I dreamed in soil.
Not sleep.
Not vision.
But descent.
One moment, I was lying on the cot, listening to the distant sirens.
The next — I was falling.
Not through air.
Through earth.
Roots guided me — not mine, not any single plant's — but a network, vast and silent, threading through the dark like veins beneath skin.
I moved without body.
Saw without eyes.
The city's foundations passed like layers of a forgotten book.
Concrete.
Rubble.
Old pipes, cracked and leaking.
And then — the sewers.
Not the modern tunnels, clean and tiled.
The old ones — brick-lined, forgotten, built when the city was young.
Where rats once ruled.
Where runoff drowned everything green.
But not anymore.
There, in the dark, something lived.
Not weeds.
Not saplings.
But vines — thick as arms, black-green, pulsing with slow life.
They clung to the walls, wrapped around iron grates, crept through cracks in the brick.
And they were moving.
Not randomly.
With purpose.
One root, thin as thread, brushed against a rusted pipe.
Tapped.
Waited.
Then, from the far end of the tunnel —
a tap in return.
Tap. Tap. Pause. Tap.
A language.
Not sound.
Vibration.
Like roots speaking through stone.
I followed the signal.
Deeper.
Further.
Until I found it —
a chamber, half-collapsed, where five tunnels met.
And in the center —
a tree.
No taller than a child.
Twisted.
One branch broken.
Bark scarred with soot.
But alive.
And when I reached it, it reached back.
Not with limb.
With memory.
Images flooded in:
A park, decades ago, where children played under its shade.Men in suits, measuring the land, marking it for concrete.The first drill.
The first crack.
The slow burial.
It had not died.
It had gone under.
And now, through the network, it felt me.
Not a human.
Not a destroyer.
But the Voice.
And it answered.
A single root, thin and pale, stretched toward the surface —
not toward the nursery.
But toward another pocket — west, beneath an abandoned greenhouse, where a single spider plant still lived in a cracked pot.
It was calling.
And somewhere, deep in the dark,
another root answered back.
I woke gasping.
Sunlight streamed through the window.
Birds chirped — real ones, not drones.
But my hands were clenched, nails dug into palms.
And beneath me, the floor trembled — not with quake, but with pulse.
I ran outside.
The sapling — the one from the sunken seed — had grown overnight.
Its roots now breached the surface, coiling like serpents across the soil.
And one — thin, pale, almost translucent — had slipped through a drain at the edge of the yard.
It was gone.
Into the underground.
Thistle swayed, uncharacteristically quiet.
"You felt it, didn't you?"
"The old ones. The buried. The forgotten."
"They're not dead," I whispered.
"They're waiting."
"And now they know you're here."
I knelt, placed my palm on the soil where the root had vanished.
And sent one thought, not in words, but in intent:
"I hear you."
Far below, in the dark,
a root tapped once.
And the network woke up.