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.

Wiley City is like the sun, and Ashtown a black hole; it’s impossible to hover in between without being torn apart.

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.

Or maybe it’s just easier to think something is impossible than to try.

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.

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.

An angel fallen from the sky, with my name on her back so I would know the gift was meant for me.” “A fallen angel is a demon.” “A being who can enact great change, either way.”

Despite myself, I smile. “No, Nik. You always held on tight enough to bruise.” And what does it mean? That the only time I’ve had value, the only time I’ve been treated as precious, was not in the arms of my mother or my upstanding Wiley City boyfriend, but in the claws of a dictator.

There is comfort in the inevitability. It makes my part in her story unremarkable. 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.

Nik Nik is the tide I’ve been kicking against for the better part of a decade, and I have to keep kicking because I’ll drown in him as surely as a tar pit.

Now I just see a tyrant establishing a legacy. 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.

I have never considered my own moral character. I’ve never known exactly what my limits were. I still don’t, but I know that this is too much.

The multiverse isn’t just parallel universes accessible through science. They are in each of us, a kaleidoscope made of varying perceptions.

Dell and I were in different universes this whole time, and I should have known. I thought she was ignoring her attraction to me, but I was torturing her with it.

Maybe that was Nik Nik’s appeal. Not that he was powerful enough to keep me safe, but that he was too powerful for my curse to touch him. I can destroy almost anyone. My mother, Jean, even myself over three hundred times. Death hangs over me like too-fine dust settles on the skin—weightless but impossible to remove, no matter how hard you try.

Murder has a cycle just like water. In the same way water becomes a cloud, then becomes water again, when blood calls for vengeance the blood from that vengeance calls too. If you plan to give death, it will always return to you.

“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.

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.

Tonight is for living like I’m still on Earth 22, for feeling every ounce of pain, and converting it into rage. Rage is dirty fuel, but it burns hotter than grief ever could.

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 love you,” I say, out loud and formal like I never have before. Wiley words for my Wiley girl. “You know that, right? I’ve never said—” “Come home with me tonight,” she says, Ashtown all the way.

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 act as an intermediary between two worlds, a traverser like I’ve always been.

We are planets in orbit, pulling at each other as surely as gravity.

But there is also a world, and maybe there is only one, where a Wileyite girl comes into this garden and takes my hand. Where she reminds me there’s more than one type of visa, where we buy an apartment on the edge, because I still work in Ashtown and because that is where half of our children will be from. Where I am always too rough and she is always too proper and it is a tension that keeps us interested far longer than lust. It is only one world in infinite universes where this impossible happiness exists, but that is what makes it so valuable.