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

by Micaiah Johnson

Nik Senior’s edict didn’t stop killing, but now people have to be in contact with their victims, have to feel their deaths.

I try to imagine what my childhood would have been like if Nik Senior’s men were armed. How I would feel if the deaths were quieter, quicker, but more common. I wonder if you feel it less, with guns. If so many people are killed with so little effort, is it easier to pretend they aren’t lives? That everything is fine? It’s different, I imagine, from seeing flattened forms like blood ghosts on the sand or hearing the screams in the streets during the parade. No, killing should take longer than a heartbeat. Murder should be unignorable, always.

They can’t think she’s a threat right now, which means the restraints are just to shame her. It’s not working. Her chin is high and she’s smiling. It’s a cruel one, and I’m glad I rarely smile if that’s what I look like doing it.

I hadn’t thought about it being the same—my traversing and Nelline’s spying—and I don’t like to think the reason we’ve both made it this far is that neither of us is bothered by stealing the facts of other people’s lives to secure our own.

Cruelty is a science he learned early and well, just like all the others.

even with an ash-washed door there is nothing so valuable in the desert as a safe, warm place where someone will touch you exactly how you want.

I’m not sure if it’s because I know this is not my Nik Nik or if this kind of revenge never really heals.

All I need to do is leave, and I won’t lose a piece of myself here. But if I leave everyone in this mess, am I still myself? Or am I Nelline? She could tell herself she didn’t do anything wrong, just passed on information, just survived.

My Nik Nik was not a supernatural monster, not an inescapable god. He was just a flawed person who could and should have been better. Just a pitiable boy who cut his brother once, and became so lost he could never find his way back.

As if not dying is a skill I’ve honed, not just blind luck.

I miss having a place where someone would touch you, just hold you if that was what you needed, or hold you down if you needed that more.

have to be alive, because there is someone who needs me.

They are smiling in a way they’d never smile at someone from downtown or the deep wastes. It’s still patronizing, the look you give a puppy, not an equal, but it’s less fatal than the distrust the rest of us get.

not since war became so technological and killing became letting the wrong people starve—but

But when dealing with their own people they are models of compassionate responsibility.

Pigeons aren’t supposed to value their lives more than the mission.

I am better prepared for horror than this, this sleeping girl, this untouched face.

“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.”

I didn’t change her fate; I don’t have that power. My presence just changed her timing. We were always going to separate. We must always separate. Time is a flat thing and we are always separating. When we are together we are already gone.

“I go to the dirt for refuge. I go to the ash for refuge. I go to the oil for refuge.”

It will run out when you don’t need her anymore.”

Exlee paid for my mother’s candle. It ran out too quickly. I still needed her. I still do.

all along she knew I wasn’t her sister.

I prayed for you, and you came. To regret that would be to reject a miracle.”

the headlights shine on something in the liquid. I can’t reach it, and it’s sinking slowly, so I lean down until I can make it out. At first, I think it must be a rock, the kind from the mountain that contains enough metal to wink if the light hits it right. But then I recognize its shape: an Eldridge collar, fully intact, sinking to a place no one will ever find it.

She’d want to be perfect to make sure she could never get thrown away again, even if that meant hating anything in herself that strayed the slightest bit.

“And Caramenta really didn’t like Dell. I think she even filed a complaint against her once during training.”

It’s a morbid comfort, but still a comfort, to know that even on the wrong Earth someone carries your name.

They’re probably just trying to blackmail me. I’ll show them my bank account and then we’ll both walk away weeping.”

I, maybe more than anyone else, have only existed to die.

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.

Suddenly I want my job again, not because I’m terrified of carving out a living in Ash, but because my job is to walk among the stars. How can I have viewed it as a paycheck for so long when I would pay to do this? I see now that it is a gift, not a lifeline.

even if I get an analyst job with a pay raise and citizenship and two bedrooms on a higher floor, I will have lost something I can never get back.

there’s no gold dust on the fingers. They don’t want to be Exlee, only the emperor.

Somehow using someone’s need to keep them in line is less awful than using their fear.

“Maintenance…” He waves his hand, as if to remove the meaning of the word, so much an emperor there is no excuse for me not having seen it before. “It’s almost always code for something else, you know.”

You can’t save the people he killed. You can only damn yourself. Unless you think some trial, some murder sentence, will please the dead?”

just use some of your new salary to save lives back in your hometown. It all washes out.”

I won’t act against Adam Bosch. Jean is right. This isn’t the first time I’ve been kept by a man ruining other people’s lives to hold on to power. What Jean doesn’t know is that even when I intend to do nothing, I have to know the exact shape of the thing I am allowing to happen.

I’ll sit at my desk, and begin a list of names.

Those three represented just over a thousand murders, but rivals have continued dying off ever since. My list now has fifty names, all dead across the majority of worlds, but none dead here. Killing on Earth Zero must be too real for Bosch, because while he dispatches his merry band of murderers to every other world, here he just buys the institutions of his rivals and runs them into the ground.

knowing how many dead I’m ignoring is like knowing how to spell the name of the demon who bought your soul.

“The only due powerful men recognize is a life—in service or in sacrifice.”

“You’re okay?” I say. “I thought the runners were coming for you.” “Not me,” she says. “They took him. Michael’s gone.”

They were based in cities like Wiley, but like all the city-based companies, they didn’t adhere to any of the same labor laws once they weren’t dealing with citizens.

I don’t pretend I won’t hate him for this. This will tear apart Esther and my parents. Not to mention what it will do to Daniel’s reputation. They’ll say he was such a bad father his own son chose the life of grit and blood and oil.

“I thought you had a plan,” I say. “I do. I plan to love my brother, whatever life he chooses.”

“I couldn’t possibly be more upset,” she says, and I know beneath the affected calm, she’s telling the truth.

Michael took on the ritual of explosives when he was a boy? I asked him once. He said he liked not knowing what was going to happen. He didn’t hope for it to go well or for it to go poorly. He didn’t care either way. He liked that uncertainty. That kind of curiosity is ill fit for people who are supposed to want only the best in all things for everyone, all the time.”

Maybe I’m not the only one who feels the tugs of my other lives. Maybe they hover over us, steering us, constantly. I told Esther before that nothing was inevitable, but that was before I felt so helpless to change absolutely anything at all.