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

by Micaiah Johnson

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

Insider trading doesn’t even sound like a crime—not a real one, one with blood.

Most of my deaths can be linked directly to my mother.

I’ve been in Wiley City for six years as a resident. In four more, I’ll be pronounced citizen. For now, I’m nowhere. 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.

The Rurals are a part of Ashtown that thinks itself a subdivision, even though the only thing separating it from the concrete stacked pods that make up the rest of the city is a wooden fence and the agreement of people on both sides of that fence.

“That you think vanity is your worst trait is a sign of your vanity.”

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

I am always pretending, always wearing costumes but never just clothes.

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.

But 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.

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

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

“What do you call science when it answers a prayer?”

The universe erases me, but it also remakes me again and again, so there must be something worthwhile in this image.

That is the mix of fear and blood and death that made having a warlord for an emperor attractive.

Why are we, who are so unhappy, fixated on long lives? What is the point? An easy life isn’t a blessing. Easy doesn’t mean happy. Alive doesn’t mean anything at all. Sometimes the path to an easy life makes you miserable.

I always thought I’d have to kill him to feel free, but hearing him say my name kindly is the balm that I thought only seeing his blood would be. Maybe it just takes this, glimpsing him as a different person who is whole and undamaged and who would never have hurt me.

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.

I could tell him Wiley City has never actually given a Purple Heart, and I’m not sure anywhere else has in decades—not since war became so technological and killing became letting the wrong people starve—but I like his explanation too much to disagree.

“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.”

Death can be senseless, but life never is.

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

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

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.”

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.

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.

I could become the thing I’d always feared, and then I might never be afraid of anything again.

It is only one world in infinite universes where this impossible happiness exists, but that is what makes it so valuable.