(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 45

It was still dark. The festivities in town had died down, but the nightowls were still making the most of a good excuse. Mom, Peter and Beebee were all back at home, sleeping tight in their warm, dry beds. I had gone to bed, too, keeping up appearances. Beebee had a bedtime, and even with the special exception of the town festival, she was down and out by midnight. The rest of us had kept it going a few hours more, my mom picking a movie for us to watch, one that didn't require loud sounds. I barely even followed it, and at this point couldn't remember the title of it if my life depended on it. Some old crime flick.
The place smelled. Even with so little time passed, I had forgotten the damp, pungent smell. But then again, the weather was acting up, humidity climbing to compensate for the drought that had ended days ago. Only days ago. It seemed weird, like time itself was stretching and twisting, fitting in more than there should be room for in fewer hours than we should have. Like a movie on fast forward. Too many things happening in too little time.
"Hello?"
My voice echoed only slightly amongst the peeling walls in the old cinema. I kept it low, not wanting to attract attention from anyone outside the place. It was a longshot, but it had been the first place that came to mind. Both now, and then. It seemed logical.
When my feet were abruptly pulled away under me, the unexpected struggle against something in the dark as my new phone and its faint light tumbled to the floor was terrifying. It only lasted a brief moment, though, perhaps half a minute.  Then my assumptions were confirmed.
Stepping into the upward cone of light from the phone, she seemed larger and more monstrous than she was. I needed a second to be certain it was her, but nothing more.
"Hey, Ida," I said, trying to sound calm and casual as I pulled against the ropes on the floor. I was never a girl scout, but Peter loved this old TV show MacGuyver, about some  guy who made traps and solved problems with anything he could find. I couldn't set a trap, but I could definitely cover bits of rope with ducttape and let someone trip and get sticky-tangled on them!
"I could say the same to you," she replied, sounding a bit disappointed for some reason. "What are you doing here? How did you even find me?"
With a bit of planning and a lot of effort, I got my right arm free of the sticky ropes, allowing me to carefully pull the stuff off of my other limbs, one by one.
"Back when you lived my life, it was the first place I laid low in after everything went straight to hell," I answered. There was no way of knowing how well her mind was modelled after mine, but up to this point, it seemed pretty spot on. There apparently were some fringe benefits to that.
"So what, we're twinsies now? We know each other's thoughts? I was gonna make a joke about wearing each other's clothes, but I'm literally wearing your stuff, from socks to hoodie," she remarked, cracking a smile that looked a bit gloomy, but perhaps that was the fault of the lighting. "Except the shoes and jacket," she added. "No need to outright advertise the connection."
I nodded. I would have thought the same. Being recognized as one another in a crowd was one thing, but having essentially me run around as two versions, everything being interchangeable, was a gamble. I had never had to think along those lines before, but perhaps that was why I tried to imagine every silly little risk. And why she did, too.
"What brings you here?" she asked, finally beginning to help me get the last sticky ropes off my shins. I could now grab my phone and lend some light to the task, which helped quite a bit.
"The time travelers, the ones that recruited me, they're leaving. The day after tomorrow."
She stopped, looking at me with a very human expression on her face.
"We gotta do something," she sighed, running both hands through her hair. It was weird to see that habit of mine as an outside observer. Part of my brain kept screaming at me to copy the move, for no real reason other than the familiarity.
"I know," I told her, pulling the final bit of dicttape off my shoe. "I have a plan, but I need you to cover for me."
She suddenly perked up a bit, squinting and frowning at me in skeptical curiousity.
"I need you to go to school and be my public face for the day, while I go recruit whoever we can find that has a stake in this."
"That's nice," she said, her soft voice dripping with sarcasm, "but what's the actual plan? I'm assuming you're not recruiting for a dance off or candlelight vigil or something?"
I shook my head, carefully moving away from the ducttape ropes now scattered haphazardly on the floor.
"No, not exactly. But I need as many as possible, and I don't have much time to get them."
"So let me do that. I'm figuring out how to use this body, you know, move faster and stuff."
Again, I shook my head.
"Sorry, but these people probably know about the copies and everything. They might see through your disguise. You know, with the injuries and everything."
She suddenly fell quiet. Sitting up against the wall, wrists on her knees, she started playing around with her fingers. It was obvious what was going through her head, even without us thinking with similar brains, but after a few seconds, she confirmed it by touching her face softly.
"Then how can I be you, I mean, with this face?"
The damage was still pretty extensive. Red streaks from both burned and cut skin crisscrossed parts of her face, especially the cheeks and chin. Her lips had a strange, dark color, as if they had just barely kept from being charred black, and she had vrey little eyebrows to speak of. But every major thing was still there. The face looked bad, but it looked like a face.
"Nobody at school expects you to be a robot. Or expects me to be a ro... Nobody there thinks there are robots."
I held up a small plastic box. As I moved it, it rattled slightly.
"Is that... Is that mom's makeup?" Something seemed to dawn on her immediately after saying that. "I mean, is that your mom's makeup?" she corrected, her voice a little lower and a lot sadder.
"It's okay," I said, feeling my heart ache in my chest. "Yeah, it's her makeup," I answered, then looked straight into her eyes as tears started to form in them. "It's our mom's makeup."
She perked up completely at those final words, mouth slightly open, looking like someone reborn. Then, she smiled.

I had been a bit uncomfortable about calling the number on the card. Too many spy movies, way too many spy movies, had convinced me that just that one phone call would be enough for evil to descent on me from the skies themselves. But nothing happened. It had been a quick conversation, just stating the bare essentials. A meeting. Time and place. And as the first rays of sunlight began to creep over the roofs of Nakskov's rustic brick houses and other buildings, I turned the corner by the retirement center, not far from where we had fought the robots in the industrial section of town.
"Ida, nice to see you!" he said, lighting up with a smile. I stopped for a bit, looking at him with skeptical eyes.
"Sooo.... Is that how spies work? You just shout out someone's name in the middle of the street?"
Alex chuckles, making a slight bow in apology.
"Again, not a spy, but I am sorry for my indiscretion. Hello, agent," he chirped, though it was clear that some part of him was, indeed, serious about the apology. "What is it you need?"
The first number on my new phone, after my mom's, had been Mischa's. I felt guilty, even more than usual, for connecting everything to him, but he had what I needed, and it had taken a bit to get it all across, roughly twenty minutes of figuring out all the settings on the new thing, and then sending and receiving the files from his.
"These people," I said, handing him the phone with the pictures opened on its screen. "We need to know who they are, so we can talk to them."
Alex nodded with a shrug, looking annoyingly unimpressed.
"Sure," he said, "we can do that. It'll take a few minutes with facial recognition, and I need to send the pics to home office, if that's okay with you?"
I nodded.
"So... who are they? I mean, why do you want to know who these people, specifically, are?"
In all honesty, the question was not only asked in a perfectly natural, completely casual way, it was also a perfectly logical thing to ask. And still, I felt like I caught a slight undertone of deliberate questioning, like he not just asked, he really wanted to know.
"Persons of interest," I answered, trying to read his eyes as he listened. "Isn't that what you spies call it?"
"Not a spy," he sighed, though with an annoyed smile on his face.
"Look, Alex, I'm sorry about all this weird stuff, but things are, well, really, really weird right now."
He just kept staring at me with frustratingly forgiving eyes, his fingers moving over the screen of my phone as he, presumably, sent the pictures to whoever was going to analyze them for him. For us.
"Let's make a deal," I heard myself saying, not entirely sure where that way of thinking suddenly came from inside my head. "If you help with this, no questions asked, I'll tell you everything. But not until two days from now. Deal?"
At first, he said nothing, and I felt the anxiety inside of me rise, struggling to hide it from him. Instead, he quietly looked at the phone.
"There," he said, handing me back the phone. The first image had already been returned, with name, address, and a few added details on it. Jens Magnussen. The street address was a place just on the outskirts of town. "And sure, I can wait two days."
I smiled, a genuine smile, watching the phone screen as another image came back. Grete Tornby. She lived on the road next to the one Mischa's family lived on.
"Ida," he said in a voice that, despite being very soft, filled the air with a strange sense of impending doom, or at the very least, a sens of drama. "Be careful. Be very, very careful. Promise?"
I nodded, suspecting I failed to hide my sudden feeling of dread.

The fields reached as far as the eye could see. In the distance, the two large silos of the sugar refinery in town could be seen, and if one squinted a bit, so could the spire of the town church. The rest of town was a multicolored blur half covered by trees that were scattered between town and this place. A few houses nearby added to the rural feel, all of them surrounded by dense plantlife, mostly tall trees that looked several decades old.
It was mostly a garage, it seemed. The house, a pinkish thing about the size of one of the smaller town houses, was hidden from view from the street by the large building beside it, and obscured a bit more by a few cars in the massive driveway. Tyres lay stacked around it, roughly separated into neatly stacked new ones and the more sloppy piles of obviously very used ones. A single car without tyres, or wheels for that matter, stood on a lawn on the far side of the large building, looking as if it had been there for quite a while.
Parking my bike I felt the burn of having driven it as far into the outskirts as I had. Part of me regrhetted not just waiting for a bus, but with the schedule this far out that the buses kept, I could easily be stuck for hours. A cab would have been nice, but to my great frustration, I knew it would be an expense I could not hide from my mom. Not a trip this far, and definitely not a return trip.
A bit hesitantly, trying not to appear conspicuous, I peaked at my phone. The picture of this Jens Magnussen was on the screen, full screen, but the man my eyes were tracking was not him. Jens was a heavy man, looking like one who had made a life from manual labor. Gruff, bulky. The guy walking around inside the large building was smaller, and younger, from the looks if him. Still a bulky fellow, but not as intimidatingly as the one in the picture.
"You looking for someone?"
I flinched with my entire body, looking up from the screen in a bit of a panic. On my way there, using my strength and concentration entirely on the bike, I had never even noticed how nervous I was. Now, it suddenly came rushing back to me.
"Uhm, yeah, where's Jens?"
"You got an appointm... Sorry, who should I say is asking for him?"
I became extremely selfconscious when he changed his question as he stepped out the door and saw me in full. Perhaps he just noticed my age. Perhaps he spotted the bike. He clearly figured out I was not here to get my engine looked at or anything else that they seemed to offer.
"I'm Ida," I said, awkwardly extending my hand to shake his. He looked at his right hand, the grime and oil on it, and carefully used the left. Although they looked fairly new and of good quality, his overalls and the shirt beneath them showed very clear sign of being work clothes, with grease and a bunch of other stains leaving a colorful, if chaotic, pattern on them.
"Niels," he answered, sounding a little out of breath. He kept shifting a wrench, or some tool I thought looked like one, between his hands, fiddling with it like I would do with a pencil or my phone. Noticing that he stopped and hung the tool from a strap in his utility belt, I followed suit and slid the phone into my pocket.
"I'm his brother, we run the place together," he added, looking a bit confused. "I'm sorry, but who are you? What do you want to talk to Jens about?"
There was a reason why I had chosen this place first, even though it was the one farthest from town that I planned to visit. And it was yet another reason I had gone there by bike. It was, more or less, located in the same direction as the old school. the place had been quiet, but I had only snuck in to grab a few bits of the second hand clothing. A few socks, a scarf, a couple of handkerchiefs, anything small and light that I could get easy, without going too far into the still terrifying buildings. I smiled politely at him as I pulled one of the handkerchiefs out of my pocket and wiped a bit of grime off my hand after the shake. It wasn't my plan, but it worked out just perfect as an excuse.
"Just wanted to look around for some parts for a school project," I answered, giving the whole place another look over. "Does that car even work? The one on the grass?"
Niels turned his head to look over at the car, and as he looked away, I took as casual a step as I could towards the car, making sure it brought me a bit closer to him, too.
Starting in my wrist and quickly spreading through both my hands and a bit up the arm, I immediately felt the static, tingling charge I had almost forgotten. Like a living thing, it crept around my arm, an invisible worm trying to wrapall the way around. Niels, meanwhile, looked like something bothered him, like his back had suddenly become sore. He shrugged uncomfortably, his shoulders almost writhing for just a few seconds, before I stepped away again, making it look like I was walking towards the car in nothing but a slightly weird arc.
"It's a... It's an old one, been there a year or so. Engine frame is... Sorry..."
Hearing him start to cough softly made me feel like the pit of my stomach had gone cold. I looked, stepping back another bit as began to look a bit sickly, his face reddening and his throat convulsing slightly, as if in the fit of some spasm.
"You okay?" I asked, not only knowing perfectly well that he wasn't, but also knowing all too well why. He just nodded, leaning over to support himself against his own knees as he coughed, deeply.
"What the hell is going on, bro?" came a voice from somewhere. I flinched, again, this time feeling more worried that I had actually done something wrong, done some kind of harm! Just by nervous reflex, I tugger the handkerchief even deeper into the pocket than it already was.
"It's fine, just a fit. Dunno what the hell happened," Niels called back, his voice cracking at the end of it. A large man turned the corner, wearing very similar overalls and carrying a large garden rake. Spotting me, he smiled, still keeping half an eye on Niels.
"Hi, I'm Jens," he proclaimed, extending his hand. Without thinking about it, I reached out and shook it. Or rather, I tried to.
Without warning, the large man burst out in a harrowing sound, his voice twisting into some kind of high pitch mockery of human sounds! He instantly pulled back the hand, looking at it in terror, then at me.
"What the hell are you doing, girl?!" he roared, clutching the hand with the other and staring at both in disbelief as, I assumed, the strange time energy stuff got from the first hand to the second.
"I'm... Oh god, I'm so sorry," I stuttered, feeling like I might cry at any moment. All of a sudden, both men were now looking at me, both bent over in their own particular pain, both with a mix of fear and anger on their faces. Standing there, frozen, I noticed the big one, Jens, sneaking nervous looks back towards the house.
Niels was fast. He made a bee line straight back into the open garage, heading for a medium-sized metal tool rack that was not yet open, in spite of him obviously having worked aroundit for some hours. In my distracted state, I didn't think to move my eyes away from him, and when I finally looked around, Jens was gone.
"It was an accident!" I yelled, but at this point, nobody was listening. In fact, nobody was even there. Where Jens had gone was anyone's guess, but Niels had clearly snapped the rack open somehow, grabbed something from it, and doven for cover behind one of the many things cluttering up the garage. There were at least four cars in various states of being repaired, and any one of them could easily conceal a grown man of his size!
My first thought was to simply hightail it out of there! But the moment I turned to jump on the bike, I also looked at the roads I had to pick from. Either one of them would be nothing but open space and me in the middle. Target practice, if that was what they were thinking of. I threw the bike on the ground and made a run for it!
"Look," I heard Niels shout from somewhere inside the garage as I bolted for the car in the grass, "we don't want trouble. We're just living here, for #*@!'s sake! We're not breeding, we're not..."
"I'm not with them!" I shouted back, with every bit of air in my lungs. "I'm not here to hurt you!"
A wave went through the air, leaving the weirdest sound in its wake, something akin to a burp in a tin can recorded and played back at high speed! It clearly passed through part of me, but other than a strange tickle inside my organs, it did nothing. At least, not to me.
"I know they're coming for you, I want to help!"
They said nothing, the entire place falling silent and giving way to the sounds of nature. Nature, as it happened, was a bit nervous, too, and the scrapping and squeeking of terrified animals trying to get away seemed to come from  everywhere around me.
"You're not with the 28417?" came the voice of Jens from somewhere. He sounded more than a bit uncertain of the answer. Uncertain was good. Uncertain of everything beat certain of the worst thing, any day!
"No!" I yelled back. "I mean, that 28 is the woman in white, right?"
"Yes, the psycho bitch!" Niels yelled back from somewhere inside the garage.
"Nope, definitely not with her. She kinda wants me dead. Already tried to replace me."
The silence came back, but the animals were now either gone, hiding or just dropped dead from fear. All that could be heard was a weird, scraping sound, seemingly coming from the air itself.
"Uhm, if that's true," Jens yelled, sounding a bit hesitant, "you might wanna, you know... move away from the car."
"I'll move away when you put down your weapons!"
There was silence again.Except for the scraping noise, which was getting louder, ever so slowly.
"Yeah, about that," he continued, "the car is kinda the weapon."
Not thinking about my actions, I threw myself away from the car and into the grass. On my back, staring at it, I winced a bit at the increasingly discomforting sound of something scraping, metal against metal or metal against something else.
"You okay out there?" I heard Niels yell, sounding a bit less aggressive all of a sudden.
"Yeah, I'm fine. Are you screwing with me, 'cause the car is just..."
The screw, quite ironically, hit me in the back of my head, managing to hurt a bit, even through the hoodie. Luckily, my instinctive reaction was to lay flat in the grass, because less than a second later, more screws came flying out of nowhere. Then a few bolts. Then two bike chains and one regular chain, rather long. I cried out with mostly fear but also a bit of pain as a large metal bearing rolled clumsily over my hand in the grass. And as a finishing touch, my bike came flying through the air, passing me a little below my feet before it slammed into the car.
"Yeah, uhm... sorry!" yelled Niels, still hiding in the garage.
It took a few moments for everybody to find their inner zen again. Making sure that nothing was going to shoot through the air and hurt me, I slowly got up from the grass. My eyes tried to scan my surroundings for dangers, but they kept going back to my bike, which was apparently somehow stuck to the car in the grass. Not leaning against it, either, but actually hanging against the door, bike tyres not even touching the ground.
"What the #*@! was that?!"
I was thinking out loud, but the two clearly heard me just the same. Jens was standing by the corner of the garage, in the gravel courtyard by the house, and he was holding what looked like a small uitcase, pointed ahead of him, roughly in my direction. Niels leaned against the inner wall of the garage, showing only a bit of his left side as he looked at me over his shoulder.
"Magnetizer," Jens said in a loud, affirmative voice. "If you'd been a robot, you'd be stuck to the car now."
His eyes fixed hard on me, he slowly lowered the suitcase thing, the heavy shoulder mount behind it coming into view. Giving the car another glance, the many things stuck to it, I stuck my hand in my pocket. The phone wriggled a bit, but showed no signs of ripping through my pants.
"Modern phones rarely react to magnets," Jens said comfortingly, lowering the strange device entirely to his side. "Too much plastic and non-magnetic metal.You might wanna check its memory, though. Sitting by a magnetic car can #*@! that up pretty bad."
I instantly thought about the pictures and adresses on the phone, but pushed it out of my mind, for the time being. Niels was also building his courage and tearing himself away from the garage wall. My phone could wait.

The inside of the house was remarkably old fashioned. Blue and white patterned china stood on little shelves and on the walls hung nature paintings and old photos, many in sepia or black and white, of what seemed to be old Nakskov and some of the nearer surroundings.
"Sorry about the whole, you know," said Niels as he joined. Jens had carefully invited me into the house, still very obviously keeping an eye on my every movement. Niels had fallen behind in order to close the garage, apparently not wanting anything to interfere or to worry about. What he expected to be interfered with what less obvious. I was, after all, alone in the house of two strange men, in the middle of nowhere.
"She says they're rounding up refugees in town," Jens told his brother, with a burdened tone to his voice. "Kinda lines up with what we already know."
Niels nodded, sighing. Standing in the doorway, he tapped his fingers against its frame, looking like he was trying to phrase something in his head. Or perhaps he simply wasn't too happy with the things he was being told.
"So you're, what, some kind of Paul Revere? The redcoats are coming and all that?"
"I... I don't know that reference. I'm not English."
Jens let out a slight laugh, looking like he was about to say something but stopped himself and simply shook his head.
"Look," I said, dangerously close to sighing, mostly because my body was finally calming down after the earlier encounter, "I just... I am trying to help. I think I can..."
"Why?" interrupted Niels. He didn't sound any kind of angry or even suspicious. At most, he sounded a little bit confused. But mainly, he sounded like he had trouble understanding.
"I... Well, it's..." For the first time it dawned on me that the only thing that had ever really pressed me to do anything was the time travelers themselves, and they were clearly not on board with my current plans. "I have friends that are going to get hurt," I lied, at least sort of. For a brief moment, my mind went back to Camilla and how terrified she was when her mother realized what was going on, long before I even did.
Jens handed me a glass for the soda he had found in the fridge. "So, what kind of resources are you bringing?" he asked, sounding far too casual about it. I made sure to follow the glass with my eyes, afraid that if I looked at him, he would see right through me.
"Some gear from rogue TTs. And a bunch of other refugees, of course."
The two brothers looked at one another for a bit, before they both turned back to me. The look in their eyes was a bit hard to read.
"Okay... so what's the plan?"