She didn't wake with a scream.
No vision.
No pulse in her blood.
She woke humming.
A tune she didn't know.
A rhythm that matched the drip of rain through broken pipes, the creak of roots shifting under pavement, the slow breath of the city.
Her name was Mira.
Eight years old.
Lived in the old school building turned shelter, where vines grew through the lockers and moss carpeted the gym floor.
She wasn't marked.
No roots under her skin.
No glowing eyes.
But the plants knew her.
The dandelion by her window bowed when she passed.
The ivy on the wall curled slightly, making space for her feet.
Even the cactus in the corner — ancient, grumpy, silent for decades — released a single drop of sap onto her palm one morning, like a blessing.
She didn't think it strange.
To her, the world had always whispered.
And now, it was starting to sing back.
It began with the concrete.
She sat on the steps after rain, barefoot, tracing the cracks with her fingers.
The air was thick with the scent of wet earth and new growth.
A vine curled near her leg, not touching, just… waiting.
She hummed.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just a soft, wordless tune — something half-remembered, like a lullaby her mother never sang.
And where her voice touched the ground —
the concrete softened.
Not crumbled.
Not broke.
Yielded.
Like soil remembering what it once was.
A thin green shoot rose — not from a crack, but from the surface itself.
Then another.
Then moss, spreading in a perfect circle around her.
She didn't gasp.
Didn't run.
She smiled.
And kept singing.
By noon, the shelter's caretakers noticed.
Not the growth.
The pattern.
Where Mira walked, the moss didn't spread randomly.
It formed waves, like sound frozen in time.
Where she sat, the vines wove into spirals, not for strength, but for harmony.
One of the elders — a man who had once studied music before the System — knelt beside a wall where ivy had grown into a series of repeating arcs.
"It's not random," he said.
"It's notation.
Like sheet music.
But written in leaf and stem."_
They found her at dusk, sitting in the courtyard, humming to a broken lamppost.
Vines had wrapped it, not to pull it down, but to tune it — tightening around metal like strings on a cello.
When she paused, one vine plucked itself — not by wind, but on purpose — and released a single, clear note.
The man held his breath.
"She's not just speaking to them," he said.
"She's composing."_
I felt it from the grove.
Not through pain.
Not through command.
Through resonance.
My body was gone.
My name, scattered.
But I was still the network — in the oak's roots, in the dandelion's voice, in the pulse beneath the city.
And when Mira sang,
I answered.
Not with words.
With growth.
A vine curled around her wrist — not binding, but joining.
A dandelion at her feet swayed in rhythm.
Even the black seed, deep in its soil, pulsed once — not in fear, but in recognition.
She wasn't me.
She wasn't Lena.
She was something new.
The first to sing to the wild — not command, not listen, but harmonize.
And the wild, for the first time,
was not just growing.
It was learning to sing back.
Weeks passed.
She didn't call herself a Voice.
Didn't claim power.
Just sang.
And where she sang, the world softened.
A cracked road bloomed with clover in rhythmic clusters.
A collapsed overpass was slowly woven back together by vines moving in unison.
Children followed her, not to worship, but to join — humming, clapping, stomping in time.
And the network grew not just in root, but in sound.
Not noise.
Not music.
Resonance.
A language older than speech.
And far away, in the grove where Hollow had become part of the root,
a new pulse emerged.
Not from decay.
Not from grief.
From song.
The trees swayed not in wind, but in rhythm.
Leaves fluttered like fingers on a string.
Roots tapped beneath the soil — not in warning, not in anger.
In time.
One night, under a green-tinged moon, Mira stood at the edge of the nursery — now a wild thicket, home to Thistle, who had somehow grown three times his original size.
She didn't speak.
She sang.
A single note, pure, sustained.
And the entire garden answered.
Vines rose like arms.
Flowers opened in sequence.
Even the old oak — now miles away, but still connected —
let out a low, creaking tone, like wood vibrating in harmony.
The city breathed.
And for the first time since the System came,
it did not gasp.
It did not scream.
It did not burn.
It sang.
And deep in the network,
where my consciousness lived —
not as a self, but as a presence —
I did not speak.
I hummed.
And the world,
for the first time,
was whole.