(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 39

Morning broke uneventfully. The alarm buzzed, but somehow, it seemed quieter than I remembered it. I had fallen asleep quickly, after the energency cleaning, but the event had stuck in my head through the night.
”I think she was in my house,” I said, sitting down with the streamlined lunch my mom had packed. Going to the grill was tempting, but somehow, just taking it slow and doing as little as possible tempted even more.
The schoolyard was buzzing. In all the other excitement, for lack of a better word, I had completely forgotten the small town festival until my mom mentioned it. I was not much of one for crowds, but for a lot of the other kids at school, it was a chance to run around town while something actually happened. Nakskov was nice and quiet, but for a lot of kids at school, the quiet became too much to bear. Some noise and some activites through town was a safety valve for them, something to let them act out in a way that didn't hurt them or anything, or anyone, else. Now, the yard was alight with kids planning to meet or discussing what they knew, hoped or guessed was going to be happening throughout town.
”You're calling it a she,” he remarked, and I mulled it over in my head. I said nothing, not wanting to even try to comment on the matter. Whatever I called the robot, it was not a statement.
Although I had slept well, it hadn't been without dreams. I saw the broken robot, sputtering and sparking, limp through the streets of Nakskov. Afraid at one point, angry at another. The overall contect of the dreams had, of course, been completely lost when I woke up, but the images remained.
”It's damaged,” I said, apropos of nothing. Mischa nodded, chewing frantically on the oversized sandwich his mother insisted on packing for him every day.
”It #*@!ing well should be,” he commented. He quickly realized the double meaning of the remark. ”I mean, the entire building blew up, how the hell did it even survive?”
I shrugged. There was an aura of unreal about the whole thing. The time travelers, the haphazard pursuits through Nakskov and its surroundings. The robot. The woman in white. And now, we were sitting like any other two school students, on an old wooden bench, eating our lunches.
"How are you coming along with Hanky?" Mischa suddenly decided to ask. I blinked a few times, trying to figure out what he was going on about. Apparently, he noticed that.
"Oh, yeah, sorry, that was her. It. I mean, that was the robot copy. Whatever. Not you."
My eyes were fixed on the three figures in the schoolyard, walking our way.
"Yeah, thing is," I said, dragging out the words, "I'm not sure she sees the difference."
Mischa looked up from his sandwich and at me, his eyes darting around in a confused manner.
"Wait what? She's here? I mean, it, the copy, is here?"
I shook my head in the most subtle way I could, and nodded at the figures heading our way.
"Oh shit," Mischa grumbled, sounding almost disappointed that the robot copy had nothing to do with it.
"Soooo," said Hanky, trying to walk with a bit of a swagger towards our little wooden resting spot. "You back to crawling around the gutter, or what?"
I tried to undrstand the question, but ended up just looking at her.
"What?" I asked, noticing that my voice sounded incredibly tired.
"I thought you'd had enough of this emo crap," she continued, and one of her backup girls couldn't keep from doing a coy little laugh.
"What emo crap? I'm eating my lunch."
Hanky sighed, the sort of sigh that was meant to make others feel dumb about something, though she failed to say what that something was.
"Look, you wanna sit in the loser's corner and chew on your dog food sandwich, go ahead. We're going somewhere a little less dorky."
She turned on her heal, literally, and walked away. The two others followed her without a word. Once they were at a safe distance, they started laughing, one of them looking over her shoulder at either me or Mischa. Likely the both of us.
"Mischa," I said, very slowly, "did the robot copy make friends with the Hanky gang?!"
Mischa himself sat quietly, eyes following Hanky and his head tilted and a frown on his face that screamed worried disbelief.

Gym class was usually a favorite of mine, a chance to just move around and not worry about wrong answers. Our teacher, one Elise Hansen, was a bit older than the average teacher at school, and fairly laid back about the contents of the lessons. Obstacle races and team sports were the common choices, like indoor hockey or volleyball. Today she had decided to experiment a bit.
"It's not a competition," she shouted, her voice echoing in the large hall. "You just pass the ball back and forth, so you get a feel for, you know..." She trailed off, sounding a little out of breath from shouting.
"For passing the ball back and forth?" someone asked loudly, and someone else giggled. The teacher said nothing, but didn't complain, either.
"You staying away from the festival again this year?"
Francesca, one of my classmates, threw the basketball at me a little hard, but not in a vicious way. She had a competitive thing, but wasn't mean-spirited about it, at least not normally. She claimed it was a family thing, being a bit overly passionate about stuff. I never knew her family much, though.
"Nah, told my mom I would..."
Another ball went across, going past whoever it was supposed to be caught by and hitting Francesca's ball out of my hand.
"Itty Bitty is hanging with us, isn't that right?"
I looked around, trying to find the source of the ball and, I assumed, words. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was Emma, one of the girls from Hanky's crew.
"Thanks," I said, not knowing exactly why. "No, I'm probably going with my family. But yeah, maybe meet up with someone out there, dunno."
To my surprise, Emma suddenly had a very, very bitter look on her face. My mind was going crazy trying to figure out what had happened between them and the robot copy in the short time I was gone.
It never had time to go beyond that, though. The sound of basketballs hitting the floor started to appear here and there, at first. Then, every sound seemed to stop. I looked around in time to see several looks go towards the teacher. When I looked myself, all I saw was two kids from one of the younger classes talking to her. There was a smaller gym hall that the young kids used, but they still came to the same one as us to shower, timed in a way so the classes didn't collide.
"Somebody got #*@!ed up," whispered a voice in the crowd. Other whispers followed, but at that point, it was impossible to make out any voice from any other. The buzzing mass of students was practically tripping over one another's feet to get close to someone with any idea of what was going on. Apart from the two younger kids, who were now almost guarded by the gym teacher, nobody seemed to know anything worth spreading. If they had, it would have spread.
So when the two kids finally took the teacher by the hand to lead her away, her shout back about just continuing passing balls around was almost entirely ignored. Most simply stood still, not wanting undue attention from the teacher, but the moment she was out of sight, all bets were off! While the majority remained to wait for some juicy details, a small group splintered off and ran towards the baths, where the kids had taken her to. I was among them.
By the doors to the baths, the entire group stopped, nobody brave enough to not just disobey the order to stay but actually barge in. I noticed one of Hanky's backup dancers in the group, looking like she was taking actual notes in her mind. But the bulk of my attention was on the baths.
It was the girl's changing room, which caused a few unhappy grunts from the girls when a boy in the small group showed a little too much interest. Clothes and bags were seemingly untouched, nothing broken or, from the looks of it, stolen. Everything looked just fine. Except for one detail.
It looked pretty grim. The wide trail of blood had been more or less washed away, but not drained out, so the pink water looked like someone had slaughtered a cow in a kiddie pool. It was far too much red for a nosebleed, but there were no other traces of it anywhere. When the small group fell silent for a moment, I could hear the teacher on her phone talk to someone about a prank. It easily could have been, of course. Some of the older students were infamous for their bizarre humor. However, I had a disturbing feeling that something else was at play.
Of course, the teacher finally sent the younger students back to their class in the other hall, then turned to leave. She pretended to be surprised, and upset, to see the lot of us scramble to get away, but it was an act. She had seen us, she had simply waited until her phone call was over to deal with us.
"Elise," I said, using the meekest, most girlish voice I could manage.
"Yes, Ida, what?"
"I don't... I don't feel good. I feel like..."
It wasn't entirely an act. My stomach felt like it was set on vibrate, and my head felt a little dizzy. But rather than walk it off, I saw my chance to use my bad reaction for something good.
"I don't like... the blood... you know?"
She put a sympathetic hand on my shoulder and, ironically, the minor shake I felt in my body from it made my stomach threaten to boil over.
"It's okay, that's normal. Just..." She looked into the locker room, an annoyed rumble coming from deep down in her throat. "We need to not touch anything, so girls shower before the boys in the boys' locker room, okay?"
I looked at her a bit confused by that tidbit of information.
"Take your clothes, shower, and go lie down somewhere until it goes over, alright?"
I nodded, giving her the most pathetic look I could to back up the story. I could have easily finished the lesson, but something told me I might be needed elsewhere.

The wait was close to being painful. I had texted Mischa the moment I left the gym hall, but it took him a good twenty minutes to text back. And when he finally did, it was abruptly short, just a wow-smiley to my only slightly longer message that "something is up".
Our classrooms were fairly close, making it a quick walk for him to get to mine. When he showed up, he looked perplexed, checking the message, or something else, on his phone as he looked at me with question marks almost sticking out of his eyes.
"Beware the other Ida?" he asked, reading directly from the second text I had sent. "I'm almost afraid to ask, but you do mean the robot copy, right?" He looked away and blinked a few times. "Wow. That felt weird to say."
The classroom was empty, everyone still at gym. Still, surrounded by nothing but posters about math and history and the few movie posters that students had insisted on putting up, I kept looking around and over my shoulder. I even kept my voice low and shut the door before speaking.
"There was blood in the showers," I all but whispered. Mischa instantly became more attentive.
"Blood in the showers? Other than maybe being the lamest imaginary rap title ever, what does that mean?"
"Blood," I said, my voice more insisting. "Blood, like, red blood, all over the floor." He seemed to get the words, but something was still eluding him. "Mischa, I think it's here. I think it's trying to live its old life, as much as it can."
"So it... wants to be in gym class? Sorry, Ida, but I'm not following."
It was hard to feel angry at him, all of it sounding insane from the start. But the pieces were still falling together, and far from all of it made sense to me, either.
"It went into my kitchen to eat last night. I think it wanted to shower and clean itself up, too, but I spooked it."
"And it's still bleeding now?" he asked, and I grumbled a bit at the fact that his question made perfect sense.
"I don't know," I said, looking around as if my mind thought the answr was written on a wall somewhere. "Maybe it's not bleeding, maybe it's just very bloody and had to rinse that off. But I don't know."
Mischa was about to say something back when sounds began to come from the hall. I made a quick gesture at him, and he left quickly through the door. The room was quiet a minute or two, then the rest of the class poured in.
"Hey, do I smell barf?" shouted Tobias as he spotted me sitting in class.
"No, Toby, you don't smell that bad," said one of the girls before I could even reply, and a flurry of hand gestures and schoolyard battlecries went back and forth in the room to cheer fresh comebacks on.
"Sit down," shouted Elise. It was rare for the gym teacher to follow students back to class, and it was too early for gym to even be over, so it was clearly something about the blood.
"As you all probably know by now," she said rather disgruntled as the last found their seats, "someone has left a lot of blood in the girl's showers at gym. I just want to answer any questions you have, so that nobody goes around scared or spreading rumors."
I could have sworn she looked my way when talking about someone being scared, but I ignored it.
"First of all, we don't know that it was blood, but it looked like it. And no, there were no fingers or heads or anything in the shower, in fact there was no sign where the red stuff came from, so stop scaring the younger kids, got it? Michael, are we clear on that?"
Michael, who would likely have told scary stories to the younger kids, and still might, nodded as he tried to hold back a big, fat smirk. Elise then pointed at someone with their hand up.
"Yeah, uhm, what if it's a killer or something?"
"It's not," the teacher answered instantly, and loud protest instantly rang out. "Quiet! A killer would have left something behind. I don't think dragging someone into the locker room to kill them and then dragging them out is something killers do, either."
There were multiple objections, most from boys, that they had seen this and that in a movie, but with a loud cough and the swipe of a hand in the air, she calmed the voices quickly.
"You, uhm, Ghita?"
One of the smallish girls, a bit nervously, actually stood up before she spoke.
"Yeah, I mean, what if it's, you know, like, girl stuff?"
There was a moment of silence before it became clear to most what she meant, and then outbursts of disgust followed, especially from the boys in class.
"Don't worry, Ghita, I don't think... yes, Ida?"
I pulled down the arm that I had raised so fast that I actually felt a bit of pain in the shoulder.
"She's not being crazy," I said, looking over at the short girl quickly with a nod and a smile as she sat back down. Then I faced the teacher again, and to some extent, the class. "My cousin's brother's girlfriend had a friend that got real sick the first time she had, you know, and she bled like, a lot a lot and had to go to the hospital."
"Isn't your cousin's brother just your cousin?" came a response from the back of the class.
"No, they're, like, not real brothers, they're parents are just #*@! buddies," I heard myself blurt out. It was a half truth. The laughs were wholehearted, though.
"I don't think it's a very normal thing, Ida," Elise said, putting on her most pedagogical voice.
"No, I know it's really rare, but, like, shouldn't someone be out looking for some girl passed out somewhere?" I quickly asked, doing my best to force the idea through. Anything to pull people away from chasing down the copy!
"Wait here, people, I'll talk to the principle about this. Wait here, and be quiet, okay?"
She left with long, quick steps through the door, and the moment it shut, everyone began talking loudly.
"Was that really true, what you said?" asked Johanna, a blond girl with freckles all over her face. "The thing about your friend or whatever almost dying?"
I smiled. "I never said dying. But no, I just wanted to get her to leave, plus Ghita gets enough crap from the Hanky gang, so I wanted to back her up."
It felt weird, lying about something that was already a lie, covering up my attempt to cover up what I thought was happening with the robot copy. But Johanna just laughed and gave a quick high five. Looking over her shoulder, I saw Ghita sitting at her table, quietly talking to someone beside her that I could not see.
The talk rose, carefully so as not to draw attention from any teachers accidentally passing by. I had other things on my mind, and after looking out the door for anything out of the ordinary, I went to the window. What could be seen out the window was limited, but part of me hoped either to catch a lucky glance, or that the robot was out there and actually looking in. Neither happened.
It took a while for the gym teacher to return, and when she did, she seemed a bit distraught. She told us that police had been contacted and everything was being taken care of, whatever she meant by that.
A double lesson of biology followed. Under great protest, teachers came by most classes to tell that nobody was allowed outside for the duration of the break. Plenty talked about doing a whole jailbreak thing, but nobody dared when it came down to it.
Biology came and went. Nobody was really able to pay even the usual bit of attention, and even the teacher was more distracted than usual. There was a strange tension in the air, as teachers and other staff did their best to pretend to students that things were under control. For whatever reason, they reminded me a bit of the time travelers. I didn't feel that that was a good thing.
"Did the panic spread to your class?" I asked Mischa as we pulled our bikes from the racks and walked them to the street, rather than fight to ride them out through the flock of others, big students as well as small, trying to do the same.
"Worse," he sighed, looking honestly disturbed about something. "I think Adin and Carla were actually buzzed by the whole thing, like it made it a bit more exciting to be there. Felt really weird to see them all energetic like that!"
Adin and Carla were two of his teachers, both of them a little infamous for being old and, most of all, acting old. They had a habit of just putting some state approved educational film on and letting lessons ride themselves out. Of course, that did make them a bit popular amongst certain students.
"You still think it's her, or it, the copy?"
I nodded, although I was thinking harder about it than I really wanted to admit.

Even though there was plenty of time, everything felt in a rush when I got home! My mom was unusually excited about the honestly very minor town festival, and Peter was basically enabling her tendencies. Beebee met me with a grim stare as I entered the hallway, wearing a bright red dress that made her look like a summer clothing junior catalogue model. Apart from the killer glare, of course!
"She's insane," she complained, tugging repeatedly at the shoulder straps of the dress. "Can I please stay home with you?"
"Sorry, biscuit, but I'm going this year."
Her glare became one of suspicion as she looked me in the eyes for a few seconds.
"Traitor," she grumbled and walked back into the living room with her head hanging a bit on her shoulders.
"Hi mom, I've...."
I stopped myself when I looked into the living room and found several summer dresses laid out on the floor and dining table. They all looked unnervingly my size.
"Hi mom, and no thanks," I quickly remarked, before I slipped away and hurried to my room. I started picking through the clothes in my wardrobe, just for show, as I heard her footsteps come up the stairs.
"Sweetie, I have all these clothes, they would look so nice on you!"
She was all smiles. It was like being greeted by a huge labrador that wanted nothing more than to see you. And dress you up like a 50s doll.
"Mom, I can't move around in any of that, I need, like, pants and stuff."
"Well, just come down and see, maybe there's something there you like," she insisted, still smiling and with a voice cheerful enough to sell cleaning products on TV.
I reluctantly followed her down the stairs, my mind mostly on how to let her down without breaking her heart. As we reached the living room, though, I glanced over my shoulder at the kitchen. The blood from that night suddenly flashed in my mind.
"Hey mom, did the school contact you about something that happened today?"
She stopped halfway towards a ghastly yellow dress with thin, white stripes, looking more like a giant dessert than clothes.
"No, why? Are you in trouble?" she said, her voice instantly beginning its familiar slide towards worry.
"No, no," I rushed to reassert her, "there was just, I think someone got hurt, you know, and they never told us what happened."
"Why would they call me about that?"
I realized she was completely right, there was absolutely no reason for that. Part of my worry might deep down have been that they had found the copy and called her, thinking it was me, but on a second viewing, none of that made any sense. Not only had I been there the whole time, but she would have said something the moment I came home! My brain rummaged through any explanation it could find to lead away from my impatient investigation.
"Well, uhm, the clinic and stuff, I thought maybe you heard something?"
Her worried frown instantly turned to a smile, and before I could plot an escape, she came over and grabbed me in a great, big hug.
"Awww, little panik, you always worry about so many people," she said, pressing me tightly against her. I let her squeeze to her heart's content, just happy it made sense to her.
The dress debate ended in a compromise. And that meant that I wore a short dress, but got to have real pants on underneath. My waist felt like a strangulation victim and my legs were the temperature of melted lead before we even left the house. And since the roads were already crowding, my mom had Peter drop us off a few minutes of walking distance from town before he took the car back home, promissing to join us later. When we finally got to the promenade in town, I already felt like I had been jogging for at least half an hour.
We were technically early, with the handful of advertised events not starting for about another hour. And yet, people were crowding out from the promenade, filling the narrow oneway street towards the station so much that traffic had simply been blocked, and cars went around the entire town center. Nakskov was not that big when compared to even Danish cities, so it had to be a big part of the people in town that had decided to enjoy the festival. Part of me couldn't help but be a little impressed. Another part of me just felt like getting away from the writhing mass of people.
"I want a big ice cream!"
The sudden outburst came from Beebee, who had of course seen the many people walking around with large, homemade ice creams, or simply the storebought ones. Being a part of the health industry, my mom was no fan of sugar, so it was a bit of a surprise to me to see her go for her purse without a single complaint.
"Ida, you want an ice cream?" she asked, but I just smiled and shook my head. I had prepared myself for worrying about running into the robot copy, but the crowds made the feeling ten times worse, and my appetite was not the biggest thing on my mind. I did think about changing my mind, but the thought of having to look out over a massive construction of multiple ice cream scoops, softice and the myriad decorations that came with it just overwhelmed me a bit.
"You want something else?" she followed up, her voice already sounding a bit nervous, likely at the mere thought of me not being happy, something she tended to measure by my appetite.
"Uhm... Meatballs?"
She stared at me for a moment, a bit confused.
"The big, spicy meatballs they make down South Street?"
She nodded, handing me the first bill that she could find in the purse.
"You go buy them, then meet us back here, okay, sweetie?"
I nodded, making sure to smile from ear to ear with as much excitement as I could muster as I took the bill. I had no idea why, but apparently she needed this. She needed me to be excited and enjoy the festival. It meant something deeper to her than just a night on the town.
Moving through the crowd became increasingly daunting as I got deeper inside of it. I was half expecting my little sparks to return, the little charges that had reacted to random people with time travel backgrounds. These were different clothes, though, and there was none of the charge left in my skin or, I could only assume, my body. For all intents and purposes, I was just an average girl in a crowd.
And yet, I was not going to slip through unnoticed, it seemed. It took a little while for me to notice, and it only dawned on me once I was more than halfway to where they sold the meatballs I wanted, but people in the crowd were looking. Not many, but a few were looking at me with expressionless faces, turning away the moment I looked at them long enough to reveal that I had noticed them! With my sense of claustrophobia beginning to set in, I pulled out the phone that my nameless friend had let me keep, for whatever reason. The prepaid card still had a bit of money on it, and I wrote a very quick text to Mischa, hoping he had already joined the crowd somewhere. I waited a bit, but there was no message back from him.
With my eyes suddenly fixed hard on the crowd, scanning every single person within sight, my attention managed to also glance over the stores. I felt surrounded, looking desperately for somewhere, anywhere, with a little less people in it. Although the stores were popular on occations like this, they were never as popular as just walking the streets.
I slipped into a clothes store. That was more or less a given, since over half the stores along the promenade were for clothes, first or second hand. The bulk of people in this particular one was women, many of them apparently mothers with their daughters, so it was easy for me to fit in. Pretending to be fascinated by everything from swimsuits to knitted cardigans, I made my way deeper and deeper into the store, giving everyone in there a quick glance. Nobody seemed to be looking at me.
I still flinched when the phone played a tinny little tune to signal a message coming in, though. Flipping it open, I fumbled a bit with the oddly placed arrow buttons before I got the text opened. It was from Mischa, not surprisingly. It simply said Axel Square, the triangular square that physically ended the promenade. The text, on the other hand, ended in a smiley. A bit unusual for Mischa, but no weirder than most things I had running through my head at that moment.
"See, I told you she ran in here!"
I looked up to lock eyes with Emma. She was looking very triumphant, as Hanky walked up beside her.
"Wooow, Ida, rocking the flip phone, super retro!" Hanky said, too loud for it to be simply meant for us. The infuriating smirk on her face made it perfectly clear she was trying to mock me, or my phone, or both. "Is that the 90s calling you?"
"It's actually a text, not a call," I grumbled, instantly annoyed at myself for even acknowledging her remark.
"Text? Like what, sanskrit or something?" commented her other minion, Amalie. The three of them were weirdly glammed up, lots of intense colors and a dash of glitter.
"Right, sanskrit. Love Wikipedia. Can we maybe not do this now?" I asked, making my move to casually slip around the three and head out of the store.
"What you playing at, Itty Bitty?" Hanky growled in a low voice, stepping into my path and blocking my quiet escape.
"What do you mean, playing at?"
I asked the question in a voice that sounded offended, but even before I had finished the sentence, I realized that I actually, honestly, wanted to know. I had wondered what had been going on between her and the copy while I was not there, but I had pushed it to the back of my mind. Now, it was pushing itself to the front again.
"You act like you wanna be all in and everything, and then you just think you're too good for us. What the #*@! you trying to say, Lund?" She took a step closer, now standing directly face to face with me. Or almost, seeing as she was half a head taller than me. "You in or out?"
Looking over her shoulder, hoping to not catch anyone strangely looking back in through the storefront windows, I bit my lips a bit in frustration. My lack of response to her question clearly did not please Hanky!
"You in or out, Itty?" she asked, giving my shoulder a push and leaning in to try to look threatening.
"In or out of what? Your girl glam band? You're not making a lot of sense, Hanne."
There was a brief moment of silence as Amalie and Emma smiled with their eyes open wide.
"That's Hanne-Katrina to you, pleeb," she hissed, clearly not thrilled about my little mistake.
"Move, Hanky," I sighed, pushing my way around her. I had never intended to use the nickname, it just kind of fell out of my mouth after she complained about the whole name thing. But now it was out there. And she didn't like it. With a quick, yet firm step, she moved in front of me again, her eyes like powder kegs about to burst into flames!
"What did you #*@!ing call me, you cunt?!"
Everything was rushing into my head, like a dam bursting and water flooding in. Sounds from outside seemed loud, sounds around me seemed to fade away. I could hear my own pulse like a soft rumble in the deep.
"I'm going to #*@!ing po..."
She never got to finish the sentence. It took me about half a second to even notice it, but apparently I punched her jaw with an open hand, like something taken out of a cheap karate flick! She stumbled a single step backwards, her hand fumbling with her chin and her eyes as wide as teacup saucers.
"Oh, you're #*@!ing dead," chuckled either Amalie or Emma, I really couldn't be bothered to notice which. I instead made my way around the still stunned Hanky and headed for the door and into the street.
Once more forced to deal with the dense crowd in the street, I stayed near the walls of the buildings along the promenade, avoiding the  more active crowd in the middle of the street. It let me get to the square in less time than otherwise, but I had the distinct feeling it also made me stand out a bit. In my mind, I explained to myself that it didn't matter. If they were indeed looking, they knew I was there, and no casual mingling would remedy that.
The square was one large mass of people. A small band was playing in the middle somewhere, but the constant buzz drowned the music out enough to make it hard to even tell what kind of music it was. The real problem, of course, was locating Mischa.
"Ida Lund," a voice in the crowd said. "How nice of you to join us!"
I turned around, but nobody really caught my eye. The crowd was just random people, none of which looked all that familiar to me. And then suddenly, a hand reached out of the masses, and I felt it gently grab my shoulder.
Still with traces of adrenaline in my body from punching Hanky, I jabbed the hand, or more correctly, the forearm, with my elbow. To my surprise, it moved without complaint.
"No need to be rough, Ida," said the voice again. I followed the hand up the forearm and over the shoulder, finally putting a face on it and the voice. I had no idea who that face was, though.
"My name is Alex. Can we talk?"
I looked at the face as it asked the question, then scanned the crowd for someone I knew, someone I trusted.
"No."
The man just continued to smile in his weirdly inoffensive, almost braindead fashion.
"Come on, I'm not here to hurt you," he said, softly.
"Spoken like a true child molester," I simply replied, still looking for someone trusted to hide behind. I was alone. For a moment, I even thought of going back to Hanky and using her as a human shield. For a moment. Then, through the crowd as it briefly parted near the sidewalk, I spotted a familiar face. Sadly, not one I wanted to seek help from.
"Okay, Alice, let's go somewhere. You got a windowless van nearby?"
"It's Alex, and no," he said, his voice now showing a bit of strain. If I had any knack, it was to bug people until they gave up playing nice.
"Right, jewelry store it is, then."
My eyes took one last look at the crowd as I walked to the nearby jewelry store with Alex at my heel. As before, I saw Kurt, or rather, the rebuilt robot copy of Kurt, stand by one of the stores, his eyes scanning the crowd as patiently as only a machine could. But I looked beyond that, scanning for anything and anyone that stood out. There were a few, but they were hard to fully place in my mind. One who wasn't there was Mischa.
"What did you do to Mischa?" I asked, putting on a fake smile to throw off anyone who might have overheard me and thought a bit too much about it.
"Nothing," said Alex, with a voice that told me that he was hiding something. "We just cloned his phone and sent you the message."
I stopped, holding a bracelet that was so far out of my price range that I feared I might go bancrupt just from looking at it.
"You lured me here?" I asked, staring at him. "Do you have any idea how creepy that is? And by extension, you are?"
"You've been in contact with some very suspect people, Ida," he remarked as he walked, hands on his back, amongst the expensice trinkets, pretending he never heard my remark on his methods. "We're just trying to..."
"Who are we?" I asked, not waiting for him to finish. He looked over, a smile on his lips much more false than any I could ever put up.
"FE," he said, and my brain had to flip through a few things before finding something that matched.
"Forsvarets Efterretning? Like, military intelligence FE? You're a spy?"
He cracked a very wide grin, pulling out a card from a pocket I didn't even know he had and handed it to me. It said Alexander Jokumsen, the name of his agency, and two phone numbers.
"Is that... a fax number?" I asked, keeping myself from laughing. Alex seemed to completely ignore the remark.
"I'm sure you know your family is in danger, right?"
My grin faded quickly.
"I thought so," he muttered under his breath. "We would really like it if you helped us find these people, Ida. And it would give me the excuse I need to put some protection on your mom, sister and stepdad."
"He's not my stepdad," I mumbled, but Alex ignored it. I just stood there, turning the business card over a few times, even though I knew the back was blank.
"What do you know about what I'm doing? What do you know about those dangerous people you think I talk to?"
He sighed, sounding annoyed. "Everybody calls everybody potential terrorists today. I think it's just a bunch of armed conmen trying to make a permanent home for themselves here in Nakskov."
The word repeated over and over in my mind. Conmen. A big part of me wanted to believe that.
"So I guess you want..."
My eyes suddenly caught something through the window towards the promenade. For a moment, I doubted myself, but then I turned to Alex.
"Did you send Mischa a text, too?" I asked, but he just looked at me, puzzled. Out through the window, I tried to spot the Kurt copy. When I hurried over to it, I quickly spotted the large man-shaped thing, but it wasn't taking any note of him. Yet!
"Uhm, Alex, sorry but I gotta... something..."
I just barely remembered to return the expensive bracelet before rushing to the door. I heard Alex call out behind me, but never heard exactly what he said.
Out in the street, catching a glimpse of Mischa again was harder than I had expected. I stood on the stone staircase of the jeweler's and tried desperately to spot his head in the crowd, until I decided to simply run in and make a nuissance of myself. He had been walking away from the square, deeper into the crowded promenade, and I was beginning to feel afraid that he would disappear before I could find him. Or worse.
"Hey, Ida, what's..."
"Mischa!" I gasped as I heard the voice beside me. Without thinking about it, I grabbed him and pulled him in for a big hug, ignoring his strained gargle as I squeezed a bit too tightly.
"Yeah, uhm, everything okay?" he coughed, but I simply looked over his shoulder. As I feared, the Kurt copy was now in the crowd, and it was making its way towards us.
"No, we gotta go, quick," I whispered, grabbing him by the cuff of his jacket and pulling him behind me. It took him a second to fall in tow, but then he matched my speed through the crowd quite easily. I was doing my best not to push and shove people, but somewhere behind us, I was starting to hear the sounds of someone who was not!
"Toy store!" I said, not stopping to look at Mischa as I pulled him along. The toy store had put extra stands out by the street for people, or more precisely, their kids to stop and both look at and play with. I dragged poor Mischa behind a few wobbly stands  with cheap masks of Japanese anime or manga characters I had no idea who were. All I saw was a quick disguise.
"Ida, this is stupid," Mischa chuckled as I handed him a mask of some smiling boy with pointy blond hair. I didn't even look at the mask I grabbed for myself.
"Just put it on and stand here. I don't think they..."
My voice trailed off as I saw Alex walking in the crowd, clearly looking for either me or someone he was working with, holding a phone by his ear and talking to someone. He was too far away for any of the sound to carry over, but his facial expressions strongly indicated that he was unhappy with the situation.
"Who's after you? Or after us?" Mischa asked, looking up and down the street as best he could, clumsily trying to adjust the child-sized mask to fit his eyes, and failing.
"They copied other people, remember? I saw one of them over by the square, and I th..."
A loud BOOM roared through the air, echoing between the buildings and, for a little while, drowning out the screams of people in the street! Within seconds, a thick cloud filled the place, rolling like a mist in between the many stands and instantly beginning to dissipate down the alleys leading to either the harbor or the station, depending on the direction.
"What the #*@! was that?!" Mischa yelled, the sound of screaming and crying people now rather loud around us. "And why the hell does everything smell and taste like... is that cherry and liquorice??"
I smacked my tongue a few times, indeed getting strong hints of both those tastes, with an aftertaste of caramel, mint and a few others.
"Did somebody just blow up a vaping store?" Mischa mumbled, looking around, the mask now off and dangling from his hand.
"I think we really should leave," I said, ignoring the weird tastes in the air.