Paused

I tend to avoid novellas because I read so quickly, they often feel over with before they started. This took me under an hour, and although of necesity it was short, it was also quite captivating.

i'm not sure that Alex - our protagonist - really does much; I found the teen girls far more fleshed out in their actions, and it seems, toward the end of the work, as though it's as much his team than Alex himself doing anything interesting. A couple of points - the mysteriously silent covert lab, Alex's mental chat with Anwen and of course the speeding up of things by the end struck awkward chords. But by and large it's a quick, clever read, even if it does posit a finite endpoint to Covid in the very near future.