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

by Micaiah Johnson

Dell’s been calling me, but she’s only irritated now and I won’t answer until she’s concerned. Not because I like being difficult—though, there is that—but because her worry over a wasted mission sounds just like worry over me.

“Cara, I need you to answer me.” There we go. “I’m here.” There’s a pause while she resets to apathy, but I heard the panic. For a second, she cared.

job’s a job, and people edging out other people to make money buying and selling something invisible just sounds like rich-people problems.

Again, I can interpret her fear over a wasted asset however I want, and I choose to pretend it’s affection.

He used to walk the worlds with us, but now he sits in a room and makes the policies surrounding traversing. When he goes out in public, people repeat his famous quote—I have seen two worlds now and the space between. We are a wonder—from the moment he landed safely on a new world.

Like I am an imposter. And I am. Back in the Wiles, I pass for someone who has known stability and money her whole life. Here, I pass for someone who remembers how to pray and scrape, who would never let the same kind of peppers they’ve spent weeks nurturing mold forgotten in the back of her fridge. I am always pretending, always wearing costumes but never just clothes.

I have to wait for Dell to send the elevator down. When it doesn’t come, I press a button on my cuff to buzz her. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” I say into the speaker. There’s a long moment of silence, and then “I’m not a princess” comes over the connection. “Could have fooled me,” I say, but she’s already closed the link and sent the elevator.

I’m the best in the universe at letting bad shit happen to me.”

“How? Will you make it okay? Take me in when I get my slip? Marry me when my residency is void?” Her breath comes up short at that, like I said something offensive. And it must be, to her. I want to remember this, this borderline disgust at the idea of me, but for some reason I can never keep it long enough to stop wanting her.

I loved re-reading this quote after finishing the book. It has new meaning now!

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.

Such romantic writing!

I don’t realize how many years I’ve been alone until I warm under a gift as simple as someone’s undivided attention.

There is comfort in the inevitability. It makes my part in her story unremarkable. I didn’t change her fate; I don’t have that power. My presence just changed her timing.

“Some things are inevitable.” “Nothing is inevitable,” I say. Nik Nik is the tide I’ve been kicking against for the better part of a decade, and I have to keep kicking because I’ll drown in him as surely as a tar pit.

was never sure. For years, I’ve been unsure I was capable of anything but ambition. I think back to the days lost crying for Nelline. Feeling guilty for Adra. Feeling hope for Nik Nik. Sometimes you have to bleed to know you’re human. I am afraid, panicked, and ashamed, but I am also grateful. I hadn’t thought all this misery would bring its own gift.

As I leave Exlee reminds me to say Jean’s name each morning and each night until the burial, because 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.

But of course she has. Of course she knew I was in this room just as I knew the moment she walked up to the door. We are planets in orbit, pulling at each other as surely as gravity.

In the box is Dell’s jade earring, the third she had no use for, but it’s been fixed onto a necklace. Instead of a platinum chain like most of Dell’s jewelry, this chain is black as night and catches the light red like Ashtown stone.

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.