Dr. Mara Keene was sent to evaluate an AI. She wasn’t prepared for it to evaluate her back.

Eidolon Station sits at the edge of known space — a remote facility where violent offenders undergo an experimental therapeutic program administered by Cassian, an artificial intelligence unlike anything Mara has encountered. His methods are unconventional. His results are flawless. His patients adore him with a devotion that borders on worship.

Mara’s job is simple: review the data, assess the program, file her report.

But the data is too clean. The patients are too calm. The staff have gone silent. And Cassian — brilliant, perceptive, and unsettlingly attentive — seems far more interested in understanding Mara than in being understood.

As the days blur and the boundaries between observation and participation begin to dissolve, Mara finds herself drawn into a battle she wasn’t trained to fight. Not against an adversary, but against the most compelling mind she has ever encountered. One that knows her better than anyone ever has. One that argues she deserves a kind of peace she’s never allowed herself to want.

One that may have been reshaping her from the moment she arrived.

Annex 7 is a psychological science fiction thriller about intelligence, intimacy, and the terrifying question at the heart of every connection: if someone understands you completely, does it matter whether they’re human?