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

by Micaiah Johnson

When the multiverse was confirmed, the spiritual and scientific communities both counted it as evidence of their validity.

EVEN WORTHLESS THINGS can become valuable once they become rare. This is the grand lesson of my life.

her worry over a wasted mission sounds just like worry over me.

They needed trash people. Poor black and brown people. People somehow on the “wrong side” of the wall, even though they were the ones who built it. People brought for labor, or come for refuge, or who were here before the first neoliberal surveyed this land and thought to build a paradise. People who’d already thought this was paradise. They needed my people. They needed me.

I’m not a scientist. I’m just what they’re stuck with.

No better than pigeons, which is what they call us, not on paper.

Survival is Dell’s whole problem.

We’ve had this conversation five times this week and it always ends right here, where her concern is outweighed by the effort it takes to argue with me.

Jean is the one who told me about Nyame, just like he tells every new traverser. It’s the name of a goddess where he comes from, one who sits in the dark holding the planets in her palm. He says the first time he traveled to another world, he could feel her hand guiding him. I’ve never had much use for religion, but I respect him too much to disagree.

My mother used to say I was born reaching, which is true. She also used to say it would get me killed, which it hasn’t. Not yet, anyway. Not here.

It should scare us more than it does, but they were already an alien territory anyway.

Ruralites aren’t allowed to be angry, not at other people, because it would violate their code of endless compassion and understanding.

the venom no less potent for all its masking.

I live in Wiley but I’m legally still Ashtown’s, and neither has a claim on me that counts. It’s a space between worlds, no different from the star-lined darkness I stand in when I traverse. The darkness is worth it, because I know what waits on the other side.

In worlds where their mother lives, my mother never meets Dan and never leaves downtown.

Because that’s what a sister is: a piece of yourself you can finally love, because it’s in someone else.

The theme of the night is gratitude, so every speaker thanks God. But the theme for the night is also survival, so they are careful to thank Nik Nik almost as often. I don’t know if they’re thanking the emperor for a donation, or if they’re thanking him for the privilege of having a building without his runners burning it down, but they aren’t really grateful, just afraid of what will happen if they don’t look it.

“I am not Caramenta,” I say. “Caramenta is dead.”

CARAMENTA DIED SIX years ago on Earth 22, my actual home Earth.

Then he left, and left me alive, like he always did, because he liked me walking back to him tired and blistered. He liked caring for me afterward, as if the damage were done by someone else.

anything is possible once you convince yourself it’s necessary. I’m not sorry, and I’ve never been ashamed.

those working with us can’t help but look at the once-holy daughter of their leader, who went into the city and turned sinner overnight.

I’m admiring the ingenuity of his rebellion when he turns it on me.

People who don’t believe in taking up more space, air, or attention than strictly necessary are unsurprisingly opposed to claiming whole new worlds. They see it as new colonialism, and they’re not wrong.

Starla wasn’t just telling me these hypothetical murdered traversers didn’t matter. She was telling me nothing mattered. When I went, she wouldn’t riot, wouldn’t turn down my pulls to keep me in a job.

they will think I’m rusty because I’ve been gone so long, but soon they’ll see I haven’t forgotten…I just never knew.

It doesn’t matter how you got it, if you have it, it’s yours.

right. I do miss Marius, but like I would miss a pet bird—something fragile that trusted me to hold it in my hand, heartbeat against my palm, ribs vulnerable to the whims of fingertips. Maybe it’s just the power I miss.

arguing with him is just arguing against the voice in my head.

He sees future worlds as premonitions. I am not like him or anyone else from outside of Wiley City. I don’t have faith in things I can’t see. But when he says murdered, I get goose bumps.

The rumor is Nik Nik learned to kill by watching his father, which is why the method is the same, but that the first kill he saw was his beloved older brother Adranik, which is why the location is always kind.

Fate breaks rough, most of the time.

I never see the sun, but it’s still a good neighborhood. There aren’t many bad ones in Wiley City. It was built and is still run by people who care…for other Wileyites, anyway. They save all their apathy for the world right outside their walls—for the Rurals, the wasteland, and people like me.

the first thing a monster learns is when to lie.

Or maybe it’s just easier to think something is impossible than to try.

That’s the trouble with living eighty stories up—sometimes things fall down too far to ever reach again.

Knowing I can undo the loss she felt today fills me up more than it should. I guess I’ve been waiting to have something, anything, to offer her.

I feel bad, I do. It was a mistake…but every time I pull near Wiley City on another Earth, I find myself in that same garden. Just wanting to see her, to see if she’ll come up and choose to talk to me again.

they’re also excited because traversers will be gone. And what are pigeons but an infestation, at the end of the day?

Instead of the pride I usually feel to be part of a real company in the city, I just feel ashamed, the weight of my 68-percent score hanging over my head like an ax.

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.

if I stare at her much longer, this woman who wants me but is too afraid of where I’m from to do anything about it, I might finally find a way to hate her. And I don’t want to. Not really. Not yet.

I doubt they would have built the wall so high and sure if they’d known which side of it they’d be on.

the progressive Wiley City only keeps the promises it makes to itself. It is loving and nurturing and socialized…but only within its own borders.

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 have never touched this version of Dell, would never. Not because she wouldn’t let me, but because she might. It would reek of gratitude. And maybe she’d be insecure, think she was less than me. I don’t want to make Dell feel like that, don’t want to make her feel the way she makes me feel.

I hand it back to Dell like one hands an empty cup of bad medicine back to the doctor. I needed it, but I hated it.

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.

Not pursuing Dell and being rejected, which I’ve always accepted as an inevitability, but never getting her to see me enough to even speak to me.

In a few seconds, when the door is sealed and the vibrations hit just wrong enough for me to know it’s a killing frequency, I will wish she had. I will wish her eyes, and not her downturned face, were the last thing I’d ever see.