The biology, in fact, was fairly basic, albeit on a monstrous scale. The larval form of various insects and arthropods were basically eating machines, consuming massive amounts of nutrients before creating a cocoon in which to undergo the metamorphosis into their adult stage. Serizawa called up an image of the massive cocoon, which had been discovered fifteen years ago atop the ruins of the Janjira plant, not long after the earlier disaster in the Philippines.

“You’re saying you knew about this… thing… the whole time?” Ford shook his head, trying to take it all in. “And kept it a secret? Lied to everyone?”

Serizawa remembered a family photo he had found among Ford’s effects.

“You have a son, Mr. Brody. Would you tell him there are monsters in the world? Beyond our control? We believed that horror was better kept buried.”

“But you let it feed?” Ford said. “Why not kill it when you had the chance?”

“It was absorbing radiation from the reactors,” Graham said. “Vast doses, like a sponge. We worried killing it might have released that radiation, endangering millions.”

Serizawa nodded. “The MUTO caused the catastrophe, but also prevented it from spreading.” Without the cocoon, and the immense pupa developing inside it, the quarantine zone would have indeed been the radioactive wasteland they had let the world believe it was. “That’s why Monarch’s mission was to contain it, to study its biology. To understand it.”

But, yes,” he thought regretfully, we waited too long.

“We knew the creature was having an electrical effect on everything within a close proximity,” Graham said. “What we didn’t know was that it could harness that same power in an EMP attack.”

Footage from Janjira showed the winged creature unleashing its electromagnetic pulse—a heartbeat before the pulse shorted out the monitors.

“Your father did,” Graham said. “He predicted it.”

“What else did he say?” Serizawa asked. “Anything at all?”

“I—I don’t know,” Ford confessed, his voice cracking. “I always thought he was crazy, obsessed. I didn’t listen.” He ran a hand through his hair, overwrought, while he visibly struggled to recall his father’s theories. “He said it was some kind of animal call. Like something… talking.”

“Talking?” Serizawa sat up straight. Was Ford implying there was more than one signal?

Ford nodded. “Yeah, he was studying something. Echolocation.”

Serizawa and Graham stared at each other in shock. Ford clearly had no idea what a bombshell he’d just dropped, but the two scientists immediately grasped the implications. They glanced down at an indistinct snapshot of the majestic creature from the ocean’s floor, last seen sixty years ago.

Could they truly be dealing with… him?

“If the MUTO was talking that day,” Serizawa reasoned, “your father must have discovered something talking back.”

Gripped by a sense of extraordinary urgency, he turned to Graham. “Go back through the data, search for a response call.”