When a teleportation demonstration goes wrong, the scientist in charge locks himself away find a solution, while his wife learns to survive on the hostile alien planet where she ended up.

I had trouble getting through this book, and I’m not sure why. The characters were well-developed, the plot was straightforward, but the execution did nothing for me. While it was frustrating along with the main character who was left on Earth, I agreed with his colleagues that he was obsessively crazy. Nothing much happened in his story, except I think the agency that tried to take over his company will end up being important to the alien planet. Meanwhile, the alien planet turned out to be not so alien. It fit into her line of work, being an ancient human society. At first, I was disappointed that they ended up being human, and from a mesoamerican culture at that. There was very little originality to how the people acted. While she probably wouldn’t think so, I found her integration into the village was too easy, as was her husband’s search, which wasn’t really a search. The revelation at the end shows that things will become more complicated by the next books, and there is obviously a reason this group is human.

The author gave a lot of detail to scenes and setup, which I found myself gliding through, as most of it, while descriptive, wasn’t really necessary. The plot was slow, and I wondered if the over-description was at fault, and characters and background didn’t make up for that.

The story starts as Amon is about to demonstrate his new Translocator technology, which is controversial but could revolutionize travel and save the dying lunar colony. The experiment goes wrong from the start, which is strange given how thoroughly he tested it before calling in the press. As they try to shut it down, his wife Eliana is caught in the field, her wedding ring causing a huge spike before she disappears. It’s unclear if her ring caused the initial problem, but it seems like it was only at fault for sending her through the portal.

The first chapter focused on the ring, which singled it out as important even before it touched the portal. Eliana lost her original ring, so Amon replaced it with a black diamond that came from a meteorite. From what happens later, it’s obvious that the meteorite was called back to its planet of origin. Maybe it wasn’t even a meteorite, but something brought back by the people with the holograms.

The story alternates chapters between Amon and Eliane, and unfortunately, neither of the stories held my interest, though I’m not sure why.

Amon faces trouble from his shareholders, and an overeager chairman who wants him to resign, putting his best friend Lucas in charge. The FBI shows up to confiscate his equipment, and he’s locked out of his own company, as things go from bad to worse. Even his assistant Reuben is locked out. From the moment the accident happens, he inexplicably knows her ring caused it, so he tries to get more from the source, though that goes poorly also. Finally, when the FBI, who by now we figure isn’t really the FBI, try to take the portal, he initiates an emergency lockdown, with him inside the lab.

We don’t see him experimenting with different solutions, which is what I would have expected, but that might have been boring. Instead, we skip through time, though why he didn’t try his last ditch plan in the first place is unknown. He translocates to the NASA lab where he got the meteorite for the ring, and conspires with the scientist to get more. He runs into an overzealous guard and ends up in the parking lot running for his life. As the police almost catch him, he activates his auto-return, and beams back into his lab. Just as the FBI drills through the lockdown door, he activates the portal and makes it to the other side.

For her part, Eliane has a pretty good survival instinct, even if she’s still in a party dress. She leaves a sign for Amon in case he follows her, and makes her way to a village. I had a lot of trouble with Eliane accepting that this was a human village without questioning. She says in the last chapter that she never wondered why, but I question how that could be, given her scientific background and that of her husband. It looks more like a plot convenience.

The villagers make sure she is safe and fed, but she has an altercation with the shaman, who is rebuffed by her ring when he tries to take her for sacrifice. Instead, a jaguar walks out of the jungle and argues with the chief and the shaman. I think it was supposed to be a man with a jaguar head, but that remained unclear to me. Regardless, Chief Dambu kills the shaman who is sacrificed to the jaguar god of the jungle. This terrifies Eliane, who remains traumatized by the city after that.

Yet she’s a survivor, and believes without a doubt that her husband is looking for her. I’m not sure where this belief comes from, as she has no way of knowing that her ring was the cause, or that Amon saw the ring pulling her into the portal. Still, this belief sustains her, so she learns to sign for things she needs, and eventually learns simple words, then more complex ones.

When Dambu and Ixchel’s youngest son dies, they mourn for a time, going off on their own. The village seems to survive this, taking it all in stride. It turns out that sickness like that used to be common, and a plague forced them to move out of the city into this little village near the cliffs.

There is a small romantic subplot as Eliane gets to know the older son, Rakulo. He helps her with a leaking roof, tells her some history, and catches on when she decides it’s no longer safe in the village and wants to run away. The author nicely shows that he’s trying to get close to her, and I wondered if she would give up on Amon and take him as husband on this new world. It didn’t happen, though the flirting was fun.

These people were transplanted to the planet from their home and brought across a wall that extends into the sea and which they cannot cross, a mystery for other books, I assume. Their god, a person (or so it seems) with a mask who is projected through hologram using a hovering device, demands sacrifices. There are still a lot of good mysteries here.

Eliane witnesses an argument between Chief Dambu and the god-man, where she understands that Dambu wants to sacrifice her, but the god-man refuses. This is when she decides to leave the village. Rakulo convinces her to wait until nightfall, and they attend a party on the beach. Wandering off, Eliane is attacked by Dambu and ends up knocking him out.

Then Amon arrives. I had trouble with how easily he found her, materializing in the abandoned city. Does the meteorite truly only bring people here? Amon had doubts, but they were unfounded. Maybe we’ll find out later in the series what properties the meteorite has that it is so finely tuned to his portal and this planet.

Rakulo barely bats an eye when Amon arrives and his father is killed, knocking the hologram projector to the ground with an electrical short circuit. He takes on leadership, stating unnecessarily that he never wanted to be chief. I have a feeling he’s going to lead an uprising against the god-men, and find a way around, over or through the wall surrounding his lands.

Meanwhile, Amon and Eliane return home and are met with incredulousness from Reuben and Lucas and the FBI people. Strangely, in the time Amon was away, they didn’t pull the plug on the translocator, allowing him to come back. If they are actually in league with the god-people, or are them themselves, I would have expected them to be relieved when he jumped through and disappeared.

The series obviously has a lot of mysteries to resolve, but even so, I’m not inclined to continue just to find out about them. Almost immediately after finishing the book, I forgot most of what happened, and the characters didn’t stay with me. It’s unfortunate, because I can’t say what didn’t stick.