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

by Micaiah Johnson

if I don’t get there soon there won’t be enough time to save us from the new world’s attack. We’ll win the battle, just to be turned to pulp on the sand.

I’m sure they think they’ve been in fights before, but kicking or choking an unarmed civilian while your friends hype you up is not a fight. They’re about to find out the difference.

Would they have come out if they knew I planned to destroy their entire way of life? There’s no telling. And anyhow, it’s too late.

Don’t turn him into a civilian with your guilt.”

it makes me mad at Cross, because it’s a balm I don’t deserve.

I don’t have much in common with the mayor, but I do know the kind of desperation that alters morality.

She didn’t betray us for money, didn’t campaign on hating us solely for power. She believes in everything she does. She’s scared, she’s always been scared, and she made her TV appearances and ran her campaign and passed her border laws to make everyone else as scared as she was.

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.

that kind of destruction and hate doesn’t have a border. It always comes back. It eats and eats and eats, finding new targets until there’s no one left to swallow but the ones who sent it. It starts with those outside the wall, and it ends with the whole world.”

I’m not just listening to what Adam’s saying; I’m praying it’s true.

For all our trying and drifting and name changing, we all grew up to be our father’s children.

This is how we can peacefully coexist, the only way, when one entity doesn’t hold the existence of the other in its firm grasp.

It isn’t just Adam who has died, but a version of Nik Nik that only Adam could claim to know.

I want to be able to tell others—Dell, her children, anyone who will listen—how brave and defiant she is in this moment. I want them to know I was more scared than she was.

The people this high up aren’t grateful to have dodged this tragedy, because they don’t actually believe any bad could have happened to them. It’s a spectacle; not a near miss.

Snakes don’t crawl back into their old skins. They eat them for extra nutrients.

You were a villain. And a shithead. But we needed you, and there you were.”

We ripped the face off the place that wouldn’t let her wear her own, and I want her to know that.”

it just feels like Adam’s own impatience, irritated at all this sentimentality.

he is there now, in the way that all stories become true eventually.

I’m happy to lose the battle against wanting to touch him, against letting myself be loved by someone who dares to talk to God, against remembering that even though I tell people the first word I thought when I saw him was hate, the truth was that first word I thought, all those years ago, when we were children misunderstanding each other outside of the House, was want.