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

by Micaiah Johnson

You’re an anomaly the universe won’t allow, and she’ll send you back broken in half if she has to.

REASONS I HAVE DIED:

I make up for it by smiling too much, because my usual aloofness will look like elitism to them.

There’s a saying in Ash, mostly downtown, that’s been applied to everything from thrones to land to spouses: It doesn’t matter how you got it, if you have it, it’s yours. So I don’t mourn the dead girl whose life I live.

Forcing Dell into small talk is fun because she’s so bad at it with me. It’s like she’s being asked to communicate with a child or snake—something that is either boring or dangerous, with no in-between.

He knows growing up under the threat of starvation and homelessness means nothing will ever quite feel like pressure again. He knows even better than I do.

“Cara, if this other you—” “There is no other me.”

Or you’re left bloodied and naked, facedown in the dirt on a world that isn’t yours, like the girl whose bed I sleep in. Fate breaks rough, most of the time.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” I say into the speaker. There’s a long moment of silence, and then “I’m not a princess” comes over the connection.

Why have I survived? Because I am a creature more devious than all the other mes put together.

Science says she’s tuning into my destination, but Jean would say she’s petitioning a god, adjusting frequencies the way monks hum to access the divine.

When I was a boy I used to wonder what it would be like to walk in the stars. Not on them. In the space between.

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.

I’M NOT SURPRISED to die in the darkness between. Die exactly how I lived: belonging nowhere.

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’ve collected marks from others all over, but I’ve never made one on someone else.

She’s staring at me, her face unreadable in the same way a star chart is unreadable when there are no lines to mark the constellations. It’s not that you can’t make out a shape, it’s that you can make out so many shapes you’ll never know which one is right.

“Must be nice.” “Oh, be more bitter. I never get sick of it.”

“You? I didn’t think you ever lost control.” “Only every single time something happens to you,” she says, putting on her coat. “These last few weeks, I’ve felt you truly slipping away from me for the first time. I handled it poorly. I’m sorry.”