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

by Micaiah Johnson

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.

I’ve been so consumed with keeping my job, with maintaining my stolen life, I’d forgotten the most basic fact I learned as a child. I was so concerned about getting fired, I’d forgotten that anyone can die, at any time.

I understand why the others followed protocol. I see why a scientist would choose the quick snap of certain death from recall over enduring this for one more second. But this hurts just a little worse than when I was twelve and mouthed off enough for Nik Senior to have four of his guys stomp me for it.

only when I’m about to go down will I use the syringe.

I used to think the traverser’s death was punishment for trespassing into a world where you didn’t belong. Now I’m sure it’s a test. To see if you deserve to stay as much as they do.

mes. I tell myself it’s just another shallow grave to crawl out of.

It was like day and night, the warmth of his approval just as out of proportion as the cold abuse of his disapproval.

Ashtown kills, sure. But we kill. We growl and we fight and we avenge and we retaliate. We don’t do this polite coddling before we strike. We don’t lick the tears. I’m not saying it’s any better morally—a body’s a body—I’m just saying I don’t understand it.

He shakes his head, less like he’s denying the content of my words than denying having heard it at all.

I have the heart of a coyote but he has the eyes of a mountain lion, a creature who doesn’t need tricks because his teeth are real.

This is a creature who knows what he is, maybe even regrets it. A monster who’s seen a mirror. That must be what the journal is for him, another mirror to see himself.

I was never one of the women who believed she could change her abusive partner. I was just one who believed she could survive it.

I was never sure if Nik Nik was born cruel, or just obedient.

in and massacred nearly everyone. But that, that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that afterward, swords and sickles still drenched in innocent blood, they turned and said they’d done nothing. If the massacre was mentioned, they denied it, and no one was brave enough to argue. Nik Senior said that was true power. Not to kill a man, but to kill a man in front of his family and force them to agree you did not.

it. I picture Nyame punishing Nik Nik this way, forcing him to see and clean up exactly the kind of damage he inflicts on every other world.

I’m so good at not making an impression it’s a wonder I even leave footprints. Not once in my whole life have I been missed.

I can be remarkably compliant when I don’t have a choice.

I’ve seen the impossible, but nothing so impossible as this. When the runners open the doors, I see him: Adam Bosch, father of interdimensional traversing and director of the Eldridge Institute, standing behind the desk, just in front of the chair where Nik Senior bled to death.

Adam, Adranik, whoever he is, he killed me on this Earth. Or tried to. I should have known. Nik Nik isn’t the only one who would have killed like his father.

I know Adam…but then, you can’t ever know another person. Which is why you should never admire anyone.

Everything I knew about Eldridge is skewed now that I know the son of the Blood Emperor is running it. I’ve always believed Nik Senior killed his eldest, but apparently his narcissism was too great for that. He had wanted his second child to inherit, but he must have only sent Adam away to learn. On Earth Zero, anyway. Nik Senior probably tried to banish his son here, too, but this Adranik killed him for it.

It is possible to love a monster, even if you spend every day reminding yourself that they are a monster.

I could fight him in my world, where he has thin, delicate hands and a face that never quite meets another person’s. But this Adam, callous and even-eyed, this one could kill me.

If she did trick in Ash, she doesn’t anymore, and his use of her working name means he still considers her open for business despite her wishes.

If you didn’t cry, they didn’t chase as hard, they got bored. But I was a child. Children always cry.

“I know that you are just like your father. Worse, even. You didn’t grow up during the wars; you have no excuse for cruelty. You just like it. Your father was right. You are weak. A weak and useless ruler. Do you want to know where I come from? I come from a place where your brother is emperor and the wasteland rejoices.

turning his father’s legacy to shame.” It’s a little lie sharpened to a knife, and it slices true.

But death by runners? As an adult? No. The parades were the specter of my childhood. In the arc of my life, the time for them to kill me ended when I outlived Senior. It’s a child’s death, and I won’t be made a little girl in the end. I’d kill myself before I’d face the parade.

I’ve forgotten the shadow means fire on the other side.

I must have trusted him, at least that much. Trusted him to hurt me without killing me, to bruise me without breaking any of my most important bones. Is that still trust? Or just resignation?

the most basic Ashtown truth I’ve let myself forget: a wastelander with two thermoses carries water and poison.

Identifying the drug fills me with nostalgia. Being dosed with it—the easy blanket of a paralytic rather than the mind-churning panic of an opiate—feels like being close to home.

Adranik must have had everything to prove.

Or maybe he only hated hunting because he was afraid of the game, and seeing someone else spill blood sat with him just fine.

If there are souls that are pure, that are insulated from things that are done to them and remain the same whether they are gutter born or tower bound, Esther is one. The knowable.

My sister is polite, but polite and angelic are two different things. Everyone makes that mistake. They think hair like snow means angel, and eyes like the sky mean saint. But my sister would ostracize someone to their death if they threatened her church. She could teach me lessons in ruthlessness. It’s what I first liked about her. If she was what people saw when they looked at her, she’d have no more use than a porcelain doll.

And it’s on my lips to tell her so. To tell her that I got to the city on my own two feet, with no stranger from another world to help me, and I don’t owe anyone anything. Except, that’s not true, is it? There’s the workers who raised me, who took me in after my mom’s death and taught me how to seduce the most powerful man in the wastes. Did I ever reach back to them? Did I ever thank them? Have I ever thanked Jean? Or prayed in thanks for Caramenta, by whose blood I’ve risen to heights I did not even know the words to wish for? I look over her shoulder at Nik Nik, the sometimes Blood Emperor who nursed me back from death.

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

They all seem deflated by that. I’m not sure what they thought I was, but they find employed a letdown.

“Miracles can be found in the most inglorious places.”

stopped. I knew. I was young but I knew that if I gave in, turned what I’d been trained to do to animals to a person, to my own brother…there would be no coming back from it. I dropped the shard, forfeited, and have tried never to hurt a living thing since.”

I was praying for a way to stop the suffering that didn’t end with me killing my brother.

Time is flat. We process it linearly, but everything is happening at once, always. Right now I am kissing Nik Nik. I am leaving him. I am killing him, because surely I’ve done that before or will somewhere in the infinite. I am home with Dell. We are happy. We are not. We used to be happy and now she resents my lower status and I resent her resentment and we stay together because we’ve given up too much to do anything else.

It’s the latter I feel most strongly. The certainty that I am on the cusp of being worth something.

It makes me hate her all over again.

Her eyes are full of rage and injustice. She still doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong. She probably thinks even betrayal is fair play in the game of survival. Looking at her is like looking at a worse version of myself, but not far off enough for me to feel superior. I could have been her, still could be.

In worlds where clients forgot their place and killed her—or me, or both—it was always away from here. I’ve died all over the desert, but never in the House. The House has always been a sanctuary for me.

It doesn’t feel like she’s a version of me at all. It feels like she’s a sister, or a daughter, or a mother. Someone I was supposed to take care of and failed.

I would never give Nelline the satisfaction of hearing me say I don’t know who I am anymore, I don’t know who I have been.

There has never been weapons manufacturing in Ashtown, but it was Nik Senior who destroyed all available weapons brought from across the desert and the ocean beyond. He made the law that metal could be used only in domestic or industrial settings—partially a warlord’s attempt to ease the fears of his new people, and partially to disarm any would-be usurpers.