Ari Goes To War: (The Adventures of Ari #2) Read online

  Ari Goes to War

  By P. J. Sky

  Copyright © 2021 by P. J. Sky

  All rights reserved. No part of this book my be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Ari Goes to War is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  First edition

  Cover artwork by AutumnSky.co.uk

  Contents

  Ari Goes to War

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Special Thanks

  The Adventures of Ari

  #2

  Ari Goes to War

  Chapter 1

  As the aircraft began to tumble from the sky, spinning and twisting like a stiletto shoe hurled in a fit of rage from the railings of her penthouse balcony, Starla Corinth found herself thinking of Ari, her wasteland saviour, and whether or not she’d ever see her again. In or out of the city, in her brief existence, so few others seemed to have touched her heart.

  Through her porthole window, she watched the aircraft engine engulfed in angry flames and it felt as if her heart was exploding. Her throat felt as dry as the barren wasteland beyond the windowpane, and a sickening shiver began to work its way up her spine. She turned to Janus, her bodyguard, who sat opposite, his soft, brown eyes now wide with fear. He seemed far away, and from the pit of her stomach she could feel the panic rising like some violent sea ready to drown her.

  Her head spun with images; a dead dog sliding down a boulder, in its wake an angry red smear; Max stood on the landing platform of the dam, gun in hand; her father’s wasted body in that hospital bed in his suite; Ari almost drowning in the icy waters of the river. She remembered the outreach programme to provide aid to the people on the outside; had it all been some way to reconnect with Ari? Even now, was this strange girl from the wasteland her only sane tether in this world of chaos?

  An explosion tore through the rotor blades, interrupting her thoughts and sending shockwaves back and forth along the metal fuselage. Janus’s knuckles bulged white against the armrests of his seat.

  Starla tried to speak but it was as if the oxygen had been sucked from her lungs.

  Up front, in the aircraft’s glass cockpit, with sweat dripping down his brow and along the bridge of his wide nose, a pilot wrestled with his controls. Left, right, up, down, but no movement of the yoke made any difference. The pilot pressed the radio button.

  “Mayday, mayday, the star is going down. Repeat, The Star Is Going Down.”

  Ahead, through the cockpit windows, the mottled ground spun, flat and rust red, baked hard under an endless beating sun, and covered with angry cracks like scars. A long, straight road of ancient tarmac split the world in two, and far ahead, almost lost in the clouds of red dust, were the distant forms of towers, those jagged teeth of glass and steel, jewelled with blinking coloured lights, that formed their great city locked behind its high walls.

  “Hold on, Miss Corinth…”

  It was Janus who’d spoken. Starla wanted him to use her first name. She couldn’t drag her eyes from his. Beneath the table, she felt his foot against hers and she didn’t pull back.

  She tried to speak. “I…?” Her voice was lost in the scream of the descending aircraft.

  Starla could feel her body being dragged towards the edge of the fuselage, as if the world beyond the thin skin of metal — an alien world of chaos and fear — was dragging her back. Her abduction in the wasteland, her rescue, her life back in the city, those stolen moments with Janus, her father’s illness, the outreach programme, the return to the wasteland on her own terms. All these memories rushed through her mind in a series of chaotic images. Always, at the edge of everything, there was the omnipresent spectre of the world beyond the wall. Her aircraft was going down. The wasteland was dragging her back.

  ∆∆∆

  Earlier, Starla had tried one final time to justify to her father her return visit to the wasteland. In the two years that followed her return to the city, the wasteland had continued to cast a long shadow over her new life. From the moment she’d got back, it had been clear to her that it would be impossible for her to take up her old life where she’d left it; she could no longer live in ignorance of the world beyond the city walls any more than she could relate to those around her who still did. Instead, she’d become a daughter of two worlds, and the longer she lived in one, the more she was drawn back to the other.

  “The arrangements have been made. I’m going back, and that’s final.”

  Starla looked down on her father’s diminished form, so thin now that it barely ruffled the bedclothes. In her upper chest, a low ache formed. Was this a pang of sympathy or something more? Perhaps, despite everything, she really did love him? But sometimes love and pity could be so difficult to distinguish between.

  But how, she wondered, am I supposed to feel about him? Visiting him every day, and watching him, with every shallow breath, grow weaker. There’s an empty place in my heart that this pang tries to fill, but that isn’t the same, is it?

  In her left eye a tear formed.

  Will I miss him when he’s gone?

  A lump bubbled up her throat.

  But can I really be this cold?

  The mayor’s chin dropped to his wasted chest and, with the long, thin fingers of his right hand, he gripped the tiny circumference of his wrist. He looked away, towards the vast windows that looked out from their tower and over the glistening city, all the way to the wall. The mayor’s most recent stroke had paralysed the left side of his face. Titus Corinth, mayor of The City, with his hollowed out cheeks and sinking chest, was now a pale shadow of his former self.

  “I won’t be gone long,” she continued, blinking away the tear. “I’ll be back in a day or so. Matron will look after you.”

  The mayor turned his face to hers. A little saliva dripped from his open mouth. Automatically, Starla lowered herself to the bed and used his silk handkerchief to wipe away the excess liquid. She ran the silk fabric between her thumb and finger. The very finest silk of course, from the mouths of cloned silk worms. Starla straightened the bed sheets around her father’s waist.

  “Shhhh…” he tried to say.

  “Shush father, it’s final. These people deserve our help. In the city we have so much, it is only right we share a little.”

  This was Starla’s pet project; the outreach programme. If Starla couldn’t bring the outsiders to the city then she would bring the city to the outside. And with reports from all over the wasteland that wells were drying and people were going hungry, it now seemed more important than ever that she try to help those beyond the city walls. At first, she’d been surprised when her father had agreed to her
idea. She’d wondered at his angle. Like her, did he also wonder if the outsiders might bolster their position in the city? But she’d begun to suspect his new found charity towards her had just as much to do with his failing health. It was as if it had taken her abduction for her father to really notice her, and then his declining health for him to really appreciate her. Now he seemed to find himself unable to refuse her.

  What, she wondered, will it take for me to appreciate him?

  The low ache grew. She looked into her father’s yellowing eyes, their centres pale and grey.

  Ari has grey eyes, she thought. And she’s out there in the wasteland.

  Not for the first time, Starla wondered if this scheme were also some way to reconnect with her wasteland rescuer, the girl called Ari. To help those amorphous masses beyond the walls was one thing, but to help Ari was quite another. Ari personified her project. Starla felt she owed Ari a debt she could never repay, but it was also more than that. Starla missed her. Whether or not she owed Ari anything, she’d want to help her anyway. After all they’d been through, the thought of Ari starving in the famine-stricken wasteland, like the forgotten skeleton they’d encountered together beside those ancient railway tracks, was unthinkable.

  Will Ari still be in Cooper, working the salt plains? Will I find her in her cave with her little pictures drawn on the walls and her collection of coloured beads and broken pottery?

  Irrationally, Starla now missed this cave she’d spent but one night in.

  But Ari wasn’t the only person in Starla’s life to remain stranded in the wasteland; she’d recently learned her mother might also be out there. Between strokes, her father had confessed his crime, as if, now that he walked within the shadow of death, he’d found it necessary to clear this burden from his chest. Her mother, he’d explained, had been an adulteress, and her father had cast her out of the city, as was the answer to so many of his problems.

  In the golden city, you lived by his rules, or you took your chances in exile and could never return.

  “Shhhh…” her father tried to speak.

  Starla leant forwards. “So what is it, Father?”

  “Shhh…you’re a f-f-fool Sharla.”

  The left corner of Starla’s lips tilted upwards. “Perhaps, but not in the way you think. Things will change. You must see that.”

  She thought of her mother, a faceless figure lost in the wasteland. She’d never even seen a picture of her.

  Did she look like me? Did she have my deep blue eyes?

  She’d sat at her marble-topped dressing table and stared at her reflection, searching beyond her father’s jaw and her father’s angular nose, slightly upturned, searching for her mother’s face.

  Her father’s eyes widened. “Shhh… you’re m-m-my weakness-sss.”

  And his grey eyes looked naked, stripped of all pretence. In paralysis, his face was no longer a wall; no longer opaque. It was an open door, and more expressive and animated than it ever had been before. The involuntary movements of his facial muscles were small but honest.

  The lump in Starla’s throat grew. She saw her father’s withdrawn cheeks, and she thought of her mother face down in the dust, like the starved skeleton.

  “Father, you know we should do this, you know it’s right. And now with the famine, we can no longer ignore the people on the outside.”

  Who am I trying to convince, she wondered, him or me?

  The imagined image of her mother became the face of Ari, starving by those ancient railway tracks, the crows swooping overhead.

  Her father closed his mouth. He let go of his wrist and moved his right hand limply like a flipper. It barely left the bedclothes.

  Starla narrowed her eyes. “All those years you hid it from me. All those years, you couldn’t tell me about my mother.”

  Her father’s eyes widened.

  Starla clenched her fists, rose from the bed, and walked to the window. The pang in her chest had grown hot and red. It was as if pity and loss and loneliness, and perhaps even love, were all balling into anger. She was entrapped by her father’s illness, as if it formed a wall around her as real as the one that enclosed the city, and she longed once more to escape.

  Outside, the city stretched out in chasms of shimmering glass and steel. A city behind a wall, closed in from the rest of the world. A city that ignored the poverty-stricken wasteland beyond its walls. A city of blinking lights and broken dreams, under the tyrannical grip of a ruler who now lay bedridden, barely able to form a sentence.

  Starla breathed deeply, swelling her chest and stomach. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Always remain mindful, always remain in control. Do not let emotions cloud your actions. Use sound reasoning to make logical decisions.

  Day by day, Titus Corinth’s power was slipping away. There was a storm coming and Starla knew it, but while there was still time, a crack, however small, had to be opened between the outside and the city. Starla suspected there were more people on the outside than there were in the city. And she would need allies if the Corinth family, whatever was left of it, were to stay in power. If she helped them, perhaps they might help her?

  Starla closed her eyes and a tear rolled down her cheek.

  She turned back to her father. His head was turned towards her, a single tear on his own cheek.

  “Father, you should have told me about her before. Now I’m a daughter of two worlds, the one here, and the one beyond the city walls. One cannot thrive without the other…”

  ∆∆∆

  The aircraft hit the ground nose first. The glazed cockpit imploded and the fuselage peeled outwards like a banana skin, its forked tail breaking away like a discarded limb.

  After the aircraft hit the ground, Starla had no clear recollection of what happened next. She came to, her head spinning. Black smoke churned around her. She tried to swallow and her throat stung.

  She remembered digging her hands into the red dust, and a strange feeling of being home, and yet not. Her aircraft seat and the straps that held her were gone. She rolled over onto her back. Grubby smoke smeared the beating sun, hot on her face. Her lungs felt heavy and she wheezed.

  She reached out a hand in search of Janus. In her mind’s eye, she couldn’t picture his face and instead she saw Ari, and her father, and the old woman she’d visited in Cooper.

  White-robed forms leant over her and, for a moment, Starla wondered if they were angels. She could almost see their wings, folded behind their backs, leaving them hunched.

  Is this death, she wondered? Have I died?

  The forms seemed to be conferring with one another, as if perhaps they debated her fate.

  Have I been good or have I been bad? I came to help the people of the wasteland. After years of careless living within the over-indulged confines of the city, at least I tried to make things right.

  This idea already seemed vain and she recalled the slight embarrassment she’d felt in front of the old woman. Starla had been so certain of her superiority and in her natural position as a giver rather than a receiver. In the city, the idea had been so simple, to give aid to those in need and see it gratefully received.

  She thought of her father, and she thought of Ari, walking away into the wasteland.

  I was left a woman of two worlds, part of neither one nor the other.

  “Janus…” Those small, stolen, secret intimacies. He hadn’t understood why, when she’d told him that since her father’s stroke, it was simply impossible. She now had to think of the future of the city and the legacy of the Corinth family. And yet, as her personal bodyguard, she’d dragged him into the wasteland anyway. However briefly, he’d also known Ari, and he’d been to the wasteland. Was that why they were drawn together? Or was it simply loneliness?

  The face of Liviana appeared, her hair white, her lips black, her pale skin flecked with new, dark freckles. The hot sun shone through her white robes. Her eyes were like two dark pools.

  Liviana grinned. “My dear Starla, we only wan
t what’s best for you.”

  Perhaps you did? My father would never tell me what happened to you. On my return to the city, after the abduction and my escape, you were gone and only then did I miss you, and only then did I realise what we had. You were my friend when no one else would be; not always a good one, but a friend nonetheless.

  “Shush…” said Liviana. “It’ll all be okay. We’ll take care of you now.”

  The blurry forms grew closer and their warm bodies pressed against her. Among them, Liviana grinned like a pale ghost from another time; a girl who’d paid for the sins of her brother and her father, and perhaps her own.

  Had Liviana formed any part of her brother Max’s plot to abduct me from the city?

  Liviana squeezed Starla’s shoulder, or at least she thought it was Liviana. “You know, that caftan actually works on you.” Her eyes glowed with faint luminescence.

  I’m just trying to blend in, I couldn’t wear my dresses here. Did I say that? Am I speaking at all?

  Starla wasn’t sure.

  Perhaps I still stood out too much…

  Liviana winked.

  Starla closed her eyes.

  Chapter 2

  An olive-skinned street urchin, Keshia knelt against the alleyway wall and pulled her knees up to her chest while her heart beat against her ribcage like a bird desperate to escape its cage. In the hot, sticky air, her shirt clung to her skin. She wiped the grit from her eyes and tucked the long curls of dark, frizzy hair behind her ears. Through the alleyway entrance, she peeked out at the legs of the passers-by. Gradually, her heart began to slow. Under her shawl, she reached deep into her pocket and removed the small, round pendant. She smiled.

  Now, she thought, that wasn’t so hard.

  “Well, well, what ‘ave we ‘ere?” The voice was gruff, like coffee in a grinder. “You little thief.”

  Keshia looked up at the two men. The first was burly, with a dry, ruddy face and small, beady eyes. He licked his lips. The other was skinny, his chin like sandpaper.