(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 29

"Wonderful #*@!ing friends you've been making," Patrick growled as we ducked down the small gravel road that ran by a patch of trees. Lisa and Elmer had just barely rolled off in the car before sounds started to appear, sounds that were definitely not a natural part of the landscape. Nothing extreme, but seeing as the white woman already had weird flying things that could go invisible, a few funny sounds were enough evidence to warrant an escape. Vera was gone, I checked that much. The ground where she had been was nothing but ashes and charred grass, just like the woman back at the library back... how long ago was that even? I honestly had begun losing track of a lot of things.
"I never really trusted those two," I growled back both to defend myself, and perhaps also reassure myself that I wasn't a complete tool.
"Shut up, you two," Mischa hissed, steadily running out of breath. "We need a plan, and when everything is lovely dovely, you can settle it with a fistfight, okay?"
He was right. As we did our best to rush along the dark gravel road without tripping over our feet, my brain began trying to piece things together. We needed a plan. Any plan.
"First, we gotta get a hold of that guy in the supermarket. We need to get..."
"I meant right now, Ida," Mischa breathed ehavily, not even sounding angry.
"Oh," was all I had to respond with. "You still got that flashlight?"
Mischa nodded, holding up something that was hard to see in the rapidly approaching total darkness.
"Great, I can still make out where the trees end. We go around them, turn that on where nobody from the road can see it, and go around the trees. They go around the back of the houses, we can skip through a garden or something and be back on the small side roads in no time. Then..."
I hesitated. I knew what I wanted to say, that we should go check out the safehouse, maybe see if the one I had named Cindy was still there, and of she was alright. But it was hard to see how that idea would be received well in present company.
"I got some cash for a taxi," Patrick mumbled, in between grumbling about the uneven ground. "I just wanna go home and forget about this. Let those crazy people fight, if they want, I don't want anything to do with them."
"Yeah," Mischa chimed in.
"I'd love to," I lied, "but there's still the problem of my evil twin."
"What evil twin?" asked Patrick, while Mischa let out a frustrated growl.
"They kinda cloned a robot from Ida," he explained, summing it up better than I was about to. "It's basically living her life now, making sure people think nothing is wrong. Except it'll demolish her if it ever thinks it's about to be outed."
"Oh," was all Patrick had to say. Even in the dark, it was clear how lost his facial expression was.
At the end of the line of trees, Mischa turned on the flashlight, and for a few minutes, we more or less waded through the damp soil of yet another field hidden behind them. As we reached a yard that had few enough obstacles, we did our best to sneak in silently. It worked less elegantly than intended, but we soon stood under the streetlights, on the dimly lit sidewalk. I said nothing about the house I knew was no more than a minute or two away, letting Patrick pull out his phone and order a taxi.
"So," Mischa said, his voice low, almost glum. "What about you, Ida?"
I wanted to say what I was thinking, I wanted to share my plans. But both the boys looked like they had had more than enough of the madness that had just unfolded. I doubted how smart it would be to even mention more.
"I know an abandonned house not far from here. You two go home, I'll catch up with you in the morning. How about down by the harbor?"
Mischa nodded, while Patrick stood a bit away, uneasily waiting for the taxi to arrive. He was making little strained fists with his hands and then releasing it, over and over, while moving restlessly, teeth gritted. This wasn't him, this wasn't his usual self. And I felt to blame.
"Take care, Ida," said Mischa, and I nodded.
"Ida, I #*@!ing mean it, take care. This..." He waved his hand in the air, index finger extended as if pointing at flies above us. "... This is insane, and I don't want to pretend to be the friend of some robot the rest of my life, okay?"
I smiled. It was forced, and I could feel how tired and worried my eyes looked, but he did me the favor of not mentioning it.

There was nothing left. Had anyone stepped in knowing nothing, it would have looked like simply another house on the market, empty for months or years. Except they had left in a hurry, never bothering to lock the old, peeling back door. Getting into the house had never crossed my mind, and I was lucky it ended up that easy. But in the end, they probably had no way to leave the place truly locked. I had never seen any one of them use an actual key.
Cindy was gone. It occured to me, briefly, that it was odd to think of her as having a name, seeing how she never even heard me give her that name. She had never seen me, not in person. She knew me as a name, as someone they had tracked down with strange simulations and whatever else they used. Some special kid, who would help them get back on their feet. But never as an actual person.
My own room, or the one they had me in briefly as I recovered, looked horrible. The bed was stripped bare, only an old blanket left on the floor, and all the weird gadgets were gone, leaving just marks on the walls where they had hung for what had to be a very long time. I had never had the time to check, or even thought of doing so, but now I wondered what they had all looked like. What the room had looked like while they had been here. Most of all, though, I wondered who had been here, at all. I only knew the four of them, Vera, Lisa, Karen and Elmer. But there had been more. The image of the woman bursting into colored dots by the library kept surfacing in my mind, again and again, ever since Vera did something similar back in the tall grass. For reasons I couldn't even explain to myself, I punched the open door of a large wardrobe, perhaps to let off some built up steam.
The house was relatively big, like two houses built into one. In the darkness, I avoided the upper floor. Whatever had given them electricity was gone, and nothing worked. I had faint moonlight and reflected streetlights to go by, and stairs felt unsafe in that setting. Instead, I stood for very long, at least it felt like that, and looked around the one living room. I could see markings on the walls from where something big had hung, something like a map, perhaps. There were more marks like them, but they seemed to be for smaller things, again perhaps maps. Bits of paper on the floor gave the impression that maps might have been torn from the walls rather hastily, rather than carefully removed. A part of me wondered where those maps were now.
Beyond that room, there was another living room, one that had all the hallmarks of a TV lounge. Couches were placed facing a large wooden piece of furniture, which had a gap that would easily fit a TV. It looked cozy. It looked like a place I might watch a movie with Mischa and Patrick, and it made me think briefly of whether they had gotten home yet, and what their parents might say about the time. That, in turn, made me think about my mom and Peter, and of course, about the robot copy of me. Not sure how to deal with those thoughts, I simply grumbled and left the room, walking through the small hallway and into the kitchen.
The one thing that dominated the kitchen was the refrigerator. Like a white monolith, it stood silently in an awkward corner, out of the way but also a bit weird to get to. Again, there was no light, no electricity, and part of me wondered what exactly I had expected to find when opening it. What I did find was not anything I would have guessed at, not by a longshot.
Water. Bottles and bottles of water. And on one shelf, bags of water, the kind you would put into cooling bags to keep things even cooler, or put on an injury or someone overheating from the sun. And they were still very cool! The sealed fridge and the tendency of water to hold a temperature for a long time conspired to keep them that way, apparently. If the time travelers had driven directly to the house and moved everythign in a rush, the fridge would have been shut down for les than an hour. Still, as someone who expected everything to basically go belly up and die without power for two minutes, I felt a bit awed at how the fridge just didn't seem to care that it had none.
There was more to the house, little rooms here and there, and a door leading to a very dark place that seemed like a boiler room, but I was starting to feel the strain of the day. My mind was flooding with things it needed to sort through, with emotions and information, with adrenaline, with things I couldn't even think what were. I was tired. And in the TV lounge, I sat down on the old sofa left behind by some long gone inhabitant. For a moment, I wondered if this had been where time travelers I never even met had slept, perhaps even for years. What was it, 20 years Vera said she had been here? My mind struggled to think of that as real, or even possible. As it had struggled to think of many other things as real or possible these last few days. But I sat in the sofa, feeling my breathing slowly soften.
And then, I cried.