Just read "To Dream in the City of Sorrows", still have a niggling question (spoilers

[Spidy]

First off, I thought the book was great overall, good incorporation of motifs and phrases from both the comics and War Without End. I was left confused about one part of the plot, though.

There's a part near the end where Sinclair, Catherine, and Marcus are getting ready to go kill the Shadows in Quadrant 14. Sinclair trades his time stabilizer with Catherine, presumably on the basis that Ulkesh might be trying to bump her off. Sounds like a reasonable assumption. However, the stabilizers aren't mentioned again, leading the reader to believe they are all identical. But if this is the case, why were the runes on the three boxes different, prompting Sinclair's original suspicions?

That made a modicum of sense, right?

[NotKosh]

Maybe they were the serial numbers of the time stabilizers.

[jahkneebee]

I always thought it provided the answer to how they could be re-united. Speculating on this made me think that this particular stabilizer could be tracked and possibly picked up on the way back into the past if Sinclair got in trouble. Since Sakai ends up with it, now she can be picked up along the way.