Those Beyond the Wall (Ashtown #2) by Micaiah Johnson

“So if you also sense an undercurrent of rage in this novel, you are not wrong. But it is not bitterness. Bitterness is anger with nowhere to go. Bitterness and resignation are close and tempting cousins. Anger with a target is Rage, and Rage is sister to Hope alone. We rage because we do believe things can be better, by fire if necessary.”

Micaiah Johnson

I am unwell!

Those Beyond the Wall really hurt my feelings and I may never recover!!

It’s also another work of art from Micaiah Johnson!

I absolutely ADORED The Space Between Worlds, and it still blows my freaking mind that it was Micaiah Johnson’s debut. With debuts so strong I’m sometimes nervous about the next one because, you know, it’s hard to beat perfection! Well she managed it!

Those Beyond the Wall takes place in the same Ashtown, and therefore same world where Cara from The Space Between Worlds was from. The story is told from the POV of Scales. Scales is an Ashtown runner, and mechanic. She is also a reluctant storyteller, but boy does she have a story for us!

“I like hearing stories. I’m not great at telling them, and I don’t like doing things I’m not good at, but I don’t have a choice. Too many of the other tellers are dead, and they’re waiting for me to say their part. We don’t like witnesses in Ashtown, but I guess that’s what I am now.”

Scales is definitely an unreliable narrator for about 80% of this book, but I think it might be because the story she is telling is so painful for her, and therefore she needs to tell it her way before she can relive the trauma that is the truth, and I do believe it’s the truth because when she got to how the story ends she really didn’t hold back on her involvement in everything that happened.

While there are ‘villains’ in this, what was interesting was that I found myself seeing and understanding the shades of grey around those who would ordinarily be seen as irredeemable. I mean I HATED Adam in the first book, he was an asshole, and he is still an asshole in this, but he is also not the type of asshole I thought he was in The Space Between Worlds. I guess it just really highlighted how complex people are.

“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.”

Thankfully we get to see Cara and Dell again, Cara had a larger role to play in the story, but when Dell makes an appearance she is of course very wise. I adore Cara, she is amazing, but for someone who knows this game, who has seen what she has seen, I feel like she was unable to see shades of grey in this. And maybe that makes sense, maybe someone who has seen the worlds she has, and survived them, maybe she needs to hang tightly onto the moral code she has written for herself. I think otherwise she would go insane, going to be honest, by the end of this, I worry about how sane she really is. I really wouldn’t hate a little domestic Cara and Dell short that takes place like a year out from the end of this story. I just need to check on my girls to make sure they are doing okay!

Who I don’t feel the need to check up on is Scales though, Scales lives in the shades of grey, and I think she is more emotionally capable because of that. I was trying to figure out why she ended up being so emotionally wise — is that even at thing? — and I think it’s everything she has been through. I think that’s why this is her story, I think that every single step Scales took, every single thing that was done to her, it all need to happen to shape her into the Scales needed to take on the things she took on, even when she really didn’t want to. She is not an ‘ordinary’ hero, but I actually don’t think there is such a thing as a perfect hero, creating real change is often messy, hard decisions need to be made, and Scales was perfectly placed to make those decisions. I wish she didn’t have to, but I actually think her empathy will be what helps her carry that load.

“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 when there’s so much darkness?”

There needs to be a way of just setting up an auto-buy function for some authors, Micaiah Johnson would be absolutely on my list.

Synopsis:

Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a series of sudden and inexplicable deaths in a searing sci-fi thriller from the Compton Crook Award–winning author of The Space Between Worlds.

Scales is the best at what she does: She is an enforcer who keeps the peace in Ashtown, a rough, climate-ravaged desert town. But that fragile peace is fractured when a woman is mangled and killed within Ash’s borders, right in front of Scales’s eyes. Even more incomprehensible is that there was seemingly no murderer.

When more mutilated bodies start to turn up, both in Ashtown and in the wealthier, walled-off Wiley City, Scales is tasked with finding the cause—and putting an end to it. She teams up with a frustratingly by-the-books partner and a brusque-but-brilliant scientist in order to uncover the truth, delving into both worlds to track down the invisible killer. But what they find points to something bigger and more corrupt than they could’ve ever foreseen—and it could spell doom for the entire world.