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

by Micaiah Johnson

“The way I dress is too traditional. It marks me as a child of immigrants.”

Others in the audience take piteous glances at the four of us, but we keep our heads high, a quartet playing proudly as the ship sinks.

Someone else might be surprised that so many are Wiley City stock—assuming, against all evidence, that cold-blooded murder is a desert trait—but I know better. I’m only surprised at how many of them are still employed.

He wants his journey recorded, not in the universal desire to be remembered, but because he pictures every word he says going on a plaque somewhere. He doesn’t want us to feel closer to him; he wants us to worship him.

“YOU KNOW DAMN well there is no inoculation. You have felt Nyame. You can’t inoculate against her.”

And then he magically finds a way to milk five of the super-rich for capital? That’s fifteen hundred people dying.”

Is this what I look like when I make excuses for my own comfort? Weak and ashamed? It must be.

I’ve been dressing more and more like Ashtown since I got back from 175. It hasn’t been a deliberate change, but I don’t care enough to fight against it.

When I walk out of the stairwell and onto the floor, it’s dark. Not dark like my floor is dark, meaning everyone’s gone home and there’s only ambient lights from computers and appliances, but perfect dark. I’d expected this floor was still research and development, just working on a different project. I was going to access their computers to either see the research for the inoculation, or prove there isn’t any because the inoculation doesn’t exist. But Adam hasn’t even bothered to set up a dummy department. There are no desks, no computers. Just empty space where a miracle was supposedly manufactured.

He just plans to kill the winning bidders’ dops. I knew it in the auditorium, I knew it when I tried to look up the department, and I knew it when I lifted the fob from Jean.

I can hear the wrinkling of a plastic jumpsuit. A Maintenance worker’s coming for me.

I wonder if I’ll wake up to her, or a group from Maintenance. I still manage to go to sleep, so I must not care. Or maybe I trust Dell…just a little.

I’ve never known exactly what my limits were. I still don’t, but I know that this is too much. Glossing over murders that have already happened so I can keep collecting a paycheck? I can take that. But standing by while the next round happens, and the next round, all so I can retire a citizen? I might as well jump in the bog beside Nelline, because that will take me to a place just as dark and suffocating.

I broke Dell’s heart before I even knew I had it, and I’ve been breaking it and breaking it again ever since, thinking I was the victim the whole time.

Adam Bosch confirmed plans to repeat the journey every two years. Because you can’t have a mass murder every year. That would be too much.

a Wileyite trying to pass as something else, and I can’t quite figure out why. Doesn’t he know we still die for not being what he is?

Every year walled cities get richer and more developed, and every year rural provinces get poorer and sicker. The other side of the scale tips down because of their rise, and they do nothing to balance it. I’m supposed to care about these five, when they have ignored entire plagues just outside these walls? I will give their deaths the same courtesy they’ve given the deaths of my people and yours. I’m going to kindly look away.”

“Their indifference has killed you on hundreds of worlds, and here you are, sticking your neck out to let them do it one more time. I want you to know, after this goes bad and you’re facing whatever end you’ve engineered for yourself, that I do admire you.”

I want them to know I did it. That I, an Ashtown child so worthless they’ve let her die hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, have scored perfect on a test made for them. I message Jean about my score, then I walk back to my desk and wait to lose it all.

was. I confused routine for reliability and reliability for safety.

This isn’t a Wiley City kind of grief, grief at the unknown, a twist of fate taking a life. This is grief because a powerful man killed someone I love but will never see consequences and it’s Ashtown all over.

Exlee lies beside me, and I curl around a body broader than mine but just as short without the advantage of shoes. I cry into the chest, arms, and hair of a person who feels more like home than this world’s version of my mother ever could.

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.

Dell is here. I sense her looking at me, but I can’t look back because I don’t know how to seem like I don’t need her, and it wouldn’t be fair to use Jean’s death like that.

His closeness is threatening but not human enough to be sexual. It’s like I’m being threatened by a rock, a robot, a weapon.

He didn’t even kill Jean because he hated him, or because he felt betrayed. He killed Jean because it made the most sense. Murdering Jean was just the answer to a riddle.

The two deaths are entwined, not separate griefs but wells digging into the same dark reservoir inside of me that is growing wider by the day.

I am a creature that destroys…and Adam Bosch has strayed too close.

Adam thinks I hesitated because I care enough about my job to make me malleable, but really I hesitated because as he spoke I got caught on the word avenge and have been ever since.

Adam may have forgotten what happens when you kill the wrong person in Ashtown, but he’ll remember soon enough. Blood is the only answer for blood in the desert.

If you plan to give death, it will always return to you.

How would Dell react if I threw away every attempt at assimilation? How quickly would she and everyone else spit me out if I became that unpalatable?

“I’ve gotten used to you pretending you’re from nowhere. It’s a change to hear you declare yourself.”

The only person who should feel guilty is the monster who beat him.”

The heat of my sister’s righteousness can rival a brush fire, but so can her empathy.

“Soft?” He says it like the word is an impossibility. “Soft like a diamond, maybe.” He means to insult her, but he doesn’t know my little sister has waited years for someone to see her and know she can cut.

What do you get the emperor who has everything? Last time I asked myself that question, I ended up with his name on my back.

I know metal. I know vehicle parts, and window blocks, and the thick clumps of it that get passed around as a rough currency. I’d expected something more like that. Not this fine work, this jewelry.

A coward’s machete.

I’m not just a child of ash, I’m a child of blood, and it’s a giant cosmic joke to think I could ever reach higher than that.

The worst part isn’t the pain; it’s the familiarity. It’s how many times I’ve felt this before and how many times I’ve sworn I would never feel it again.

Rage is dirty fuel, but it burns hotter than grief ever could.

She takes it as sarcasm, but it’s the truest thing I’ve ever said.

This is what Adam does. He dispatches operators to three hundred worlds, killing in his name, and thinks himself civilized because he doesn’t go along.

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.

But I find myself nodding, accepting a vision of a future that might want me more than the city ever has. I could become the thing I’d always feared, and then I might never be afraid of anything again.

I tell myself that just because he doesn’t keep images of friends or family doesn’t mean there isn’t someone out there who loves him.

Think of a traitor as a father and a husband too. He didn’t mean grant mercy. He meant when you kill him, know him well enough to know who might seek revenge.

I can’t say this is a misunderstanding, that this isn’t who I am. I can’t lie the way I’ve been lying to myself for years.

With the exception of my too-brief stays at the House when I was a girl, I’ve never been a part of anything. I thought of Nelline as being tragically lonely, without so much as a lover who would claim her in the light. But now that I’ve lost Jean, I’m not much better off.