Gatekeeper

For eight years Angela has been a pair of hands. At the Project’s dig on the far side of the only wormhole humans have ever built, she cleans and catalogues what a vanished civilization left behind, and she leaves the theories to other people. She survived cancer at eleven, and she still takes inventory of her body every morning.

She has counted six handlers who left the site with tremors, on medical leave that quietly stopped being leave. The Project calls it strain.

Then Angela lifts a small pale artifact that has been logged as inert for fourteen months, and her hand locks to it. When she comes to, she can sense presences, many of them, distant and enormous, and the sense won’t switch off.

Dr. Yvonne Levin is courteous about it. She asks for Angela’s cooperation directly. She would like Angela to volunteer, and if Angela doesn’t, they will need to revisit.