(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 51

Blinding lights. No, lights on blinding white surfaces. Whatever the case, my eyes burned from simply opening.
I was laid down on a bed, one that was overly soft and, like walls and ceiling, very white. No decorations. A hospital.
The clinic!
I sat up quite abruptly, instantly letting out a cry of pain as my skin felt like it cracked and my muscles tore themselves apart! Aches and pains ran rampant in my body, covering every bit of skin and every pieces of organ, as if my blood itself was filled with burning needles. The room spun, tilting in ways that went beyond the movements of my head, I suspected. And then, everything aligned. I turned my head just in time to not puke on myself.
"Ida?"
The question was slurred, like someone drunk was asking it. It came from slightly behind me, and it took some painful strain of the neck to look over my shoulder at the source. Flat on his back, blinking and trying to focus right, was Niels. Bandages on his right side and wrapping his left leg had red splatters on them, from some form of bleeding inside. He moved, but no more than he he to in order to look up from his own bed. Plastic strips tied his wrists to the metal frame of the bed, and I instantly looked at my own hands. The right hand was secured by an identical strip to my bed. I was not moving anytime soon, it seemed, and with a hurting back I laid myself down on the bed again.
"Hey, Niels. How's the fam?"
The first thing I could make out from him was mostly just a growling sound, a complaint without actual words. It took a few seconds for it to turn into a deep sigh.
"Jens basically collapsed when he stepped out of the car. Had it gone on for much longer... I dont know. But everybody is alive. That was the main plan, right? Dont die?"
"Yeah. Don't die..."
The words echoed around inside my brain for a bit. Images of the fight with the woman in white's goons kept flashing through my head like poorly edited film clips, making my heart skip a beat practically each and every time. Spurred by a sudden impulse, I sat up again so quickly that the strip around my wrist yanked back, making my arm hurt more than any other part of my body!
"The others! The rebels!"
Niels looked over at me with a weird expression on his face, looking like I had just screamed incomprehensible nonsense at the top of my lungs.
"I need to get... out. I need to leave," I complained loudly. So loudly, in fact, that a nurse came over. I froze as she suddenly stood by my bedside, arms crossed over her chest and a stiff look in her eyes.
"You're not leaving until you've talked to the police," she said with what was seemingly meant to be an authoritive voice. She failed to hide how tired she was, making her sound more snarky than authoritive, but the message got through quite nicely, nonetheless.
"No, I need to get..."
Before I could finish, she put her surprisingly firm hands on my shoulders and laid me back down, tucking me in and securing the sheets firmly around the sides of the bed. They could easily be pulled loose again, but along with the plastic strip, she was letting me know quite clearly how I was expected to behave.
"Whatever you idiots have been blowing up out there and around town, the police want to see you about it, and I'm not..."
Pulling the aforementioned sheets loose, I fought to sit up again, pulling at the plastic strip, feeling my heartbeat get more erratic and the multiple aches becoming a tense frustration all around my body. She grabbed me by the shoulders, again, and this time forced me down quite powerfully.
"If you don't lie down and stay there, I will tranquilize you," she said through gritted teeth, and from the look on her face, I believed her.
Staying down in the bed until well after she finally left, I listened to the sounds around the place. The nearest real hospital was several towns away, the local one having been cut from the budget long ago to save money. There rarely passed a week where government officials didn't complain in one way or another about small towns being a drain on resources, and how they wanted to centralize and optimize hospital planning and so much else. In other words, anyone not living in one of the ten biggest cities was a bum and waiting two hours for an ambulance during a car wreck or a heart attack was what people in expensive suits felt that such lowlifes deserved. It had been a debate for as long as I could remember. But this once, not having to listen to the flood of noise in a fully equipped hospital was arguably a good thing. With much less background noise, the interesting things stood out much better.
What was easy to hear was that there was a bit of a panic going on. I had been to the clinic often, almost always to see my mom at work. Behind the closed doors, it was a lot easier to get a sense of the hectic work environment, and one thing I had long ago learned was that it had a rhythm to it. People spoke a certain way, walked a certain way, did everything a certain way. They were not doing it that certain way right now. They had upped the beat, everything faster and leaner.
"Niels?"
There was a grunt from the nearby bed.
"Did something else happen? Something that has people in a rush here?"
"Dunno," Niels replied, sounding a little out of it. "Something about cars piling up."
"Cars? A pile-up of cars? In Nakskov?!"
He grunted to confirm, but it still sounded wrong. Traffic was barely ever even dense in town. Mischa had a running joke of calling one car stopping behind another a Nakskov traffic jam. There simply where not enough cars to fill the many streets.
"Niels? You still there? Do you know where the others went?"
A slurred mumble could be heard from him, a slight hint of a complaining growl. Whatever was bothering him, it wasn't leaving him alone anytime soon.
"A few jumped out by the edge of town. The rest are here," he mumbled. He just barely finished the sentence when a nurse stopped by him to say something and check something. With him behind me and the plastic strip limiting my movements, it was hard to tell what, exactly. As she walked away, I managed to twist my neck enough to get a look, and he was fast asleep on the mobile hospital bed. A few random sounds mumbled as he fell into a deeper slumber was all the sign of life he had to give.
With nobody to talk to, the place suddenly seemed a lot bigger. As minutes ticked by, I closely watched every corridor within sight, hoping to see someone familiar turn a corner. Nobody came. I pulled and yanked against the plastic strip, but it never gave way, not even the slightest,and all I managed to do was make my wrist hurt. Finally, tears in my eyes, I gave up. Holding back a scream of frustration, I collapsed back on the bed,making its metal parts rattle loudly.
"You need help with that?"
The voice sounded very familiar. I had to tilt my head back at an uncomfortable degree to see, but even before I saw her face, I felt a warm rush of hope race through me.
"Hi, Ida," I said with a broad smile. The robot smiled back.
"Hi, Ida," she said, leaning in abit comically. Her face still had an abundanceof wounds, but they were healing rather impressively, to be honest!
With one eye on the people in the hallway that mine and Niels' bed were placed in, she walked around the bed and stood up on the metal railing to reach over me. The right side of the bed, and hence my right wrist with the plastic strip, was placed against the wall, and something told me not by accident. Still, she could just reach it. With a quiet snap, she pulled the strip apart, sending me a proud smile while she jumped down off the bed again.
"Cool, thank you so much," I sighed, then looked over at the now sleeping Niels. "Could you do his, too? Please?"
The robot copy looked at him, clearly a bit confused by the request.
"He might wake up and have to make a run for it," I commented, answering whatever question she wasn't asking. With a nod and a look down the hall, she strolled over to the bed and reached in to snap his strip, too.
"What now?" she asked, looking very excited to be part of the whole undertaking.
"I need to get to the time machine. I need to get the rebel time travelers out of this place, out of harm's way."
Having finished the sentence, I felt my brain go over it, going over the things the time travelers had kept secret, the way they had treated me. And I thought of Vera's last seconds, in the tall grass north of town. Then I shook all those thoughts out of my head.
"There's something going on with traffic, you should..."
She stopped talking, noticing that I was nodding to let her know I had already heard about the cars.
"Yeah, I need to find some other way to get there. And I don't think that's a coincidence."
"Me neither," she replied, and we looked at each other for a moment before we smiled, both admiring how alike we apparently still were.
"First thing's first, though," I said, jumping down from the bed and taking in the surroundings, now without being restricted to twisting my neck around. People still moved back and forth with a sense of quiet rush to them, but none of them seemed very interested in our little part of the hallway.
"It's dangerous out there. Take these," said the copy, handing me a fresh set of clothes. She clearly caught the fact that I was staring rather confused at them.
"The spare key," she explain very casually. "Peter was in his study, no problem just walking in and taking them."
"Cover me," I whispered quickly, right before I started changing against the corner of the bed. She didn't hesitate, moving to block any potential prying eyes so quickly that I suspected she already knew I wouldn't waste time looking for a proper place to change. A minute or so later we wrapped my filthy clothes around a pillow and did our best to make it look like I was sleeping in the bed. It would only trick people at a distance.
Down the hallway and to the left I knew there were stairs. In my times following my mom to work, back when she hesitated letting me roam free around the house when not in school, I had gotten enough of a look around the place to know the layout, know the ins and, especially, the outs of the place. These stairs would lead me to the main lobby, which meant to a way out. Theoretically, at least.
The moment I got to the bottom of the stairs, I knew something was wrong. The lobby was roomy, meaning there was never really much hustle and bustle in there. But even before my feet were at the foot of the stairs, I could hear people, many people, a level of activity that was completely out of place there. One peek through the glass door and any doubt was laid to rest.
It was not chaos. In a strange way, things seemed more in control than I might have expected, had I even known that there were that many people in there. But the lobby was, in a word, crowded. Leaning against the stairway wall and sneaking glimpses of it all, I could see clinic personnel weaving in and out between a lot of people that were...
I froze, leaning out awkwardly from the wall. I had expected police to be there. Even with the limited number of officers allotted to small places like Nakskov, two vans dumping off injured people, some of them kids, would attract attention from some part of the authorities. And there were officers there, to be sure. From a quick count, five of them. But there were at least a dozen more in there, and none of them looked like cops or clinic personnel. They looked like random people, just standing around.
Copies.
And that was when sounds began to ring out from upstairs, too! Off hand, it could be anything, but it felt like a safe bet that someone had found the fake pillow me in the bed, along with the snapped strip. The hunt had already begun. They would soon think to look in the stairwell.
On the other hand, it made a few of the people in the lobby, including two officers, rush to the elevators when word came in over their comms. The people, three of them, tried to be very casual about following the two cops, but only someone completely oblivious to them would not spot it. They were robot copies acting like robot copies, but not a soul was looking for such things, so it didn't even matter.
I spotted her in a reflection. The woman in white, standing by one of the large windows, keeping an eye on the entire operation without even mingling. What she spotted was beyond me. Maybe my long jacket, maybe the hair. Whatever it was, she didn't wait for anyone else to react, she just bolted down the hallway leading away from the exit that all the people, probably not coincidentally, were blocking. The door to the stairwell had barely even glided shut before she passed by, and I could only watch her hot in pursuit by catching glimpses of her in even more reflections, or the blur when her long coat flapped in the air like a cape. She was fast, faster than I remembered having ever seen her before, and getting rid of her seemed less likely for every second that passed. It only took one wrong turn, and the hunt was over. That turn ended up being a small exam room across the hall from the corridor that ran to one of the rear exits.
"Hello again," she chirped, flashing a smile so falsely warm that it was outright creepy. "Funny running into you here."
She was breathing a bit too rapidly. Not out of breath, but pressed, that much was clear. A fast move might be enough to evade her. Maybe.
"#*@!ed up sense of humor you have, lady."
Her smile simply grew wider and creepier at the insult. Her neck long blond hair was a mess from the sudden sprint, and in a weirdly casual move, she stopped for a moment to untangle a bit of it from her collar.
"Its over, little girl. We've got the exits covered, we've got your little friends tied to hospital beds, and we've got your cars boxed in right outside in the parking lot. Not a lot of options left."
"Really? You're covering all the exits? Quite a lot of them, you know..."
"Yeah," she purred, taking a few feminine steps forward, making the room seem a whole lot smaller. "It did take me a few minutes to regroup after that little stunt of yours out at the fallen colony. But hey, not my first spin around the block."
The way she talked, the look in her eyes, the calm way she tried to walk forward without seeming to intimidating. It looked weird. It looked like she felt some kind of respect. In the hallway, two of the obvious robot copy people had showed up to block the door out of the room, just in case.
"I really wish you would have teamed up with us. You're good."
"Are all your people really covering the exits?"
She laughed. It seemed genuine, but it came completely out of left field!
"What, you think you can take them? I told you, you're out of options, little girl. Give up. Give in."
"Yeah, about that... You might wanna check again."
Her laugh had died down, but now her smile also started looking a bit forced.
"What, your friends are going to launch some assault?"
"Nope."
"Then what?"
"Me."
"You what? You're going to launch an assault?"
"I'm not a little girl."
Watching the woman's reflection in the fullbody mirror on the far side of the exam room from out in the hall, a warm sense of victory flowed through my body as her cocky smile faded, realizing that she was not talking to the real me. I pulled the solid wooden door shut behind her two robot copies the second the copy, my copy, threw itself at her, and as bodies slammed against the door, pinning it shut, I heard the woman in white roar in anger as the little robot tore into her and everything else. Even as I headed down the hallway, I could hear things smashing inside the room!
"Ida?"
My mistake occurred to me too late. Turning the corner, she just stood there, holding a small tablet while talking to one of the doctors.
"Mom?"
Neither of us said anything, but the looks we sent each other were a furious conversation in their own right.
"I'm... Mom, I can expl..."
"Are you one of the kids they brought in?!"
She was terrified. I had heard her voice like that before, but there had always been some physical reason for it. Beebee's bike getting hit by a car, me taking a hit to the head during some dumb sports event at school. Something to be afraid of, something tangible. I had never heard it as just a reaction to seeing me.
"It's... I'm trying to help someone..."
"Who? Panik, what are you doing here?!"
It took me a second to realize that she was looking at the cuts and bruises on my face and hands. The fresh clothes covered everything else, but not those.
"I... I'm sorry, I have to tell you later!"
Seeing her standing in the hallway, eyes wide and confused to near the point of tears, felt like a spear through my chest. And yet, I ran by her, into her office, the place I had been looking for. She had been using the same office for years, and I knew every bit of it by heart. That included the small window by the radiator. I had snuck out of it many times to mess with her as a kid, having her wait for me in the lobby and then calling to her from the outside. As my clothes scraped against the metal frame I had to accept that I was not that kid any longer, but in spite of some aches and scrapes, I tumbled onto the damp grass outside.
The office was placed far enough from any exit that the woman's minions were nowhere to be seen. I did my best to ignore the thought of my confused mother, no doubt walking to her office now, expecting to find me inside. I was gone from the window before she had a chance to see me through it. I didn't stop before I reached the parking lot behind the clinic, and even then, I only looked back briefly, cursing under my breath, angry and sad that she had to be there to see me. I couldn't see her, or even see her office window that well, but instead noticed that several suspiciously nondescript people hanging out near the various exits of the place were now scrambling to either get in or look around outside the building. The cars hid me well, but it was only a matter of time before someone came looking.
The road nearby was a bit of a puzzle, it always had been. Nakskov was old, and many streets had been laid down with horses in mind, new streets growing as needed when the town grew. Even after all these years of living there, I still had an uncanny  ability to lose my way around streets I rarely used. This was one of those cases.
In the end, I doubled back around, getting as close as I dared to the clinic again, but by another road. Even from a distance, I could see the hushed commotion of the woman's henchmen trying to get the situation under control. There were even police cars there, two of them, parked on the curb outside the clinic grounds. The parking lot could get cluttered, so it made sense. What made a little less sense was that there was clearly someone inside. More precisely, someone in the back.
"Hi in there. What are you in for?"
The joke was in poor taste, and I fully deserved the angry glare that Emilie sent me from inside the backseat of the car. Without a word, she held up her hands, showing a plastic strip much like the one I had on just minutes ago, holding her wrists together. I was surprised at how little I felt when I turned and walked to the front yard of a nearby house, picking up a grey brick from the nice flowerbed that was made from them. Emilie's eyes grew the size of teacups when I raised the brick, and she covered every bit of skin right before the broken bits of safety glass rained down on her seat.
"What the... I mean, thanks. I guess."
Looking at the clinic, keeping an eye out for anyone who was distracted from the manhunt for me long enough to actually spot me, I helped her squeeze through the broken window. With her hands still tied together, we did our best to look inconspicuous as we hirrued away. And as I carefully put the grey brick back, I picked up the sharpest bit of flint I could spot in the mixed stone gravel that had been spread out carefully in the front yard around the flowerbed. Still looking over her shoulder, Emilie used it dilligently, and just as we reached the main road that the street was attached to, the plastic strip snapped open.
"So, not that I mind, but exactly why did you risk everything to get precisely me out of there?" she asked, sounding honestly grateful, but also honestly confused.
"How are your legs doing?" I asked, fearing the answer.
"Just fine. Why?"
"The lovely lady we've been fighting blocked everything from here to the place I need to get to. Im pretty sure her minions are already there, and we need to beat them to the punch."
"Where is it?"
"An old school south of here."
"Give me the directions and I'll...."
The way she suddenly met my gaze told me that she had just figured out what I was asking of her.