She tried to ignore it, and to think about how she might have got here.
She had been riding her bike to school … and then she’d woken up. And between those two moments things were fuzzy. Edie frowned and tried to remember if there had been a bright white beam, or any sense of floating. But because she couldn’t remember either, they both remained possible in her mind, like that cat in the box. Daddy had told her the story about some guy who had a cat in a box that was both dead and alive until you opened the lid and found out which it was. So, until she remembered something different, she definitely could have been abducted by aliens.
Edie could remember earlier things though. She could remember saying goodbye to her mother as she pedalled away in the half-light of the early January morning. A brief glimpse over her shoulder, and the feeling of the bike wobbling slightly as she raised a quick hand in farewell. She could remember doing a good swerve to miss a dog poo on the pavement. She could remember stopping to zip up her anorak because it was even colder than it looked.
She could remember cutting across the corner of the wide green patch they all called the woods. There wasn’t a proper path there, but local people had made one just by taking the shortest route through the grass. In the winter the path was mud; in the summer it was flat and hard. Today it had been cold and dry – the grass alongside it encrusted with dark diamonds of frost.
She could remember swinging out of the woods and on to the pavement next to the road …
After that she couldn’t remember anything until now.
Edie tried turning her head again and this time when it hurt she thought about being at home in bed, with Mum stroking her forehead and Dad calling the doctor.
Maybe she’d ask the aliens to take her home soon. She was pretty sure they would; there wasn’t much Edie Evans didn’t know about aliens, and she knew that nobody got abducted for ever.
Maybe they’d take her home right away.
For some reason, thinking about going home made her throat ache and she nearly cried and her visor misted right up.
It wasn’t really a space helmet; it was a skateboard helmet that Dad had fixed with a tinted visor so she could be an astronaut as she rode her rocket bicycle to school every day.
One small BMX for mankind, he always said.
Without turning her head again, Edie carefully reached out her hand and felt around the floor for her bike. It wasn’t there. They must have left it on Earth. She got a pang, and hoped Frankie wasn’t riding it already; much of Edie’s life was devoted to keeping her bicycle out of her little brother’s clutches. He never took care of anything. He’d left his own bike outside so often that his trainer wheels had rusted right through. The thought of him mistreating her bike the whole time she was in space was infuriating and, at the same time, made her miss him.
Her visor misted up again, obscuring the gleaming pipes overhead.
After a while Edie fell asleep with her arm still outstretched, her delicate fingers curled and weightless.
When she woke for the second time she was in a bed, but it wasn’t her own. Even though it was so dark that she couldn’t see a thing, Edie felt sure that was true because this bed smelled like a road.
She sat up carefully. Her head had stopped aching and she was sorry she’d cried. Cross with herself for being a baby. Being in space was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her, or to anyone she knew, and she should make the most of it. Then when she got home she could tell people all about it, especially Dad.
Slowly she stuck her left hand straight out into the darkness and moved it about. There was nothing in front of her, but to her left she felt a smooth, cold wall. She kept her hand there, feeling safer for touching something solid.
‘Hello!’ she shouted.
Her voice sounded short and dull and like it wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t like it, so she didn’t shout again.
From somewhere a long way off there was the rhythmic hiss and underwater thudding of a great engine.
The spaceship was on the move.
Where were they going? Were they leaving their orbit of Earth and heading for the stars? She got a little thrill of terror.
With her left hand flat against the cold wall, Edie felt the bed with her right. It wasn’t a proper bed; it was like a camping one. The canvas sides were stitched over a tubular steel frame. She crawled slowly to the end and bumped her head on a wall. She felt around and found her space helmet and put it on. Then she turned and crawled even more slowly to the other end until the helmet hit another wall. Wherever she was, it was only as long as the bed.
Edie leaned as far as she could to the right without leaving the anchor of her left hand on the wall, but couldn’t feel the floor or another wall.
Maybe she was in a pod hundreds of feet up a wall in a hive of other captives. She imagined the beings around her – of every intergalactic species, each one thinking it was alone in the dark.
‘Hello?’ she said carefully. ‘I’m Edie.’
Nobody else said anything. Maybe they didn’t understand English. Maybe to them English was just like an oink or a purr would be to her. She wouldn’t talk back to a pig or a cat.
There was a blanket folded at one end of the bed. It wasn’t a nice soft one like the one they put over Nanny’s knees when they took her out in the wheelchair. It was cold and itchy.
In the black nothingness, and with one hand flat against the wall, Edie fingered the thin, rough wool.