(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 43

The festivities were still in full swing. The blown vaping store was already just a topic of random public debate, with passerbys noting the two men sweeping glass off the street and the air in town still having a slightly sweet smell. The panic seemed all but completely gone, little left except a few hushed voices when people in the nearby square looked down the promenade.
The moment he looked at me, I sent Mischa a glare that succeeded in telling him to play it cool. He was standing with my mom and Peter, near the smaller square that connected all the three major shopping streets, including the promenade.
"Ida! Panik, where have you been?!"
Almost trampling poor Mischa, my mom ran to me the moment she spotted me in the crowd, grabbing me in her arms and hugging me tight. She quickly stopped, though, holding me at arm's length and looking me over with a confused look in her eyes.
"And why are you soaking wet?"
I looked at Mischa, as discretely as I could, and from the calm look on his face and the small nod he quietly gave me, I figured he had told them very little.
"I saw Mischa and we were talking when that... when the whole thing with the store happened. You guys hear that?"
All of them nodded, even Beebee who was going to town on an ice cream cone that was nearly the size of her head.
"I guess we got split up in the chaos," I continued, looking to Mischa for another nod to check that the story still held. "I somehow ended up by the harbor and some panicked moron pushed me in. Like, I'm completely soaked!"
"Yeah, and you smell like dead fish," Beebee remarked, never taking her eyes off the ice cream.
"I called you about a dozen times," my mom quickly said, ignoring Beebee's remark. "Why didn't you..."
She stopped when she noticed that I was looking for my phone. I knew there was nothing to find, that if my phone even existed after the whole affair at the old school building, copy Ida had it. I only hoped she wasn't picking up.
"#*@!," I mumbled, and immediately noticed the slight frown on her face. "I mean, it's not... Damn it, it's probably in the harbor now, somewhere."
She sighed, very deep and very slow. But when the sigh ended, she put a smile back on and just hugged me tight, ignoring that I was more or less dripping with harbor water, which actually did smell a bit like dead fish.
"It's okay, panik," she said as she held me, rather firmly. "We'll see if they have some good offers tonight on a phone. Just... don't go anywhere, okay? From now on, we stick together."
I nodded, smiling back at her. I had expected to have to put on a fake smile, but having her hold me, even when she let go a bit and just held her hands around my arms, I found that the smile was entirely honest. It felt good. It felt safe. The images in my mind of copy Ida spearing robots on long metal rods faded far into the back of my brain, becoming a distant bit of white noise. I even started breathing slower, myself.
Mischa was another case entirely. As we started walking, a smile on my face, I turned to look at him as he tagged along. I was surprised to find him glaring back at me, his brow curling up and his lips tight and slightly puckered. I had seen that face before, but never aimed at me. The last time was just under a year ago, before he freaked out completely and punched one of the older students in the nuts for making fun of his older brother's death. It was not a good look to be getting from him. He had punched the other guy surprisingly hard, too!
"What about you, Mischa?" my mom suddenly asked, turning to look at him. The angry glare vanished immediately, replaced with a content, if slightly tired, smile.
"Don't mind me, mrs. Lund. My folks are having a drink with some friends over by the sausage place," he said in a calm and friendly voice. The moment my mom decided not to ask any further questions and looked away, though, the smile faded as quickly as it had appeared, and the glare returned, even if less intense this time around.
Walking down the promenade, actually going towards the wrecked vaping store, felt unnerving. Every look our way, every sudden movement, got caught by some primal depth of my brain, analyzed so loudly I could practically hear the gears turn inside my head. I felt a tingling in my skin, not from any weird time travel energy but from adrenaline. I kept the smile going, but as we moved along, it became the false show of calm that I had expected it would be from the start. Everything looked dangerous. Everything looked like it was waiting to attack me.
The phone store was ratherg crowded, every teenager at the festivities wanting to see if there was a new model or a better offer they could grab and show off over the coming days and weeks. New, shiny models hung on every wall, and a spare wall, the kind on wheels that got held in place by sand bags, had been brought in to add to the options. And every offer, no matter how alike the normal prices, was getting attention. It took only seconds before Beebee, ice cream all done with, was putting her sticky fingers on 5 inch screens all over the store.
"What the #*@! is your problem?" I asked Mischa in a whisper, while my mom and Peter discussed the merits of the seven or so different subscription plans listed on glossy pamphlets.
"What problem?" he whispered back, his voice sounding like a dog preparing to growl.
"You're giving me the stink eye like I strangled your cat or something. Either stop it, or tell me what's wrong!"
He stepped aside with a polite smile as a mother of two young girls passed between us, looking tired, perhaps from the one girl that kept complaining loudly about how unfair something was. The moment they were gone, the grim stare came back in his eyes.
"I had no #*@!ing idea if you were alive or dead," he whispered, and even then his voice sounded shrill. "You just left me there. And then your creepy friend shows up and..."
"What creepy friend?" I asked, interrupting him. He stopped for a moment, looking like he was trying to read me, trying to judge if I was stalling or really didn't know.
"That mr. Smith bozo. Alex something."
"Yeah," I sighed, "we've got a whole new level of company with the..."
"Look, Ida, this looks good. Tell her, Peter," my mom said, stepping physically in between us, even though just slightly. Peter began to rattle off the numbers he had calculated, comparing the subscriptions, and Mischa took a step back, turning to feign interest in some new touchpad device.
"Yeah, mom, that sounds, I mean, that's a lot of numbers. Does it have... I don't know, yeah, no, sounds about right."
I was barely even paying attention, and I feared that it showed. If it did, she didn't show it back. My eyes still tracking Mischa around the store, noting as his black hair moved around amongst the many others in there, I followed her to a selection of phones that apparently had some tie-in plans with the subscription. I made it a point to stand near some of the bigger touchpads on display, using the reflections as much as I could to keep tracking Mischa. Not surprisingly, I lost sight of him before Peter was done describing the first of the phones laid out on the display table. But I spotted something else, and my blood froze almost immediately.
"I just need something small and durable," I said, not really having heard exactly what Peter had been saying about my options. Even while trying to use the reflections, I could see both of them make surprised glances at one another.
"Something small? I thought big screens were so trendy," my mom said nervously, as if it meant the world to her to stay informed about young people's buying habits with phones.
"I just... I don't really feel like jumping on the trends, you know?" I said, keeping just enough attention on them to carry on the conversation, while everything else was on tracking the shape I thought I had spotted in the reflection. I was interrupted when Peter put a hand firmly on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I looked up to see him smiling strangely at me. It took me a bit to realize he was proud of what I had said!
"You know what, Ida," he said, very uncharacteristically not looking at my mom to check her reaction, "that's really, really smart of you. I think you'll like this one." And then he grabbed an astoundingly white clamshell phone.
"Uhm, not the trends of 2003, either, but thanks," I answered with a smile. Pretending to be looking over the selection, I desperately tried to find any reflection that let me hunt down the familiar face I had seen, but it was gone.
"This one?" I asked, pointing at perhaps the blandest phone on the table. It looked sturdier than the rest.
"Oh, okay," said my mom, and I looked away as she went to find a salesman in the writhing crowd. I waited a few seconds for her to leave and for Peter to talk with Beebee about why she wasn't also getting a new phone. Ironically, due to her age and occassional temper, her phone was probably the sturdiest. I did consider offering her a trade, but felt like it would drag her into my mess, somehow.
"What are you scoping out?" said Mischa out of the blue, causing me to flinch visibly! He was standing by the wall near me, obviously pretending to care about the phones on it.
"Elmer," I answered, trying to stay casual about it. Mischa was the one to flinch this time, and I thought I caught a glimpse of him almost saying something out very loud. His lips froze a second, and then he grit his teeth.
"Elmer? As in that creepy time guy?" he more hissed than whispered, and I nodded, casting a glance out the storefront windows without giving it much thought.
"Yeah. He's shy about it, but I saw..."
My mom showed up, beaming with the pride she had whenever buying a technical product without taking days to decide. She called it a professional affliction, her job as a buyer for the clinic making her overly cautious about expensive purchases. The rest of us knew she simply hated having to compare a bunch of technical features that meant nothing to her, but nobody wanted to put a dent in her joy.
"Did I interrupt something?" she chirped, putting a hand on Mischa's shoulder as if to squeeze a bit more of a smile out of him.
"No, no," he quickly replied, "Ida just thought she saw a friend of ours in the street, but he's gone now."
She let the remark pass, handing me the stylish box containing the phone, along with a smaller box apparently containing SIM card and more for the new subscription.
"They'll do some techie magic to get you your old number back in two weeks or so," she added, before turning to find Beebee and Peter. As she moved out of immediate hearing range, I turned to Mischa again.
"We just got rid of half a dozen robot things, now time travelers?" he growled before I could even get a word in edgewise. All I could really do was shrug. My mom had already found the others and was heading for the exit, Beebee still refusing to understand why she couldn't get a new phone, but at least being somewhat civil about it.
"We were thinking about going to the cafe down at the square, get a little something to eat. How about you, Mischa? My treat," Peter said as he slowly walked by. Mischa gave me a look that seemed to want to say something, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what.
"Sure, thanks a lot," he simply answered, briefly faking a calm expression as he looked at both Peter and my mom.
We both had our eyes peeled walking out of the store. For some strange, primal reason, I was clutching the box with the phone, my general unrest somehow becoming a fear of theft somewhere inside the murky corners of my brain. The crowd was still densely packed on the promenade, but everyone seemed to move slower now, a lot more relaxed or just a little more tired. Colored lamps, the cheap kind that used flimsy paper for the color, had been turned on along cables above the street, making the evening sky look like a blurry piece of random art. People were carefully balancing oversized ice cream cones like the one Beebee had eaten, or discussing the pros and cons of unusual and highly sugared treats made by little vendors or shops that were a bit more adventurous on this festive occassion. Young couples were using the slight chill in the evening air as an excuse to hold one another closer, while older couples sat on both the regular benches and the many folding chairs set up around the place for this one evening.
None of the calm enjoyment really got a hold of me, or from the looks of it, of Mischa. Whether it was the previous rounds with copy Ida and the robots, the nerves about maybe having spotted one of the time travelers,  or simply a side-effect of the slight shiver from my still damp clothes, I felt my skin tingle and my breath struggling to find a regular rhythm. The many faces in the crowd made...
I stopped.
"There," I whispered to Mischa, nudging him with my elbow as I nodded towards one of the many small alleys that connected the promenade to the harbor. The moment he turned to look, I pulled on his sleeve, avoiding him making it obvious. He got the message and faked bumping into a passer by, so he could cast a glance.
"Yup," he whispered, looking pretty embittered. "Elmer and that horrible bitch, what's her name..."
"She doesn't have one," I remarked, not really planning to make a big deal out of it. I did notice Mischa looking at me with confused eyes, though. "They don't have actual names," I quickly explained, grumbling a bit at the strangeness of that extra fact. "I gave them names because it drove me insane. Hers is Linda." Like a TV episode replay, the memories of her ran quickly through my mind. "I kinda feel like I owe the Lindas of the world an apology for that one," I finally added.
I had only spotted Elmer myself, and my eyes were now scanning the crowd for her, as well. I only realized how much it had distracted me when I walked straight into some guy, bumping my head on his stomach and chest.
"Sorry about..."
I looked up to realize I had bumped into Elmer.
"We need to talk," he said in a quiet, very monotone voice, looking at me with a strange kind of pissy indifference.
"Hi, who the hell are you?"
All three of us, Mischa, myself and Elmer, turned to look at Beebee, who was standing with a fist full of cookies, looking at Elmer with very judgmental eyes, for some unexplained reason.
"Bee," said my mom, grabbing the girl by the shoulders and pulling her up against herself. "Your language!"
"Ida says #*@! a lot," she simply retorted, but my mom ignored it completely.
"Hi, I'm Sara," she said, extending her hand to Elmer. "Do you know my daughter?" It was her way of being protective. The friendly smile covered for a distrust in everyone who talked to me, or especially to Beebee. She didn't want to offend, nobody here ever did. But I could see the momma bear in her eyes as she looked at the tall, muscular man in front of her.
To my surprise, Elmer just shook her hand with a smile.
"Elmer," he said. "Subsittute teacher at Ida's school."
My startled look at Mischa for some kind of moral support went unnoticed. Mischa was just standing there with a softly tilted head and his mouth hanging a bit too open.
"Yeah, mom," I added, noticing how slow my voice was an immediately making it a point to not sound like I was making up stories on the spot. Or suddenly slow in the head. "Elmer teaches... music. And arts. Right?"
Elmer first hesitated, looking a bit annoyed, but then nodded. The most unnerving thing, however, was how easily he faked a completely relaxed smile. He wasn't wearing the same odd, highly noticeable clothes he was back at the house. Instead, he wore some old T-shirt with a slightly faded pattern of green and black lines, with a very darkly grey, unbuttoned shirt over it and whitewashed jeans that actually looked a bit like the whitewashing might be from natural use. It looked very casual, and almost like something a regular human would wear. It made him seem almost normal. But only almost, which was perhaps even more unnerving than the smile. It was also the reason he had been a bit hard to recognize in the reflections, I suspected.
"Oh, an artistic spirit," my mom continued, her voice now much less tense, knowing, or believing, that she was talking to a teacher at the school. "Are you here with someone, mister..."
"Elmer. Just Elmer," he answered, sending me a weird look without breaking the smile. "And I'm here with three friends, but one of them isn't doing so well right now, so the others are looking after her.."
"Oh, how sad. I hope she gets better," my mom politely replied.
"He says they have to talk, mom," Beebee added from behind her, tugging on her jacket, clearly wanting to regain some attention.
"It's just...."
"Ida is behind on an assignment," Elmer said with a voice that was clearly meant to be friendly to her, but serious to me.
"Assignments?" my mom wondered out loud. "In what, music? Or arts? Do they give assignments in that?"
"It's a special case," I intervened. "Right, Elmer?" He nodded. "And I'm not really behind as much as I want to be really thorough with it," I said, trying to round off that bit of convesation. It was clear that Elmer had other plans, though.
"Well, you're welcome to have a drink with us," she suddenly offered! I instantly shared terrified look with Mischa, who was already balling and unballing his fists in a nervous fit of frustration.
"I would love to," Elmer answered, to my mom's delight. I couldn't help but notice a weird, growling sound emanating from Mischa, however.

The small cafe, or bistro as everybody kept insisting on calling it, was on the corner of the square. It was one of the early participants in the wave of places that were just as much meant to get just a cup of coffee and talk for overtwo hours as it was meant for a family party of eight to eat a full meal. On any given day, it seemed to have examples of both extremes and everything in between, all depending on when you passed by. That also made it a place for a third kind of customer, namely the one just there to look at the people there and in the streets near it.
Although Elmer's sudden inclusion in our little group was clearly going to be a problem, it was fairly amusing to see my mom grill him on his opinions about artists through the ages with names I could often not even repeat, much less knew anything about. Whether he was just expertly faking it or actually had some background knowledge, his answers, mostly short and to the point, seemed to fit her just nicely.
Mischa, on the other hand, was obviously having none of it! He made very little show of his intense anger about the situation and what I could only assume was a deep loathing of Elmer. I had a hard time blaming him, but with every subtle signal I could think of, I still tried ot tell him to keep it clean and nice. He did. The only question was how long it would keep.
"You're really big for a music teacher," Beebee said, distracting me from my pressure on poor Mischa. She had ordered the burgerh from the kids menu, which apparently got made a lot quicker than the adult dishes. I had absentmindedly glanced at the menu and ordered some random pasta dish that looked agreeable, but between keeping my eye on Mischa and on the conversation between Elmer and mainly my mom, with Peter chiming in now and then, my attention to culinary details was limited. Nobody had reacted to my choice, so I knew that the pasta was, at the very least, nothing too weird.
"He was in the army. Right?" I stepped in to say. Beebee immediately lost interest, having clearly just said something that happened to fall into her headand out of her mouth, but both my mom and Peter suddenly perked up a bit.
"Really?" Peter said, looking up from the wine menu he seemed to be looking at mostly to keep his hands busy. "Where were you stationed?"
"Anywhere dangerous?" my mom added with a hint of morbid fascination, sounding like she was checking out some new crime novel, rather than talking to a living person.
Elmer froze for a bit, hiding it behind a sip from a large soda he had ordered. All drinks came at the same time as Beebee's burger, cluttering the table a bit, but Elmer's strategy was one I knew only too well.
"You said something about Iraq," I remarked, trying to make my coaching of him sound as casual as possible. Luckily, he grabbed it and ran with it, nodding as he put down the soda.
"Infantry," he elaborated, "very dangerous."
My mom lit up like a christmas tree, and I saw dozens of questions piling up inside her head, just from the expression on her face. I knew she had no interest in a dangerous life for herself, but her constant audiobook addiction told a story all of its own, just by flipping through the titles on her list.
"Yeah, we grilled him on it, but he can't talk about it," I added, making sure to sound ever so disappointed about it.
"Or he'd have to kill us," she remarked with a weird smirk.
"That's in the past, though," Elmer continued, putting a strange emphasis on the word "past". "I'm more focused on the future," he added, again putting that emphasis on the last word. "I still like to travel, at least when I have the time."
At this point, with the emphasis on those two more key words, his obvious subtext was becoming more text than sub, and I could see Mischa's facade begin to break. My palms were getting sweaty, and I could almost hear my heartbeat in my ears.
"About the assignment," I finally said, feeling pushed into a corner, "I have some ideas that I wanted to talk to you about. You know, a way to make it work without losing some of the important parts halfway through." Lifting my own soda slowly, staring him down to the best of my abilities, I paused for a dramatic sip before continuing. "After all, there's no reason to bail on a good thing. Right?"
For a second, his eyes blazed with an anger I had trouble remembering having seen in him before. He had been fristrated, perhaps even angry, but this seemed to take it to a whole new level. He quickly glanced around the table, though, and kept his almost convincing smile on.
"That's nice, Ida," he started, talking slowly, as if to a small child, "but the assignment is what it is. Getting too experimental is going to do more harm than good."
"Uhm, is this a very important assignment?" my mom asked, sounding a bit nervous at the hint of tension that must have shone through from us.
"Very," Elmer replied. "It might dictate her entire grade for the year."
"Oh, wow, that's... Wait, there's a grade for music now?"
"It's all a bit experimental, mom," I said, hoping to calm her down a bit. Talking grades was a bit of a trigger of hers. Elmer just smiled a bit harder at the matter, taking another slow sip of the tall glass.
"Would you excuse me for a moment. I think I spotted someone I know in the crowd."
With those words, he got up, leaving his soda behind. I gave Mischa a look as he followed the man with his eyes, clearly trying not to fire laser beams out of them to incinerate the guy on the spot!
"He seems nice," my mom commented the moment Elmer was out of earshot. "A bit intense, though. Or is it just me?"
Peter put a comforting hand on hers. "He's ex-military, love. He's seen things."
She nodded, and I turned a bit awkwardly in my chair to look for whoever Elmer had referred to. The crowd was thinning a bit as the evening went on, but I saw neither Elmer nor anyone else that I could imagine him looking for. A part of me hoped he had simply seen a chance to escape and taken it.
"What's that assignment he's given you, Ida? Sounds like a big deal, at least for him," Peter asked, still holding my mom's hand as if to keep her from being nervous about Elmer. Peter was not a small guy, but there was definitely something funny about him trying to appear protective in the face of someone like Elmer. I didn't quite feel like laughing, though.
"It's just... I mean, it's something about a song. A music thing, you know?"
They both nodded, though they clearly just did it for my sake. I chose to hide my lack of musical knowledge behind the soda. Luckily, neither had a chance to ask more questions. A loud crash from a nearby alley caught their attention instead. A thud followed, then another crash. I looked around, and we were definitely not the only ones noticing it, although people just stopped briefly, looked, and then went on with their evening.
"Maybe you should just, you know, finish that... assignment," Mischa suddenly said. Everybody, including Beebee, instantly looked at him. It was the first words he had said since sitting down.
"I thought about it," I replied, leaning back as the waiter arrived with most of the remaining food and went back to get the rest. "But I think he can wait a little longer. I really want to get it right, you know? Nothing left behind?"
Mischa didn't respond much to my answer, but when I accidentally glanced at her, I noticed my mom smiling proudly. A look at Peter gave me the same from him. Part of me suddenly worried that sounding so serious about a school assignment, or what they thought was a school assignment, might give them false hope for my future enthusiasm at school!
"Sorry about that," Elmer suddenly said, slipping down into his chair with a deep sigh.
"What was that?" my mom instantly asked him, making him look confused. "Was that you, that noise?"
Elmer smiled, making me uneasy. "Oh, just a friend of mine who had too much to drink," he chirped. "Had to get him down from a dumpster before he hurt himself."
Whatever hidden message was in that line, I didn't catch it. But the way he looked at me, while smiling, made me feel very unsafe.
"I think you got some trash on you from the dumpster," Peter remarked, pointing at Elmer with the fork he had just spiked his salad with. I looked over and saw a few pieces of something on Elmer's shoulder. It looked disturbingly like tiny bits of robot. Tiny, very broken bits of robot.
"Is your friend... okay?" I asked, suddenly feeling a bit less confident than a minute ago. Again, Elmer just smiled, swirling his soda a bit with one hand.
"He'll sleep it off. Can't have one unruly person make a mess of it for everyone else, can we?"
"Are there more of your... friends... running around here tonight?" I asked, fearing the answer a bit. As he smiled and slowly took a gulp of the soda, I felt that my worst fears were about to be confirmed.
"Funny thing," he said, cocking his head a bit as if thinking hard about the topic, "some of them realized that there were a lot of unusual things happening here in Nakskov, and now they suddenly seem to come crawling out of the woodwork." He took another gulp, never breaking eye contact with me. "Imagine that, huh?"
A bit to my surprise, I felt nothing. No fear, no annoyance at his clear feeling of moral superiority, nothing. At most, part of me felt tired, maybe a little sad. Maybe it was the victory over the robots that were chasing copy Ida that suddenly felt redundant, maybe it was the sense of an uphill struggle. Maybe I was just running out of steam.
"Yeah," I finally replied, between chewing on my pasta. I had regretted my choice of dish for a moment, but whatever the slightly sour sauce was, it was growing on me. "Not something I'd run away screaming from, though."
Finally, his cocky cmile began to fade. Rather than looking angry or bitter, though, he too was starting to look tired. Very tired, in fact.
"Anyway, Ida," he said, putting his soda on the table and leaning forward with a bit of an old man's grunt, "I need that assignment from you in less than two days."
I wanted to say something, feeling a sudden rush to be a smart-ass. Maybe I was sensing weakness, or maybe the tense conversation was getting in my blood. It didn't matter. I said nothing.
"Me and my friends are leaving town after that, one way or another. If you haven't finished it by then, I really can't protect you from the fallout."
Putting on a smiling face again, he nodded at my mom and Peter before emptying his glass and casually disappearing in the crowd.
"Is it just me or did those last words sound a bit ominous?" asked my mom.
I nodded. They did.