Chapter 10

I stepped clumsily over a cowpat and tried to sweep my hair out of my eyes. It was just breaking dawn, nearly twenty-four hours since we had been abducted, and I was crossing the field that is a short cut to my house. I shivered in the cool spring dawn air – I was still wearing the hideous outfit the Skirt-Na had chosen for me. I tried to think of a speech that would satisfy my parents about my whereabouts, but I couldn't concentrate. My mind raced with imaged of Andalites, Yeerks and death. I tried to block out them out, but it was difficult. Everything I remembered was true, and we couldn't afford not to believe any of it.

The four of us had finally arrived back on Earth, after about sixteen hours of flying. Funny how it takes a complete day to travel halfway round the world, yet less than that to travel tens of thousands of miles through outer space. But we had made it. We had survived a harrowing and incomprehensible ordeal, yet this was only the beginning. The module had taken us back to the last place on Earth the Skirt-Na had visited – where they had abducted us unawares. A small town just outside Leeds, in Yorkshire. My house was in the southern part of the town, near the motorway. My family – just myself and my parents – had just moved here from Hampshire. Asha had told us that she had been staying with relatives during the school holidays and was meant to be returning home to London today. She had quickly grasped that fact that she wouldn't be going back home to London anymore. According to Philip, their house was nearby, just outside the town itself. I had suggested we meet up in a couple of hours, around lunchtime. Just enough time to catch some sleep and make our preparations for leaving. He had given me directions on how to get there. The directions were from a driver's point of view. He either didn't realise I wasn't old enough to hold a licence, or his was deliberately distracting me from acquiring an animal and making my way there cross country.

Philip had remained unconvinced about the whole mission. He was determined to ignore the whole experience and wipe it off as a strange nightmare. But I and the others knew that we couldn't take that attitude. We'd seen and been through more than enough to completely screw with our ideas of reality. Aliens. Whoa. Morphing? Been there, done that – but there was a whole lot more to come. A bumblebee suddenly buzzed into my face, snapping me out of my trance. I could morph that, I realised. The Andalite had barely given us any information about morphing, other than the fact that we could morph anything we could touch, and that we couldn't stay in morph for over two hours at a time. But we had experienced the morph first hand. We had become Andalites. My mind suddenly raced with possibilities. If we were to – could – find this small band of human resistance, perhaps it wouldn't be as difficult as I thought it might be. Being able to become animals opened up all sorts of possibly! But it would be challenging. No one had ever been able to do anything like this before. There were no books on travelling in the form of animals. Nothing around on the internet. And of course, no government leaflets on how to act if you're a fugitive of a parasitic alien war lord. As I walked, I could feel my mind slowly beginning to plan ahead. Five thousand miles is a long way to travel, even by plane. But of course, we couldn't take the plane. We couldn't use any type of human transport. Eramas had warned us that the Yeerks knew that we were human. By now, they would know our names, faces, addresses. And within less than a day, they would arrive on Earth to begin hunting us down. I guess a body capable of morphing – human or Andalite – would make a pretty decent host for the Yeerks.

We'd need a good variety of animals, I thought. Animals for all situations and all terrains. Land morphs, sea morphs, sky morphs. Wet and dry terrains. Hot and cold environments. Morphs for running. Morphs for hiding. Morphing for spying and for fighting. Being able to become an animal would be a fantastic bonus – but of course each animal had it's weaknesses as well as its strengths. So far, the only creatures we could become were human and Andalite. Human wouldn't get us very far without being caught. Andalites would be far too conspicuous. A Controller would recognise one immediately. No, we couldn't use Andalites again, we'd have to find our own to acquire. But where could we acquire such a variety of creatures? A farm? A zoo? A zoo would be the best option, but there wasn't one around here, as far as I knew. And there was no way they'd give a bunch of kids access to the lion's den. I thought about morphs I could do closer to home. Pets? I had a dog – a greyhound called Tallulah. She'd be a good first morph, and the speed of the greyhound – and possibly the teeth – might be useful later on. I took a deep breath as I walked in through the front door. It was 6am. Just enough time to try out my dog morph before my parents woke up and started banging on about disappearance. Hopefully they would have guessed that I'd got some good exam results and had gone round to a friends for some all day and night partying.