There’s a mulberry in your yard, older than the house, older than you, older than the roads that brought you here. It hums when the heat lies thick in the air, a low, bone-deep sound that never quite stops. You don’t remember when the first beetle came. Or the first moth. Or the first time you noticed the webs stretched between the leaves in shapes that looked almost like faces.

The neighbors call it an infestation. They bang brooms on the trunk, leave poison in the grass, mutter to each other about “getting the city involved.” You know better. The swarm has chosen you.

Summer is peaking, and something is coming. It will arrive when the days run out.

Until then, you will guard the tree. You will feed them, smuggle sugar water in glass jars, carry dead cicadas in your pockets like talismans. You will read their silk sigils and their chitin scripture, and pray you understand it in time.

Because when the hum swells to fill the sky, when every leaf turns toward you, and every wing unfolds— You will stand with them. Or you will not stand at all.