to meet at a consumer electronics show in New Delhi. Both their families were going to thoroughly approve of the match, and within the very same year Sal was going to already be a bump growing in her mama’s tummy.
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?
Her mobile phone suddenly vibrated in the pocket of her jacket. She fished for it and pulled it out.
‘Yeah?’
‘Had you forgotten?’ Maddy sighed impatiently.
‘Forgotten? What?’
‘Today? This morning? Trip to the museum? Remember?’
Sal winced then bumped her head against the window again. Yes of course, they’d been discussing it last night before turning in. But with her dream … no, nightmare … that horrible memory … she’d completely forgotten. She cursed under her breath. ‘I’m on my way back.’
‘Meet us there if you like. On the front steps of the museum?’
‘Right.’
‘About an hour?’
‘OK.’
Sal snapped her cell closed, once again faintly amused at how old-fashioned it looked compared to the T-buds almost everyone back in Mumbai had looped over their ears.
She looked once again at the blue bear. The blue bear that shouldn’t be there.
It stared back at her with one button eye, almost challenging her to explain why not.
CHAPTER 2
2001, New York
Maddy led the five of them through the swing doors into the Museum of Natural History’s main entrance hall. Foster had brought them all here once before, not long after he’d recruited them: Maddy from a doomed passenger plane, moments before it was due to disintegrate mid-air, and Liam from the sinking Titanic. It had been a field trip, a reward for them, a change of scenery. A chance for them to see, to reach out and touch the history they were now responsible for preserving.
Both support units, Bob and Becks, eyed the enormous looming brachiosaurus skeleton