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

by Micaiah Johnson

I don’t want to fit in. I don’t want to look like I belong there, because one day I want to pretend I never did.

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

Interesting

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

He opened his mouth, blood still dripping from his jaw, and declared peace.

Yikes. The imagery is beautiful but still...yikes.

“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.”

Time is a flat thing and we are always separating. When we are together we are already gone.

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.

“You asked me why I was always on the fortieth floor if I lived and worked on eighty.” I lick my lips. It’s a nervous habit, but the attention it draws only makes me more nervous. “Why were you?” “For the same reason I have never taken a promotion or a vacation, Cara. I’m always on the fortieth floor because that is where you are. I will always want to be wherever you are.”

Because, despite his blood and his birth, he thinks of us as simple, stupid, greedy creatures. And me, for my part, I was saved by my knowledge of him.

Every bruise and broken bone, every moment of self-loathing and tainted desire, has led me to this: sitting across from the smartest man in the universe, and having the upper hand.

I lean forward. He should stop me, but he doesn’t, because he’s intelligent and the downfall of all intelligent creatures is curiosity.

maybe it’s one of the slow corporate deaths, like that dust that settled in our grandparents’ lungs until there wasn’t room enough for air.

that my dreams are the same as the hallucinations in the hatch because they are both just the mind trying to process what it doesn’t understand. And there is a world where they are right, and a world where they are wrong, and I don’t need to know which this is.