The Space Between Worlds (The Space Between Worlds #1)

by Micaiah Johnson

One day, the Eldridge Institute will figure out how to remotely download information across worlds, and I’ll be worthless again.

have seen two worlds now and the space between. We are a wonder—from the moment he landed safely on a new world. They shake his hand and take his picture, but he is quick to remind me that he was once worthless too.

It shames me more than it shames them, but it does shame us both. I make up for it by smiling too much, because my usual aloofness will look like elitism to them.

“Yes, they do, but when the company looks at applying analysts they don’t see their skill. They see their credentials, background, and education. The people Eldridge hires have to prove they’re unfit despite their background. You’ll have to do the opposite, and to do that you need to be infallible where they are flawed.”

But the practical higher-ups have never heard of Nyame, the unofficial goddess of traversers. If they knew the irrational reason traversers reject the veil, they would force it on us. So we talk about our vision and diminished effectiveness and longer pull times, because these are terms they understand.

The universe is brimming with stars and life, but there is a section of sky that is utterly dead and empty. They call it a cold spot, a supervoid, and they say it got that way because two parallel universes got too close to touching. That’s us. That’s me and Dell. We coexist, parallel but never touching, and if one of us goes too far, if I ever get too close, the Eridanus Void opens between us. We both withdraw and leave a cold darkness in the space where we almost touched that three suns couldn’t light.

If I figured anything out in these last six years, it is this: human beings are unknowable. You can never know a single person fully, not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if your cleverness would outlive your desperation.

I want to take her hands and tell her that, yes, she is better than me but that is because she is better than me. Not because Wileyites are better than Ashtowners, but because she is driven without being manipulative, she is ambitious but only until it edges over into cruelty. Until we have that common understanding, we can never really speak, and that’s something I’m just coming to terms with.

What they don’t tell you about getting everything you ever wanted is the cold-sweat panic when you think about losing it. For someone who’d never had anything to lose, it’s like drowning, all the time.

Sometimes, focusing on survival is necessary. Sometimes, it is just an excuse for selfishness.

“The phenomenon of death is just the separation of the astral body from the physical body. It is the five elements of the body returning to their source. In the divine plan, every union must end with separation. Whether it was now, twenty years ago, or twenty years in the future, you were always going to lose her. We are pilgrims at an inn. When we leave is immaterial, because we are only meant to leave.

our dead are only weights on our backs when we won’t let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead.

They say hunting monsters will turn you into one. That isn’t what’s happening now. Sometimes to kill a dragon, you have to remember that you breathe fire too. This isn’t a becoming; it’s a revealing. I’ve been a monster all along.

Adam licks his lips. Hubris. That is the word that will be written on his grave. He’s spent decades studying any space he’s ever wanted to conquer, any person he’s ever wanted to win over, but he didn’t bother to check even the most basic things about Nik Nik. Because, despite his blood and his birth, he thinks of us as simple, stupid, greedy creatures.

This is what I do. I act as an intermediary between two worlds, a traverser like I’ve always been.

My dead grow quiet in my chest, content now that I’ve brought them back to a place they know. The scientists would say this is all expected, that the pressure in my chest was just the toll traversing took on my most concentrated bones, and that my dreams are the same as the hallucinations in the hatch because they are both just the mind trying to process what it doesn’t understand. And there is a world where they are right, and a world where they are wrong, and I don’t need to know which this is.

But there is also a world, and maybe there is only one, where a Wileyite girl comes into this garden and takes my hand. Where she reminds me there’s more than one type of visa, where we buy an apartment on the edge, because I still work in Ashtown and because that is where half of our children will be from. Where I am always too rough and she is always too proper and it is a tension that keeps us interested far longer than lust. It is only one world in infinite universes where this impossible happiness exists, but that is what makes it so valuable.

Such a bittersweet ending. Fitting according to the story. Loved it. Keep hope alive