THESSUNE

On Thessune, a human body is a source of dangerous heat.

For the Ilven, who live among ammonia-rich fluids, living stone and carefully balanced thermal currents, the warmth that keeps a visitor alive can blister a membrane or kill a nursery. For biochemist Dalia Sorek and the small human expedition on the High Ice, contact means learning how to stand in the same place without destroying what they have come to understand.

Their answer is the Porch: eleven plates held at eleven temperatures, a fragile meeting place between two kinds of life. Then a warm brine line bursts. An engineer loses a hand, a chemical front moves towards the Ilven Fold, and every attempt to stop it shifts the danger somewhere else.

To save six hundred and forty seed-plates, Dalia must work with a physician, a transport coordinator and an injured engineer—and with Ilven whose knowledge is carried in their bodies, their living structures and the tunes passed from one generation to the next. Together they face a problem no single species can solve: cooling one place without freezing another, moving a generation before its home dies, and counting the human cost of a plan while there is still time to change it.

But survival is only the beginning. After the rescue comes the harder work of keeping promises, repairing damage and building a relationship that does not require someone to be brave every time they meet.

THESSUNE is a standalone first-contact science-fiction novel about alien biology, practical ingenuity, shared responsibility and the quiet arrangements that let profoundly different lives continue side by side.