Are You Listening?

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. That’s like the first thing you learn in kindergarten—there’s no sound in space. Those old movies where the space cruisers explode in a fiery boom are faker than freeze dried ice cream.

That’s what people think, anyway. In reality, there’s one person in the cadet training station who can hear sound in space.

Me.

It started on Earth, back when we lived in the green apartment with stepdad What’s-His-Face. I sat in my dino pajamas, popping Cheerios in my mouth (sans milk) and watching retro cartoons from Ma’s day.

Someone leaned directly in my ear and said, “Check on the baby.”

I turned around. The living room was empty except for What’s-His-Name snoring on the sofa. The voice didn’t sound like a man’s, anyway. It was little and feminine, almost like my sister Rosemary’s, truth be told, but she was a toddler who only spoke in baby babble.

“Go. Now,” the voice said.

I was four, maybe five. Far too young and dumb to question it any further. I shuffled down the hallway to the second bedroom on the right. The door was ajar so I didn’t bother knocking.

Rosemary lay in the middle of the floor, slumped out of her crib, with blankets tangled around her legs. Her eyes rolled up, showing bloodshot whites. Her body jerked and spasmed.

“Ma! Ma! Come quick!”

Rosemary had a seizure. The doctors said if I hadn’t called for Ma when I did, she might’ve swallowed her tongue.

Since then, the voice popped up from time to time. One morning, I heard a high-pitched whine in my ear; that afternoon, I found an injured stray whimpering in the backyard. Once, while riding my bike, a squeaky voice yelped, “Stop!” I came that close to running over a frog. During my entrance exam, the voice told me, “Double check page 4.” Turns out I forgot to answer questions 32 and 33.

It stopped about a year ago, around the time I joined the junior cadets. I just figured that, like sunscreen and fresh flowers, I left it behind on Earth.

Until now.

It was my last class of the day, flight simulation. It’s probably my favorite class. The model rockets are pretty cool, and unlike the rest of the station, which is steely chrome and bright bleach white, the walls here mimic the red and blue atmospheres of Earth and Mars.

“Cadet Morales, Cadet Ha, you’re up,” Dr. Reinboch said.

“Let’s go, Lola!” a few of my classmates clapped and cheered.

Lola nodded at me, her long ponytail swishing as she moved. She flashed me a we got this smile as we climbed into the cockpit.

“You good, Vic?” she said.

“Yeah.”

The course went smoothly for the first ten minutes. We gained altitude, going up, up—

Someone screamed right in my ear. It was the scream of someone being tortured. The scream of someone dying.

“Argh!”

My arms jerked back suddenly. We plummeted down, the klaxon alarm mingled with the terrified shrieking.

“What the hell!?” Lola rounded on me. “What did you do!?”

“Sorry,” I panted. “I—I—”

“You screwed it up for both of us. I’m not taking an F because of your dumbass—”

“Cadet Morales, Cadet Ha,” Dr. Reinboch said. Everyone fell silent. “Take a break and cool off.”

“I’m—I’m sorry,” I said, painfully aware of the dozens of eyes on me. “It’s my fault, not Lola’s. If I could just have a do-over—”

“Later, Cadet Ha,” she said. Dr. Reinboch wasn’t usually strict, but her tone shut me up. “Take a break for now. Cadets Lopez and Brown, you’re up.”

I headed for the locker room, head ducked down, trying (and failing) to ignore the sharp whispers buzzing around me like wasps.

Who screamed? Obviously, it wasn’t someone in this room, but they had to be close. My hearing wasn’t always predictable, but the source was never too far away. Someone on this station screamed like they were being burned at the stake.

I changed from my jumpsuit to my lounge wear. Classes were finishing up by now, and soon most people would head over to the cafeteria or rec rooms. The screamer shouldn’t be hard to find—they weren’t exactly inconspicuous. People would notice, and gossip spreads faster than light speed around here.

Unless it’s a metaphorical scream, from someone in so much mental anguish it felt like torture. Either way, I had to find them. Maybe I could help—

Crunch.

My nose smashed into something hard. Ow. Did I walk into a solid wall?

“Watch where you’re going!”

Wonderful. I just walked right into the back of my cousin’s head. At least I wasn’t bleeding.

“Uh, hey, Morgan,” I forced a smile that probably looked more constipated than anything else.

“What’s with you today?” Morgan might only be two years older than me, but she acted like it was closer to twenty. Our moms told her to look out for me after I was accepted into the junior cadets, though I wasn’t supposed to know. “I heard what happened in flight simulation.”

“Oh, um, you did?”

“You look like shit. Are you sick?”

She didn’t sound concerned, but I knew she was, deep down.

I glanced around, making sure the corridor was still empty.

“I heard it again.”

She scowled. “I told you I don’t want to hear about—”

“They were screaming, Morgan. It sounded like they were dying.”

Morgan narrowed her dark eyes.

“So what, Vic? Seriously, what are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to find them,” I said. I started walking down D Hall. “I’ll search the whole base if I have to.”

Morgan jogged up to me.

“Just keep quiet about it, okay?” she huffed as we turned the corner to C Hall. “Don’t give people even more reason to talk.”

“Why do you care?” I asked. “You’re the one who always says it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”

“I—don’t—” Morgan said out of the corner of her mouth. Two uniformed officers walked past, whispering urgently to each other. “Believe me, I don’t care what norms think. But you need to get better at masking for your own good.”

“Why?”

“You—you just do, Vic!”

Her tone told me to drop it, so I did.

We checked the empty classrooms along C and D Halls; the storage units and restrooms that made up G; the rec room in E and the dorms in F. If some poor sap was in the throes of mental anguish, they did an excellent job hiding it. The cadets were either deep in their studies or blowing off steam, same as any other day.

We searched for nearly an hour and I didn’t hear so much as a peep. My ears rang from the silence, almost like the quiet was weirder to me than the ear-splitting shrieks.

“Vic?” Morgan’s voice crashed over my thoughts. “Are you going to keep searching until lights out?”

I sighed. “No, I—”

Then I heard it.

The scream sounded faint this time, like headphones notched to the lowest volume. The fear still came through just as clearly as before.

“Victor? Hello?”

“Shh.”

Concentrate, Vic. You got this.

I stepped forward, tentatively, like me and Morgan were little kids again and this was just another game of The Floor is Lava. With each step, the screams grew louder and louder.

“I know where it’s coming from!”

I didn’t wait to see if Morgan was following me. I flew past the sanitation worker rolling her cart and nearly slammed into Dr. Rafkin. The screams reached a fever-pitch, like someone cleaning out my ears with chainsaws. It hurt enough to bleed, enough to make me permanently deaf, but I pushed on.

“Victor!” Morgan called, just as I rounded the corner from A Hall to the lobby.

The lobby is the best part of the station. A massive plexiglass window covered the entire length and width of the left side wall. The inky blackness stretched out for eternity, broken up only by the twinkling balls of light and occasional asteroid. When I first arrived here, I sat by the window every day. At the bottom corner, you can see the Earth. Home. Whenever I felt homesick, I looked down at the swirling blues and whites, knowing that’s where Ma and my siblings still lived.

Now, as I approached the glass, my ears felt ready to burst into a bloody pulp.

“It’s here,” I said.

“No one’s here but us,” Morgan said. Was it just me, or did she sound scared? She was right, though: The lobby was deserted. But they had to be here.

I took another cautious step forward until the tip of my nose pressed up against the glass.

“Here,” I said.

“Where?” she said. “You’re not making any sense.”

“Whoever’s screaming is out there.” I rapt my knuckles against the glass.

“Vic, there’s nothing out there but space.”

“I know,” I said. An eerie stillness washed over me. “It’s coming from space. Someone—or something—is out there, screaming.”

I glanced back at my cousin. For once, she didn’t have anything to say.

“And whatever it is,” I continued, feeling the truth of my words, “it’s coming right for us.”