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All Chapters of The Distance Between Worlds: Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

7 Chapters

1

The day was ordinary right up until the exact minute it stopped being ordinary — and up until that minute, Alice could have narrated it in advance, hour by hour, and gotten almost nothing wrong.Work ended on time. Her car — the one with the rotten temperament, the one that started maybe every other try and never for any logical reason — turned over on the first try today, as if it, too, had decided to play along with the calm mood of the day. The city outside the window was the same city as yesterday: the same signs, the same crack in the sidewalk by the crosswalk that they'd been promising to patch since spring, the same guy walking the same dog on the same strict schedule — like the dog held down an office job too and took punctuality personally.She loved days like this — not because nothing interesting happened in them, but because nothing happened without her knowing about it first. The world behaved predictably. She returned the favor.On her way home, Alice stopped at the litt

Last Updated : 2026-09-12

2

The next morning, the city looked ordinary and predictable again.Alice was walking to work past the old building on the corner of Ratushnaya — the one that had been wrapped in scaffolding for two months now, with perpetually irritated workers up top and a sign reading CAUTION, WORK IN PROGRESS that everyone had long since stopped noticing. She'd stopped noticing it too. She was simply walking her side of the sidewalk, out of habit skirting the construction barrier, thinking that she really did need to call the bank today instead of putting it off again.The shout from above hit before she'd even processed what it meant.Then — a metallic screech, short and awful, the sound of a fitting snapping.Alice looked up.A heavy steel frame — part of the scaffolding structure, torn loose from either a winch or a temporary bracket — was falling, tumbling unevenly through the air, too heavy, too fast for anyone to react sensibly.Directly beneath it, right on its path, stood a young woman with

Last Updated : 2026-09-12

3

For a few more seconds Alice just stood on the sidewalk, not quite grasping what had happened. Around her everyone was talking at once — someone calling for the crew, someone comforting the young mother, someone filming the fallen frame on their phone.Alice pulled out her cell on autopilot."Hey, Marinka? I'm not coming in today. I suddenly feel sick. Can you cover for me?"She listened to the reply, thanked her quickly, and put the phone away. She didn't want to explain anything. She didn't yet know herself what exactly there'd be to explain.The walk home took an oddly long time — not because it was far, but because her legs seemed to refuse to move any faster, and Alice didn't notice until she was almost there that she'd made the whole trip staring at her own feet, as if she were afraid the sidewalk might betray her the same way reality just had. At her building's entrance she lingered longer than she needed to, punching in the door code — her hands weren't cooperating properly, a

Last Updated : 2026-09-12

4

By the next day, she'd almost managed to convince herself that everything that happened yesterday had been the result of serious stress, lack of sleep, and one entirely real but ultimately explainable incident with a construction frame. People saw all kinds of things in situations like that. The brain was good at filling in gaps with pretty, completely false pictures — she'd read that somewhere once, and she chose to remember the article now instead of the silver line on her skin.She stopped at a café near the office — not her usual one, but a different one, because her usual place today gave her a vague, unexplainable reluctance to walk in — and was waiting for her order when she noticed a man at the next table.The café was small and mostly empty at that hour — the morning coffee-break crowd had cleared out, and the evening one hadn't started yet. Outside, a fine, lazy rain was falling, blurring the signs across the street into watercolor smears, and a low wash of jazz drifted from

Last Updated : 2026-09-12

5

First there was the feeling of stone underfoot — damp, cool, uneven, the way real ground is uneven, not the way imagination draws it.Alice was standing barefoot on a shore.The night around her ran deeper than any night she'd ever seen awake — not darker, but deeper, as if the sky here simply went on farther than a sky was supposed to. The stars weren't where they should have been: too bright, too dense, arranged into patterns she'd never seen in any atlas.At the water's edge grew tall reeds, nearly translucent against the light — swaying steadily though Alice felt no wind at all, as if the lake itself were breathing on its own. Very far off, at the edge of the horizon, faint lights trembled on the water — reflections of unfamiliar stars, maybe, or windows in houses too small and too distant to make out, too regular to be some accident of light. The air smelled of wet earth, something faintly sweet and floral, and, just barely, of metal, as if a storm had passed close by and hadn't

Last Updated : 2026-09-12

6

Alice woke with a jolt, as if someone had yanked her out of sleep by the collar. Her heart was pounding, her skin hot, the sheet twisted down around her ankles. For a few seconds she lay still, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what exactly had woken her.The man came back to her first. Not the dragon, not the foreign sky, not even the silver crack in the air — the man.Alice closed her eyes.Her palm still remembered the warmth of the water, the exact place where his fingers had almost — almost — closed around hers. She flexed her hand once, testing it, half expecting to find something there.There was nothing there. Of course there was nothing there."Great," she muttered. "Just great."She let herself lie there a few more seconds, listening to her own breathing, waiting for her pulse to slow to something reasonable. A dream. Extremely vivid, extremely detailed, borderline indecently convincing — but a dream, all the same. She didn't have a better explanation, and she'd d

Last Updated : 2026-09-12

7

The next morning, Alice forced herself to go through the motions as if everything were ordinary.Coffee. Work. The to-do list she'd never finished writing yesterday. She moved through her usual motions with the determination of someone clinging to a schedule on the one day a schedule feels like the last solid thing left in the world.In the entryway mirror, she lingered a beat longer than usual, fixing her collar — and in that moment her eyes went silver. Not bright, not alarming; for a split second, her irises lost their normal color and filled with that same quiet, even light that had glowed in the line on her palm two days before.She blinked.Her eyes were her own again — dark, a little tired.Alice grabbed her bag, walked out the door, and decided she'd think about it later. She'd definitely accumulated a whole list of things to think about later by now, and it was growing faster than she could work through it.She walked right past the coffee shop on the corner — the one where s

Last Updated : 2026-09-12

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