(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 15

I woke, startled and sweating, when the cab finally came to a halt. I had no recollection of even driving, remembering only that I got into the cab and gave the driver the small note from my pocket. Now, we were here.
"You sure about this? I can drive you to the clinic, it's free for emergencies," he said, voice filled with concern. His large and fuzzy brows, brown with strong streaks of grey in them, seemed almost alive as they moved with his expression. He really felt bad about leaving me at the house, that much was clear.
"No, no. I need to be here. I'm safe here," I huffed between flinching at every perceivable movement of my body.
He drove awya slowly as I finally stood on the sidewalk, having taken my good time to get out of the cab. The house looked old, and in poor condition. The garden was overgrown, a row of individual bushes having clearly been planted in their day, now grown together to form a lumpy hedge in front, shielding the rest pretty well from prying eyes outside. But the same bushes grew all along the tiled path to the door, their branches sticking out from either side of the path, making it feel like a jungle trek just to walk the ten or so paces. The garden behind the unintended hedge looked much the same, wild and chaotic. A stone garden, once white crushed stone still very visible beneath the growths. A tree stood as tall as the house behind the bushes at the path, and deeper into the garden, lower plants could be seen. In the distance, at the other end of the real estate, stood tall birch trees, their untrimmed branches hanging heavy in the moist heat. The garen was thriving, but on its own terms.
As I got to the door, everything was already spinning. I was fighting for air, feeling my ribs like burning poles inside me. A knocker, its actual shape worn away by years of neglect, made my life that little bit easier, as I weakly lifted it and slammed it with all my remaining might against the door. Its sharp sound echoed in my ears, and onward into my brain, as if the knocker had been mounted to my skull. Giving it one more, far weaker knock, I let the pain and tiredness take over and sank down at the foot of the door. As I sat there, eyes barely moving, staring straight ahead with my back to the old, peeling door, I thought I could smell the sea. It was a trick of the senses, the sea was far away, but looking through the fruit trees in the garden next door and on into the horizon of flowering fields, the fake smell of sea seemed a welcome sensation. It wasn't pain, at least.
The pain, however, came rushing back as I tumbled backward, through the doorway as someone opened! I let out a cry of pain as my body briefly stretched out, then forced every muscle to curl me up into a ball again, even moreso than before.
"Ida?!" came a voice at me from behind the wall of tears that blocked my eyes. Thought it sounded familiar, but everything was blurry and I had too few brain cells to spare on the matter tot ruly identify it. What I did notice were arms, strong arms, lifting my entire body up and inside the house. Somewhere, the door slammed shut. Sot pillows and the smell of old farts wrapped around my body, the pains scattering, spreading out through the body but also spreading themselves thin in the process. A few painful ribs were exchanged for a generally sore body, and the exchange was not one I could really complain about.
Voices surrounded me. I still knew the one I had heard first, but the others seemed new. Three of them, maybe four. Nothing was entirely certain, considering the state of, well, all of me. Even as my sight slowly returned, my body regaining some strength as it rested on the soft, farty pillows, nothing became truly clear. The curtains were drawn, and they were excellent at keeping the light out. I saw a light grey ceiling, some dark brown furniture, and people shuffling about, blurry shapes of oddly distinct colors. As my brain started to understand reality again, I spotted blue and red almost instantly, and knew what they were. But I also spotted orange and a dark green.
"Ish... yuw,,," I babbled, badly enough that even I noticed how wrong it sounded.
"Don't move, Ida, you've been banged up pretty bad," one of the voices said through the misty haze that still surrounded everything. I did as it asked, relaxing everything in my body. Whether it was from too much relaxing or just a reaction to the overall smell of the pillows, I felt a fart try to make its way out, but I managed to deny it the privilege.
For the second time, I screamed! A quick sting of pain bore its claws through my chest and spread almost instantly through my left arm and torso, then bleeding into the rest of me! Everything became clear, britally clear, colors springing to life like beds of angry flowers wanting to be seen! Every curve and contrast was sharp as blades, the dim room suddenly seeming so bright it might as well have been built on the very sun itself!
"Relax," said the dark-haired woman in the blue coat. She was clearly Asian, the way her eyes were structured and the overall tone of her skin. The thought fleww through me that she might be Inuit, too, but her skintone denied it. I was also acutely aware that she had her hand placed in the middle of my chest, making me feel very awkward. I said nothing, just throwing it a few glances, and apparently, she didn't notice, or didn't care.
"What are you? Who are you? Where are we?"
Questions came like a firestorm through my worn brain cells, neurons firing way too fast.
"What did you do to me?!"
Someone in the background cursed, a sloppy and inaccurate curse, like someone who only knew basic Danish but had half caught the phrase from casual conversation or watching a movie. It was a fairly unique curse, not easily translated, so it made sense that someone not inherently Danish might screw it up. It made less sense that someone would even use it in the first place. I noticed the person having short hair, and the voice sounded far more masculine. But he turned his back, so I could only assume that it was, in fact, a he.
"I gave you a mixture of adrenaline and caffeine, infused through your skin. It's going to mess with your brain, but it will keep your body functional for a little while."
My heart was racing, feeling like it tried to show everyone the best it could do. The rush made me ignore the last bit of her sentence.
"You're the one from the grill, and you from the alley. What do you want? Why did you take me here?"
There was a moment of confusion, the four of them looking at each other, exchanging looks but no words. The one in green was indeed a man, fair skin with a slight tan, some stubble and hair in a 90s grunge rock style, or simply poorly cared for. The last one was, like the one in blue and the one in red, a woman. Her orange clothes looked a bit odd, lacking much in the way of sleeves and looking a bit unfinished. She seemed very young, with a dark complection, but not completely black. I thought of Egypt, but the country I knew from movies, not the real one. I had no idea if one was the same as the other, and my brain immediately began going down a track to figure it out, without my permission. It took me a few seconds to stop it from straying.
"Yes, but you came here yourself. We weren't expecting you until later today. Don't you have school?"
School. The word slammed around my skull like an errant pinball.
"School!" I almost shouted! "The other one! Me! The other myself!"
The woman in blue still had her hand uncomfortably on my chest, but as the worst of the energy from whatever she had given me wore off, the hand somehow made me voluntarily lay back. As I did, my head getting lower in relation to my body, more blood rushed to my brain. My feet became tingly and my stomach felt numb, but my head was buzzing even more than before.
"What other?" asked the one in red, sounding nervous. I felt a strange compulsion not to answer her.
"What happened at school?" asked the one in blue. For whatever reason, she seemed far less wrong to answer.
"There was something, like a glass person," I said, speaking fast enough that my tongue felt a cramp coming on. "It beat me up and became me."
The one in blue turned her head to the others, in a rapid, unhealthy motion, the kind that should leave a neck feeling twisted. Something scared her.
"A copy!" I shouted, out of the blue! "A copy, like the one you... Like Kurt! Like poor Kurt. Oh my god, did they kill Kurt like it tried to kill me?!"
I was talking at a hundred words per second or thereabout, and part of me was aware of it. Everything seemed to move too slow for me, even though there was no doubt that time was moving like it always did, and nobody was being lazy.
"Yeah, he's probably dead," said the woman in red, causing the one in blue to turn and, from the looks of it, send her some serious looks. The one in red just shrugged, looking perplexed, as to ask what she had done wrong.
"Easy, Ida, you're safe here," the one in blue said as she turned to look at me again. "We've shielded this place, they can't trace you here."
I suddenly started thinking about tracing, and just as everything around me seemed unnaturally sharp, so did even my own thoughts! Mainly, I thought about the taxi. According to the movies, people could trace credit cards. Did I pay with a card? Come to think of it, did I pay at all, or did the driver just take some kind of pity on me, or even forget in all his concern for my health? I honestly could not remember.
"Look, we're..."
"Yeah, time travel, she told me," I mumbled and pointed at the one in red. Again, she shrugged, but this time, nobody seemed miffed at her.
"I know," the one in blue continued, "we told her to. But do you understand what's going on here?"
I had ideas. A basic sketch was drawing up inside my head, but it had holes the size of small countries in it. So I lied and shook my head frantically.
"Okay, in our time, the people controlling time travel have taken full control of everything. They are trying to round up everyone from that time, everyone who is living in other times, and take them back and throw them in jail. They even hunt for the kids of those who..."
"I get it," I blurted out, not thinking enough about it to, well, not blurt it out. Suddenly, they all looked at me, curious for what I was going to say. Or I assumed that was why.
"I mean, I know this girl, and she isn't a time traveler, because she didn't get, you know, zapped," I explained, still talking at a breakneck speed, "and her mom did get zapped, but for some reason only in her mouth, so maybe she is a time traveler. Or her teeth are?"
The dark skinned girl in orange suddenly jumped a little, looking very interested.
"Teeth," she said, as if everybody would understand the point she was making. "I mean, we change almost everything in our bodies. Our skin always grows, and old skin falls of like dust. Our body replaces cells all the time, and it only takes about a year or so for most organs to have every cell changed."
"We know that," grumbled the man, who still looked a bit out of place.
"Yeah, so after a few years, every cell in the body has been replaced with something that came from this time. But the teeth don't get replaced."
For a second, everybody just looked at her. Then, the other time travelers, or whatever they were, nodded, as if it was the most logical thing in the world to them.
"Uhm, so she has been here so long that her body has replaced every cell in her body, except her teeth?" I asked, and the dark girl nodded, very enthusiastically.
"I guess that explains why your rejection thing only reacted to her teeth," said the one in blue. "She has been here so long it's the only part of her from her original time."
The buzz in my head was dying down. Everything in me was moving slower, including my thoughts. I felt like what they said was making sense, but at the same time, I wasn't entirely sure it wasn't just a lot of nonsense. And behind it all, something was bothering me. Some tiny thought, some tiny question, was pushing against my skull from the inside.
"Who carried me in?" I asked, trying to seem like it was just a random question, like there was nothing behind it. The man raised his hand.
"Thanks," I added, again trying to make the question seem irrelevant to anything. But something was building in my brain, little pieces of a puzzle trying to fit together.
"What now?" I instead asked, putting the ball in their court. I was feeling sluggish, like a balloon with the air starting to leak out. I felt a little tired, and that feeling seemed to be building, second by second.
"Now we fix you up," said the one in blue. She seemed like she was the leader of the group, or at least the one with most of the initiative. She reached in, and I kept a close eye on her as she helped me stand up, helped me limp from the dusty living room couch through a small dining room with an ugly old carpet, and into a small bedroom. An old bed, looking almost like a block of wood with a carpet stretched over it, stood there, apparently waiting for someone to need it. Little gadgets surrounded it, tiny items that looked like someone was trying out a do-it-yourself project, but had failed badly. I was put gently on the bed.
"This is going to feel a bit weird. Don't worry, okay?" said the one in orange. Her words would have been more comforting if she hadn't been wringing her hands constantly. She then proceeded, with the help of the one in blue, to grab the items. The one in orange put a small block on my upper arm, and suddenly, everything blurred.

When I came to, the sun had visibly moved in the sky. It was past noon, but not yet late, and I was still sprawled out on the old bed. The gadgets around the bed had been moved away, only a small thing in the corner blinking with a silent, yellow lamp. Without thinking first, I sat up. I instantly flinched, expecting my body to hurt badly, expecting the rash move to be painful beyond belief. I felt nothing. My muscles were a bit tired and sore, and I was a little dizzy, but as I raised my hands to move them in front of me, I confirmed that no, there were no pains.
"What did you do?" I asked, never thinking to check if there were even others in the room with me.
"We fixed you," said a voice from somewhere behind me. I turned, sluggishly, to find the woman in blue sitting there, on a very old, wobbly chair.
"We managed to save a few tools before everything went straight to hell."
I blinked, rapidly, trying to bring the world into focus. More precisely, to bring my thoughts into focus.
"What went to hell?" I asked, listening to my own voice and realizing that I was waking from some kind of sedation. The image of the small block in the other woman's hand came to mind. It had to have been a medical tool.
"You saw the school, right? The one outside town?"
I nodded, saying nothing.
"Yeah, it used to be our base of operations. But someone was clever enough to get a pulse sent through the energies we use for time travel, and our time machine overloaded."
I nodded again, but this time, with a skeptical frown on my face.
"Don't worry about the details," the woman said, slowly getting up from the chair, as if she knew that it could fall apart with a single wrong move. "The people we fight against, the people rounding up time travelers, have some weapons at their disposal that make very little sense to anyone here. One of them made something in the time machine we used overload and explode. And when it explodes, sadly, a lot of bad energies get released. Every time traveler within a radius of... Well, everyone in a pretty big radius got blown out of your time and back to whatever time they came from."
"I saw... a woman," I said, uncomfortable emotions bubbling back up. "She was in pain, and then she disappeared in a kind of cloud, a cloud of tiny colored dots."
To my surprise, the woman nodded as if it was the most logical thing in the world to talk about.
"She was clearly some time traveler, caught in the energies from the blast. You saw her get pulled out of this time and back to whatever time machine sent her here."
"She's not... dead?" I asked, almost cutting the woman off before she could finish.
"Depends," she answered. "Going back unprepared is never healthy, but if she came through a good time machine, if she didn't have to go far to get here, if she hadn't been here long, and if someone back there were prepared to handle her return, then she could be alright."
I just looked at her. In fact, before I even said anythng, I realized I was really staring at her.
"That's a lot of if," I said in a more serious tone than I was used to hearing myself speak. The woman nodded.
"Time travel is no walk in the park."
"How long have you been here?" I asked, trying to casually look her over and somehow guess. She looked in her late 20s, part Asian, physically fit. Other than that, I had no idea what to look for. I had no idea what a time traveler looked like, after all.
"I'm coming up on 15 years," she said, as if it was noting special.
"That's longer than I've been here," I replied, not really trying to say anything that profound.
"We usually do 25 years on a mission, and if..."
"What's your name?" I interrupted, almost intentionally being rude about it. At first, I thought the interruption was what took her by surprise, making her look at me quietly. Then, the look in her eyes made me rethink that.
"Your name. What are you called?"
She seemed completely baffled.
Standing up so wuickly that I felt the world spin a bit, I walked out of the bedroom and into the dining room. The man was putting together some gadget on an old dining table, while the woman in orange was looking through some parts and sorting them on the floor. The one in red was not there.
"Seriously," I said, almost throwing up as my dizziness forced me to lean heavily against the frame of the bedroom door, "do any of you have a name? I need a name. Anyone?"
Everybody froze. Standing for a few seconds, saying nothing to follow up on my demand of names, I saw the woman in red enter from the living room. Nobody answered me.
"Come on, a first name, or codename, or anything. What are your...."
I never finished the question. I barely needed to, as it was the same one again. But it was the complete loss of any sign that they understood me that really made me stop and think.
"Are you telling me, that you don't have names?" I asked, regretting my somewhat aggressive tone almost immediately.
"Why would we need names?" asked the man. "We know who we are."
That answer just sent my brain into an impossible tailspin. Rather than try to make sense of it, I made a growling sound, annoyed and dizzy and very uncomfortable at the whole thing.
"You, red coat," I almost burped towards her, "You're Lisa. You, orange, you're Karen. And you, guy, you're Elmer."
They showed absolutely no signs that they were getting any of it.
"And me?" I suddenly heard, in a rather humble tone, from inside the bedroom.
"Sorry. Hi, you're Vera. Congratulations."
Amassing as much strength as I could, I stumbled into the dining room, grabbing a chair much like the wobbly one the woman in blue, Vera, had been sitting in. I sat down in a clumsy and hard way, instantly fearing the thing would snap beneath me. It settled on just swaying ominously.
"I need someone to take me home. I need to stop that thing before it hurts my family."
I was trying to speak in a calm matter, but even as I spoke the words, they felt like they were choking me. I got flashes, imaginary images, of my evil twin bursting through the front door, mom and Peter desperately trying to get away from it, my sister screaming in fear deep inside the house. I could feel my stomach twist into a knot, just at the idea of it.
"It's not going to," Elmer said, sounding like the very idea was crazy to him. "It's here to convince people it's you, not to take over the world."
I looked around the room, and everyone I looked at nodded.
"So they're safe? They're absolutely safe?" I asked, glaring at every single one of them, trying to convey the seriousness of it. Again, everyone nodded.
"I still need to get home. I need some things."
"You understand that the copy has taken over your life, right?" asked the one in red, Lisa. "If you go back, it'll kill you. You were already pretty much dead when you arrived here."
I sat, leaning heavier and heavier on the dining table, watching out of the corner of my eye as Elmer moved each component for his little project away from me, one by one. Even as I closed my eyes, I could hear the faint scrape of them being dragged across the old wooden surface.
"I need..." My brain basically spun around, grasping for anything I could think of to get them on my side, to get them to understand that I couldn't stay. Nothing really came to mind.
"I need to talk to someone. I think..." Pieces were gathering in my brain. Rough, poorly assembled pieces. "I think I know someone who can help you."
"Help us do what?" asked Lisa, sounding awfully skeptical. I looked at her, trying not to send her an angry glance, but probably failing a bit.
"You're trying to deal with that white woman, right?"
Everybody looked like big question marks.
"The woman in white clothes? The one by the harbor?"
It finally made sense to them. Most nodded.
"Do you know where she has her... I guess, base?"
Karen shook her head instantly, and Vera followed a bit reluctantly. Elmer and Lisa did nothing, just looking back and forth between me and the two that had, perhaps by mistake, tipped their hand a bit.
"I know people. I think I know someone who can help you."
"Who?" asked Lisa, looking increasingly skeptical.
"He's.... He has this...." I sighed, deeply, trying to show as much frustration as humanly possible. "Its easier if I go talk to him. He doesn't even need to know what it's about, he owes me a huge favor."
A strange silence fell over the room. Elmer clearly had his doubts, and behind her tinted shades, Lisa looked wary, too. Karen was clearly looking to the others for confirmation, saying nothing, perhaps regretting that she had answered my question seconds earlier. Then, finally, Vera walked hesitantly through the room, passing Lisa on her way, having to all but order her to step aside in the doorway to the living room.
"Fine, follow me," she muttered, sounding tired. I wasted no time and shot out of my chair, nearly falling flat on my face from my continued dizziness.