1

      Proxima.

      Rigel.

      Barnard.

      Wolf.

      Under the arc light, stargirl held the thin flannie around herself, reciting, stamping her feet against the cold within.

      Luyten’s. Sirius. Methuselah. Lah. She liked that one, with its sound a creamy whipcrack on her tongue. Methuselah, that most ancient of stars: the mother; she from which they all came. At the big bang. When everyone was stardust – her; them, the coppers she could see across the road, in their hotdog-van copshop, fan-cooled behind their desks. The people at the cavernous PCYC hall today – queuing for watered down juice, in the cheap plastic cups she held out to them but hated because they would end up in the sea or tossed for future generations to find. A few breeding pairs wandering the arctic circle. There was a bin nearby and she leaned on it, vomiting in. No-one knew. No-one understood. There had been no other way.

      Times like now she would name the constellations too. Cassiopeia. Triangulum. Andromeda: her namesake, with its syllables that bounced back from her teeth like from a skin drum. She’d breathe their sacred names and look up at the sky, starting from the beginning when she forgot the order, from closest to furthest, from this, her tiny blue ellipsis orbiting the sun. The order was important. It calmed her, like the metal of the bin, cool under her fingers. There was no cool any more, she thought, as the depthless sadness bolted in. Above, the sky was dry as a cornhusk, the dirt beneath her feet dessicated, empty of all but the memory of rain.

      The water at Liddell had been warm, when she’d stepped into it. The smell – so thick it had clogged her nose – hypoxic peat and seaweed. And carp. Bloody carp, clear beneath the surface – one metallic streak and then another, in the dark water. This is what we humans do, she remembered thinking. Make muck out of paradise. Her mind had chased them then – little fishy, I don’t belong here either. Come with me? Be my talisman, make me safe? Hah. Safe. Since when had she ever wanted safe? Or had it, for that matter. She felt safer right now, watching the Muswellbrook constables with all their relaxed camaraderie and paperwork, moving about, ink-dark firearms slouched at their waists.

      She stood, wiped her mouth, and breathed the stars’ names again. Looking up at them made her remember. Yes. She could rest, now; they had done it. Nothing more was required of her. She was Gaia. She crossed the floodlit road and walked in.