Project Open Door

Will fixes things — until a solar flare stutters through the gate he maintains at exactly the wrong quarter-second and flings him across a dark that nothing is supposed to cross.

He wakes, spitting and furious, in a fountain, in a plaza full of people who aren't people: wolves that stand like men, foxes, scaled things, creatures out of no story he was ever told. They lock him behind thick glass and study him, because he can't understand a word they say, and their machines can't decide whether he's a person or a specimen to be opened.

Then one of them — Sarali, the researcher assigned to him — lays her palm against the other side of the glass. One impossible word at a time, they begin to build a language.

But her kindness and her surveillance are the same act. And Will is proof of the one thing her world cannot survive knowing: the dark was never sealed.