The Catalogue of Negative Silence

The generation ship Argentis has crossed the dark for a world no human voice has touched. Hana Ibarra trained her entire life to become its first xenolinguist.

When she loses her hearing mid-sentence, command sidelines her while a hearing xenolinguist is woken from cryo. The expedition's instruments record nothing.

Hana notices what they miss: the silences are not empty. They recur with structure, separating wind from absence, accident from intent. As the expedition prepares another broadcast, she begins cataloguing the gaps and finds a language built from what the planet withholds.

Humanity has one chance to introduce itself. To be understood, Hana must persuade a crew trained to transmit that listening may begin with restraint.

An intimate first-contact novel about deafness, attention, and the eloquence of what remains unsaid.