Those Beyond the Wall: A Novel

by Micaiah Johnson

Overview

A searing sci-fi thriller about a woman reckoning with her past to solve a series of sudden and inexplicable deaths in the face of a coming apocalypse—from the Compton Crook Award–winning author of The Space Between Worlds.

“A bold, beautiful, gut-punch of a story, at turns ferocious and poetic—and sometimes both at once.”—Veronica Roth, New York Times bestselling author of Chosen Ones

“[Those Beyond the Wall] reads like Mad Max: Fury Road was written by Phillip K. Dick and N.K. Jemisin.”—CrimeReads

SHORTLISTED FOR THE URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE FOR FICTION

In Ashtown, a rough-and-tumble desert community, the Emperor rules with poisoned claws and an iron fist. He can’t show any sign of weakness, as the neighboring Wiley City has spent lifetimes beating down the people of Ashtown and would love nothing more than its downfall. There’s only one person in the desert the Emperor can fully trust—and her name is Scales.

Scales is the best at what she does: keeping everyone and everything in line. As a skilled mechanic—and an even more skilled fighter, when she needs to be—Scales is a respected member of the Emperor’s crew, who’s able to keep things running smoothly. But the fragile peace Scales helps to maintain is fractured when a woman is mangled and killed before her eyes. Even more incomprehensible: There doesn’t seem to be a murderer.

When more 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 by any means necessary. To protect the people she loves, she teams up with a frustratingly by-the-books partner from Ashtown and a brusque-but-brilliant scientist from the City, delving into both worlds to track down an invisible killer. 

But the answers Scales finds are bigger than she ever could have imagined, leading her into the brutal heart beneath Wiley City’s pristine façade and dredging up secrets from her own past that she would rather keep hidden. If she wants to save the world from the earth-shattering truths she uncovers, she can no longer remain silent—even if speaking up costs her everything.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593497500
Publisher:	Random House Worlds
Publication date:	03/12/2024
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	222,352
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Micaiah Johnson is the Compton Crook Award–winning author of The Space Between Worlds. Her debut novel was an Editors’ Choice of The New York Times and named one of best books of 2020 and one of the best science-fiction books of the last decade by NPR. She was raised in California’s Mojave Desert, surrounded by trees named Joshua and women who told stories. She received a bachelor of arts in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and a master of fine arts in fiction from Rutgers University–Camden. She now studies American literature at Vanderbilt University, where she focuses on critical race theory and automatons.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One


They call me Mr. Scales because I’m a snake.

Or because I’m real balanced.

Or because my father lent metal.

Depends who you ask, and they’re mostly wrong. Doesn’t matter. Wrong and right are moods in Ash. Not values. We tell one another stories we know aren’t true, and we’re glad to hear them as long as they stretch. No one cares if the endings are happy; we only care that they eat up time.

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.

When it happened I was on drop-off. I was not supposed to be on drop-off. I’m the mechanic. I fix things. I’m supposed to work back at the row downtown unless I get bored enough to beg Mr. Silk for a week’s alt duty. But Mr. Cheeks’d been flaking, and he’s covered my ass before, so I was covering his by doing his drop-off. You don’t need to know any of this to understand what happened next, but I told you—I’m bad at stories.

Exlee was waiting for me when I came in. Exlee is always waiting for me, or maybe their face just looks that way because it’s the face they wear to greet clients. I don’t mind if it’s just for show or just for me. It looks like they’re happy to see me, like their life is brighter because I’ve walked through the House’s door, and that’s all I need.

“Hey, Pretty Girl.”

No one is more careful about gender than the proprietor. Exlee doesn’t even strictly believe girls and boys exist separately, but they still call me Pretty Girl because I like being called a girl as much as I like being covered in grime from other runners’ rides. Girl, I don’t mind. Pretty’s a lie, but even a lie sounds good coming out in Exlee’s silk-smoke voice.

“Hey, Boss.”

I call Exlee Boss because I used to, and because they’re the only person in the wastes the emperor won’t get salty at if he finds out.

I slid the package along the bar, deliberately stopping it just shy of Exlee’s grasp because I wanted to steal the simple pleasure of watching those long, gold-dusted fingers tipped with glittering nails reach for its edge like the uncurling legs of a glamorous spider. They tucked the package behind their fan so delicately it was like someone tucking away a love letter from an admirer, or a raptor tucking away a chick. It looked like anything but a drop-off. I’m not sure what’s in the brown bundle, but it comes from the emperor and goes to the House so we runners are all sure it’s payment. What the two most powerful people in the wastes could consider valuable enough to trade’s a mystery to me, but I don’t really think in terms of value. I like to watch pretty things move. I like to make broken things fixed. I’m simple.

I remember that Helene X was dancing on the femme stage. We’ve been friends since even before I used to dance in the slot right before hers, so on my way out I stopped to watch her because I always do and always have. I always would have, too, if the world hadn’t forgotten itself right then.

Helene’s Wiley City all over—true pale, not that chalk-wash new providers use—with golden hair. That’s the part I want to tell you. I want to tell you how she looked golden right before, twirling with her back too straight to have ever really been from here. I want to tell you how her eyes and mouth were that almost-but-not-quite-shut she’d perfected, an invitation the way a half-closed door can make you want to come inside more than one flung wide open. I wish I could describe the way her skin was pale but didn’t look like a corpse.

Until it did.

It began at her neck. The tight ridge of it pulsing, at first strange enough to be sensual and then too much to be anything but grotesque. By the time the bones at the back of her neck had pushed through the skin of the front it was too late for her to scream, though her mouth made the shape. Her eyes were wide open by then, too. The front of her torso cracked in, then back out like her ribs were wings pushing through the wrong side. Finally, the bones broke through her chest cavity like something being born, the accompanying blood an arc of spray that painted the crowd.

The hot splatter hitting their skin gave them permission to panic. Everyone screamed. Everyone ran. I walked toward her. I don’t know why. I fix things, I guess. It’s what I do. I climbed onto the stage I’d last stepped foot on over a decade ago and gathered her fracturing torso into my lap. I held her together. She insisted on breaking apart. I held her harder. But then I was just breaking her too. Sometimes when you want to fix something too bad, you break it. The way you can shatter metal if you get it too hot, even if all you’re trying to do is mend a crack. This was something I should already have known.

In the end, I don’t know if I held her together more than I tore her apart, but I know that’s how they found me: like a real runner, bloodied up and still trying.

“Mr. Scales, report.”

I’ve been cradling a glass of f***-yourself-up juice from Exlee’s secret stash since they pulled me away. The House calls it tar—it isn’t, but it’s thick as gum paste and it numbs your whole mouth on its way to numb everything else, so it might as well be—and I’m wondering where I can find a vat of it to dive into when the voice comes again.

“Back from the edge, Scales,” he says, this time a whisper that comes with a hand squeezing my wrist.

I look up at my commanding officer.

“Huh?”

“I said report,” Mr. Cheeks says.

We both know he didn’t, but there’re two other leathers checking out the scene and it wouldn’t do to act too casual.

“Yes, sir.” I slide the glass away. “Body looks like it’s been lead-piped from every direction, but there’s no assailant. Everyone saw the kill. No one saw a killer.”

He nods, flexing the sea of tattoos he calls a neck, the only bare spots his pretty face and the column of his throat—left deliberately empty in case he ever considers being a colossal moron and falling in love. Usually I spend too long staring at that three-inch strip of uninked brown, but not tonight. Tonight his Adam’s apple is too prominent to remind me of anything but Helene X’s bones coming from the back to break out the front.

The two runners move out of earshot, and Cheeks leans in.

“You gonna puke?”

“You gonna f*** off?”

He holds up his palms—also tattooed, though they fade so fast the design changes from year to year. “Wouldn’t blame you. It’s a bad one, and you knew her better than the rest of us.”

“I’m solid,” I say, and it’s not just talk.

I went through all the corpse exposure training the emperor could throw at me when I joined, and that was back when I was still a teenager in boot camp with lieutenants who assumed I’d never seen a dead body. Before I’d been pulled away, I’d forced myself to stare at what was left of Helene X. I took in the damage; not just what I’d seen happen, but what I’d missed. While I’d been trying to force her ribs back together like she was an oil pan that’d bottomed out in the off-roads, the tremors had continued down, shattering her hips, inverting her legs. I stared long and hard, trying to fit the pieces back where they were supposed to go, trying to find a pattern in the damage. And there is a pattern. I can’t quite see it, but I know it’s there. This can’t just be chaos.

Cheeks lets out one of his long-suffering sighs. “I’m sorry about this. You were covering for me, if I’d . . .”

“No sweat. You couldn’t have known. No one could have.” The smile I force hurts, but I’m desperate to ease his guilt. “You can make it up to me Wednesday.”

“Wednesday?”

I fake an appalled face. “Full moon? Midnight buggying? I outride you? You weep at your lack of skill?”

“Not how I remember it.”

“That’s all right. Denial is a fine coping mechanism.”

“We’ll see,” he says, straightening back into superior officer formality as another runner approaches.

I can tell from my periphery who it is. Too tall and pale to be anyone else. F***ing Cross. Upside is, Cross walking in means I’ve got an acceptable target for all my impotent rage. I don’t telegraph, but because he knows me as well as anyone ever will, Cheeks says, “Play nice, Scales,” before I can even open my mouth.

It wasn’t an order though. His mistake.

I’m still making eye contact with him when I shout, “Who let Ruralite trash into the House?”

Editorial Reviews

01/15/2024

In a telling introductory note to this fierce, noir vision of a postapocalypse Earth, Compton-Crook Award winner Johnson (The Space Between Worlds) distinguishes between rage, which has a target, and anger, which has none. Conceived during the 2020 sit-in at Nashville’s People’s Plaza aimed at “institutionalized racialized violence,” this thought-provoking novel’s rage is fueled by “dreams of a different but possible future.” Scales, the most effective enforcer for the ruler of the Black community of Ashtown, witnesses her friend Helene X inexplicably torn to pieces by an unseen force. After more, similarly shattered bodies appear throughout Ashtown and the neighboring, walled-in white enclave of Wiley City, Scales is ordered to investigate. Her quest is textured by her anger issues, lingering trauma from childhood abuse, and unrequited love for a man she’ll never have. Also complicating things is the sinister influx of “dops,” alternate versions of existing people from parallel universes. Wrenching scenes of physical and psychological torture are tempered only slightly by a closing vision that things could be better, “by fire if necessary.” This searing and demanding novel is sure to stir readers. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 01/01/2024

Scales is a mechanic and enforcer in Ashtown, working under the powerful, deadly Emperor to help keep balance in their desert town. When a close friend dies horrifically in front of Scales, she is tasked with finding out the truth about their violent death—especially when there was no murderer in sight. When it is discovered that more deaths have occurred, both in Ash and in the walled and wealthy Wiley City, Scales must work with two frustrating men—her Emperor-compliant partner Cross and annoyingly brilliant scientist Adam—to discover what is killing people. As the truth is uncovered, so is the buried past that Scales has tried to overcome, one of blood and secrets. Yet more secrets and more blood will be spilled, and the answers could destroy their world. This book packs an emotional punch, as brutality lies next to the thin edge of caring, wrapped up in friendship and rage, and love will not stop hearts from shattering. VERDICT Set 10 years after The Space Between Worlds, this novel provides a new protagonist, returning characters, and a multiverse of paths for all of them. Johnson's tense sci-fi thriller is exciting and immersive.—Kristi Chadwick

Library Journal

Angel Pean sounds young, sweet, and tough as nails in her impressive narration of this second novel by the author of the Earphones Award-winning sci-fi debut THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS. Set on an alternate, perhaps future, Earth, where Wiley City residents guard their walled community from gritty Ashtown, this is both a thriller and social commentary. Scales is a mechanic and warrior who is trusted by Ashtown's emperor. When Ashtown residents start to be mysteriously murdered, she is tasked with stopping the crimes. Honeyed tones and audible bravado make Scales achingly real as she faces all manner of threats, which Pean performs with edge-of-your-seat pacing. A growling emperor, condescending scientist, straightlaced colleague, and other characters contrast evocatively with Scales, raising listeners' involvement with this fierce morality tale. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2024 - AudioFile

A bold, beautiful, gut-punch of a story, at turns ferocious and poetic—and sometimes both at once.”—Veronica Roth, New York Times bestselling author of Chosen Ones

“Those Beyond the Wall is a standout novel with painful clarity of voice; [it is] savage, yet humane. Micaiah Johnson has more than delivered on the promise of her exceptional first novel with a follow-up that is even more tightly plotted and more vividly characterized.”—Elizabeth Bear, Hugo Award–winning author of Ancestral Night

“[Those Beyond the Wall] reads like Mad Max: Fury Road was written by Philip K. Dick and N. K. Jemisin.”—CrimeReads

“Gritty like desert sand, shiny like a too-hot sun on chrome, armored in its finest battle leathers, but beneath all that, Those Beyond the Wall is an exploration of community and found family and what happens when the real enemy is a society that refuses to recognize the humanity of others. This book is a fierce love letter to everyone who has ever found themselves beyond the wall. Wonderful stuff, but I wouldn’t expect any less from Micaiah Johnson.”—Sarah Pinsker, Nebula and Hugo Award–winning author of Lost Places and A Song for a New Day

“[Those Beyond the Wall] packs an emotional punch, as brutality lies next to the thin edge of caring, wrapped up in friendship and rage, and love will not stop hearts from shattering.”—Library Journal, starred review
 
“Johnson’s riveting dystopian story . . . will appeal to fans of classic SF that portrays parallels to current social issues.” —Booklist, starred review

From the Publisher