Fenrir Greystone smelled the blood on his own hands and knew he could not do the next part of the work in the woods behind his cabin. He had come out of a gene-splice program built for tracking, part wolf, part human, and now he wanted the rest of it undone. He wanted a cure that would let him choose a shape instead of wearing the one they gave him. That meant gene work. Gene work meant a sealed room, clean air, a centrifuge that did not sit on a stump. The stab wound in his side had taken six weeks to close. He had earned it walking into a storage facility without an exit, following a scent past three guards who were waiting for him. He would not make that mistake twice. Whoever ran the facility was still out there. If they caught the smell of a lab, they would come for him before he finished a single sequence. His cabin sat at the end of a dirt track, stacked timber and a stone chimney, one room and a loft. Good for hiding. Bad for centrifuges. He had spent the morning pacing it and counting outlets. Drake Wyrmwood arrived at noon with a pack on his back and an axe strapped across it, the head oversized and polished, the handle wrapped in red and green cord. Fenrir had asked him because Drake tracked dragons for study and knew how to build a blind that people did not find. Drake looked at the cabin. "Too clean a target," he said. "Neighbors?" "None close." "Still wrong. Anyone follows a scent here, they find the whole setup in one room." Drake set the axe down and walked the tree line. He came back and pointed at the slope behind the house. "Dig in. Second room under the floor. One vent, angled downhill. I can frame it in four days. You cut the logs." Fenrir agreed before he thought about the cost. They worked through the afternoon. Drake swung the axe into pine after pine, clean strokes, no wasted motion. Fenrir dragged the logs. By dusk they had a pit under the cabin floor, six feet deep, braced with fresh timber. Drake showed him where the vent would come out under a bramble, downwind of the road. "Anyone with a nose walks past this," Drake said. "Even you." Fenrir climbed out and washed his hands in the rain barrel. He had a lab now, or the start of one. He also had a second person who knew where it was, and a fresh stack of cut timber and turned earth behind the cabin that any tracker would read at a glance. The hunters would not smell the work. They would see the ground. He looked at the churned slope and understood he had four days, at most, before someone came to ask what he was building.