Cassian Ferreira is a xenobiologist on ACHERON-9, a mining station 14 light-years from Earth. The comms delay is 14 years one-way. No rescue. No extraction. The job is routine: classify microbial samples and fossils recovered from the asteroid belt. In 18 months, nothing in his lab has been alive. Then the drill team cuts open a sealed alien vessel embedded in an asteroid -- a wreck 2.3 million years old -- and brings him a seven-foot-eight obsidian statue that reads 34 degrees Celsius on every surface. He classifies it as an inorganic artifact. He is wrong. The specimen is watching. It doesn't move while he's looking. But the cameras glitch for four seconds and the shadow shifts. The containment cell reads two degrees warmer every morning. Hairline fractures appear along the joints, weeping a black-iridescent fluid that makes his skin register touch at four times normal intensity. And then Luka -- his most frequent hookup, the warm body that made the distance bearable -- is found dead in the mess hall. Seated. Coffee in hand. Eyes open. No wounds. No cause. Every cell in his body simply stopped. Then another man Cassian has slept with dies. Then another. Then someone he slept with months ago, before the specimen arrived. The pattern is clear. The creature is not killing randomly. It is removing every person who has touched him. Past and present. It is not competing. It is editing. Under the cracking obsidian shell: dense, dark, mercury-smooth muscle that reshapes in real-time. Hands with fingers that can independently shift texture, temperature, and pressure. An intelligence that has spent weeks watching Cassian through glass -- cataloging the angles that made him arch, the rhythms that made him gasp, the depths that made him come. The first time it touches him, it already knows his body better than he does. It learned from observation. It studied him like a specimen.