The silence of the Aethelred lab was a memory. Here, in the great, mad central market of Cluj-Napoca, the world was a deafening cataract of sensation. The air was thick with a rich soup of scents: roasting meat, rotting fruit, diesel, cheap perfume, and the fouled, earthy aroma of unclean humanity. It was a necessary evil. The new, expanded lab's insatiable appetite for supplies had no limit, and bulk electronic buys to a rural mountain zip code would entice exactly the kind of attention they couldn't have.
So they visited the source. They visited the market.
Selene Vark led the team, her Beta's head whirling with math for a hundred things simultaneously. She'd brought two of the younger pack with her: Elara, an alert chemist with eyes like a hawk, and Bren, a broad-shouldered tracker wh
