Chapter 23: The Judas Light
The silence after the knife thudded into the wall was absolute.
Sam froze, her hand still extended, the tiny red light on her watch face blinking once, twice, then going dark. The serrated edge of Cynna’s blade had sliced through the sleeve of her jacket, biting deep into the concrete seam, missing her skin by a millimeter. It pinned her there, a butterfly on a board.
Frankie’s eyes went from the watch to Sam’s face. He saw the truth there, not in some grand confession, but in the way her expression didn’t shift to shock or outrage. It simply settled, the frantic energy of the last few hours melting away into a bleak, resigned clarity. The performance was over.
“Sam?” he said, the word sounding foreign.
Will was the first to move, his weapon coming up not toward the shadows ahead, but toward Sam. His blue eyes were chips of glacial ice. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“Wait,” Frankie breathed, holding up a hand, his brain trying to catch up to what his gut already knew.
Cynna didn’t wait. She was already on her, one hand clamping over Sam’s mouth before a scream could form, the other pressing the muzzle of her pistol hard into Sam’s ribs, right over the still-bleeding wound she’d earned in the woods. Cynna’s face was pale, taut with pain and a fury so cold it was unnerving. She breathed the words directly into Sam’s ear, her voice a venomous whisper.
“One sound.One twitch. And I will paint this tunnel with what’s left of you. Nod if you understand this isn’t a debate.”
Sam’s eyes, wide and terrified, darted to Frankie. He saw a plea there, but it was buried under layers of calculation. She gave a single, stiff nod.
The overhead lights, triggered by the motion sensors Sam had just alerted, flickered to full brightness with a collective hum. The tunnel was bathed in a sickly yellow glow, exposing every patch of rust, every dripping pipe. They were exposed.
“Weapons hot, stay sharp,” Santiago murmured, his voice low and calm as he and Benny turned their backs to the scene, guarding the two directions of the corridor. The low, industrial hum of the silo’s machinery seemed to grow louder, a mocking soundtrack.
Frankie stepped forward. He ignored Cynna, his gaze locked on Sam. He reached for the knife, not yanking it, but working it free from the wall with a firm, gritty twist. He held it up, the steel catching the light. Then he reached for her trapped wrist. His touch was clinical. He pressed a button on the watch’s side. The screen lit up, showing a simple, horrifying graphic: a pulsing dot—their location—inside a schematic that unmistakably matched the tunnel system.
“How long?” Frankie asked. His voice was quiet, flat. It was the voice he used to clear a room he knew was rigged to blow.
Sam shook her head behind Cynna’s hand, making a muffled sound.
Cynna slowly removed her hand, but kept the gun dug into Sam’s side.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Sam gasped, the words tumbling out in a desperate rush. “After they took Addison… they showed me things. Pictures.Of my sister. Her kids. They said they’d be on a school bus that would have a very bad accident. They implanted the tracker in the watch at the drop. They said if I didn’t keep it active, if I didn’t lead you here…”
“They what?” Will’s voice cut through the hum, sharp as broken glass. He took a step toward her, his controlled fury palpable. “My Addison is in here because of your family?”
“It’s not that simple!” Sam cried, her eyes brimming. She looked at Frankie, begging him to understand. “You know me, Fish. You know me. I would never…”
“I thought I did,” Frankie said. The disappointment in his tone was worse than anger. It was a door closing. He looked at the watch, then at the tunnel ahead. “Cynna. How bad is our clock?”
Cynna didn’t look away from Sam. “The signal was short-range. They knew we were in the tunnel network. Now they know exactly where. I’d give us three minutes before a welcome party arrives. Maybe less.”
Benny shifted his grip on his shotgun. “So we’re in the cage. She sprung the door.”
“And we walked right in,” Santiago finished. He glanced at Frankie. “Options, jefe?”
Frankie’s mind raced, scanning the schematic on the watch. He saw their position, the main silo shaft ahead, the branching service routes. One route, smaller, less direct, snaked away toward what looked like auxiliary power.It was a choke point.
“This way,” he said, pointing with the knife down the narrower passage. “Benny, Will, take point. Santiago, cover our six. Cynna…”
“I’ve got her,” Cynna said, her meaning clear. She would be Sam’s keeper.
They moved, the dynamic irrevocably shifted. The easy, trust-fueled flow of the team was gone, replaced by a brittle, efficient tension. Sam stumbled as Cynna pushed her forward, the gun never wavering.
The auxiliary tunnel was tight, forcing them into single file. The air grew warmer, tinged with the smell of ozone and hot metal. The hum coalesced into a distinct, rhythmic thumping—generators.
“You were playing me from the second you showed up at the bar,” Frankie said from behind Cynna, his words directed at the back of Sam’s head. It wasn’t a question. “The tears.The panic. All of it.”
Sam’s shoulders slumped. “The first part was real, Frankie. The call, them taking her… I was out of my mind. But when they contacted me after, with the pictures… What was I supposed to do?”
“Come to me,” Frankie said, and for the first time, a crack of heat showed in his voice. “Tell me. We could have worked it. We could have gotten your sister’s family safe. Instead, you served us up. You served Cynna up.”
“I didn’t know about the ambush at the culvert! I swear! They just said to lead you to the silo. That was all!”
“And the necklace?” Cynna’s voice was a clinical probe. “The convenient clue?”
A hesitation. “They gave it to me. Told me to ‘find’ it.”
Will let out a harsh, bitter laugh from up ahead. “Unbelievable.”
They reached a heavy service door, riveted steel with a wheel lock. Benny and Will set to work on it, their movements synchronized and silent. Frankie turned to Sam fully. In the cramped space, they were almost nose to nose. He searched her face for the woman he’d known, the one he’d laughed with, the one he’d held in a different life. He saw only a stranger shaped by fear.
“You should have trusted me,” he said, the words final.
“You would have chosen the mission,” she whispered, tears finally breaking free. “You always choose the mission. I needed you to choose me.”
Before he could answer, the wheel lock clanged. Benny pulled the door open, revealing a cavernous space beyond—a generator room, vast and echoing with the roar of two massive diesel engines. And standing between them, in a casual formation that spoke of waiting, were six men in tactical gear, their rifles raised and steady.
Not amateurs. Professionals. Their leader, a man with a close-shaven head and a scar through his eyebrow, gave a slight, humorless smile.
“Samantha. Right on time,” he said, his voice cutting through the engine noise. His eyes swept over Frankie’s team. “Lay down your weapons. Petrosian is eager to meet the legendary Catfish. The rest of you… are excess.”
Frankie didn’t move. His mind was clear, the calculations made. The door behind them was blocked by Santiago. The room offered minimal cover. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and betrayed.
He met the team leader’s gaze, and a slow, familiar smile touched his lips. It was the smile he used before doing something profoundly stupid and dangerous.
“See,” Frankie said, his voice loud and cheerful over the generator’s roar, a bizarre, light-hearted tone in the tense space. “He remembers my name. That’s kinda sweet.”
In that split-second of confused dissonance, as the tactical team processed the bizarre casualness, Frankie moved.
His hand shot out, not for his gun, but for a large, red emergency shut-off valve on the wall next to the door. He wrenched it down.
The world went black and deafeningly loud in reverse.
The roaring generators choked, coughed, and died. The overhead lights vanished, plunging the vast room into a darkness so complete it felt solid. But the silence lasted only a heartbeat before it was replaced by the piercing, brain-splitting shriek of backup battery-powered alarms and the dim, frantic glow of spinning red emergency strobes.
In the hellish, disorienting strobe-light chaos, Frankie’s last words were a shout to his team, a fragment of an old, effective playbook.
“Scatter and scorch! Rendezvous at the well!”
Gunfire erupted, muzzle flashes blooming like violent flowers in the spinning red dark.
Gunfire erupted, muzzle flashes blooming like violent flowers in the spinning red dark.
Frankie was already moving, a phantom in the strobe-lit chaos. He dove behind the bulk of a dead generator, hot metal searing through his jacket. Rounds sparked and whined off the machinery around him. The disorientation was a weapon he’d used before.
“Fish, north wall!” Santiago’s voice cut through the alarm shriek.
He followed the sound, crawling on elbows and knees through a slick of old oil. A shadow lunged at him from between two turbines. Frankie didn’t think. His combat knife was in his hand, then in the man’s thigh. A choked cry was lost in the sirens. Frankie yanked the blade free, shoved the man aside, and kept going.
Across the room, he saw the frantic strobe-light snapshots of the fight. Benny, a mountain of shadow, using his shotgun as a club, the crunch audible even over the noise. Will was a precise, furious ghost, disarming a man with a vicious twist before silencing him with two close-range shots.
Cynna had Sam.
She’d used the sudden darkness not to flee, but to anchor her prisoner. Frankie saw her in a frozen stroboscopic frame: one arm locked around Sam’s throat from behind, the other pressing her pistol into Sam’s temple, using her body as a shield against the confused hostiles. Sam’s face was a mask of pure, wide-eyed terror.
“Stop!” Cynna’s roar was a raw, commanding thing that somehow pierced the bedlam. “Next one who fires, she loses her head! Tell Petrosian his beacon is about to go dark!”
The shooting stuttered, then ceased. The spinning red light painted the scene in jerky, bloody increments. The tactical team leader, Scar-Brow, stood exposed near the door, his weapon half-lowered. He looked from Cynna to Sam’s petrified face.
“You wouldn’t,” he shouted.
“The hell I wouldn’t,” Cynna spat back, her voice ice. “I’m bleeding out in a fucking silo because of her. She’s currency. And right now, she’s my currency.”
Frankie used the pause. He slid from his cover, moving low and fast toward Cynna’s position. He saw the strain in her posture, the tremor in the arm holding the gun. The wound in her side was a spreading black stain in the red light.
“Easy, Cyn,” he said, arriving at her flank, his own weapon covering the room. “We’ve got a standoff.”
“We have a problem,” she hissed through gritted teeth, her eyes never leaving Scar-Brow. “I can’t hold her and walk.”
Sam whimpered, tears cutting clean lines through the grime on her cheeks. “Frankie, please.”
He didn’t look at her. His focus was on the geometry of the room, the positions of the remaining five hostiles. “Will, Benny, Santiago. Converge on the west service stair. That’s our exit.”
His team began to shift, a slow, tactical migration toward a rusted metal staircase that spiraled upwards into darkness. The hostile team mirrored them, keeping distance, weapons poised.
“You’re not walking out of here,” Scar-Brow stated, though his certainty was fraying.
“We are,” Frankie said, his tone conversational, almost friendly. “And you’re going to let us. Because if Petrosian wanted us dead, we’d be drowned in bodies by now. He wants a conversation. Dead men are bad conversationalists.” He finally glanced at Sam, his eyes empty of the warmth she’d always known. “She’s our ticket to that chat. You shoot us, she dies. Petrosian doesn’t get his pawn back. You lose. He loses.”
The logic was cold, irrefutable. It hung in the alarm-filled air.
Scar-Brow’s jaw worked. He keyed the mic on his shoulder, speaking low, listening. He gave a sharp, frustrated nod. “The stair leads up to Level Three. You have a straight path to the central command spur. No deviations.”
“See? Civilized,” Frankie said. He nodded to Cynna.“Move. I’ve got rear guard.”
Cynna shuffled backward, dragging Sam with her toward the stairwell where the others now waited. Frankie walked backward after them, his rifle sight never leaving the tactical team. The red light made them all look like figures in a failing old film.
They reached the stairs. The metal was cold and vibrating. As soon as they were out of the direct line of sight, the pace changed.
“Go, go, go!” Santiago barked.
They went up, fast and loud, their boots clanging on the treads. Cynna released Sam, shoving her forward. “Climb or die here. Your choice.”
Sam scrambled upward, sobs hiccupping in her chest. Frankie took the point, taking the stairs two at a time, his heart a battering ram against his ribs. The sounds from the generator room faded, replaced by the hollow echo of their flight and the ever-present, sub-audible thrum of the silo itself.
Two landings up, Frankie halted at a heavy door marked ‘LEVEL 3 – COMMS & CONTROL’. He listened, heard nothing, and pushed it open into a sterile, grey corridor lit by dim emergency runners. It was empty.
The team spilled into the hall, a battered, breathing monument to exhaustion and betrayal. Will immediately covered one direction, Benny the other. Santiago leaned against the wall, catching his breath.
Cynna slid down the wall to sit, a sharp gasp escaping her. Her hand was pressed hard to her side, blood welling between her fingers. “I need… a minute,” she breathed, her face grey.
Frankie knelt in front of her, his professional detachment crumbling for a single, raw second. He checked the field dressing.It was soaked. “You don’t have a minute.” His hands were gentle as he pulled a fresh compress from his pack.
Sam stood apart, hugging herself, watching them. Her earlier terror was morphing into a shaky, desperate defiance. “You think he’ll just talk to you?” she whispered, her voice cracking. “You’re wrong. You’re all wrong. He doesn’t want to talk. He wants to show you.”
Frankie didn’t look up from Cynna’s wound. “Show me what, Sam?”
“What he built. What the catalyst does.” She swallowed hard. “He called it ‘The Refinement’. He’s not a monster, Frankie. He’s a visionary. He showed me the data. The world is sick, rotting from the inside. He can fix it. He just… he needs the right subjects to prove it works.”
Will spun around, his weapon half-raising toward her. “Subjects?Like my Addison? Like Thorne?”
“Thorne was weak!” Sam snapped, a sudden, fervent light in her eyes. “His body rejected the process. He was a failure. But the others… Lucas, Addison… they’re stronger. Petrosian said they have the ideal genetic markers. They could be the first of a new chapter.”
The corridor fell silent except for the hum of the lights. Frankie finished tying off the new bandage on Cynna, his movements slow and deliberate. He finally looked at Sam, really looked at her. He saw the fanaticism now, glowing beneath the fear and the guilt. It hadn’t all been a performance. They hadn’t just threatened her. They had converted her.
“Oh, Sam,” he said, his voice thick with a profound, weary sadness. “They didn’t just hold a gun to your family’s head. They sold you a fairy tale.”
He stood up, leaving Cynna propped against the wall. He walked toward Sam until he was inches away. He could smell her perfume, strangely persistent under the sweat and concrete dust.
“Where is Addison, Sam?” he asked, his voice quiet, lethal.
Sam’s defiance wavered. She glanced down the featureless hallway. “The central lab. At the heart of the silo. Where the old missile control was. But Frankie, if you go in there guns blazing, you’ll ruin everything. You have to let him show you. You have to understand.”
Frankie reached out. For a second, she thought he might touch her face, a final moment of connection. Instead, his hands went to the straps of her tactical vest. He unbuckled them with quick, efficient pulls.
“What are you doing?” she asked, confusion replacing the fervor.
He yanked the vest off her, letting it clatter to the floor. He patted her down, removing a secondary pistol from her ankle holster, a radio from her pocket. He was impersonal, a mechanic stripping parts.
“I understand enough,” he said, handing the gear to Santiago. “You bought the lie because you were scared. Then you sold it to us because it made you feel like you were part of something grand. You chose your new chapter over your old friends.”
He turned his back on her, addressing his team. “Central lab. That’s the well. That’s where we rendezvous.” He looked at Cynna. “Can you walk?”
Cynna pushed herself up, wincing but steady. “I can finish this.”
Frankie nodded. He didn’t give another order about Sam. The understanding was silent and complete. Will took a zip-tie from his kit. He grabbed Sam’s wrist.
“No, wait—Frankie, please!” Sam struggled, but Will’s grip was iron. He secured her hands behind her back to a pipe running along the wall.
“You get to watch the last act from the cheap seats,” Will muttered, his voice devoid of any pity.
Frankie led them down the corridor, toward the silo’s cold heart. He didn’t look back at Sam’s pleading figure, receding behind them. The sounds of her cries were swallowed by the industrial hum, a faint, fading echo of the betrayal that had led them here.
The corridor seemed to press in on them, the sterile walls absorbing the sound of their ragged breathing and boot steps. The industrial hum was a living thing here, a vibration in the teeth and bones. It smelled of ozone, stale coolant, and something else, something sweet and chemical underneath.
Frankie moved on pure instinct, every sense hyper-alert. The map from Sam’s watch was burned into his mind. Left at the junction ahead, then down the access shaft marked ‘Primary Control’. His focus was a laser, burning through the fatigue and the dull, throbbing anger at Sam’s betrayal. There was only the next corner, the next door, the next breath.
Cynna kept pace beside him, but her breathing was a shallow, hitched thing. Each step pulled a wince from her. "He's letting us walk," she muttered, her voice tight.
"I know," Frankie said. His eyes scanned the empty hallway. "He’s herding us to the pen. Doesn’t matter. The well’s in the pen."
Benny and Will flanked the rear, their footfalls eerily synchronized. Santiago was a silent ghost on point, his head constantly swiveling, missing nothing. The tension was a coiled spring in all of them, wound tighter with each deserted passage.
They reached the junction. A heavy, windowless door stood where the map indicated the shaft entrance. A keypad glowed red beside it.
"On me," Santiago whispered. He produced a small, multi-tool from his vest, his fingers working with a delicate, swift precision that belied the moment. He pried the faceplate off, exposing a nest of wires. "Old system. Standby power only. Should be simple."
A loud clunk echoed from the door’s mechanism before he touched a thing.
The red light on the keypad turned green.
The door hissed, then slid open with a smooth, hydraulic sigh, revealing a grated landing and a ladder descending into a deeper, warmer darkness.
"He’s rolling out the welcome mat," Benny grumbled, his finger resting alongside his shotgun's trigger guard.
"Don't care," Will said, his voice a strained wire. He pushed past them, peering down into the gloom. "Addison's down there."
Frankie put a hand on his chest, stopping him. "We do this right, Will. Or we join her as lab rats. Benny, first light. Cynna, you're in the middle with me. Santiago, watch our six. Will, you're behind me. Check your fire—we have no idea what the environment is."
Will’s jaw muscles bunched, but he gave a sharp, jerky nod. The urge to charge was a physical tremor in him.
Benny attached a high-lumen tactical light to his shotgun’s rail. He took a breath, then started down the ladder. The light beam stabbed downward, cutting through a faint, rising mist. The air grew warmer, damper. The smell intensified—that cloying antiseptic sweetness, now mixed with a subtle, earthy rot.
The shaft opened into a vast, cylindrical space. They were on a metal catwalk that circled the perimeter of the old missile silo. Below, instead of a decommissioned Titan, was a nightmare of industry.
The silo had been converted into a towering laboratory. Multiple levels were carved into the curved walls, each lined with sterile white workstations, blinking servers, and clear-walled clean rooms. The center of the space was dominated by a massive, transparent column that ran from the floor far below to the ceiling high above. It was filled with a viscous, amber fluid.
And suspended in it were people.
Frankie’s breath caught. There were five of them, naked, floating like specimens in a giant’s test tube. Tubes and wires snaked from their bodies to ports in the column. Thin, illuminated data streams cascaded down the glass beside each one, a waterfall of vital signs and code.
"They're alive," Cynna breathed, her psychologist's mind wrestling with the horror of the display.
"Subjects," Will corrected, the word a poison in his mouth. His eyes were already scanning, searching. "Where is she?"
The catwalk led to a central command platform that extended out over the abyss, directly facing the column. A single figure stood there, back to them, observing the data streams. He was tall, dressed in a simple grey t-shirt and trousers, his posture one of casual ownership.
Lucas Petrosian.
Hearing their steps on the grating, he turned. He looked younger than his file photos, his face unlined, his dark hair streaked with silver at the temples. His eyes were a pale, curious blue. He smiled, a genial, welcoming expression that was utterly dissonant.
"Frankie Morales," he said, his voice a rich, pleasant baritone that carried easily in the cavernous space. "The Catfish. I’ve been looking forward to this."
Frankie ignored him. His eyes, like Will’s, were raking the suspended forms in the tank. He saw a man with a thick beard, another young, wiry woman, a middle-aged man… his gaze froze on the third form from the top.
Addison.
She hung suspended, her blonde hair fanning out in the amber gel like a halo. Her eyes were closed, her expression peaceful. Sensors were attached to her temples, her chest, her arms. Her body looked lean, almost too perfectly defined, as if every ounce of non-essential tissue had been stripped away.
"Addison," Will whispered. The word wasn't a shout. It was a cracked, broken thing. He took an involuntary step forward, his weapon lowering.
"Don't," Frankie said, his hand snapping out to grip Will's arm. His own heart was hammering against his ribs. "Look at her, Will. Don't just see her.Look."
Will blinked, his gaze focusing beyond the relief of finding her. He saw the details. The unnatural, sculpted leanness. The subtle, serpentine patterns of raised veins visible beneath her skin, glowing a faint, biotic blue. The way her fingers ended not in nails, but in smooth, keratinous caps.
Petrosian followed their gaze. "Ah. Subject A-7.A remarkable resilience. Her assimilation rate is ninety-four percent. The highest we've achieved."
"What did you do to her?" Will’s voice rose, trembling with a rage so vast it threatened to swallow him whole.
"I refined her," Petrosian said, spreading his hands as if the answer was obvious. "The pathogen, as Thorne no doubt called it, is a misnomer.It's a key. It unlocks latent genetic potential and directs cellular reformatting. It strips away the weak, the inefficient, the human clutter. What remains is… optimized."
Frankie finally dragged his eyes from Addison’s floating form to Petrosian. The man’s calm was more terrifying than any shouted dogma. "Optimized for what?"
"For the next environment," Petrosian said, turning back to the column with a proprietor's pride. "The one coming after the collapse. The one we will usher in. Thorne was a brilliant geneticist but a coward. He saw the process as a disease. It is not a disease. It is evolution with a guiding hand."
Cynna leaned heavily on the catwalk railing, her face slick with sweat. "You're talking about forced speciation. You're turning people into… something else."
"Turning implies a conclusion," Petrosian said, glancing at her with interest. "They are in a state of beautiful becoming. Their metabolisms are hyper-efficient. Their musculature is denser. Neural pathways are simplifying, focusing on core directives: sustenance, propagation, territorial integrity. The old anxieties, the doubts, the pointless emotional drag… all being burned away."
Will made a sound, a raw, animal noise. He raised his rifle, the sight centering on Petrosian’s forehead."Let.Her. Go."
Petrosian didn't flinch. He looked almost pitying. "And do what, Mr.Miller? Reverse the process? There is no reverse. The template has been rewritten. The woman you knew is being edited, line by line. What will emerge will be stronger. She will thank you."
Frankie’s mind was cold, clear. He saw the layout. The catwalk.The tank. The workstations. This was a demonstration, a sales pitch. Petrosian felt safe here, in control. He hadn't called his guards down. He wanted an audience.
"Thorne said the fluid in the pods was a stabilizer," Frankie stated, his voice cutting through Will's shaking fury. "He said without it, the body rejects everything. What's in that tank?"
Petrosian's smile widened. "Perceptive. The amniotic solution provides nutrients, yes. But its primary function is a modulated immunosuppressant cocktail. It keeps the host body from rejecting the new genetic instructions while the rewrite completes. Remove a subject too early…" He gestured to the bottom of the tank.
Frankie’s eyes dropped. At the base of the column, lying in a shallow catchment area, was a shape. It was vaguely human, but monstrously distorted, a mass of uncontrolled tissue growth and ossified bone.A failed refinement.
"The body fights the change," Petrosian continued, his tone clinical. "It tries to grow everything at once. A tragic, but necessary, part of the learning curve."
Will’s rifle remained steady, but his finger was white on the trigger. The conflict in his eyes was agony: the need to destroy the man before him, and the paralyzing fear that pulling the trigger might doom Addison to that catchment pit.
Frankie took a slow, deliberate step forward onto the command platform, drawing Petrosian's focus. "You needed Sam to bring us here.You wanted an audience. Why? You think you can sell us on this? On turning us into those… things?"
"Not you," Petrosian said, his pale eyes gleaming. "You are catalysts of a different sort. You are chaos agents.Survivors. I study survival above all else. I want to see how the unrefined mind reacts, fights, adapts when presented with the inevitable. Your struggle is the last, best data set of the old world."
He tapped a control on the console. A soft chime echoed. In the tank, the amber fluid around Addison began to slowly drain.
"What are you doing?" Will screamed, stepping forward.
"Accelerating the timetable," Petrosian said. "Let's see what emerges when the safety net is removed. Let's see if the soldier's love can withstand the product of my work."
The fluid level dropped past Addison's chest, then her waist. Her eyes flew open.
They were no longer the soft blue Will remembered. They were a vibrant, electric cyan, pupil-less and glowing with an inner light. She took a sudden, gasping breath as the fluid cleared her head, the tubes disconnecting automatically with soft pops. She looked down, not at Will, not at any of them, but at her own hands, flexing the strange, smooth fingers.
She let out a sound. It wasn't a scream. It was a low, resonant harmonic that vibrated in Frankie's fillings.
Then her glowing eyes lifted and locked onto Will. There was no recognition in that gaze. Only a fierce, predatory curiosity.