Elias put on his headphones and hit play. For the first ten minutes, there was nothing but the white noise of a forest—leaves rustling, the occasional snap of a twig. But as the recording progressed, the rhythm of the rustling changed. It became rhythmic, almost syllabic.

The text file contained only GPS coordinates and a single sentence: "The wind doesn't blow through the branches; it talks through them."

By the twenty-minute mark, Elias realized with a chill that he wasn't listening to wind. He was listening to thousands of leaves rubbing together to mimic the sound of a human throat. It was a dry, papery rasp, whispering a name he hadn't heard in years. “Elias…”

The USB drive was unmarked, save for a piece of masking tape with a date that had already passed: . When Elias plugged it in, the only file in the root directory was A.Murmur.in.the.Trees.v06.20.2021.zip .

Elias sat in his quiet apartment, the hum of his computer cooling fan suddenly feeling too loud. He looked back at the GPS coordinates in the text file. He plugged them into a map.