When exoarchaeologist Thalassadra Memnōnis discovers a sealed vault that shatters her civilisation's origins, she must choose between the silence that will save her career and the truth that will cost her everything: the discovery, her name, exile, and the woman she is only beginning to love.

The Anankē Threshold is a standalone, adult literary science fiction novel of 84,560 words with series potential and would appeal to readers who enjoy the lyrical SF register of Martin MacInnes's In Ascension, the uncanny archaeological mystery of Jessica Lévai's The Glass Garden, and the classical-reception machinery and mythopoeia of Emery Robin's The Stars Undying.

Thalassadra leads her first excavation on the moon Pieris haunted by her ancestry and imposter syndrome. When her student uncovers a metal tablet inscribed in ancient Sapphic verse, buried three millennia before her civilisation ever broke orbit, Thally finds what she has always sought: music in the stone. To claim it will require exactly the confidence she has never possessed.

Into the dig arrives Simaitha, a poetician whose voice is the only thing that opens the vault and whose presence begins to matter to Thally in ways that have nothing to do with the discovery. When institutional forces move to suppress the find and decide what becomes of the scholars who opened it, the two women must decide separately how much truth is worth. Thally has the data. Simai has the voice. Neither can act without the other knowing the costs.