(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 28

"I don't get it."
Eben was gone. Maltheus had  ordered him paid without hesitation. He seemed almost jittery about arranging the meeting with the curly woman, and Eben seemed more interested in getting back to the safety of his maps and notebooks.
She was tall for a woman, and for her age. Her skin looked like fine leather, folding like thick fabric as she took slow paces along the old furniture she had somehow acquired. But the eyes were what really stood out. Piercing, sharp eyes, looking as if they could cut through bread with just a stare. She still had the curly hair, although it was shorter, more grey, and put in a sloppy ponytail behind her head.
"How does someone like, well, you even survive in this field? You seem like a bumbling idiot, pardon my French."
It was an honest question, one that she was not actually the first to ask, although she was at least one of the most forward about it. Of course, that didn't mean the answer wasn't still highly elusive.
"I'm good at improvising. And really charming. No, really."
She let out a quick laugh that seemed to surprise even herself. Her patchwork leather jacket scraped across an old wooden commode, almost begging anyone looking to wonder what was inside its drawers. The commode was a very weathered dark green, somehow both clashing with and oddly complementing the deep crimson of the jacket.
"Aha," she responded with a smile but a dry voice. "And you're from an embassy, Maltheus tells me. Mind filling me and the rest here in on that?"
She waved a hand at a few others in the already slightly cramped room. It looked like a sparsely furnished living room, except with no windows whatsoever, but at this point, there were perhaps fifteen or so people stuffed into it, badly challenging its capacity.
"It's a bit complicated."
"We've got time. As do you, Marie," she countered, with a strange calm in her voice that sounded vaguely threatening, honestly.
"Well... Basically, we try to get people out of harm's way when all this fighting across time gets out of hand. Receive, heal, rehouse, that kind of stuff."
"That does, indeed, sound complicated," she mocked as she sent a look at the others, seemingly probing them for reactions to that information. There were no laughs, no follow-ups. She wasn't mocking anything for fun. Everyone knew that.
"But what do you want with us, then?"
From the chair in the middle of the room, it felt like a interrogation. The chair was simple, just padded wood with legs and a back, unlike most other furniture in there, which seemed demonstratively not simple. Old things hang on the walls, pieces of machinery, mostly small ones, and assorted knickknacks stood on tables and shelves. Although the degredation of the world outside shone through in the details, with rusty walls peeking through here and there, it was an impressive attempt at making the place look unaffected by it all. It also seemed to be very deliberate. A show of force.
The people standing around, apparently part of the curly woman's crew, were perhaps the biggest reveal that there was a harsh, wrecked world just outside the walls. Scars, both facial and wherever skin was exposed, seemed the norm, some of them looking as if they had been infected at some point. Clothes were tough but handmade, many of them put together clumsily or hastily, improvised patchworks of whatever fit the bill. But what made the biggest impact was the looks in their eyes. If there was ever a casual version of the thousand mile stare that shellshocked soldiers were known to have, this might very well be it. They didn't seem empty, or scared, or saddened. They seemed unimpresed, as if they had seen whatever the world had to offer and now were just seeing the same things again everywhere.
"Fifth force."
The woman stopped her pacing for a moment. "What?"
"The fifth force. Spirits. Energies, I don't know what you call it. We've got some problems with it and need someone who understands it better."
A vague mumble went through the room, almost like in a bad movie. It was brief, though, as the woman took a few steps closer, squinting and arms subconsciously crossing on her chest.
"What is that, and why would I know about it?"
"Because it seems to be a time travel thing."
Again, a mumble. The woman looked up, giving the impression that not everyone in the room was clued in on time travel. They might be her crew, but that could just as well mean local, just skilled allies from this world that had nothing to do with the whole time travel issue. That would probably be bad.
"Konrad," she suddenly said in a commanding voice, especially for her age. There was a response from one of the others, though it was too short to pinpoint the person completely. "Do you have any idea what this... girl is talking about?"
Feet approached, one treading light, one heavy, like an old injury. The man who appeared from behind was surprisingly young for that kind of gait. Like most of the rest, including women, he had his hair shaved down to a minimum, although it had clearly been a while since last he did so. He wore lighter clothes, none of it protective against more than the various elements. Not a warrior.
"Mary, was it?" he asked, sounding like a child trying to sound serious. It was kind of adorable, under the circumstances.
"Marie."
"Okay, Marie. This spirit energy stuff, is it electromagnetic? Like light?"
He opened a small notebook, flipping through a few pages, an actual pencil in his other hand and not the same improvised thing as the people at the museum place.
"I'm not a..."
"Just, you know, whatever you can tell me."
His voice forgot the tough act, slipping into a surprisingly kind tone, almost concerned. His eyes were on something in the notebook, reading, not writing. They did peek up when he spoke, though.
"It's... uhm..."
The tables turning was a problem. The point had been to get answers, not give them.
"It's usually invisible. It can mainly be seen through very sensitive electronic gear, like unshielded cameras. It seems to flow like water, but in the air?"
He never even listened until the end, instead turning on his heel to the curly woman, taking a few stumbling steps to whisper in her ear. There was nothing wrong with his leg, it turned out. He was missing a foot, or at least most of it.
"We know what you're talking about," the woman finally said, sounding oddly grim. "Why are you asking about that?"
She started waving a hand subtly at the others in the room, and they left, one by one. Something in that was less than reassuring, her suddenly wanting to be alone. To not have witnesses.
"We've run into some issues with it. For lack of a better word, the spirits seem angry at a person of interest."
"The woman in white?"
For a moment, the world seemed to fall away, nothing remaining but those words.
"The... how do..."
The curly woman pointed to Maltheus, who had been standing silently by the wall the whole time.
"One of the first things he mentioned about you, back when he approached me that day you visited, after you disappeared, was that you had it in for her. Very much in for her. Seems like a bit of an obsession of yours."
Maltheus, completely breaking the tension in the room, smiled a sheepishly nervous smile and did an awkward finger wave.
"He seemed to think I would offer him a job if he told me what he knew about you, since you also had a strange interest in me," she continued. "He was right, of course."
"She... is building something. I've tracked it all the way from around year 4000 down to 2015. It turns out, whatever it is, it pisses these spirits off."
"Yeah, spirits..." she said in a low voice, sounding none too pleased with the word. "Not the word I'd use for this stuff, but I see how it might fit."
She stood, looking for a moment before turning around, walking far more slowly than she had earlier. She was walking towards a cabinet of bottles, but none of it looked like alcohol. What was more interesting, however, was how slowly she walked. Anyone else might not have given it much thought, but she seemed to be hiding the time she needed for thinking behind some act about walking to those bottles. In the end, she opened the cabinet and took out a bittle, pouring a glass that had stood beside it. Sipping it, she turned around.
"Water?" she asked, making the sudden politeness of her voice sound utterly fake.
"No thanks. What do you..."
"Easy now, girl," she sighed, still looking like she was weighing each and every word. "It's a type of energy that got discovered a few millenia from now, back in the 9400s."
She took a deeper sip from the glass, her eyes jumping back and forth like hyperactive insects, between the few people left in the room.
"It's weak, very weak, but it can be focused. After a few decades of tampering with both machines and organics, it turned out to be a useful toy, but little more. It was too weak to match any technologies that existed back then."
"Back in... the 9400s?"
She nodded, taking no notice of the oddity of that phrase when put into context. Veteran time travelers talked about time in a very fluid way, describing distant futures as simple pasts and, sometimes, vice versa. It got easier to follow, but it never seemed to sound truly... right.
"Then came time travel," she continued. "No bringing machines through, all the energy and stuff, but you know that." She filled the glass again, looking a bit uncomfortable, as if she was holding back a burp. "Suddenly, this stuff was a big hit with the trainees, something they could manipulate in ways that didn't require the same kind of machinery. Get a high enough count of copper or silver in your body, and you became a living conduit. Early missions were lousy with freshly grown bodies that were adapted for that stuff. And then, they stopped doing that."
"They?"
She nodded, avoiding eye contact, her mind clearly back in some until now nearly forgotten past, or future, of hers.
"The ones that made us. My former bosses, you might say."
She took another swig from the glass, making it seem almost like she was actually boozing it up. It still looked like nothing but water, though.
"28417."
"What?"
She stopped in the middle of finishing off the glass, hand frozen near her lips, looking.
"28417. We call them that. Someone calculated the year that you come f... well, that most time travelers seem to come from."
She finished the water, putting the empty glass upside down on the thin counter in front of the cabinet, and letting out a refreshed sigh. "Clever," she remarked, sounding not all that impressed with it. "You sure you don't want some?"
"Is it..."
"It's just water," she added. "Well, Konrad here mixes in some spices that the locals grow, just to freshen it up." Without warning, she suddenly had a second glass in her hand and a question on her face as she displayed it. "Nothing funny, I promise."
"Thanks. I guess I'll have one."
The tone in the room was hastily changing. Her tough exterior was molding almost while she spoke, becoming more and more friendly, in a way that seemed very calculated. There was nothing hostile to it, nothing even mocking. But there was something going on that she wasn't telling outright.
"Anyway," she chimed, as she poured both glasses, "your socalled spirits. Fact is, we know very little about them. The... 28417?" She peered over for confirmation. "Yeah, the 28417 stopped doing that. Something went badly wrong, I think, long before they started hunting us, mind you. I only know this from things pieced together during my stay here, talking to others like you and me."
The water she handed over smelled odd, more like a barbeque steak than water. A single sip and a bundle of flavors suddenly unfolded, one moving over to let the next pass through. The aftertaste itself was more complicated than most actual dishes.
"Good, right?" she chirped, taking a sip herself. "Konrad knows his shit."
"So, where did those early time travelers go?"
She seemed taken aback a bit by the question, perhaps hoping that she had said enough. Perhaps the drink was her way of finishing the topic, perhaps she just hoped it was a sufficient distraction. Whatever the case, her sudden good mood began to waver a bit.
"No idea. It was the early days of time travel, relatively speaking. Definitely not the year 28417 or whatever your people figured out." She looked in her glass as she swirled the remaining water around a bit. "Best anyone can tell, they were scattered all over, not a lot of accuracy in the jumps. And nobody on the inside is going to talk, so I don't think you're going to find anyone to give you a clearer answer. Sorry."
She was half right.
"I don't know. I might know someone."
She failed to hide her sudden interest at that remark, but she never commented on it. Instead, she put down her glass and lokoed up with a disturbingly wide smile.
"Now, Marie, let's talk about what you can do for me in return for all this!"

The wind swept over the fields, carrying with it the fresh scent of autumn plantlife. Many trees were beginning to drop their leaves, creating a moist smell of leaves drying on the ground, and in many places, the grasses joined in. It was a countdown to the last harvest of the year, and the grain was just about ready.
"The farmers are gonna #*@!ing hate us."
Standing in the middle of the grain, Danny was practically glowing with discomfort. He wasn't used to being dragged away from his cozy little office, and the outside weather rarely agreed with him, being either too hot, too cold, or too meh. Right now, the breeze was clearly his biggest issue, as he clutched his clothes like they might be ripped straight off his body. In reality, they barely moved in the faint winds.
"Look, Danny, we have basically #*@! all in that age, so I think we should just take this as a lucky break. I'm sorry there was nobody else around to wingman me on this, but you'll survive. You will, right?"
He sent a few embittered looks, then nodded.
"And she's actually got parallel time machines set up? I mean, we're not splitting the timeline here or anything, right?"
"No, of course not."
There was no way to know if the curly woman had told the truth. She had promissed that the time machines under her control, although not in the best condition any longer, would send their passengers in one, collected batch, so that one did not arrive to change the timeline, then another arrive in that timeline, and so on, creating a mess of minor branches in time. Considering the vital inputs refugees often gave, it could cause a lot of trouble. Maybe. There was no way to know, really, not without equipment to track timeline stability, and The Embassy had yet to get any of that.
The booms came almost in a row. Boom, boom, boom, almost a dozen. There were a few that missed the mark by a handful of seconds before or after, but all in all, her people had done a good job aiming.
"I counted fourteen," said Danny casually. "We were supposed to get fourteen, right?"
He looked over, waiting for a nod.
"Good, so they came together. Disaster averted."
"Yeah, or we're just the last version of the timeline, getting all of it."
Danny hated that, all that sewing of doubt in what was real and what was not. He lived for decisive, single answers, riddles with concrete solutions. He didn't mind theories and speculation on complex time travel technologies and their impact, but that was all just talk. He didn't like it when chaos became too real, not even as a joke.
"Anyone hurt?" he called out into the fields. Whoever had come through, they had appeared briefly here and there, but quickly fallen to the ground, now covered by tall grain.
"Is everything prepared for them?"
Danny nodded. "Yeah, we got temporary rooms ready, and Laila is looking into a more permanent placement somewhere near town. Don't worry."
It sounded almost silly coming from him, the suggestion to not worry. He even looked like he was about to have a heart attack, just walking around in the field, looking for new arrivals.
"Help," a weak cry came from somewhere nearby. It took very little time to track the source of the cry, sprawled out amongst charred grain, eyes squeezed shut, hands feeling out the surroundings as he struggled to get up. He was trying not to curl up around his crotch, a very normal thing for first-time male time travelers. The jump took its toll on the male genitalia.
"Here, we're here."
"Yeah, relax," Danny added. "What's your name?"
"Arthur," said the man, coughing hard and spilling a bit of blood in the process. He looked somewhere in his thirties, but his somewhat leathery skin made an exact age had to guess.
"Where is she?" he asked, nearly out of voice.
"Who?"
"Johanna, my daughter."
Danny immediately began calling out that name, and before long, someone answered, a very young voice. While rushing to meet it, his face changed from worried to a growing frustration.
"We're gonna need more people, Marie."