The manor was a cacophony of chaos tonight.

Cody pressed his palms against his ears, the latest explosion from upstairs rattling the beakers on his shelf. Someone—probably Jeff—was testing something incendiary again. The shouting match that followed was just as loud.

I can't think in this madhouse.

He'd been in the middle of recalibrating his viral stabilizer formula when the latest blast had knocked a vial off his desk. The glass shattered. The liquid evaporated. Three hours of work, gone.

So he packed.

Scalpel. Sutures. Antiseptic wipes. A roll of gauze. His notebook and a handful of empty vials. His mask. The half-finished stabilizer.

Quiet. That's all he needed. Somewhere quiet to write, to think, to work.

The estate's lower levels stretched deeper than most residents knew. Cody had mapped maybe a quarter of the tunnels beneath the manor—storage rooms, old wine cellars, forgotten boiler rooms. Tonight, he went further than he'd ever dared.

The tunnels narrowed. The air grew colder. Damp. His flashlight cut through thick shadows, illuminating ancient brickwork and, eventually, raw earth. The walls became carved rock. Natural cave, or something close to it.

He was so focused on finding a quiet corner that he didn't see the drop until his boot met nothing but air.

The fall was short but brutal. He landed sideways, his shoulder taking the worst of it, his equipment scattering across the dirt floor. For a long moment, he just lay there, staring up at the hole he'd fallen through, listening to the distant drip of water.

"Fantastic," he muttered, pushing himself up. His shoulder screamed. Nothing broken, probably. Just bruised.

He gathered his supplies—notebook intact, vials miraculously unbroken, flashlight cracked but still working—and looked around.

This wasn't a cave.

The walls were concrete. Old, cracked, but concrete. A corridor stretched in both directions, lined with pipes and junction boxes. Some kind of... facility? Buried deep beneath the manor's already-buried tunnels?

His scientific curiosity prickled.

Cody checked his watch: 2:47 AM. The manor's chaos wouldn't die down for hours. He had time.

He chose a direction and walked.

The deeper he went, the worse it got.

Rooms full of rusted surgical tables. Restraints bolted to walls. Old bloodstains that had turned black with age. Glass canisters containing things he couldn't identify—preserved organs, maybe, or something worse. A filing cabinet stuffed with files written in a language he didn't recognize, but the diagrams were universal.

Specimens. Growth charts. Vital signs. Experiment logs.

Someone had been playing god down here. Someone cruel.

Cody's stomach turned, but he kept walking. The scientist in him wanted to understand. The... whatever else he was... wanted to find the exit. Both pushed him forward.

Then he heard it.

A soft whine. Weak. Thready.

He followed the sound to a door at the end of the corridor. Heavy steel. Locked with a chain and padlock, not a keypad. Rusted. Old.

He shattered the padlock with a rock from the corridor floor.

The room inside was smaller than the others. More recent, maybe. A concrete floor stained with dark patches. A drain in the center. A heavy chain bolted to the far wall, ending in a thick metal collar.

And attached to the collar—

A dog.

Except it wasn't quite a dog.

Cody's flashlight swept over the creature. Too large for any breed he knew. Muzzle too long. Ears set wrong. Fur matted with dried blood and something darker, something that looked like old infection. Its ribs showed through its coat. One of its hind legs was bent at an unnatural angle, held off the ground entirely.

It lifted its head when the light hit it. Yellow eyes. Intelligent eyes. Watching him with a mixture of fear and something that looked horribly like exhaustion.

Not a dog, then. Or not just a dog.

The collar had rubbed its neck raw. The skin beneath was angry and red, crusted with old scabs. The chain was short—maybe three feet of movement. Enough to lie down, barely. Not enough to reach the drain, where clean water might have pooled.

There was no food bowl. No water bowl.

"They left you here to rot," Cody said quietly.

The creature didn't growl. Didn't bare its teeth. Just watched him with those yellow eyes, too weak to do anything else.

Cody made a decision.

He approached slowly, talking under his breath the whole time—nonsense, really, just quiet words to keep the creature calm as he examined the collar. The lock was simpler than the door's had been. A few minutes of work with his scalpel, and it clicked open.

The collar fell away with a heavy thunk.

The creature didn't move. Didn't try to bolt. Just lay there, breathing shallowly, watching him.

"Okay," Cody said. "Okay. Let's see what we're working with."

He worked quickly. The leg was the worst part—a fracture, maybe a week old, starting to heal wrong. He'd need to re-break it to set it properly, but not here. Not now. He splinted it as best he could with spare tubing from the corridor, wrapped the worst of the wounds in gauze, cleaned the collar sores with antiseptic that made the creature flinch but not fight.

He was running out of supplies. Running out of options.

The creature was too heavy to carry easily. Too large for him to lift without aggravating his own bruised shoulder. But it let him help it stand on three legs, leaning against him heavily as they limped back through the maze of corridors and tunnels.

Up the ditch was impossible. He had to find another way—a sloping passage that led up and up, back toward the manor's lower levels, back toward his own lab.

By the time they reached his door, Cody was exhausted. The creature was barely conscious.

He got it onto the cot in the corner—the one he used for overnight observation of particularly unstable samples, or for his own rare attempts at sleep when the manor was too loud to risk his room. The creature collapsed onto the thin mattress and didn't move.

Cody worked for another hour. Re-set the leg properly—the creature cried out once, a sound that wasn't quite a dog's bark, then went silent—sutured the worst of the lacerations, cleaned and bandaged everything else. He found an old blanket and draped it over the shivering body.

"No more chains," he said quietly, more to himself than to the creature. "You're safe here. For now."

He collapsed onto his small couch, still in his bloodstained shirt, and fell asleep within seconds.

---

Morning light—what little of it reached this deep—filtered through the high windows when Cody woke.

He sat up slowly, his shoulder screaming, his back complaining about the couch. For a moment, he didn't remember.

Then he looked at the cot.

And froze.

There was no dog on the cot.

There was a person.

Naked. Curled on their side. Hair matted with the same dark blood that still stained the bandages. Skin pale beneath the grime, but human-shaped. Human-sized. Human.

The blanket had slipped during the night, pooling around their waist.

Cody made a sound that wasn't quite a word and wasn't quite a scream. Something between a strangled gasp and a wheeze.

He looked away so fast he nearly gave himself whiplash. His face burned. His hands flailed at his sides, grabbing for something—anything—to cover them.

There was a spare lab coat on the back of his chair. He snatched it, crossed the room in three panicked strides, and laid it over the sleeping figure like a man trying to defuse a bomb. Careful. Precise. Don't look don't look don't look.

The lab coat covered... most things. Enough. Barely.

Cody retreated to the far corner of the lab, pressing his back against a cabinet full of glassware, and stared at the ceiling with wide eyes.

"Okay," he whispered to himself. "Okay. Okay. A person. A person. That's fine. That's—I treated a person like a dog and brought them to my lab and they're naked and I have to—I need to—"

He dragged his hands down his face.

"Don't be a creep, Cody. They're injured. They're clearly some kind of—experiment, maybe—they shifted back in their sleep, that's all. It's fine. It's fine. Just... wait for them to wake up. Explain. Apologize for the... everything. And don't stare."

He didn't stare.

He absolutely did not glance at the cot every few seconds to make sure they were still breathing, still covered, still there.

(He did. Constantly.)

The figure stirred.

Cody forgot how to breathe.

Yellow eyes—familiar yellow eyes—opened and blinked slowly at the unfamiliar ceiling. Then at the lab coat draped over them. Then at the pale, panicked man pressed against the cabinet across the room.

They opened their mouth. Closed it. Licked dry lips.

"...Where...?"

Cody squeaked.

He cleared his throat and tried again.

"You're in my lab," he said, his voice cracking on the last word. "I found you. Last night. In a—in a place. Underground. You were... you weren't... you were a dog. I mean. You were in a different form. I think. And you were hurt. So I brought you here and I—I fixed you up. The best I could. And then I went to sleep and when I woke up you were..." He gestured vaguely at the lab coat. "That. And I covered you because I'm not a creep and I'm sorry if this is weird or invasive or—are you thirsty? Hungry? I have water. I think I have some crackers somewhere. Do people eat crackers when they wake up from being a dog? I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm rambling."

He was definitely rambling.

The figure on the cot—the person on the cot—blinked at him slowly. Their voice, when it came, was rough from disuse.

"You... unchained me."

"Yes."

"You bandaged me."

"Yes."

"You're... not from the other lab."

Cody shook his head. "No. I'm from upstairs. The manor. I'm... I'm Cody. Well, most people call me X-Virus. But Cody is fine. Cody is better, actually. I don't really like X-Virus. It was a lab designation and I—" He cut himself off, pressing a hand over his mouth. "I'm doing it again. Sorry. Talking too much. It's a nervous habit."

The yellow eyes watched him for a long moment. Then, slowly, they closed again.

"Thank you," they whispered.

Cody's heart did something complicated in his chest.

"You're welcome," he said quietly. "Rest. We can... we can figure out the rest when you're stronger. I'll find you some clothes. And the crackers. Definitely crackers."

He turned away to give them privacy and immediately walked into a lab stool, sending it clattering to the floor.

Behind him, he could have sworn he heard a soft, exhausted laugh.