Kara knelt beside the cracked soil, the late sun turning her field notes into an off-white color. Her seismograph had recorded another tremor. It was the twelfth one in three days. Not enough to warrant headlines, but enough to make her neighbors joke about the earth’s “mood swings.”

The data didn’t amuse her. The readout showed a rhythmic pulse, not random but consistent every 26.8 seconds. She ran the numbers again. That same interval had been recorded deep under the Gulf of Guinea. It was what geologists call the Earth’s hum, a microseismic vibration no storm or quake can silence.

She didn’t believe it when she first read the paper five years ago. Now, her instruments hummed with the same signature, right beneath her Illinois farm.

Her radio crackled. “Kara, still out there?”

She hesitated before answering. “Yeah,” she said, eyes on the darkening horizon. “I think the planet’s trying to talk again.”

When the ground shivered, it wasn’t seismic; it was language. And for one full 26.8-second interval, the world exhaled through her instruments before falling quiet again.