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March 16 - March 22, 2024
Author’s Note from Micaiah Johnson When my agent (the incredible Cameron McClure at Donald Maass, without whom you wouldn’t be reading these words) read the first draft of this manuscript, she said—accurately—“I didn’t realize how angry you were.” Yes, this novel was largely conceived during the sixty-two-day sit-in at Nashville’s Tennessee State Capitol. And yes, this protest produced hundreds of arrests under frivolous charges that dissolved shortly thereafter, and far more instances of brutalization, which proved harder to erase and linger with many of us still. If any faith in
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i did not come to preach of peace for that’s not the hunted’s duty. —Danez Smith
Wrong and right are moods in Ash. Not values. We tell one another stories we know aren’t true, and we’re glad to hear them as long as they stretch. No one cares if the endings are happy; we only care that they eat up time.
I slid the package along the bar, deliberately stopping it just shy of Exlee’s grasp because I wanted to steal the simple pleasure of watching those long, gold-dusted fingers tipped with glittering nails reach for its edge like the uncurling legs of a glamorous spider.
I climbed onto the stage I’d last stepped foot on over a decade ago and gathered her fracturing torso into my lap. I held her together. She insisted on breaking apart. I held her harder. But then I was just breaking her too. Sometimes when you want to fix something too bad, you break it.
I stared long and hard, trying to fit the pieces back where they were supposed to go, trying to find a pattern in the damage. And there is a pattern. I can’t quite see it, but I know it’s there. This can’t just be chaos.
People think the big secret between Nik Nik and me is that we’re sleeping together. They’re wrong. The thing unspoken between us is much more dangerous than that: The emperor is afraid of me.
I look back toward Helene X. “And if I find out you prayed over her, I’m snipping out your tongue. You called her a sinner while she was alive, you don’t get to violate her afterlife.” “I was a child,” he says. “So were we,” I say, and turn away.
Sometimes I want to call him back close again. Tell him there’s no need to worry. Tell him there’s no danger of us being more than friends. Tell him I only miss when we’d touch for the warmth. Tell him he’s just a brother to me, and I’d rather have him as a friend than a lover anyhow. But he probably wouldn’t buy it. Just ’cause it’s a lie and all.
The victims share a blank-faced obliviousness, the kind of people who wouldn’t flinch when someone walks behind them. It’s like nothing bad’s ever happened to them. Like they didn’t believe in nightmares until they became one.
Before I respond, I am pulled into a memory. It’s an old one, which means it can’t be trusted—but it’s potent, which means it can’t be denied.
The emperor is like one of the reptiles outside of town—the ones whose names start with useless information like red-eyed or striped yellow belly but end with dragon or monster, which is what you actually need to know.
Everyone thinks deepwasters are one turn from delusion on their best day; if I run around spouting that the emperor can be playful, downright fucking silly, they’d have me sent to a quiet place.
Places where violence isn’t tolerated will never teach you how to deal with it, when it is avoidable, or how to execute it cleanly when you must. You have to accept violence as a part of life to know it, to tame it like a pet, to keep it in your pocket and understand when to let it out. There’s nothing you can tell me about the right way to bruise flesh if your only rule is don’t.
They choose privacy over security every time. The citizens say privacy is a right they won’t have violated, but apparently rights are only for people on one side of the wall, because their perimeter is crawling with surveillance drones armed with facial scanning and nonlethal—but not non-damaging—projectiles.
If I walk around geared up and punch someone in the face, I expect them to fight back. I’m not looking to lock them up for the most sensible of reactions. They wanted to beat us bloody, and then arrest for “assault” anyone who kicked dirt in their direction. They wanted to look like, be armed like, and act like a gang, but get treated with respect by the very people they terrorized.
The mistake they made was an old one, but one they’ll undoubtedly make again: forgetting we outnumber them, forgetting we are just as comfortable with bloody hands as they are and that we don’t have delusions of being called a hero holding us back.
But his death became a story. It had been seen and heard and shared by so many of us that we began to whisper his name across the sand. Every mouth changed the story’s shape a little: He was crying. No, he was stoic. No, he begged for mercy. No, he said, Do your worst. He fought to the end. Or his hands were tied. They came at him from behind and he never saw it coming. They came at him from the front and he stood his ground. With his last breath he called for his mother. With his last breath he called for god. With his last breath he called for vengeance. Or he called for nothing with his
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They hate our violent parades and our bloodthirsty leader. They’ve forgotten that we’re just the honest version of what licks its lips in wait on the other side of the wall.
In my town money buys you notice. It buys you shine, and flash, and the too-loud rumble of a too-big ride. In Wiley money can get you subtlety. Invisibility. Screens that look like walls, appliances that look like cabinets, and projecting cuffs that look like bracelets of the thinnest chain.
I guess most Wileyites need a few blinks to process brutal death. They profited off it for centuries, but god forbid they have to see it.
I know, though. I know what it’s like to be somewhere else long enough to see Ashtown as special. Long enough to know there are far darker places than even the town in the city’s shadow.
When I first came I was too tall, the runners around me couldn’t reach to cover my back. So I learned to hunch low and they learned to strain high, and within our compromises I found somewhere I fit. That’s the lesson: As long as someone is stretching to reach you, you’d better bend to reach them. This is how a runner always has coverage.
Our staring is interrupted by Mr. Cross. “We’ve got city work. We need outfitting and housing.” The reigning champion of not reading the fucking room, this guy.
It’s easier than it should be. Wileyites talk like nothing bad can come from it, and she recounts her story like she’s been dying to be asked.
If Wiley City cares about nature, they must only care about the right kind. They must only care if the nature is pretty, or serves them. They must only care if the nature makes them feel good about themselves, or if caring makes them look good to others. And they must only care if the nature got here the way they wanted it, by them planting it, not by it coming naturally or preexisting them in this space.
He was raised in a culture that normalized memorizing twenty-page-long passages to save their souls, so of course he’s got a better memory than I do. But he was also raised in a culture that accepted whatever a man in an apron told them was true, so his instincts are trash.
Not sharing true names is my favorite thing about being a runner. I like the idea of stories and I hate the idea of truth. Names—real names, fixed names, government names—are too concrete to be made into a story properly. You say, A man named Diamond Jones died trying to eat a mountain and that’s why there’s a crater in the wastes. And someone says, Actually, I checked, and there’s never been a man named Diamond Jones or According to his obituary Diamond Jones died from cancer, not mountain-eating.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re seeing someone in love and you want it to become a love story. Stop. Being in love with someone doesn’t entitle you to them; wanting someone doesn’t obligate them to want you back.
Last year I even helped him write messages to someone he wanted so badly it froze him solid. And I did my best writing in those messages, because I want him to be happy more than I want him to be mine.
I wonder again if they’re fucking, but I know it’s not that. They are close like two people comfortable being close, not close like two people dying to touch.
Cara was one of us, an Ashtown girl sent to the city to walk between worlds. But every time she came back, she was a little less ours and a little more theirs. The last time, when she came back with haunted eyes and permanent dark stripes in her skin, it became clear that she wasn’t theirs either. She belonged to something else entirely.
It doesn’t matter what’s true. She stopped being a person years ago and became a story. On her best day, she’s still a puzzle, people doing her the courtesy of acting like it isn’t all figured out. But mostly, we talk about her like a finished tale. Like someone in a Ruralite book, or wasteland graffiti. A ghost.
“Are you lost, Traveler?” she asks Adam. It’s a standard Ruralite greeting that probably could have been a genuine offer in another time or another mouth, but the context has shifted it into an expression of irritation regardless of the actual words. Like how Can I help you? translates to Fuck you want? if you wander into shopper’s alley right when they want to close down for the day.
What must it be like, to know the person you hate most in the world is the one who knows you best? I look back into Nik’s eyes, grateful the person who knows the truest version of my story is the one I’d protect with my life.
Adam’s such a piece of shit, it’s wild to me that there is one person in the world who can’t cope with the idea of him being gone, much less two. It gives me hope. If you have to be more of a monster than Adam to be totally abandoned, it means I might not die alone either.
He says it casually, like a dog that steals food slowly hoping you won’t notice it happening.
Mini-atomics and ever-burn incendiaries are the weapons only the council of cities use, and they only ever use them on the people outside the walls. Because inside would be a human rights violation. No telling what that makes us in their minds. I’d say dogs, but they’re quite manic in their protection of dogs, so we must be less.
I hit her with the full force of my glare, but she just glares right back. Her eyes are too dark, not dark brown like everyone else’s, but like the empty black of a place light can’t live. Too late, I realize it’s a trap. Those eyes are tar, and I’m sure even if I tried to look away I would be held in them. Maybe it’s just the stripes on her face. They make her appear otherworldly so my eyes are playing tricks. Just a trick…but I still can’t look away.
I look around, but no one else seems to have noticed that Cara is clearly a fucking witch.
The city can bray all they want calling Nik a dictator, but he just uses force to make people bow to one man. He doesn’t change the way they think, just how they behave if he’s in earshot. The city uses education, and vidshows, and goddamn etiquette to train people into bowing to anyone who seems more successful than they are. They don’t even know they’re doing it.
Stories are powerful, and none are more powerful than the ones you let others tell you about yourself.
You’re going to call me a liar, I know. You think I lied when I said my irritation at enforcement was just because they were keeping me for a citizenship scan, and now you can see I have many reasons. But lies are just stories, and now you have another.
Describing a person as rich in Ashtown implies the words greedy and selfish. The wealthy in Wiley get respected for hoarding. They get thought of as good and wise and, most laughably, hardworking. Just like enforcement. Wiley is full of people wanting blue ribbons for doing bad shit.
“What you’re experiencing now is grief,” Jax says. “No. I wouldn’t—” “Not for the person. For the feeling of having someone to hate. You had a burning core keeping you going, and the first thing you feel when it goes out is cold.” I nod, wondering how they could have known about the creeks of dry ice my veins had become since I began processing the news. “But that fire was killing you, Scales. Its absence opens up potential. It’s a hole that you can fill with anything in the world now. Choose wisely.”
The only thing that felt false was pretending anyone had ever cared about me deep enough to turn to ash. That’s never been true, and it never will be.
You know that person who has seen so much of you? Who has seen you at your dogshit worst, seen you when you were toxic trash and—worst of all—too full of your own hurt to even know you were trash, but still somehow cares about you? That person for me is Exlee. I know, me and half of Ashtown. But it doesn’t matter that making people feel loved, comforted, and safe is just what Exlee does. It doesn’t make it any less valuable.
I stared at my reflection in the scissors. I hated myself, that much was so clear even Exlee could see it, but did I think that the self I hated was all I could ever be? If I did, I should turn the water red and end the lie. Or did I think I could move on, turn my old life into nothing more than a story I could just stop telling. I grabbed the last piece of hair and sliced.
“Silly thing, I need no protection from these men,” Exlee says, meaning Nik Nik and Adam, but somehow also any man who ever lived. Like anyone who still clings to the gender binary is automatically unworthy of being considered a threat.
A beautiful woman doing what needs to be done. A devoted man paying the price. Maybe it’s for the best I’ve always been ugly. I do quite enough damage without something that powerful in my arsenal.
