by P. J. Sky
“Wait,” said Starla and dragged Ari to a stop.
“Look,” said Ari and pointed at the balloon. “That’s ya way outa here.”
“But he’s going to kill them all,” said Starla.
“Who?”
“Everyone. He means to kill them all. Today. That’s the point of this ceremony, this is a suicide cult and the Morning Star has them all under his spell.”
Several white-robed followers had stopped to stare at the balloon. Then, from among them, sprinted the reduced figure of Keshia, her frizzy hair blowing in the wind.
“This is our one chance,” said Ari. “I didn’t come for them, I came for you, an’ I got no idea what’s goin’ on with the world but I do know that balloon can take us back to Alice.”
“But I’ve seen it. At the full moon he means to kill them all. I saw it all but I couldn’t stop it.”
“Starla!” It was a girl’s voice. A follower was running towards them; thin, pale-skinned, her hood back and her long, blonde hair, almost white, flailing behind her. The girl Ari had seen during that first ceremony.
Ari slipped herself between Starla and the girl.
“It’s all right,” said Starla. “This is my friend, from the city.”
“Ya friend?”
“Starla,” the girl repeated. She came to a stop, panting. “You can’t leave me here.”
“But the Morning Star…”
“Screw the Morning Star. We’re friends, aren’t we?”
Ari sighed. “Look sister, we gotta go, whether ya friend comes or not.”
Liviana smiled.
Starla nodded. “Okay.”
Together, they scrambled over the ditch and approached the balloon. Ari could see the hunched form of the captain moving about on the deck. There was no longer any canopy, and Ari was able to reach up to the edge of the deck and pull herself up. She rolled onto the metal surface
The captain grinned at her. “Didn’t think I’d leave ya ta make it back ya selves, did ya?” He jabbed his thumb towards the balloon above. “Told ya she’d be right.”
Ari grinned. “I guess ya came through for us.”
The captain winked. “I usually do. Besides, I was paid to get the princess back to the city, so which one might she be?”
“The one in blue.”
“Well, better help ‘er up, we can’t wait around ‘ere much longer.”
Ari rolled over, reached down, and helped first Starla and then Keshia clamber aboard. As she got to her feet, Starla and Keshia reached down and helped up Liviana.
“All aboard?” the captain asked.
“We better be,” said Ari.
The captain nodded, reached for the burner, and pulled on the cord. In the dull light, the burner lit up the deck. The balloon began to rise.
Ari looked up towards the diminished sun. It was now reduced to a thin crescent of golden light, as if, in death, it was taking on the shape of the moon. The thick black smoke rolled in front of it and she followed the smoke down to the burning remains of the tower and the silos.
She glanced down at Keshia. “Nice work.”
Keshia grinned and nodded.
Ari placed her hand on Keshia’s shoulder. “Not bad for a kid from the streets of Bo.” She looked back across the fields towards the dark column of smoke and the mine. In her throat, a lump began to form. She thought of how her father had died here.
Perhaps there’s no making it right, she thought. So is that why this don’t feel right?
She took a glance at Starla and remembered her words.
“But he’s going to kill them all.”
But that ain’t my lookout, if these people wanna die, that’s up to them. I got debts to settle. And I got Starla out, that should be enough. I stopped him killing her, didn’t I? These people being here is their own fault, ain’t it?
Just like it was your fault when you plunged your blade between the ribs of the milky-eyed man, because hope makes you do desperate things. Where there’s hope, you’ll fight a war. Where there’s hope, you’ll believe a lie. Where there’s hope, you’ll trust a monster. These people are desperate, just like you were, and they’ve put their faith in the Bone Pointer. But do they deserve to die for it?
The balloon sank. With a thud, the deck bounced off the ground and Ari struggled to keep her balance. The metal deck scraped along the dusty earth. Above their heads, the burner throbbed, lighting up the ground around the balloon.
“What’s wrong?” asked Keshia.
The captain shook his head. “We’s too heavy. We’s gotta lose some weight.”
Ari looked to the captain. “We can’t stay ‘ere much longer.”
The captain nodded. “I’m givin’ ‘er all she’s got but she ain’t what she was an’ we’re five of us.”
Ari looked back towards the column of smoke and felt the cold hand around her heart.
All these people are gonna die unless someone does something about it.
But it don’t have to be you, Ari.
“Yeah, it does,” she said aloud.
She thought of the moment she’d slid the blade between the ribs of the man with the milky eye; she thought of Max falling down into the water; she thought of the two soldiers tumbling over the tailgate. What about the other soldiers in the trucks? What about every life she’d taken? She’d never wanted any of it. And how else could she make it all right?
You can’t ever make it right, what’s done is done, you just gotta live with it, but you can change the future.
And besides, thought Ari, I’ve been running for as long as I remember. I ran from the hut, I ran from the mine, I ran from Cooper, I ran from the city gates and I ran from the swamp. If I run now, I’ll be running my whole life.
“It does what?” asked Keshia.
Ari looked down at her. “I got someplace to be, kid.”
“Where?”
“Ari, what is it?” asked Starla.
Ari shrugged. “Ya near enough said it ya self, sister, someone’s gotta stop the Bone Pointer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just sayin’.” Ari looked at Keshia. “Look after her will ya? Ya earn’t ya self a one-way trip to Alice.”
“But…” said Starla.
“Ari, you can’t,” said Keshia.
“Look,” said Ari. “You’ll be right, I didn’t wanna go there anyhow.”
Ari winked at Keshia, then she jumped from the deck onto the dusty ground below.
Chapter 31
“Ari, no…” Starla shouted down from the deck. “Ari, I order you to get back up here.”
But it was too late. From the ground, Ari watched the huge balloon rise into the sky, and with it Keshia and Starla and the captain and that strange friend of Starla’s.
“Ari,” cried Starla again. She seemed to be searching inside her robe. She held out her hand and dropped something from the balloon. It fell to the ground near Ari’s feet. Ari looked down and saw the familiar form of her blade. When Ari was imprisoned, Starla must have taken it.
Ari leant down and retrieved the blade. She slid her finger along its familiar curve. In her throat, the lump grew.
Maker, I’m sorry for the lives I’ve taken. I’m sorry for Jirra and Koora, ‘cause their deaths were my fault even if I never pulled the trigger. The Bone Pointer never made me do that. And I’m sorry about the man among the rocks with only one eye and everyone else and even Max. If I could make it right I would but I can’t. But if I die today, and if I return to the earth, know I was at least trying to make it right. All this time, I wasn’t living some life of luxury in Alice I didn’t deserve, I was out here trying to make it right.
Ari looked up and saw the girl with the white hair move next to Starla and place her hand on her shoulder. The girl that, inadvertently, Ari had given up her place on the balloon to.
“Maka,” she whispered, “blow them home.”
Ari turned her back on the balloon. She looked down at her hands; palms that had brok
en everything they’d ever touched.
Well not today, she told herself. Not today; if I’m still here then it stops here.
She looked up and all the robed followers had gone. The dark fields were empty. Above, the last sliver of sunlight was rapidly disappearing.
“But he’s going to kill them all.”
Ari squeezed her fingers around the blade.
Not if I get there first.
∆∆∆
The Bone Pointer held out his arms. “Have faith, my children. For five-hundred years I have waited for this moment. It is time.”
From inside their white robes, the followers removed their ceremonial daggers and held them out, blades towards their hearts.
Overhead, the crows now circled.
Blade in hand, still in her red robe, Ari slipped passed the guards. They didn’t seem to see her; they seemed as entranced as any other follower. They too held daggers out, blades pressed towards their hearts.
The world was now luminescent, bathed in a strange, unworldly, milky glow. The ridge surrounding the basin, and the followers in their white robes, and the stage and the coloured flowers, all glowed, and most of all, the pale white head of the Bone Pointer glowed like a celestial beacon. He was like a landlocked star, incandescent in the new crystal twilight at the end of the world.
Ari stepped up onto the stage. The Bone Pointer paused and turned his head towards her. He lowered his arms and his big, dark eyes fell on her.
“My child,” he said, in those smooth, soothing tones. “You have come to me now, as I foresaw. You shall be my salvation. But where is my beloved Starla?”
Ari could feel herself being sucked into those deep, glassy, phosphorescent eyes, like midnight pools, opening a portal into another void. They were as dark and cold as his skin was light and glowing.
“She’s gone.”
The Bone Pointer nodded. “Such a pity that she won’t be joining us, and now nothing will stop the armies of the snake, but it cannot be helped. Her purpose was almost through. I see you brought your own blade.” He nodded to the blade in Ari’s hand.
Ari tried to prise her eyes from the Bone Pointer’s dark voids.
“I see,” said the Bone Pointer. “You mean to kill me with it.”
Ari swallowed and her fingers began to tremble.
“It’s all right, I understand now. I couldn’t see it before but now I do. You were never a believer, but it is what was needed to bring you here. Always, when I looked to the future, all paths led to here, to this place with you. Always, it was our destiny. Beyond this point I could not see, it was you I needed to show me the way. Now, turn your blade.”
Ari’s hand started to shudder. She saw her father, toiling in the mine, his face thick in coal dust, his fingernails torn. Tears began to roll down her cheeks.
“It’s all right child,” said the Bone Pointer. “In the stars, we will spend an eternity together. I’m sorry about your father, but it had to be this way.”
In Ari’s fingers, the blade began to twist.
“This is the end of the world, my child, but we shall live on beyond it.”
In her mouth, Ari tasted salt. Maker, she prayed, I can’t believe this is the end of the world. A world with Starla and Keshia and Bina and Doug and all those people in can’t just end like this. So I can resist. I can stop this, Maker. I couldn’t save those others but I can save them at least.
But her fingers disobeyed her, and the blade continued to turn.
The Bone Pointer stepped closer.
“The time draws near, when the moon swallows the sun.”
The crowd began to hum. The vibrations shuddered through Ari’s soul. She thought of the man with the milky eye; the blade sinking into his gullet.
It was him or me. But what lets me place my life before his?
And Ari knew she’d never come here to kill the Bone Pointer. Even if she’d thought she had, she hadn’t.
But this man killed my Dad.
The Bone Pointer raised his hand. “Raise your daggers, the hour is upon us.”
In the final rays of the dying sun, a sea of raised daggers glinted.
Ari thought of Bina’s words.
“Some folks can resist.”
I can resist.
The moon swallowed the sun.
We make our own destinies; we don’t let others make them for us.
Ari’s wrist loosened, the blade twisted back, and before she’d thought of what she was doing, Ari had slipped the blade beneath the Bone Pointer’s ribcage. It cut in as easily as it would the soft underside of a dingo.
The Bone Pointer’s jaw dropped.
All along the ridge, the ground exploded.
∆∆∆
Beneath the stage, the ground shook. Through the dark sky above, missile projectiles left arcs of vapour in their wakes before plunging into the edges of the ridge with angry flickers of ball lightning and thunderclap explosions.
The Bone Pointer collapsed to his knees, his pale face stiffening into a contortion of horror.
Ari’s heart thumped against her chest and her legs began to shudder. She could feel the Bone Pointer's influence slip away like water through a dam. And there, deep in his phosphorescent eyes, those black holes into another universe, she saw her father wave goodbye at the door.
“I’ll be back soon, I promise, but your mother needs medicine.”
She remembered, in those final moments together, him leaning down to kiss the top of her head, and this was a memory entirely hers that the Bone Pointer couldn’t touch.
The luminescence in the Bone Pointer’s eyes began to fade. On his knees, the Bone Pointer began to look small and old, as if his supernatural form would hold only as long as his fading mind. His skin lost its glow. He tried to mouth something, but no words came.
Ari withdrew the blade. “I figured it out see. I couldn’ let ya do it.”
She turned her back on the Bone Pointer. Facing the audience, she raised her blade. All eyes seemed to fall on her. She could feel the warm blood dripping down to her elbow.
The Bone Pointer’s blood; blood like any others.
A second set of projectiles struck the ridge scattering dust into the air. The ground rippled and chunks of earth rolled down into the edges of the basin. At the back, some of the robed followers were on their feet and running, but most still knelt, eyes affixed to Ari, their daggers still pressed to their hearts, as if the loss of the sun and the falling missiles were all portents of the end of the world.
But this can’t be the end of the world, thought Ari, I can’t let it be. I don’t believe it can be. Maker wouldn’t end it like this.
Ari looked up to the sky, to the perfect black disc now suspended above her; a ring of yellow light where the sun had once been, as if a hole had opened up into the heavens. It was as if the Maker was looking down on her through one vast pupil; one ringed with a slender iris of gold.
“Maka, forgive me,” she said under her breath. “I tried so hard, but everythin’ I tried… I’m sorry Maka, don’t end it like this.”
I killed the Bone Pointer, she thought. And I feel his blood on my hands, and sticky like any others. But these people don’t deserve to die.
“Maka, I give my life for theirs.”
Black smoke rolled across a dark sky crisscrossed in razor-blade vapour trails. A sweet odour permeated the air and Ari tasted the blood-like tang of metal. And all the time, the Maker’s one eye beat down from the heavens. And then, as if in answer, a golden ray of light broke forth from the edge of the disc and the sun began to reemerge, this emissary of the Maker; the great, red, merciless sun, true ruler of the wasteland.
Ari heaved a sigh and dropped her eyes to the audience. She held the blade out straight and watched the crowd do the same. It was as if she could feel The Maker inside her, urging her on, telling her what to do. She dropped the blade. It bounced on the stage floor among the red and blue and yellow petals.
The sun had emerged from behind
the moon.
Then soldiers swarmed over the ridge like ants bursting from their hive. The thousands of followers scrambled to their feet and started to run, leaving behind a dangerous clutter of discarded ceremonial daggers.
∆∆∆
Ari jumped from the stage and began to run.
Soldiers in vests, the snake-like symbol of the Black Mulga emblazoned on their chests, large guns in their hands, were charging the followers like dogs chasing sheep. People shouted, gunshots cracked, and somewhere Ari heard a lion roar.
Across the ridge, the squat, angular shapes of tanks heaved themselves into view, their cooking-pot gun turrets swinging towards the basin below.
In the confusion, Ari spotted the red robe of a guard, his hands now in the air. The Bone Pointer's men had clearly been unable to give any kind of fight. In those last moments before the Black Mulga invaded, Ari wasn’t even sure the Bone Pointer’s guards were prepared to fight. Either way, her red robe now felt like a target on her back. She slung it off and discarded it at her feet.
Reasoning that the soldiers were coming over the ridge from the direction of the fields, Ari instead made for the smoking remains of the tower. She weaved around frantic followers and ducked as gunfire clattered through the now toxic air. Her throat stung and her eyes watered. Everywhere she looked, patches of earth seemed to be on fire. She leapt over a steaming chasm that cut like a lightning bolt into the basin floor. Looking back, the great column of smoke that churned from the peak of the mine was now joined by numerous new smaller vents.
She caught sight of the lion. It was running in circles, its head down, its tail up and waving like a snake, while soldiers closed in around it. It roared, pulled back like a coiled spring and pounced. The soldiers jumped back, laughing, and waved their arms as if this was all some sort of game. One soldier held out a red robe and waved it like a flag at the frustrated animal. Another soldier swung a rope noose.