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

by Micaiah Johnson

I can work for a murderer, because I am a murderer. But I cannot work for a man who would lock someone in a room for days in their own filth, because I was that too. I said that like a riddle, didn’t I? Was I the man who locked someone in a filthy room for days? Or was I the person locked in? I’ll tell you for free that I was not the man who did the locking. But I wasn’t always the person who’d been locked in either. Some days, I was the room. Others, the filth.

They call me Mr. Scales because I can climb any damn thing. Or because I turned my first wasteland kill into gloves, wearing the skin of its spine on my knuckles for years. Or because I used to be real good at piano, but scales is all they’ve heard me play.

Wanting something is not a license to have it. An old lesson, but a good one.

“Snakes don’t cry over their skins,” she says, exhaling an expertly round puff of smoke. Her eyes go sharp and sideways. I can see from my periphery that she’s cut her gaze toward Cheeks. “Don’t mourn what you outgrow.”

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.

I close my eyes and imagine floating there, all three of us, without all the shit that makes us separate: Cheeks without his abandonment issues making him over-prioritize romantic relationships, me without my abusive history keeping everyone at firing distance, Cross without the self-loathing he was taught to call holy. I wish fiercely that we were kids together and this was a clubhouse, before the world taught us its many disappointments.

Those who built the city were never paid for their labor. They are never acknowledged in the city’s history. That makes those walls and everything in them stolen, and everyone knows you’re allowed to take back what doesn’t get paid for. Really, they’re lucky. We’re only taking the wall. We’re letting them keep their homes, and we built some of those, too.