(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 41

It never failed to astound me how easily people in Nakskov would slide from a panic to a calm. As Mischa and I slipped down one of the many narrow streets between the promenade and the harbor, the cloud of flavored steam had already begun to dissipate, and frightened screams were turning to nervous laughter and intense chattering. People were unharmed, and they were now wondering if it had been a stunt, street art, a weird accident, or whatever else they might imagine. To be perfectly honest, however bizarre it could feel, the willingness to not see the world as the worst of all possibilities was often a heartwarming part of living here.
"What are we running from?" asked Mischa. "I mean, this time," he quickly added.
I said nothing. I honestly had no clear idea. The Kurt copy had been lurking, that FE Alex person had been a bit intense, but there was nothing to go on. It could be aliens, ghosts, Santa Claus or the Salvation Army, and none of us would be any wiser about it all. I just knew to run when things got crazy. It was a habit I had learned disturbingly fast.
The harbor was, a bit surprisingly, more nervous than the promenade. A local band was playing on a small stage, but they seemed a bit less energetic than they could be, the lead singer visibly looking towards the source of the boom almost half the time. Everyone seemed to want to pick up where they had stopped without skipping a beat, the band literally so, but there was an unease in the crowd, looks sent towards the promenade all the time.
"Someone told them nothing dangerous happened," I mumbled, my by now paranoid brain making up all kinds of stories of who might have tricked them. At least, it did so until I made it shut up and accept that it had likely just been the people behind the events that had passed on the message. Being constantly on edge made me see things, and seeing things made me on edge. I had fallen into a nasty spiral, and as we cut our run to a brisk walk, I kept silently cursing at myself to stop making up problems. There were plenty of real ones already to deal with.
"I need to get back to my family," I muttered, half to myself and half to Mischa. He nodded. I somewhat expected him to say something similar, but he did not. I knew his parents liked the little events that happened around town now and then, and that they likely were at this one, as well. And again, I had to cut paranoid thoughts, this time of him being a robot, out of my mind, before it went down the path of rampant conspiracy theories.
It was about at that point that I noticed his eyes. They had seemed to stare aimlessly into the crowd, but with him saying nothing and our pace still dropping, I could see that he was silently following something.
"Mischa, Earth calling. What's going on?" I asked him, but at first, he said nothing, just nodding again as his eyes kept moving slowly across the mass of people. When I finally tugged on his arm, he snapped out of it, looking briefly at me but then quickly scanning the people ahead of us again.
"I thought I... saw something," he more or less mumbled, his eyes now desperately trying to reconnect with what they had followed. I looked along the same path as he did, but he had some height on me, and all I saw was people's chests and a few random faces.
Then, without warning, he picked up his pace, never even telling me to match it! His nimble, gangly body was like a coral fish, slipping in and out between people with frustrating agility, forcing me to keep up and make use of the brief slipstream he left behind him in the crowd. In a panic, I grabbed his wrist, both to tell him where I was and to simply hold on!
When he finally swerved around the corner of one of the old walls along the street and into the open, less crowded space behind it, he stopped, and I bumped rather unceremoniously into him.
"What did..."
He held up a single hand, making me shut up more efficiently than I liked in hindsight. A few seconds passed before his hand balled into a fist and he then pointed slowly towards a cluster of large dumpsters. I looked but saw nothing. Then, his finger drew a rough outline, and I spotted a weird shadow amongst the trash containers.
The shadow never moved as we approached, not even a bit. Walking softly, we tried to hide behind the dumpsters, staying in the blind angle of whatever cast the shadow. It seemed to work.
"Why are you breathing heavily?" Mischa asked out of the blue. I was baffled until I stepped around him.
"Because I'm #*@!ing programmed to," the robot copy answered, looking up at us from her spot on the ground. She was kneeling, with her back straight, looking like a sprinter before the sound of the gun.
"Is that my old hoodie?"
She nodded, grabbing the waist of the piece of clothing as if to look at it and make sure.
"Yeah, sorry, I kinda panicked," she muttered, in a weirdly low and either tired or outright sad voice. She looked at the fabric between her fingers for a little while longer, then let go of it and returned to her heavy breathing. It was controlled, her straightened back meant to let more air into her lungs, again like a sprinter getting ready for a race.
"What happens if you d..."
I cut Mischa of, a bit rudely.
"What the hell is going on?"
The copy looked at me, and I saw her face straight on for the first time since the barn. There were nasty cuts across it, and the left half was pretty clumsily bandaged, the edge of the bandages already a dark red.
"I'm pretty sure they tracked you," she said, and I noticed for the first time, watching how her lips moved oddly against the bandages, that her was sounded raspy, like she needed a good, deep cough to clear her throat.
"How do you know they didn't track you?" asked Mischa, suddenly looking over his shoulder more than once. The robot cracked a smile, which looked very wrong with the bandages.
"Because I tracked them."
"How did you even s..."
"The chair," she said, now making me the one to be cut off mid-sentence. "It was a solid #*@!ing thing, even found a few of them crushed against it once I got out from underneath it."
I said nothing more, asked no follow-up questions. It did make some semblance of sense, I had seen the table-chair thing and could testify to how it looked like two tons of solid metal. But most of all, it was the look in her eyes that made me quiet up. Something told me she had no real desire to think back to that recent part of her technically very short life.
Both Mischa and I jumped back a bit as she jumped to her feet.
"I think it thinks I'm fine, now," she said, making the two of us share a confused look. "My body," she added, glancing at our confused faces. "My body still thinks it's human and all. Gotta keep it happy so it doesn't mess with my brain."
She glanced very briefly at us for any comments or follow-up questions, but when none of us said anything quick, she looked right through us and to the street behind us.
"We need to leave," she said, in an oddly calmvoice, almost as if she was cheerful about it. Then she started walking away, going right past the two of us without a word.
"Bossy much," I whispered to Mischa as the copy marched towards a small alley, heading as far from the street as she could.
"Yeah, it really is a close copy," he muttered, not thinking about it much, from the slightly vacant look in his eyes. I gave him a scathing glance, but when he finally noticed it, he just shrugged sheepishly.
The alley, while fairly wide and well lit, was full of trash. It seemed like festival trash, things like discarded cups, cans and plastic bottles mixed with popped balloons and food wrappers. On most days, the main streets of town were clean. But apublic event and an alley made for a bad mix, and brought the worst out in the various litterbugs in town. I never even thought about the fact that I was frowning at the garbage kicked into  the corners of the alley before I noticed that the copy was also glaring at it with some disdain.
"What exactly are we running from?" I asked the copy, trying to distract myself from  our apparent similarities.
"Three, as far as I could see," she said, never turning around to look back at us. "They have some kind of... I don't know, heat ray or something. Makes your blood boil." She finally turned around, with a weird, uncomfortable look in her eyes. "And I mean yours, of course. I just getf blisters and some power surges. My fuses have handled it, at least this far."
"Fuses?" Mischa asked. "You have fuses?"
She nodded. "I think so. One of them grazed me," she said, holding up her arm and showing a patch of little red blisters just above the elbow. "I could feel something inside me practically light up, then parts were switched off and on again a moment later. It felt like a fusebox, if that makes any sense."
We were reaching the end of the alley, and the copy was starting to lean as she walked, trying to get a few glimpses around the corners at the end of it.
"It... doesn't," Mischa replied, grumbling as if to say that he knew that nothing he said would make a better explanation come his way. And he was right.
As we reached the end of the alley and the edge of the promenade, she tugged the hoodie in tighter, covering her face as much as she possibly could. I felt a weird urge to do the same, even though I knew I was not wearing a hoodie or anything else that allowed me to do so. It was impossible to look away from her. I even studied the way she walked and then compared it to myself. It was spot on.
"We need to lure them away from people," she said, keeping her voice low enough that likely only we could hear her.
"Why?" asked Mischa.
"Because innocents might get harmed," I found myself saying, answering the question he had given her without even giving it a second thought until afterwards.
Without saying anything, the copy made gestures to suggest that she saw two in the crowd. Two what was never explained, or how she knew, but she seemed confident. Confident enough to one moment later jump into the street, startling an older woman before stopping to look. It took a second for me to realize that she was waiting for them to look and see her. When they did, she immediately bolted down one of the narrow streets in the opposite side of the promenade.
The moment I set off to follow her, Mischa grabbed me by the back of my jacket, holding on so tight that I felt the strain of my shoulders against the seams inside it. Catching my footing quickly, Imade an awkward squat but never fell to the ground. Instead, I instantly turned, not even getting up, to scold him.
"She is a robot," he hissed, his teeth clenched together tightly. "She can handle it. You cannot!"
In that moment, just for a few seconds, I hated him. Hated his guts, hated his face, hated his voice. I wanted to punch him. Not because he was wrong, but because he was right. She had walked away from an exploding barn, and even if she got hurt, odds were that she could be fixed like any other machine. I hated my vulnerable flesh and blood.
"Then what?!" I asked, not hiding my anger even though I kept my voice under control. "Let her run blindly to her death because she wants to keep others safe?"
It clearly tore at him, wanting both to help and to keep out of harm's way. He was biting his lip and his head all but bobbled around as he stared anywhere except at me.
"No stupid risks," he finally said. "If we don't have the element of surprise, we don't risk it."
I nodded, then looked for my chance to jump into the crowd. As I looked, another two turned the corner and ran down the same alley as the copy and her first two pursuers! Tall, male, physically well built, and better dressed than most others around them, they looked a bit more professional than the average copy on the street, at least from what I knew.
We both got across the busy promenade unscathed, Mischa having to dodge a bit quicker than myself as he missed the opening in the crowd by perhaps half a second. The narrow street on the other side, a bit too open to call an alley when seen up close, was already empty. There was a bit of litter along the red and yellow houses that stood squished against one another, but the copy and those on its heels were gone. For a moment, we just stood there, a bit lost. Then the sound of something heavy hitting something solid could be heard. We didn't skip a beat before darting towards the sound!
We were near the town church, the roof of it towering above the surrounding one and two-story houses. People were walking in and out of the church, enjoying whatever cultural events were being run inside. None of them seemed to notice that a small girl down the street had thrown a large man into, and from the looks of it, straight through, a large plastic dumpster! Moods were high and children were running around. The resounding smack of what had happened to the dumpster apparently disappeared in the noise of people enjoying life.
Mischa was ahead of me now. Unlike me, he hadn't hesitated to look at the crowd. He was speeding ahead, keeping near the walls of houses along the street, eyes fixed on the copy as she looked around for other threats. She spotted us quickly and, rather surprisingly, smiled at us! Then she bolted out through an archway between two buildings.
"She's too fast," Mischa panted as I caught up with him, leaning against the corner of a local bike shop. "We'll never catch her."
He was fristratingly right. Whatever she had discovered about her robot abilities, she was pushing them to the utmost. In many ways, she might have been designed to mimic me, but the shape she was in was apparently superhuman. I was about to say something consoling to him, when she suddenly came shooting through the street, at the other end of the church grounds!
"I think she wants us to follow," I mumbled, ignoring the strained whine from Mischa as he pushed himself up on his feet again.
"Maybe she's just lost," he countered. "You never had the best sense of direction."
Ignoring his sadly very correct remark, I took a deep breath and made my way quickly towards where she had run through. If she continued in the direction I had seen her run, she would already be back on the promenade, and she seemed not to want that. Exactly what her plan was, if any, was becoming a bit of a puzzle to me.
That all changed when I got to where I had seen her! A bit down the street, she suddenly camerunning through, this time with five obvious copy robots in full pursuit! I was about to run down a parallel street when the two well-dressed men suddenly also turned the corner. One of them looked my way, just casually, as if checking that I wasn't a threat. The moment he looked at me, however, he became utterly confused, nudging his buddy and stopping. The other guy, about to start running, froze up jus tthe same, looking back and forth between me and where the copy was currently running around.
"Ida... Lund?" the first asked. Skeptical for a moment, I gave him a look up and down. He dressed stiff and almost robotic, but he moved like a human. At least, as much as I knew about the matter. I nodded, slowly.
"Then who..."
He looked down the street. The copy wasn't in sight at the moment.
"Long story," I told the two. "You with Alex?" They both nodded. I looked past them, at where the copy had been a moment ago. "I think I know what she's doing. Follow me!"
I didn't wait for them to answer or give any other sign of understanding, I just ran. It was a shot in the dark, but f she was thinking like me, odds were that I was thinking like her. That, at least, was the logic I came to.
Most people had no real idea how close to town the industrial area really was. They saw the cranes and warehouses across the harbor and thought that those were all there was. But all it took was one turn away from the road that started at the edge of the town center, and suddenly it was all shipyards and grain silos. We were obviously a little late to the party, judging from one broken wooden gate and the sounds inside, but there was still plenty of activity. As we got close to the broken gate, one of the men, who I had decided had to be FE agents or something like it, grabbed me by the shoulder, keeping me from entering. I turned and sent him a scathing stare, but he didn't even seem to notice. What I noticed, however, was that Mischa was no longer with us, no doubt having run out of steam back in town. I debated for a split second with myself if I should go back to find him or at least send him a message, but it seemed meaningless at this point.
"Stay here," said the agent who had pulled me back, as he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun that looked a little too big to be standard issue.
"Put that away," I hissed, entirely as a reflex. "People live around here, are you #*@!ing insane? You'll hurt someone."
He just gave me an offended glance. Although he didn't put the gun away, he lowered it and, from what little I understood about guns, put the safety back on.
"It won't do any good, anyway," I added, pulling myself loose enough to look around the corner, in through the gate. At about that moment, there was a loud crash as splintered wooden boards slammed to the ground nearby, shattering into bits and pieces. As I turned to look, the copy landed with a loud crunch, although the sound seemed to come from the sidewalk, not her!
She looked around, almost like on instinct. When she saw me, she just froze, an unasked question getting stuck on her face. Then she ran in the opposite direction!
The two agents instantly moved to follow her, but as the first copy robot slammed into the sidewalk from above, they stopped in their tracks, completely at a loss for what to do! When the second one slammed down, they began moving backwards, and when the third hit the pavement, they ran, one of them grabbing me by the jacket collar as he passed, physically lifting my entire body up and along with him! Even when my feet caught up and I started running, he never let go, making me feel like I was running on some weird treadmill as I bounced along. We heard the fourth copy that had been on her tail crash into the ground from above as we dove for cover in the loose rocks by the side of the road.
"What the hell are those?!" panted the agent that had not grabbed me. He was talking to his partner, though, not to me. And the partner just shrugged.
"Basically, robots," I interjected, and both of them sent me angry glares. But my brain was preoccupied with something else. "One is missing," I added.
The agents were not happy when I slipped out from the limited cover amongst the rocks and hurried across the road, but since neither was quick enough ot grab me, they quickly followed. The gate was nearly completely destroyed, only hinges and a few chunks of woods clinging to them still remaining in their intended place. The bulk of the two big doors was spread across the yard inside. Anything that had survived the initial impact of whatever had smashed through had not survived landing on the old cobblestone that covered the yard. Once through I turned to see the two agents calmly following me, guns still drawn. The last one, the one who had not grabbed me, stood for a moment to examine the wrecked gate doors.
"This would take a lot of strength," he said, seeming a bit like he was just thinking out loud. The other turned for a second, nodded with a grunt, and then turned back to follow me.
"There were five of them on her tail in town," I said without turning to look at them. "Four came out from here, still trying to catch her. That leaves one."
The building at the side of the road, now in one end of the yard, was large and looked like an average warehouse or similar storage place. Plants had grow a bit high along its red brick walls, and several windows were cracked, but the many machine parts visible inside suggested that it was still in use. It didn't take long to find the missing copy robot.
"Jesus #*@!ing christ," the nearest agent nearly yelled as he entered. I was still standing in the wide doorway, looking at the rather peculiar sight. He didn't know, or didn't understand, that we were looking at a robot. Had I not known, either, I would have reacted even worse.
A few metal beams were scattered across the floor, close to a machine that looked designed for either farming or torture. The robot had clearly stepped aside as the beams hit the ground, avoiding being crushed by them. It had apparently not noticed the long steel rods that came as the second wave, because several of them had pinned it down, leaving it hanging against the rotary blades of the machine at an odd angle. Not enough to make the blades rip through it, though, although they simply might not have the material strength to go through whatever these copy robots were made of. But the crate of machine parts that had crashed down on the robot as a third wave had plenty of force. The top of the robot, meaning most of the chest above solar plexus, was smashed back and into the blades. One arm had been ripped clear off by a machine part falling from the crate as it dropped. The head was still attached. Half of it, anyway.
The first agent walked slowly over to the twisted mess of metal and machines, looking like he was about to throw up. I looked over my shoulder to find the other one still standing in the doorway behind me.
"What the hell are..."
"I told you, robots," I said, cutting his slow sentence off before he could finish it. He just stood there, gawking at the brutalized robot.
"Peter Christensen," said the other one, from somewhere behind us. I turned confused to look at him, finding him standing closer than expected, phone in his hand. When he noticed me looking, he turned the phone over in his hand, showing the screen. It had a snapshot of the robot's battered face in some kind of message app, with then name he had mentioned written beneath it.
"How did you..."
"Secure facial recognition server back home," he replied, flipping the phone back around for himself.
"So, this guy was a robot? How do they... I mean..."
"Look, agent," I started, hesitating for a moment to think of something better to call him. He looked over, obviously having noted that.
"Sonne. Agent Sonne," he said as calmly as nothing. "That's agent Teglgaard," he added, pointing at the agent now putting his phone back in his pocket.
"Seriously? You want me to call you that on the street?"
His eyes flicked around a bit as he mulled it over.
"Simon," he added, looking and sounding oddly uncomfortable in doing so. "That's Josef."
I breathed deep, feeling that even such banalities as clear names at least made the situation a little easier to deal with.
"Great. Look, Simon, this is all a bit weird and all, but someone made a switch. The real Peter..."
"Christensen," the other one, Josef, clarified.
"Yeah, the real Peter Christensen is pretty probably dead. He started being a problem, I guess, somehow, and they replaced him with... that, to live his life in a more predictable way." I looked at the robot, getting the disgusting feeling that it was slowly, very slowly, sliding down the rods that stuck through its body. "When they needed someone to hunt down... the one we are chasing, I guess, they somehow activated him and the others to do the dirty work. Does that make any kind of sense? Like, at all?"
"Body snatchers," I heard Agent Sonne mumble, his voice sounding like that of a man fearing he was slowly going insane.
"I have no idea what that is," I reluctantly said, loud enough to make him aware that the mumbling bothered me.
"Old movie," he explained, still looking at the robot. "Aliens make copies of people to invade the world."
I nodded, but as I did, the talk of movies made me think of Mischa!
"Hey, the guy, well, the boy I was with in town, did you see..."
"We got a man on him. We thought we had two on you, of course, but..." As he said the last sentence, he pointed at himself and agent Teglgaard. "Wait, if the other one that looks like you is a robot, is there a copy of that boy, too? And is the other you, uhm, evil?"
"I don't think so. To both of those," I answered, but my attention was starting to wane. My eyes kept creeping over the rest of the place, gazing at the different machines and machine parts fastened inside of it. Ropes had been cut in multiple places, machines looking disturbingly poorly fastened. The copy had gone through a few failed attempts before making these things crash down on her pursuers. It had to have been fast, with the final success so close to the door!
"Sonne, how do we catch up to those other... robots, I guess? They have a solid head start and we have nobody out here."
Agent Sonne looked at his partner,clearly still thinking, digesting it all. I stopped my scan of the place for a moment, too, wanting to hear what he had to offer.
It turned out, he was pretty stumped.
"She thinks like you, right?" he finally asked. I just nodded. "Well, what would you do in her shoes?"
"Wet myself?" I answered, not really think about it. "Sorry, uhm... Well, if I had her strength and speed, I guess I would... Wait, she wasn't hiding here! She's ambushing them!"
I never really explained it beyond that before sprinting out the door, darting right past a surprised agent Teglgaard.
Outside, it was getting fairly dark, but as the streetlights came on, the outline of the area became somewhat visible. There were several places that she could have run, and my brain immediately started trying to spot or figure out something that would give me an answer. Nothing came to me.
"Go with your guts," said agent Sonne. I hadn't even heard him come out from the broken gate.
"The ship," I said in a slow, almost questioning voice. The ship was tethered nearby, looking almost stranded so close to the coast. A single boarding bridge connected it to the shore. "If she got them in there, there's only one way out. Well, other than the water."
There was no security on shore. The bridge was completely unguarded, both at the ground and on board. Nobody expected people to run aboard random ships, and it was probably impossible to start anything on board. People might be trusting, but they were not leaving the keys in the ignition for anyone to sail off with a whole ship.
On the main deck, the streetlights were still hung high enough to shine a light on everything. The deck was quiet, not a soul aboard, it seemed. Even with the streetlights on, the shadows were long, resulting in creepy black shapes crawling all over the deck. Agent Sonne had made an effort to board first, putting him in front of the three of us, so when he raised his hand as a fist, we all got the message and kept silent. He then spun two fingers around, which was a bit harder to interpret. Agent Teglgaard seemed to get the point, though, and started walking the deck in a circular pattern, looking closely at everything. After he pointed his gun at it, of course.
"Put that thing away," a voice whispered out of the dark. "People live around here, you lunatic. You'll hurt someone!"
All three of us stared at the shadow that formed out from behind what looked like a big transformer box on the deck. Even before her features became visible, I was rgumbling under my breath, and agent Sonne clearly noticed the similarities in hre remark, turning briefly to look at me with a weird expression on his face.
"Let me guess," he responded in a low voice, "they won't make a difference, anyway?"
The copy of me gave him a funny look, then looked at me. I just shrugged.
"Other than attract attention? No, probably not."
She gave the two agents skeptical looks, and Sonne lowered his gun and then holstered it. Teglgaard was a bit less compliant, only lowering his. He didn't even pu the safety back on. It went up again when a loud thump sounded from underneath us.
"Yeah, about that," she said in an awkward voice, looking back and down. "I got them lost down below, but they're still very much..." As if to emphasize her words, a quick series of loud thumps rang out. "... alive."
Both agents immediately began moving nervously backwards, while the robot Ida looked over her shoulder at something in the dark. The thumps were slowly moving towards whatever she was eyeing in there, but no amount of squinting was enough to make me see what she saw.
"Uhm, guys," she said, not letting the thing in the dark out of her sight, "what's the plan?"
I heard Sonne start answering something, but while one part of my brain listened enough to discount it as nothing important, another part made me look around the ship. Apart from the boat across to Germany for some tax-free shopping and a few small sailboats as a kid, I had no experience with ships, but there were plenty of things that looked hazardous to your health. Maybe something would be hazardous to theirs, too!
"Can we get them into the water? Does that damage them?"
Copy Ida looked at me, then shook her head.
"No," I grumbled, mostly to myself, "that did sound too easy."
"Where's the main power?" asked agent Teglgaard, surprising everyone for a moment. "The main power cable? Like, the central power cabinet?"
Everybody looked around a bit, until copy Ida put her hand on the big box she had come out of the shade from.
"Lots of electricity in here," she said very casually, taking a second to notice that everybody was looking at her. "What? I'm full of wires, sensing electricity is like any of you smelling a fart."
Nobody said anything beyond that, instead letting agent Teglgaard get to the big cabinet. Copy Ida helpfully snapped the simple bolt that locked the box, making the agent hesitate as he stepped past her. Without another word, he started tampering about inside the metal box, and everybody nervously gave him some room to do so. When a loud thump came some somewhere nearby below deck, he was the only one not to flinch and freeze.
"They're close," copy Ida whispered. "We should leave."
"There!" said the agent, loudly, stepping back with a proud smile. Everybody just stared. "I rigged the capacitor," he added, clearly thinking everybody would understand what that meant. When nobody clearly did, he looked first at the door nearby leading below deck, then back at the rest of us. "When it's charged, we blow it and release a burst of electricity, that will short anything electric. Like them."
"You made an EMP from a ship's fusebox?!" the other agent said, clearly surprised, and agent Teglgaard nodded proudly! His proud smile instantly faded when there was a loud thump from the door.
It all happened very fast. Agent Teglgaard stepped back at the last second, the door flying off its hinges and practically bouncing across the ship's deck where he had stood. The four copies, each one looking just like any other Nakskov local, stepped out in what looked almost like military formation, giving everyone a quick glance before two stepped forward and the other two raised what looked like large, forearm-mounted flashlights at us. The agent, meanwhile, pulled his gun out, and as he aimed it at the metal box, something clicked in my brain. Not thinking about it for a single second, I hurled myself at copy Ida, tumbling across the deck and towards the boarding bridge! We rolled off and into the water right before a shot rang out and a weird, tingly static filled the air.
The water felt like hitting a wall. I was still clutching her, and my head smacked into her chest as we hit, making everything blurry and dazed for a second. Then the cold water rushed in on me, and I instantly felt like I was passing out, only slowly. The next thing I really registered was copy Ida dragging my drenched body up on the rocks on the shore.
"Did it work??" I heard her call out, and I wanted to answer, until I realized she was calling to the agents on the boat. I couldn't hear their answer.
"It worked," she said to me, smiling from ear to ear.
"You okay?" I coughed, still spitting out foulsmelling and worse tasting water.
"Yeah," she answered, her voice now far more relaxed. "Thanks. I completely forgot what I was, for a sec there."
I nodded. "I think everyone did," I said, rolling over and onto my hands and feet. I looked up at her as I struggled with my balance, trying to get on my knees before standing. The bandages had come loose, revealing her badly damaged left side of the face. It looked like a bad movie effect, the skin dangling like thick rubber and the unrealistically simple bone beneath looking like something from a medical playset for children. There was no blood, making it seem almost like a kind of mask she wore. But it wasn't. She was a machine. And the thing the agent had put together would have blasted her, too.
"You two okay, there?"
Agent Sonne towered over us as he carefully stepped across the rocks. We both nodded.
"What now?" asked copy Ida, looking at the agents as she slowly got up, herself. The two looked over at the boat.
"We need to arrange a pick-up," agent Sonne answered. "We got them chained up with some stuff we could find up there, but there's no saying if that will hold them. One of them came back online or whatever almost immediately, right after we got the chains on them."
He kept looking at the boat, as if expecting something to happen.
"Is Josef watching them?" I asked, and it took a moment for the agent to react to his partner's first name. He nodded, though. Then he looked at us, with a very strange look in his eyes.
"I think we need to talk."
Something told me he was right.