Those Beyond the Wall (The Space Between Worlds #2)

by Micaiah Johnson

“I…want access,” he says, and the edge of rage in his voice tells me he’s lived a life where want is merely the step before have.

“I could make you,” Adam says, and everyone in the room believes him. Esther’s hand tightens on her staff. She says, “I doubt that very much,” and somehow everyone in the room knows this, too, is true.

“No one else was going to,” she says, and I wonder if she knows how special she is. How many people would use no one else is doing it as an excuse not to act, rather than as motivation.

I think my mother knew. She could tell that I wasn’t a spirit broken into obedience, I was a spring held tight and losing, a monster being born but holding its breath.

“No,” she says, and it’s not even heavy. “You go. I’m not the one who can help him.” I can’t tell if she means Esther is the sister who could help him, or I am the one out of the two of us that could help him, or—most impossible but feeling the most true—she’s not the Cara that can help him.

Those that do harm themselves, well, I understand how strong the urge to self-destruct can be, no matter what form it takes. But I’ve seen it in people who lift or run until they’re nothing, people who love only those that hurt them, people who spend their pay so quick it’s like they want to starve—not just those who tap their veins looking for a way out. They all have the same thing in common: You can’t solve any craving for excess by stopping the act. You’ve got to solve what made them need, which is a separate thing entirely. Need can make any act harmful. Even love.

This won’t stop him, or the next photographer, I know. Bored Wileyites hoping to turn our tragedy into a section of their portfolio have been shadowing us all morning.

If Helene was here. It still hits me like a truck that she’s not just stuck at work, not late because a client ran overtime. She’s gone, forever. Maybe once we have the funeral it’ll be easier to keep straight. Though, at this rate, we’re going to have too many funerals for any of them to register. It’s easy to feel loss—to focus on it, to mourn it—if it’s just one. Too much missing? All those absences, all stacked up? That’s just night. How can you tell the shadows apart to feel them when there’s so much darkness?

I was a violent child who committed the worst crimes; I was a broken child who had no reason to believe she wouldn’t be broken forever, but through the love, care, and modeling of everyone around me I learned how to love and care for others. All because I wasn’t thrown away based on how I behaved on my worst day.

Maybe choosing myself over him is growth. Maybe this distance is healthy, but right now it just feels like being a shit friend.

He stares at my face, taking in the signs that I’m trying not to cry like he’s trying to decide if he cares. He doesn’t. Our friendship ends when, and because, he looks away.

Being Adam’s research assistant feels like doing exactly the kind of job we became runners to avoid for exactly the kind of asshole we swore we’d never work for.

“It’s not your fault,” Cara says, somehow appearing in the doorway. She has a way of entering rooms where it never feels like she’s arrived, just like she’s always been. It impresses me, but my own incompetence just makes me resent anyone who is good at anything, so I give her a snarl too.

I’ve been gone long enough to have forgotten how hard up the city is about genders. They want gender like a border, something fixed, something to be defended from trespass. We like genders like landmasses here, like puddles that congregate, evaporate, and re-form.

“It feels good to criticize others into the ground when we are right and we know they are wrong. But it’s not good, it’s righteous, and the two seldom have anything to do with each other.”

I bet snakes do mourn their skins. I bet they crawl back inside sometimes, wishing they could fit. I bet they rub their old skins all over, trying to cover themselves in the smell of home. That’s all growth is, getting too big to stay somewhere that used to feel good. Just having one less place in the whole world that fits right.

Many of the original smuggling tunnels into the city have the names of ancestors carved into the archways. In the city, the streets above are named for their heroes, but down here everything is named for our dead.

Every time you’ve misstepped, or lashed out, or fallen down, I have been there to comfort you through what you’ve done to me.

I need time. Time to understand if the story he is telling is one I want to believe, one I can make true by believing.

I have never, not once, believed someone like Cheeks could really care about someone like me. In the smallest part of my mind, the part where I am an unwanted child wrist-deep in other people’s blood, I’ve never believed I was worthy of our friendship. Only now, now in this moment that is far too late, do I believe.

“What do you want?” she asks, and Adam smiles. He smiles like that is his favorite sentence, like it’s the sentence he’s heard most often in his life, the sound of another person’s desperation the lullaby that sends him to sleep.

“…Not in a long time. Not since I was young.” I look up, forcing him to meet my eyes. “Not since I came?” “No one had ever protected me from harm before. Not my mother, not my older brother. No one. But when you came, you stopped it like it was obvious that it should stop. I realized I was wrong about everything. I still don’t understand like you do. Not in my heart. But I have learned from watching you. I have learned what is too much. I’ve since gotten…help, with my heart.”

You’d think I’d be getting better at watching it, but every time it’s worse. It’s worse because I know these aren’t dreams. These are worlds. This isn’t fantasy; it’s reality. Even worse, soon it will be history.

I just didn’t think I would ever see Ashtown turned into deadland, turned into museum fodder. And I have no doubt that if I look far enough into the future, Wiley will have whole exhibits about the people we used to be. Their kids will dress up as us for school projects. Their eccentric artists will take names that sound like ours and say stupid shit like Spiritually I am an Ashtowner.

I will not be the same person when this ends as I was when it began. But maybe that was always true.

I may never get to be a runner again, but let them always remember that my name was Scales.

Her eyebrows knit. “I want us to exist peacefully. That’s not a crime.” “The city only exists in peace with itself. Peace will only come when we stop being us, and they can pretend we’re just like them. Your peace is genocide.”

She’ll keep her word to never speak to me again, so I’ll never get to tell her that I do respect her. That I respect her and I know she’s right and I wish being right was enough, but it’s not.

This was not me killing a man I used to love who never loved me back. This was not me killing my best friend so he wouldn’t suffer what was to come. I would have done it even if there had been happiness on the other side for him. No. This? This could only ever be one thing: the moment I became an emperor.

The multiverse is full of people you could be, sure. That’s all anyone thinks about when they look at Cara. But I am here to tell you the multiverse is also full of people you can never be. Of paths you can never take. Of rooms with only one way out.

That is what we’ve been prepping them for. We are murderers. We are meant for murder. The last few weeks have been a scramble to protect our people, but at the core of that protection is a promise to rise to violence. This is the step some civilians don’t understand, the step Cara rejects: We can only make good on our promise of protection if there’s blood on our hands. We can’t bluff. The city only speaks the language of power, and we have to speak it right back for them to listen.

No, not Ruth. She’s Ruthless again now, and seeing the ease with which she slips back into the fight lets me know she was never anything else. Ruth was a mask, with Ruthless always waiting underneath.

A sea of black stands in front of the wall. Enforcement looking more like us than they ever have in their dark jumpsuits, though those clothes are for easy cleaning, not protection like ours. The biggest difference, though, is that they had a choice. Enforcement in the city isn’t keeping anything alive, isn’t vital to anything. They just protect rich people from minor inconveniences. They could stop working and their world wouldn’t fall apart.

It’s a curse, this well-armored ride. It will never be me getting got. I will sit in my rolling fortress and watch everyone I love turn to dust. This is the nightmare of ruling.

Now the battle is beginning in earnest as roughened leather clashes with its plastic equivalent. Even our clothes are two different kinds of violence meeting head-on: Their plastic jumpsuits don’t require a carcass to make, but they take so long to decay we’ll be finding them in the stomachs of choked birds for centuries.

If the other world comes over and takes even a single Wileyite’s life, it will be the handful of dirt over the grave of her position. Will she even make it to reelection? Or will the Wileyites drag her out of her mansion and set her on fire? Okay, probably not that, but surely they have some method of angrily outing people in power. Something with paperwork, probably.

And most of what she feared wasn’t even real. No army of Ashtowners waiting to beat Wileyites to death, get their children pregnant, outlaw their gods. Just shadows being jumped at by someone whose only response to change is dread. Now it’s time to make her dreams come true. Everything I know about cruelty I learned inside the wall, but I’ll happily use Wiley tricks to give her an Ashtowner worth fearing.

And just like that he understands. He’ll never be the second son again, never be a little brother again. It isn’t just Adam who has died, but a version of Nik Nik that only Adam could claim to know. One day, I know, this will be me. Nik Nik will turn to ash and with him will burn the one who made me a sister, who made me belong.

As we make our way back to Ashtown, the story is set, though there will still be whispers. The city will never really believe Adam Bosch is dead. Ashtown will never really believe Cara is still alive. We are making our way into the night with two legends. Three, if my brother counts. Not me though. I’m just the witness. Just the storyteller.

“Hey, fucker,” I say, so he’ll know it’s me. “Thanks. I don’t think you were a good person and, I gotta say, you were a real shit brother. But you helped bring that wall down. You kept us safe. You were a villain. And a shithead. But we needed you, and there you were.”