A Girl Called Ari

  “Na, you’ll be right. Ya don’ need me now anyway. Though I reckon you’d ‘a made it here anyhow.” Ari grinned. “Ya tougher ‘an ya look sister.”

  “Please,” said Starla. “That’s not true. I do need you.”

  “Listen to your friend Starla,” said her father through the screen.

  “And you can shut up,” cried Starla to her father.

  Ari stepped forward and took Starla’s hand. “Ya know, I ain’t never met anyone like you. You’re amazin’. But ya belong here. I don’. This ain’t my world, I see that now.” Ari reached into her pocket, drew something out, and pressed it into Starla’s palm. Then she reached up and wiped a salty tear from Starla’s face. “But who knows? Maybe one day it will be. Until then, you keep these.”

  Ari leaned forwards and gently kissed Starla on the cheek.

  “Well sister, be seein’ ya round maybe.” Ari winked at Starla and her pale eyes sparkled. Then she turned and walked away.

  Starla collapsed on her knees and watched until Ari had disappeared completely into the darkness. She tightened her fingers around the two lashes. She tried to speak but nothing came. A lump grew in her throat and she was more alone then than she'd ever felt before.

  Chapter 36

  The city Starla returned to felt cold and sterile, and its people seemed shallow, preoccupied with trifles that no longer seemed important. And with the Panache family gone, Starla found herself alone. Liviana was gone, but so was everyone with whom they were ever connected. And there was no more talk of marriage. If the power succession still bothered her father, Starla saw no hint of it. There was even a rumour that, when the time came, Starla would rule the city alone. But for now at least, her father was more powerful than ever.

  At society gatherings, where once those attending kept their respectful distance, they now actively avoided Starla. She'd been on the outside, a stigma that was difficult to escape. But her family name was also a little more dangerous, and Starla didn’t know which one of these factors repelled people more. What she hadn’t expected was to feel so acutely the resulting loneliness. She'd found a new status; an exile within her own city, and in her isolation she never did discover the exact details of her botched abduction, or what the Panache family had hoped to gain from it. And if her father knew the details, he didn’t share them with her.

  Once Starla had confronted her father, specifically to know the whereabouts of Liviana. Starla had always thought she’d no time for Liviana, but now she missed her. At parties, she wondered what terrible hair colour Liviana might have chosen. At the zoo, she missed her bored companion. Had Liviana been a part of Max’s plot? She had deliberately spilt the wine, but had she deliberately spilt it for that purpose? Her father had told her not to worry about such things, that the Panache family were being dealt with. And Starla suspected her father had spied an opportunity to cement his power and be rid of the Panache family all together. But was Liviana now in exile somewhere in the wasteland?

  Janus became Starla’s personal guard. For his efforts he was promoted. Sometimes Starla caught him watching her, and she felt slightly safer for it.

  As time passed, Starla would frequently find herself gazing out into the wasteland surrounding the city and wondering what became of Ari. Ari had left behind an emptiness in Starla’s heart that she couldn’t easily fill. Now in memory, Ari seemed nothing more than a ghost, one of the many that haunted the world beyond the walls.

  At night, Starla would wake from some nightmare or other and would wonder where she was. She would expect the silence of the desert, huddled under a salt sack, shivering in the cold, and instead was met with the hum of the air conditioner and the traffic moving far below and the twinkling lights of the city refracted through her window blinds onto the dark walls of her bedroom. And on nights like these, she would go to the big windows and look out over the luminous cityscape, and she would let her eyes wander, from the chasms of steel and glass and blinking lights, to the inky blackness beyond.

  Occasionally she would look up, to the star that never moved. She no longer thought of it as her own, or Velle Stella, now it was the Maker star. She would think of Jirra, and what he’d said about the wall. And, she would remember the words of the voice from the sky and the dream of a world without borders, for this was what the wall undoubtedly was. A physical barrier that separated one group of people from another. The more she thought on it, the more pointless the wall seemed. It was too arbitrary. Now the outsiders had faces, and ones she couldn’t hate. And the face she thought of most was Ari’s.

  One girl who’d almost achieved the impossible and broken through the wall. Where she was now, Starla could only guess. Like the old man, she had crumbled back into the red dust. Now, the world beyond the wall was once more a mystery, but one Starla couldn’t easily forget. And, nor could she forget the girl with the shaven head.

  The salt digging girl.

  The orphan girl.

  The girl called Ari.

  Special Thanks

  No writer can work entirely alone, therefore I would like to give special thanks (in no particular order) to: Katherine Moore, Guy Russell, Maureen O'Brien, Karen Guyler, Colin Hurst, Keren Stiles, Alan Stiles, Autumn Sky, all the members of Writing Group, all the members of Now Write, all the members of Monkey Kettle, and all the friends and family who have supported me, proof read, and generally been there when I needed you.

  You know who you all are. Thank you.