(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 13

There was no smoke. There were barely any flames, just a few quick sputters. There were, however, some blue sparks, many of them flying between parts of Kurt's tiny components as they flew apart. If it was Kurt, at all. The woman in white was blown back, tumbling over on the pavement, but she found her balance with disturbing ease, landing in a crouching position, supported by one arm against the ground. The other arm looked... wrong.
"Over here," a voice called out of the blue. I was on my back myself, having been flung back just like the blond woman. How I had even survived was beyond me. A few cuts and scrapes, a ringing in my ears, but no floods of blood from gaping wounds or broken bones sticking out like in some ghastly horror movie. Too dazed to think about it, I reacted to the voice. "Here," it said again, lower, but just loud enough for me to hear it. As I bolted in its direction, I gave the blonde one last glance. The cuts across her face looked nasty, and tiny burns in her hair showed that even without fire, there had been heat. It was no simple mechanical failure, Kurt had quite literally exploded. Well, part of him. The legs and lower body, and the arm that hadn't been at my throat, all still stood there, bits and parts sticking out.
"Here," the voice said again, sounding like someone speaking at a normal, casual dinner tone. But there was nobody around. I was at the road that I had previously crossed to get to the harbor, now about to cross it on my way back. I made my way through an open gate, expecting someone to be waiting on the other side, but still, only the voice remained.
"Go back. The alley."
I took a confused step back, out of the gated area, looking around for an alley. I knew the town pretty well, but adrenalin in my mind and my exact, current location all conspired to throw me off. I finally noticed what clearly seemed to be the alley in question. Looking back to locate the blonde, I saw the sky change. Not the weather, but the view of the sky itself. It flickered, shifted, like part of it was coming unhinged. Like I was looking not at the sky, but an image of it, and part of that image was about to break. All that broke, however, was a small hole in it, a small hole in the sky. Dull, darkly grey tentacles shot out of the hole and pulled up the remainder of the Kurt machine thing, sucking it into the hole, which then disappeared. The flickering moved. I decided not to hang around to study the details.
For an alley, it was fairly lit, the houses along the sides of it being in fair condition and bright colors. I took a few tentative steps into the alley, hoping to see someone standing by an oddly angled wall or something, but again, nobody turned up.
"Hello? Who are you? What do you want?"
I thought I saw someone inside one of the houses look at me with puzzled eyes, but it could have been my own selfawareness running crazy.
"Sorry about that," the voice said, and I heard a scrambling sound behind me. As I turned around, I found myself looking straight into the stomach of a tall woman. This one, dressed largely in blue, ignoring the dusty black shirt inside the blue coat.
"Hell and no," I grumbled, taking a step back. "Who the #*@! are you, now?!"
The woman had smiled at first. She tried keeping that smile plastered on her face, but it quickly began looking very fake, and then she basically gave up.
"I saved you," she remarked with a hint of question in the voice. "I'm here to help."
My brain was already looking for a way out of the alley, regretting having ever followed the disembodied voice in there. She was blocking the way I had entered the place, and the stretch in the opposite direction seemed long enough for her to catch me if I ran. Still, it tempted me.
"I don't want to know who you are," I said, trying to be preemptive.
"We're a group of..."
The woman stopped mid-sentence, apparently realizing that what she thought I said was not what I had actually said.
"Look, Ida, we need to..."
"Shut the hell up, right now, lady."
Even I was a bit surprised at my sudden outburst. I wasn't shouting as much as hissing, feeling misty spit fly from my lips as I did. I was shaking, my skin crawling and my every limb trembling. For some reason, it dawned on me that she was wearing some nearly clear, but seemingly yellow or orange shades, the kind that covered the eyes like a visor. Combined with her blue choice in wardrobe, it looked like a bad 80s costume.
"I've had it with you colorcoded freaks. Just leave me alone."
I backed away, feeling the ground with my foot at every step. The ground was uneven, the stones in some need of repair. But I was not taking my eyes off this one.
"Ida, you need to understand that you..."
"Yeah, special, I got it. I quit, okay?"
She stared at me, baffled, her voice skipping a beat and finding it hard to get back into a natural rhythm.
"You quit... being special?" she asked, in that sort of serious tone that masked confusion and made it seem like she was just making sure she heard it right.
"Yes, I quit being special," I replied tersely, still not taking my eyes off her.
"Jesus Christ," she growled, "we don't have time for this, girl. You may have noticed that..."
Without giving her any kind of indication, I jumped forward and swung my arm at her! Clearly thinking I was diving in for an actual attack, she quickly crossed her arms for a full frontal parry, but I never got that close. I got close enough, however. With a nauseating snap echoing amongst the many walls of the alley, a blue spark gathered all along my right arm as I reached it forward, collecting around my wrist and shooting from my hand at her. It struck her blue coat, but something got through. She let out a muffled cry of pain, and I could swear I saw a small puff of colored dots leave the mouth of her coat sleeve.
"Yeah, I noticed. You're one of those so-called time travelers. Where's your..."
This time, I cut myself off, ending the line of questioning to actually look around the alley. I spotted one figure ducking out of sight quickly up near the other end of it. The woman in red, however, never even tried to hide. She stood about halfway into the alley, resting her hand against a corner as she just looked at us.
The blue one was clutching her arm. Her face was distorted with a frown of pain, and she hunched a bit, her body trying to protect the hurt arm.
"What the hell is wrong with you, girl?" she complained, sounding more hurt than angry. "I just pulled your sorry ass away from that lunatic, and you try to send me back? Are you insane?!"
I kept my angry frown on, not wanting her to know that I was, in fact, feeling a bit guilty about the spark. I had no other way of knowing, but it still seemed a bit cruel. But there was no way I was going to let her know that.
"Wait," I suddenly heard myself say, as my brain tried to put a few pieces together, "back where?"
She was now down to just rubbing the hurt arm, although she did rub it in a way that made the pain seem even worse, somehow. Her face twitched with every rub, her mouth making involunary sucking sounds in response to the pain.
"Back," she grumbled, taking a quick look at the arm, even though the sleeve still fully covered it. "You're disrupting their anchors, the... energy, or whatever you wanna call it, keeping them here. They go poof, they go back to where they were sent from."
I turned to look in the direction of where I had run into the blonde and the Kurt machine, realizing that I was just looking into the wall of the first house that was blocking my view.
"That's why that man thing didn't care?"
She nodded.
"That's why. It's not a time traveler, just a robot copy of someone."
Forgetting to keep the whole defensive frown thing going, my eyes widened.
"They copied Kurt? Where's the real..."
Even before I finished my question, she sent me a look that answered it, in the most undesirable way possible.
"Oh," I muttered, my voice now sad. "Ohhhhh, oh dear god!" I added, as the implications of it hit me.
"Yeah," she responded, still rubbing that arm. "Anyone here could be one. They replace them when things go wrong and they really need to control how people act."
I could feel my heart beating faster as my mind ran through everyone I had met, not just in the last few days but essentially my whole life. The teacher, the people at the supermarket. Camilla's mom. Or....
"There are other time travelers here," I heard myself say, instantly regretting that I was just blurting out that fact. The woman just nodded.
"Refugees. Some have been hiding here a long time."
"She ran away from me," I continued, my brain now just sending thoughts directly to my mouth, no inspection given.
"Who?" asked the woman. I shook my head.
"Just... someone. She was a refugee, I guess. I must have scared her."
I felt horrible. Camilla probably never even knew about it, seeing how she felt odd about her mom's entire act. I had scared someone on the run, and now they were probably on the run again.
"So you... you help them?"
I was trying desperately to put my skeptical frown back on, but the cat was out of the bag. She knew that I wasn't just going to turn my back on this, now. Or at least she knew she had my full attention, for the time being.
"You got the address, right?"
For a moment, I rnasacked my mind to figure out what she meant. Then my hand almost on its own slipped into my pocket, finding the slip of paper that the woman in red had given me at the grill.
"Yeah. Why?"
"Because we're standing in an alley, and their agent just had a stealth craft pick up the lower body of a robot copy of someone, which, by the way, I blew apart. In broad daylight."
She waved what looked like a very complicated stapler and brass knuckle combo in front of her, and I assumed she had used it to blow that robot thing apart. She never confirmed it.
"That flickering in the sky was..."
"A stealth craft, yeah," she said, sounding almost sad, or frustrated. It was getting hard to tell. "They're a bit better equipped than we are."
Without a word of good bye, she turneed on her heel and walked out of the alley. She left the way I had come in, so she was clearly confident that the blonde and her weird team of robot copies and invisible jets had gone. I stood for a moment in the alley, wanting to ask somethng clever before she was gone, but nothing came to me. My brain felt exhausted, a weird throbbing having begun, like I was about to cry. I wasn't. I did feel a strange need for a snack, though.

My mom's bike was in the driveway. I sighed, a heavy sigh of unhappy expectations. I needn't even look at my phone to know that I was late, very late. In fact, I felt better not looking, not knowing how late I was. It was still light out, but that meant very little. Then again, maybe sunlight meant I would only be ounished, not ritually sacrificed.
"Dear god where have you been girl?!?"
I froze as I entered the door, not knowing how to answer her. She was in the kitchen, talking to Peter and one of the neighbours, an older woman named Caroline. Even more baffling, she instantly grabbed me and hugged me tight. A bit too tight.
"Uhm, what's going on mom? I just took a walk to clear my head," I lied. Lying was not my greatest skill, but this one seemed simple enough to pull off.
"Why don't you answer your phone? I've been calling you for over two hours!"
I must have looked puzzled, because as she let go of me and looked at my face, she, too, looked puzzled at my reaction. My brain raced to figure out what had happened, why I had never heard the phone. Finally, I simply pulled it out of my pocket to see.
"What on earth happened to your phone, Ida?" she asked. It was a valid question, and I had absolutely no answer. The phone was slightly warped, the glass cracked straight across and the little fiddly bits in its sides sticking out slightly. A few buttons had fallen off, only one still remaining. It looked like it had been in a microwave oven. For a few minutes, at least!
"I... don't..."
I knew. Or at least, I figured it out quickly. But telling her about zapping people with some strange time energy ability seemed like a bad idea. It was best to let her think nothing special had happened, considering she had sent me to therapy that very morning.
"And, uhm, Ida?" she added, picking strangely at me. "Who's clothes are these?"
My heart froze and I felt a pit open up in my stomach as I looked down at myself. Underneath my own jacket, I was still wearing the things from the second hand market! I touched the sweatshirt gently, trying to keep calm as my mind raced for an explanation that made some sense.
"I got wet in the rain, so I bought something at a second hand store. I don't wanna get cold," I answered, realizing that I had basically told the truth.
"And why are they... are those burns?!"
I could feel my heartbeat rise, my heart pounding harder and harder in my chest. Every brain cell in my skull seemed to be fighting to find some clever lie.
"I don't think this phone is safe," I simply mumbled, holding up the warped, broken phone, hoping she would fill in the blanks herself.
"Ida," she said, in that tone of voice that sounded like some ancient king's messenger not wanting to tell some random prisoner they wer going to be executed at dawn, "why are there burns... all over your clothes?"
My brain finally drew a blank and gave up entirely. I stood, like some little child who had rolled in mud, and looked at every part of my clothes that I could see while wearing it. Tiny black marks, little burns, were strewn over it like glitter at an 80s party. They looked almost like freckles on the body, except they were, of course, on the outside of the clothes.
"Ida," she said, putting even more of that terrifying tone in her voice, "what have you been doing?"
I tried to say something, but each time I tried, I choked. I wanted to play it cool, to think of answers that she had no choice but to believe. But I wasn't, and I didn't, and in a strange way, I felt like a failure for it.
"Ida, tell me the truth. Did you run into those fireworks kids again?"
It took me a moment to put her question into context. She still thought I had seen fireworks go wrong.
"They say there were explosions all over town last night, just like the one you talked about. Did you run into something like that again?"
At this point, my entire brain seemed to have frozen up, coming up with absolutely no answers.
"I'm...." My voice felt like it turned physical, like the sounds became cotton, choking my wind pipe. "I'm not supposed to tell."
I could see my mom get increasingly angry. I could see her forehead begin to wrinkle, the center of her brows curl up into thick, dark lines above her nose. I had seen her angry before, but it had been a long time since I had seen her like this, at least with me. I had no doubt that only the fact that my voice was cracking, that she could hear I was on the verge of crying, was the one thing that kept her from flying into a rage.
"Ida," she nearly growled, trying to keep anger at bay, "I need you, right now, to tell me who you ran into, so we can go to the police."
I said nothing.
"Ida," she said, the constant repetition of my name starting to become very unnerving, "I don't care what they said they would do if you told. We need to know who they are, so we can do something about this, do you understand?"
I nodded, a very hasty nod, to the point that I felt my neck ache. It was reflex, I had no idea what to tell her, but I felt like it was my only way to stay alive.
"Some b... boys," I stuttered, my eyes shifting between my mom and Peter standing ebhind her. "Down by th... down by the harbor. I don't know them, just some boys by the harbor. Old ones, like from the... that business school out by... in town."
It was as if a demon released its grip on her, and then she released her uncomfortably tight grip on my arms.
"Those #*@!ing big kids, I'm gonna #*@!ing kill them!" she hissed as she stood up. Peter said nothing, remaining where he stood, arms crossed and eyes looking abstractly firm behind his reading glasses. I felt my body start to tremble, tears forcing their way out my eyes.
"Ida, stay in your room, and tomorrow, you're going straight, and I mean straight, home from school. No talking to anyone about anything, and no going anywhere but the school. Not even that pizza place, eat your lunch at school. Do you understand me?"
Feeling the pressure to cry suddenly evaporate, I balled my fists instinctively as a sense of anger replaced it.
"Wait, you're grounding me?! For what? I didn't..."
"Yes, I'm grounding you," she interrupted. "I told you to go home after leaving the clinic, and you did everything but."
In a few seconds of silence, I could see her face shift from anger to concern, slipping into painful thoughts. But her eyes quickly snapped back.
"But most of all," she said in a suddenly calm voice, "I don't want you running round town with those morons out there." Her eyes moved to my second hand clothes and their many charred holes. "#*@! knows what they'll do next."

"Ida!"
I snapped back to reality, the classroom coming all inot focus at once! David, our history teacher, was looking right at me, having clearly just asked me something, or told something that he realized I never heard. My head was full of bits of dreams that had kept me waking up throughout the night. Dreams of floating in darkness, only lit by occassional bursts of strobe light that showed vague, writhing figures in the distance, my skin feeling like plastic. I wasn't used to having weird dreams like that.
"What...?"
I wasn't trying to be glip, my brain simply had yet to snap back as much as the rest of me. The whiteboard had a lot of names on it, set up much like when picking names for imaginary sports teams. I recognized none of them.
"Feud of the Counts, Ida. What were the different sides about?"
My mind kept flipping through endless facts, half of them probably remembered wrong, but nothing on the matter came up.
"I didn't sleep that well," I finally mumbled, looking away from the board and refusing to meet his eyes.
"You slept poorly, so you forgot what we talked about last week? Must have been some party you had yesterday," he huffed, sounding like he was more giving up than giving me grief.
"Yeah, well, women's issues," I grumbled, lying through my teeth and instantly feeling bad about it. David wasn't a bad guy, just nobody really cared much about long dead kings and other old men.
It took a second for me to realize that the class had begun chuckling, and I had no idea if they were laughing at me or at David, who suddenly looked uncomfortable in his silence. Even if nobody was laughing at me, I felt uneasy, exposed, like any one of them could fire off some joke at my expense at any given time. But most of all, I was telling the truth, at least part of it. I had barely slept, constantly waking up afrom weird dreams. A rainbow of women in different color coats told me one meaningless, babbling story after another, calling me special and then getting angry at me. The details had fallen from my mind whenever I woke, which had been several times during the night. Sweaty, panting, feeling tears push against my eyes to get out, wanting to scream but never doing it.
"I need to.... can I just.. go, for like a minute?" I asked, sounding like I was either drunk or about to pass out, or both. I cast a glance at David, who simply nodded with a frown, saying nothing about how long I could stay away or whether he even cared at this point. Again, I felt a pinch of pity for the guy. I didn't want to put him on the spot. But I had to get out of there, and it had to be right away!
The hum of classes behind closed doors filled the hallway outside like some kind of threatening growl before an animal attacked. The large and plentiful windows defied the slightly chilled weather outside by collecting the sunlight in the building and making it feel warm, very warm. I was wearing a T-shirt, an old thing with flowers on it, one that I could constantly feel I  would soon outgrow. It and the loose pants were both thin and breezy, but the heat was still messing with me. And if it messed with me, it messed with my head, a piece of me that was still not in a good and stable place after the events of the day before. I felt a burning need to talk to Mischa, but I had yet to spot him. It was just the first lesson, but it bothered me. My senses seemed heightened, but since I was not entirely used to that, I had a hard time processing it all. I thought I saw shadows, saw people looking at me. I thought every third or fourth person looked odd, wrong, as if my mind was trying to alert me about copy robots, or whatever that woman in blue had called them. More than once, I speculated if this was how a spy felt, constantly suspecting that things around them were not in any way what they seemed. Even worse, they were not only not what they seemed, but they were hostile, sleeper agents just waiting for a single command to strike. Old James Bond movies and other spy stories kept popping up in my mind, but I pushed them back down.
Instinctively, I found myself heading for the bathrooms. I had told David I had "women's issues", and it seemed like that was the place to go to for that. Now, walking slowly through the largely empty hallways, I had no idea what to do or where to go. I could just hang out in the bathroom, wasting time, maybe go on my phone, it really didn't matter. But part of me wanted to do something meaningful. It was a part I was not entirely familiar with, to be honest.
I turned a corner as I noticed the first signs of something being not entirely right. Instantly regretting it, I stopped in place, listening for what I could only think of as wrong sounds. Nothing. I took a few steps, and as before, they sounded wrong. They sounded heavy, like I was carrying a heavy load, almost dragging my feet. As I started nervously walking again, my ears were taking in everything arond me. I couldn't put my finger on it, but the sounds were wrong. It felt like hearing the sounds of the world through recordings and headphones, some of them twisted slightly. No, not the sounds of the world. The sounds of me. My sounds weere wrong.
Looking around for anyone who might see the embarrassment, I decided I was alone, and I did a little step routine. A few quick steps, a drag over the floor, nothing especially stylish, but enough to create a few odd sounds. Nothing sounded wrong. My mind was clearly playing tricks on me, I thought, as I started walking again. And immediately, my footsteps sounded wrong again!
And then, a thought struck me. Feeling my skin crawl at the thought, I began walking again, listening closely to the sound of my steps. Wrong. Heavy. Like my feet were too big. Or like there was an echo, but only for my feet. Like they were walking twice. Like another set of footsteps, mimicking my own. Copying me.
My eyes darted around the hallway, looking again for people that could see me, but this time not out of some silly vanity. Witnesses, I wanted to know if I was being watched. And when I found none, I ran! I knew the halls and hallways of the school, I knew the ins and outs and the little details. And even if I couldn't see anyone, I could only guess that they knew less than that. Or rather, I could only hope!
It finally came to a head as I hurried down the stairs, something we were typically told not to do. The stairs were designed to be of a size and shape that made it safe to walk fast on them, but little corners and, ironically, safety bumps had come loose over the years. Fixed one by one rather than in one big swoop, there was always one or two that would trip up the less careful. I found one. My copy footsteps did not. Two or three seconds after I passed it, feeling the poorly glue strip move slightly under my foot, I heard the snap of it flip out and then the rubber surface snapping back in place. I instantly turned and saw....
Barely anything. I saw barely anything. A shimmer in the sunlight, like a mirror being moved too fast to clearly see it, or like a glittering puff of dust in the stale, indoor air. But it was there, a misty, glasslike thing, following me, adding its own echo almost perfectly to my footsteps.
"Go away," I growled, looking for any flinch or other sudden movement, perhaps some indication that it had been spooked at being discovered. Nothing happened. My eyes were doing their best to focus on the shimmer, but it was hard, as if it was deliberately designed not to be easy to see. Some sort of stealth thing, like the shimmer in the sky yesterday. In a fit of frustration, I picked up a discarded juice carton from the ground and threw it at where I thought I saw something. I nearly shat my pants when it made a plunk sound... and dropped to the floor. Most likely at the feet of my misty stalker.
Everything after that happened extremely fast. The glass mist figure solidified enough to be fully visible, looking like a person made of actual, dusty glass, face poorly formed but still forming. The weird, transparent arm grabbed me before I could even see that it was reaching for me, the whole figure plunging forward. Long, unnaturally long fingers reached around my neck and held me in place as I struggled, kicking and grabbing, hoping to hit a sore spot purely by luck. But nothing did.
As I stood there, hands gripping the glass-like arm in desperation, I found myself looking directly at what was supposed to be its face. A bland void, nearly flat, outlines of a nose and brows the only thing to really see. Slowly, that changed. The brow adjusted itself, the nose found its width, length and height. Under the nose, lips began to appear, wildly distorting the light that fell through their dusty glass body. Finally, eyes began to form, sockets sinking in and lids becoming visible. And once the human face had formed on the thing, it stopped. It did nothing, not moving a muscle, or whatever else it used to move its glass limbs. Not until, in the blink of an eye, the entire glass figure became fully colored. And I was looking into eyes I had seen before. In the mirror.
"Speak," it more breathed than said, a deep and bestial noise escaping its mouth as a voice. I felt the long fingers around my throat loosen, even if just a little bit.
"What the #*@! are you?" I hissed, but the thing showed no interest in answering the question.
"Speak," it repeated, in a low, mildly hissing voice, before it loosened the grip on my throat a little more, letting me actually feel as if I stood by myself, not held up by this imitation of me.
"What are you gonna do when..." I only just managed to speak the words before the fingers tightened again.
"What are you gonna do when..." the thing repeated, in a weird voice.
"Wait," I all but gargled, struggling against the casual pressure of the fingers, "I don't sound like that, do I?!"
The things face twisted and bent, muscles, or whatever they were, twitching. It seemed to be testing them.
"Wait, I don't..." I kicked the thing before it could say any more. It hurt. More precisely, it hurt me, hurt my foot, as the top of it connected with the rock solid thigh on the thing. It copied everything, including my clothes, but they didn't act like clothes. They acted like a solid thing. Even worse, the attempted kick didnt seem to go over well with the thing, as it began squeezing my throat tighter and tighter, until everything began to blur. In one last, desperate measure, I twisted my body around as much as I possibly could, placing my feet on the bannister of the stairs. We stood at the bottom of the ones we had just come down. But we stood at the top of the next round of stairs beneath them. Twisting my leg so hard it hurt, I gave the bannister a full, hard push, putting everything left in me into it. The thing kept its grip, but not its balance! Realizing what was happening just a split second too late, it tilted forward, against me and towards the downward staircase. In that brief glimpse of time, I thought I could see every decision fighting in its eyes. It let go of me.
The rush of victory was brief, as I felt myself fall and instantly remembered what, in my desperation, I had chosen to fall down on! The top step hit my hip like a boot kicking me. I had never had much in the way of cushioning, and pain shot through my bony ass, making me cry out loud. That cry got cut off when my right shoulder hit the step below. Right after that, the left one struck a step farther down the stairs. I felt everything, as if in slow motion, hearing a disgusting crunch on the impact of the first shoulder. I had instinctively tucked my head between the shoulders and forward, but I landed hard. Everything became blurry for a moment when the back of my skull slammed into the stairs beneath it. For a second, every limb turned limp, flopping to the ground around my pain-riddled body and head.
Time seemed to stretch out, like in nature documentaries about flies and how they saw everything at a completely different speed than humans. The thing, the other me, the copy, stood at the top of the stairs, not flinching, not even smiling, just watching me. It took a step forward, reaching the foot of mine that was closest to it, and thoughts of death and more pain flashed through my aching head.
"What happened?" someone called out from somewhere upstairs. The copy looked at me with a strange, sort of cold bitterness. Not anger, just a sense of frustration about being interrupted.
"I fell. I think I hurt my ankle," said the thing, presumably in my voice, although I had a hard time fully recognizing it. It then continued its move towards me. Despite the pain, I pulled my leg away from it, and instantly, my entire body began tumbling down the stairs, as clumsily as before but much slower. Every joint ached, badly, but nothing crunched. Nothing new, at least!
"Do you need to go to the nurse?" called the voice from upstairs. The copy leaned over the bannister, looking up. It seemed to lock eyes with someone, and I carefully slipped farther down the stairs, sucking up the pain.
"No, I'm okay," it called, still looking at whoever it talked to. "I just need to..."
"Okay, then get back to class," the voice called back. The thing quickly glanced at me, clearly wanting to go after me right away.
"Yeah, I will, I just have..."
"Now," said the voice, firmly. The moment the copy looked up again, I pushed against the stairs with both my legs, biting my teeth together with all my might as I took the pain of sliding down the stairs like a sack of potatoes. Every edge of every step on the stairs dug into me, playing my ribs like a musical instrument! I wanted to call for help, but everything hurt, and I could barely breathe at this point. I wanted to cry out, but even the petty whimpers from the pain put me on the verge of throwing up from sheer pain. In the blur of hurt and tumbling downward, I heard my own voice try to shout for help, but all that came out was a squeeky whimper.
From the top of the stairs, the copy still looke up when I rolled on my side, tears rolling down my cheeks, and clutched the metal bars holding up the bannister. Everything hurt, and I couldn't get a sound out without making it worse. I was crying my eyes out, but silently, fearing that a single sound could do more damage to my beaten body. But more than anything, I felt helpless and alone. I held back a cough the best I could, but a slight spray of spit still flew from my lips. It was red with blood. Fighting to keep myself upright, I scuttled down the stairs like a toddler just learning to walk, one hand clutching the bannister, the other clutching my waist. All the while, my brain was fighting to hold on to reality, to stay awake and not give in to the pain. When I reached the bottom of that flight of stairs, I was almost standing up. Almost.
I found the back door. It was easy to find the way, but harder to walk it. My right shoulder felt horribly wrong, like it was moving around when not meant to. Every organ in my body felt bruised, and my head was pounding. Biting my lips to distract me from one pain with another, I managed to get the door open and step outside. I immediately felt the cool wind rush around my body, my jacket still inside somewhere. Even though I had no idea why, the pain of ... everything subsided for a while after I coughed up some blood, giving me precious moments to get away. Inside me, I argued with myself what to do. Find an adult, yes, but to say what? Go to the clinic, that was probably the best answer. Get help. But all I heard in my head was my mom, scolding and complaining, wanting me to tell her a story that both made sense and was true, something that I simply had no way of doing. I needed help, but I had no idea how. And my brain was expending most its energy keeping my stomach under control, to keep me from vomitting all over myself from the pain.
"What happened to you?!" said the cab driver as I flopped into the back seat. The train station wasn't far from the school, and I had somehow managed to get from one to the other without attracting much attention. The streets were largely empty at this time of day, and apart from my shoulder, the pain was coming under control. Well, more or less, at least.
"Got... beat up," I managed to whisper over painful breaths of air. The driver stared at me, clearly concerned, but as far as I could see, he didn't know me. I rarely used cabs myself, but when I was younger, my mom used them whenever she had to bring me and my sister farther than to the nearest shops in town. At some point, the drivers apparently started recognizing her, and last I remembered, she was on first name basis with several of them. I didn't know this one, so he wouldn't be telling her, in one way or another.
"You need to go to the clinic?" he asked, still looking shocked. I shook my head.
"Here," I said, little more than breathing the words as I handed him the slip of paper I had carried in my pocket. It had been a hard decision. It no longer was.