Time's Agent

Pocket World-a geographically small, hidden offshoot of our own reality, sped up or slowed down by time
"What would you do, given another universe, a do-over?"
Since humanity discovered the existence of pocket worlds, academics have embarked on exploratory missions as agents for the Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Portal Worlds to study this new technology and harness the potential of a seemingly limitless horizon.
Archeologist Raquel and her biologist wife Marlena once dreamed the pocket worlds held the key to solving the universe's mysteries. Now, forty years in the future, Raquel is a disgraced ex-agent, pocket worlds are controlled by corporations squeezing every penny out of all colonizable space and time, and Marlena now lives in a pocket universe Raquel wears around her neck in which time passes faster than on Earth, and no longer speaks to her.
Standing in the ruins of her dream and her calling, Raquel seizes one last chance to redeem herself, to her wife and her own failed ideals and confront what it means to save something-or someone-from time.

Brenda Peynado's genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters-featuring alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones-was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature's best books of the year. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.