The robots were sleek, angular and faceless, like the posh hand-driers you found in good hotels but ten times the size and festooned with Doctor Octopus-like tentacles. There was certainly something medical about them – they had laid her on a metal slab surrounded by an array of machinery, like an operating table. There had been other people trapped on their own slabs all about her, shouting and pleading, pinned down and probed by fierce lights from above. One of the octopus arms had pricked her neck with a needle and after that she remembered her ordeal only in dizzy snatches. Floating in a tank of water. Something like a large metal bullet being pushed up her nose. Filaments like metal spider-legs forcing their way under her fingernails.

And when she had woken up again, here, she’d found herself wearing some kind of squishy, fluid-filled body suit, like a man-sized IV bag tailored to fit, limbs and body hidden by the dark red solution inside.

‘Bet you never wore anything like that on a fashion shoot, huh.’

Chantelle jumped as if poked with a stick, and saw beside her—‘Kim!’

She tried to grab him in a hug but fell dizzily forwards. He tried to catch her but fell instead into her plasticky arms and they both went down with a squishy thump.

‘Smooth, aren’t I?’ he said.

‘You agreed the terms and conditions, then.’

‘You charged right in. I’ve always been easily led.’

‘And I’ve always led easily.’ Chantelle’s smile faded as she woozily disentangled herself. ‘What have they done to us, Kim?’

‘Classic alien abduction shtick. Medical tests. Mental scans. Implants.’

‘Implants? I can’t! People like me for my natural look …’ Chantelle caught herself and snorted. ‘You don’t mean those sorts of implants, do you.’

‘Not cosmetic. These are in us now for a purpose.’ Kim held up his red fingertips, and Chantelle saw little metal splinters sticking out from under the nails. She looked down at her own nails, cracked and torn, and saw she had the same things, like the tips of tweezers pushing out from her flesh. She gingerly tapped finger and thumb together, afraid they would hurt. But she felt nothing. Numb. Anaesthetised.

‘What have they done to us?’

‘I have no idea.’ Kim shrugged. ‘You know I always dreamed of being abducted by aliens. It was kind of the Holy Grail, you know. The ultimate experience. You met them, you communed – just as we have.’ He actually laughed out loud. ‘God, I wish I had my recorder. The podcast I could do here.’

‘Alien abductions …’ Chantelle had caught enough episodes of The X-Files to know about those. ‘Thing is, they let you go after, don’t they? All the people taken, they wake up back where they were taken.’ She looked at him, willed herself to focus. ‘You think they’re going to send us back to Earth?’