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Chapter One: A Silent Scream
Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. And, of course, “they” refers to my parents as they cautioned me against straying too far from the hive. The vacuum of space is an ever-looming threat on a planet where wormholes spawn randomly, drawing everything below into the inky nothingness of the galaxy or unleashing torrents of debris on unsuspecting victims of fate. And scream isn’t really the right word.
I’m an auqred, which means I don’t have vocal cords. We have a spoken language, but it would sound more like the hissing of a cockroach to human ears, or so I’ve read. This is because our voices, produced by special rattles in our throats, can’t create inflection or change volume. Instead, we have a series of glands that secrete chemicals into the rattles when we feel strong emotions, so those chemicals disperse as the sound travels. So a “scream” is just a word flavored with panic bile.
From what I have read, humans can have voices that sound the same. We do not. Auqred voices are unique harmonies created by a set of rattles that produce different frequencies; no two are exactly alike, even among millions of beings. I think it would be similar to how human voices work, but I’m not sure. We know a bit about your anatomy from studying the travelers brought here by the portals, but I’ve never spoken to a human before. None of you ever survive the…
