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

by Micaiah Johnson

the man I do work for thinks of murder as more of a tool than a sin.

I almost correct the thought to Nik’s palace, but it’s not and I’ll need to get used to owning what’s mine.

He spares me this time. At first I think it’s just so I won’t be bruised for my inauguration, but he must think I’m right because he doesn’t just not punish me—he gives me my way.

Treating him broken without giving him a voice is no kinder than compelling him to pretend he’s not.”

“Adam’s old murder squad has been recruited to Wiley enforcement.”

“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.”

sometimes the girl I was is sitting right beneath my skin, as toxic and reactionary as ever.

Now we’re just two sad people standing too close together, and nothing good can come of that.

Knowing the traverser—the only creature who seems as unknown and otherworldly as the murders themselves—is on the case is like having an angel show up to fight your ghosts.

I make it sound like I believe everything is going to be okay.

You dedicate yourself to killing long before you plunge the blade.

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.

inner circle on this case, and if I look too down word will get out how fucked we are.

If you’re not safe, none of us are.”

So this is why she took Adam’s eye. It wasn’t because he was operating a corrupt company, it was nothing as large as that. It wasn’t righteousness, it was vengeance.

the walls, built with the blood and sweat of people who still hoped for better, are as good a sanctuary as any church.

Maybe it isn’t about being safe from the force outside at all, but about choosing to die where your roots are. I don’t know. For me, being in the wall while being denied access to the other side doesn’t feel like a privilege. It’s just a reminder of everything that should have been ours, but was kept from us by those who never even worked for it.

I’ve given him an out, but also given myself one. If he says yes to this version of reality, if he even nods, it will be true, and I will understand, and we can both keep on going in a world where my best friend has never been ashamed of me. He doesn’t.

“It’s fine,” I say, because it is, in the worst way. I feel the part of myself that cared about Cheeks, that cared that Cheeks respected me, wither and fall off.

holy. I wish fiercely that we were kids together and this was a clubhouse, before the world taught us its many disappointments.

Jeffery Ackerman died in the same way I imagine he lived: thinking of, and talking about, nothing but himself. There was some kind of investigation that intended to make an example of him. He talked about his own death like beating them, like winning.

It’s an ending, but not closure. More like a closing off of possibilities.

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.

We don’t live in a place where nonviolence is an option, but you are precisely the person who needs to be holding the sword.” He looks away. “What Adam and I have planned is bloody, bloody enough to ensure your reign will be peaceful.”

It is tempting, though. To sit back, let something bad happen, then call myself innocent.

The cities don’t care that Wiley broke their word. They side with them against the faceless dead Ashtowners. We don’t matter to them. They will incinerate us for daring to think we deserved the respect of a promise kept.

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. We’ll all just be so much history. It’s already happened on other earths, and in other places on this earth. Civilizations once strong wiped out by those greedier, more religious, more self-entitled. Inventions uninvented. Poetry, not just unwritten, but the very words that would have made it up lost forever, the very tongue it was written in cut out and excised from reality.

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.

Every worker, runner, garbage git, and Ruralite together in their deaths in ways they would never be together otherwise, because the people killing us can’t tell us apart anyway. There is no distinction to them. We don’t have different religions or cultures. We’re all just Those Outside the Wall.

“I call as your servant, sanctify the actions of the day. Guide this child through light, but bring her home to ash, and dirt, and oil.”

Maybe that’s all holiness is: the dirt that raised you in the hands of someone who cares.

With all his arrogance and Ashtown pride, I’m not surprised he couldn’t plan for our death. He assumed the children would be held until we returned victorious, because of course we would. But we need to plan for our own annihilation.

I don’t add that I finally know, for certain, who he is in love with, because I watched that love turn like a hatchet.

There are those who choose the city because they’ve genuinely absorbed Wiley’s values so they’ve learned to hate the way their parents talk, the town they were raised in, their own names, their own skin. But then there are those that shed those things, not because they hate themselves, but because it is the only way to really feel safe. The only way to reach a place in life where you no longer feel like you’re always just barely not-drowning.

viewing Wiley as a tool not a salvation.

the black jumpsuits are just the bluntest version of every value the rest of the city doesn’t even know they hold.

It doesn’t matter who knew what, or which officers were actually there. The whole system is guilty.

A story gets extra legs when it counters the narrative, and this one does.

Then the new discourse begins. New among Wileyites, because they are just now asking one another the question we have been asking the whole time:

All good stories have ghosts. Let me be a vengeful one. Let me be the bloody kind men hear shrieking in the night before they never wake up again. Let me be the ghost of all our dead come back armed and rabid.

Your peace is genocide.”

This is Ashtown’s irreconcilable difference: to assimilate and reduce suffering, or to remain ourselves and stay a target. We are standing on two sides of an issue that can never be resolved, and it’s a shame because it’s a fight we didn’t start. They did, but it will tear us apart anyway.

I respect her and I know she’s right and I wish being right was enough, but it’s not.

The line between hot stuttering machine and the human body is thin enough to barely see light through.

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.

Enforcement in the city isn’t keeping anything alive, isn’t vital to anything. They just protect rich people from minor inconveniences.

schoolyard cruelty when you are actively condemning others to death strikes them as the height of cleverness.

Their first move is to fire projectiles. Stun blasts, electrified nets, beanbags that are classed nonlethal but have blown out eyes, shattered organs, and, yes, stopped hearts.

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.

He’s the only one who knows how true that is. The only one who knows I killed both my father and best friend to get here.