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

by Micaiah Johnson

How can you tell the shadows apart to feel them when there’s so much darkness?

We’re supposed to stand steady when there are holes ripped through the world…It’s just a lot easier when we’re the ones doing the ripping.

Not-Helene looks up, but keeps his hands on his knees. “I didn’t know. He didn’t tell us.”

I dreamt of running away from the moment I could dream, and I never thought of going anywhere but the desert.

Reisha used to be a Ruralite with a more boring name, and even though she left the vows behind as a teenager, that upbringing of religious moderation left a mark in the shape of her strongest desires.

having big brown eyes waiting to obey your every word, and having a body not tense in fear or flinch away, even when I’m touching her most breakable places—it’s enough to make me feel worthy.

I just want to give, to make someone in this world feel anything but miserable.

Slate doesn’t yet know how much he’s going to want some sweet memory to get him through the next few hours, and we could give him that.

I spend the night thanking the universe for Reisha, for Slate, for Helene X, and anybody who has ever let me pass a too-dark night in their warmth.

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.

I’m thinking about how I can survive life, how I can survive anything, as long as there are warm people who know what it looks like when someone is cracking, and know how to be the thing that holds us together,

Without words, I thank her for every time she should have turned me away, and didn’t.

the kind of joke I’m only making so civilians can hear me making it,

“Those ones. I inherited the profit from his shares, and I’d like to give it back. I don’t want to sit on apartheid money.”

It’s rare to meet a Wileyite who acknowledges Wiley’s role in keeping Ashtown down.

it’d kill them to acknowledge that the goodwill they’re giving is far less than what they’ve taken from us, far less than what’s owed.

The city doesn’t teach sign easily. They’d prefer to change or ignore anyone who’d use it. If she learned sign, she must have worked for it.

“It’s good,” Raider says. “To let them talk about their dead. To see someone recording what they say. They won’t have recognizable bodies. This will be their only clean remembrance.”

Everyone in the crowd hates me. I’m a bully and a monster. They’ll never know that a monster is what I would be without the leather. They’ll never know I’d die for them, each and every one.

Spite can look just like care, if you squint.

every time I’ve seen Cheeks like this before, every time he was close to cracking, I saw it coming. But I was so distracted with Cross’s depression, our mound of bodies, and my own flared up wounds, that I didn’t see him. I think it’s the first time since I decided I loved him that he wasn’t my first and only thought in the chaos.

that would just be healing someone else instead of myself, wouldn’t it?

He must have seen Nik Nik walking back into camp like a second chance to do right.

I doubt they actually care about Cheeks mooning over an outsider. They’re just delighting in the fall of the immaculate runner with the angel face the way insects delight in a new carcass. They’ll slather themselves in his failure and pretend it’s their own success.

I have more of my own teeth than most of them and, yes, that my bones will hold when theirs will break.

It’s like he wants a new face or something.

What happens next will make it so the past decade and a half never happened. I’m already in mourning.

I could never wear this shirt again if it had my best friend’s blood on it.

You are perfect. If I could have made you love me back, I would have been able to love myself forever. After that, every blow just tells him I love him.

right now love means not giving him a punctured lung.

I know he will never let me near him again.

It doesn’t feel like I’ve killed something I was meant to kill. It feels like I’ve committed cannibalism but closer. Hurting him feels like devouring pieces of myself.

now I’ve finally got the chance to lay hands on the man I hate the most and I…barely hurt him.

“I don’t want to fight you,” I say when we’ve only just started, surprising myself with the news as well as him. I don’t just not want to fight him, I don’t want to hurt him. No, worse than even that. I don’t want him to be hurt, and I wish I could make him less hurt than he already is.

The hard thing to accept is that it wasn’t hate or indifference that ended us. It was love. If I didn’t love him, I’d be able to be his friend after breaking him. If he didn’t love Nik Nik, he would never have made me do it.

I want to imagine us still there, still smiling, still safe from all the horrors love can bring.

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.

If anyone is useless here, it’s me, and that’s why I’m swiping at everyone around me like a sand cat.

Is this what science is? Putting your blood and sweat into something that might be nothing? Well, I fucking hate it.

my own incompetence just makes me resent anyone who is good at anything,

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.

I wonder what this woman would call Helene? Would she acknowledge Helene as a woman? Or would it be just another gate she’d thrill to keep?

in. I wonder if her own imperfect belonging would make her more open to protecting others. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe hating others is the easiest way to prove you belong, even if you’re just doing to others what someone wants to do to you.

dwelling on their own lack rather than their teammates’ win. They say runners are bad, but we’re nothing like this. They may be a group, but they’re not a team. Not the way we are. How can you swear you’d give your life for anyone if you’d slit your fellow soldier’s throat just for getting a better detail than you?

He’s trotted out his gruffest voice for them. It makes him sound removed, not just like English isn’t his first language, but like human isn’t his preferred tongue.

Then, precisely on cue, Nik, Tear, and I all begin laughing the runners’ laugh, the braying echoing off the floor and ceiling both. The most important part of a runner’s laugh is keeping your mouth wide enough to consume your enemies. The second is keeping your eyes dead and mirthless.

you used this tragedy to increase funding and approve force allowances against noncitizens,” Nik Nik says. “Meaning my people. Meaning me.”

I’ll let sixty-five more of you die, and then save the seventy-first. And the scales will be even.”

These kids are looking for violence like they’re afraid they’ll miss the opportunity to use their fancy new stun sticks. Runners get to be calm, always assured that violence will come, and when it does, we’ll be ready.

I’ve been doing this dance where I’ve decided to pretend Cara is interesting rather than attractive because I would never in a million years act on