Splinter Self

by S L Shelton

“Well, just let us know,” the tech said, pointing at the camera in the corner. “As long as you’re in recovery, we’ll do whatever we can to make your stay more comfortable.”

  Recovery.

  Kathrin looked up at the camera then nodded back to the tech. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” the woman replied, smiling pleasantly as she pushed the cart out of the room.

  Kathrin kept waiting for the door to close, but it never did. She stared at the open doorway for several minutes and tensed when she sensed someone approaching. Her reflexes relaxed when a barefoot woman, about her height, stepped through the door, her hair dripping wet. Her sweat pants were identical to the ones the technician had left for Kathrin, and her small breasts seemed to form one single lump under a clean black sports bra.

  She smiled. “Kathrin, I presume,” she said as she walked over and sat next to her on the bed.

  “Tris?”

  Tris smiled and nodded. “That shower made all the difference in the world. You should go ahead as soon as you finish eating.”

  Kathrin stared at her for a moment, drinking in the face of the woman who had shared her sickness for the past few days. Or had it been weeks? Time was little more than a vague cloud in her rearview mirror. Months seemed entirely off the map— years even.

  The woman pushed Kathrin’s bare shoulder with her fingertips, sending a jolt of electricity through her senses—erotic and primal.

  Tris smiled as if she had sensed Kathrin’s response to her touch and leaned toward her, slowly, teasingly. “Really,” she whispered, her lips tickling the tiny hairs on Kathrin’s earlobe. “You reek.”

  Kathrin laughed and returned to eating. After gulping down the last of her eggs, she stood and peeled off her filthy garments. Tris sat on the bed and leaned back against the wall, watching as Kathrin showered.

  “So, do you think we’re prisoners?” Kathrin asked as she lathered her matted hair. She peeked through an avalanche of shampoo bubbles and saw Tris maintaining her vigil with the same slight smile on her lips.

  Tris looked away up to the camera then back to Kathrin. “I’m not sure…but they left the doors open.”

  Kathrin washed the soap from her hair, momentarily musing at her complete absence of modesty, then turned to Tris. “How are you feeling?”

  Tris’s face suddenly went blank as if checking internally for an answer. She shrugged after a moment. “I feel strong. Still a little sick—” She rubbed her stomach. “And a little wobbly. But other than that, I feel pretty good.”

  Kathrin nodded and went back to washing. “Are you as fuzzy in the brain as I am?”

  Tris’s smile broadened and she stood, stretching her arms over her head. “I don’t know… How fuzzy are you?”

  Kathrin looked down, noting the current condition of her own grooming and laughed. “Good point. They should have given us a razor, too.” It seemed to take a moment, but the forced laugh found sincerity when Tris joined her in the chuckle.

  Tris sat again, excitement on her face, as if an idea had just occurred to her. “As soon as you’re done, let’s see if they’ll let us explore.”

  Kathrin finished rinsing herself and turned the water off. She stood, dripping for a moment looking at her hands and arms. Despite feeling tipsy, she felt powerful. It was almost as if her entire body had been purified by whatever illness she had suffered through.

  She reached up and grasped the showerhead with one hand and pulled herself off the floor, slowly, steadily. When she gently lowered herself to the tile again, she turned to see Tris grinning broadly at her.

  “That’s an impressive feat of strength,” she said.

  A wave of discomfort swept through Kathrin. Not physical, but it affected her physically all the same. It was almost as if a tiny part of her soul was screaming at her that something was horribly wrong. And she just couldn’t get the fog to lift from her mind.

  “I don’t think that’s normal for me,” Kathrin said, looking at her hands.

  Tris’s face melted to one of concern so genuine it made Kathrin’s heart ache. “I’m not sure what’s normal and what’s not. I don’t remember enough to tell the difference.”

  Kathrin nodded absently, wanting to wrap her arms around Tris and undo the doubt she had just created. Instead, she just stood there and stared at her hands.

  She could feel Tris watching her but couldn’t pull her gaze away from her fingers—it didn’t feel as though they belonged to her.

  “Get dressed,” Tris said, snapping her from her finger induced self-hypnosis. “Let’s explore.”

  Kathrin toweled herself dry and slid her clean underwear on. It was euphoric. Clean undergarments and the weight of freshly laundered sweatpants seemed like such a luxury. The act of dressing felt like constructing scattered pieces of a puzzle, only to reveal an unfamiliar yet comfortable image. She chuckled at the ridiculousness of the thought as she tied the arms of her hoodie around her waist. As the arms cinched together, the dark, unsettled feeling that still lurked deep inside her fell silent.

  After slipping her feet into the tennis shoes and lacing them, she stood straight as if presenting herself for inspection. “Good?”

  “Ready to conquer the world,” Tris said, flashing a toothy grin as she turned and left the room.

  Kathrin followed behind her, looking both directions down the hallway before continuing. Tris walked confidently down the center of the corridor and that gave Kathrin the confidence she needed to follow in kind. She caught up with Tris as she reached a double metal door.

  Tris pushed through.

  “No alarms…that’s a good sign,” Kathrin said.

  Tris reached back and took Kathrin’s hand. “I am certain we are not prisoners.”

  Just those few simple words were all it took for Kathrin to relax. She curled her fingers around Tris’s and continued down the hallway, confident, her sense of power growing.

  Tris stopped at another double door halfway down the new corridor. Though the door stood closed, Kathrin smelled sweat and adrenaline on the other side. The realization she could sense such subtle odors from the hallway frightened her—then it excited her.

  Kathrin released Tris’s hand and pushed the door open. Inside, three men were lifting weights along the wall and two were sparring on a training mat in the center of the large room. They all stopped their workouts and stared at the two women as they entered the space.

  The men followed them with their eyes, glaring almost hungrily while Tris led Kathrin to a second mat on the other side of the room. Kathrin watched them in her peripheral vision. They looked hard, sculpted, and dangerous. The two men standing on the sparring mat breathed evenly despite the intense combat they had been engaged in. The sweat of their effort clung to them like a glistening second skin, and they reengaged each other as Tris stopped in the center of the second sparring mat.

  Kathrin looked at Tris, curious about her intent.

  The mystery was solved when Tris put her hands up to Kathrin, palms out, and assumed a fighting stance. “Come on.”

  Kathrin smiled and assumed a mirroring stance. Tris moved fast—too fast. In the split second Tris struck out with inhuman speed, Kathrin panicked, worried she was in over her head. That is until her body took over and responded instinctively with a block that seemed equally inhuman. They stood there staring at each other for several seconds, their hands still frozen in the blocked strike, then smiled.

  The fight was on. The flurry of strikes and parries that flew from the two women would have appeared more like the blur of snake strikes than combat to human eyes. With increasing speed and intensifying impact of the blows, the two fought like ancient martial arts masters, locked in a struggle of life and death.

  Tris broke an arm-lock and attempted a leg sweep, but Kathrin saw it before it arrived and flexed her spine and hip to avoid it. At the last instant, she decided to turn it into a counter strike and flicked her legs up, bracing her weight on her hand in a gymnastic shift.
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  Tris dodged sideways, but Kathrin followed her down with her feet, trapping her shoulders on the mat. Her body flowed like water over Tris and pinned her shoulders, dropping down on top of her.

  Tris struggled momentarily then relaxed, smiling up at her. “Not bad.”

  Kathrin winked and pushed herself up, grasping Tris by the hand and helping her up in the process. “Again.”

  “Why don’t you try that with one of us?” one of the men said from behind them.

  Tris looked over her shoulder and sneered. “This is a private party.”

  The two men ambled over onto the girls’ mat. “Come on. We’ll go easy on you.”

  One of the men put his hand on Tris’s shoulder, and Kathrin whipped her foot from the floor and slapped it across the man’s shoulder, sending him tumbling.

  “Well that’s just rude,” the other man said and lashed out with an open palm.

  Tris lifted her arm between Kathrin and her attacker, and with a delicate communication, no more than a shift of her eyes, guided Kathrin to close the space with her own strike, sending the second man to the floor as well. For just a second, it had been as if Tris and Kathrin had become one mind, partnering to easily subdue the threat. Arousal pulsed up Kathrin’s gut, and she flicked her foot out again, stomping the ankle of the downed man.

  He cried out, drawing the attention of the men who had been lifting weights.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Tris said with a teasing edge to her voice.

  As the men approached and spread out around the two women, Tris pressed her back to Kathrin’s and whispered. “As one.”

  With that, they flew into action. The men were obviously trained in hand-to-hand, but Kathrin’s confidence soared as she struck out, keeping mindful of Tris’s position relative to hers. She discovered that as she moved, her body seemed to sense Tris and adjusted posture accordingly.

  A single kick from the man in front of her exposed so many possible counterattacks that she had difficulty executing any. But it was as if the man moved in slow motion and her brain, piercing the veil of fog that had enshrouded it only minutes earlier, expelled the perfect response. She stepped into the kick and trapped his leg on her shoulder before delivering a devastating punch to the man’s groin.

  As he curled into a ball and fell to the floor, she regretted the blow, saddened that she had so quickly dispatched the foe. She adjusted and decided not to be so decisive again.

  Behind her, she felt Tris dip to the floor. It wasn’t until she felt a tinge of doubt that she turned to look. Tris had been taken to the mat by one of the remaining men while the other jumped into the air to deliver a heel blow to her head.

  Reason and restraint left Kathrin’s mind. She closed the distance with a sliding kick, catching the man midair with her heel and cracking his jaw with the strike. Before he had fallen, she slipped her arm around the throat of the man on Tris’s back. With a brutal yank, they both flew backward, him landing on top of her.

  Like a python, her legs encircled his waist, and her grip around his neck tightened. Anger pulsed in her temples. Though instead of producing an adrenaline-fueled emotional response, her thoughts cleared, and her actions took on a machinelike precision. She lifted her elbow, tilting the man’s head back as her other arm levered the back of his neck.

  She could feel with disturbing clarity the exact point at which the man’s neck should begin to break.

  “Kathrin,” Tris whispered in her ear.

  One eye blink sent the adrenaline pouring out of her bloodstream, replaced by a calming cocktail of serotonin. She could feel her body release the combat instinct as if against her will.

  She turned her head to Tris who stood above her, hands on her hips, smiling.

  Embarrassment, and then amusement washed over Kathrin when she released the man from her grasp. He fell to the floor gasping as she rolled over and stood. She wondered if he knew how close he’d come to having his neck snapped.

  Tris draped her arm around Kathrin’s shoulder. “It’s all in good fun,” she said, nudging Kathrin toward the door.

  Kathrin chuckled uneasily and followed. As they exited the gym into the hallway, a man in a white lab coat approached them. “There you are. It’s time for your blood work.”

  “Just stretching our legs,” Tris replied with a flirty lilt and nudged Kathrin with her arm. “Right Kat?”

  Kat… I like that. She nodded. “Yes. Just stretching.”

  The man grinned awkwardly and nodded them down the hall. The thrill of the fight had completely erased any urge for escape, yet Kathrin’s mind filled with more questions than ever. How did I get here? What’s happening to me? Did I really almost just kill that man?

  “You should mellow your tremor,” the man in the coat said. “It’s a core in need of rest.”

  As if covered in a heavy, warm blanket, Kathrin suddenly felt unsure of her footing, and her mind began to fog over again. “What?” she asked.

  The man looked at her as they walked. “Nothing. You’re fine now.”

  She relaxed even more, and felt an overwhelming desire to crawl back into bed and close her eyes. “I guess I overdid it. I think I need to rest.”

  Tris smiled. “You did well… And thank you for coming to my rescue like that.”

  Kathrin smiled, and a blush rose to her cheek. She could feel it spread to her ears and scalp. They reached Kathrin’s room and Tris kissed her on the lips. The touch startled her. Though nothing more than a friendly peck, it nonetheless left behind a tingling she couldn’t explain.

  “Sleep,” Tris said. “Everything is fine here. We’ll play more later.”

  Drowsy, Kathrin nodded, and without even removing her shoes, slipped under the covers of her bed. Tris leaned in the doorway for a moment, staring at her. “You did very well.”

  Kathrin smiled more broadly, exhaustion closing her heavy eyes. “Tris.”

  A satisfied sigh escaped her lips and she drifted to sleep, comforted by the taste of Tris’s lips on hers.

  **

  TRIS waited in the doorway until Kathrin’s breathing indicated she had fallen asleep.

  The lab tech attached monitoring leads to her chest and head then turned to Tris. “That went better than expected.”

  Tris nodded and turned without another word. She walked to the end of the hall and pushed through the double doors at the end opposite the gym. Three doors down, a smiling Braun stepped into the hallway. “The trigger phrase conditioning worked well,” he said as she stopped in front of him.

  “She didn’t feel threatened. If I hadn’t been there, she would have killed all of them.”

  He grinned more broadly. “That’s good. Her instincts mutated perfectly.”

  “That’s just the Jagger alterations. That will all change after the Lance protocols are enacted.”

  “You sound worried.”

  Tris leaned against the wall next to Braun. “I know how my perceptions changed after I turned. Your control of her is an illusion that’ll evaporate once she’s Lance enabled.”

  “You remained focused on avenging your former Jagger pair bond,” he said.

  She faced him, his smug response agitating her. “It wasn’t vengeance I wanted,” she said coolly, backing him into the room he had emerged from.

  “Who are you trying to convince?”

  “Don’t toy with me,” she snapped. “It was vengeance I wanted when I locked myself in isolation and injected the LOT and Lance treatments. But when I woke I was something very different. It was rebalancing that I wanted. There was no vengeance in my mind.”

  She backed him up with nothing but her stare until he bumped into a chair and sat. “And do you still have that desire? The desire to ‘rebalance’ yourself after your Jagger mate was killed?”

  Though a mild flit of anger washed over her, she peered deep inside herself, seeking the answer to that question. Realization crept in and she looked away from him. “Yes.”

  Braun nodded. “Then you
retain exactly what it is we hope Kathrin will exhibit.”

  She stared into nothingness, letting the abasement of her emotional discovery sting like a sharp slap.

  “It has to be subtle,” Braun said, snapping her from her reverie. “Anything more compelling than that would raise suspicions. We don’t want that.”

  “If you say so. But you need to consider that she has deep feelings for Wolfe. My presence was immediate, physical, and tied only to the insecurity of her not knowing what’s going on.”

  Braun nodded reluctantly. “I fully understand that her bonding prior to treatment may interfere. But it’s only an opening we seek.”

  Tris turned to leave. “That’s fine. But you have to accept the possibility that the Lance enhancement will break your hold over her, and she’ll turn on you for trying to destroy her true love.”

  She walked down the hall but was aware when Braun exited the room again. “It’s you who will keep that from happening…now that you have allowed her to establish the dominant, protective role of Jagger Alpha.”

  Tris turned but continued to walk away. “Me throwing a fight so she could rescue me is no substitute for sincere emotional attachment… A soulless sociopath like you wouldn’t understand that.”

  Braun laughed as Tris turned her back on him and disappeared through the doors. “Keep laughing, you devil,” she whispered. “We’ll see how funny it is when she rips your heart out of your chest.”

  **

  SAMANTHA couldn’t keep her eyes off of him. He walked into the club like he owned the place. The stuffy, cigar smoke filled lounge seemed to brighten as he moved toward her, and she temporarily forgot how pissed off she was for being relegated to the reception bar of the old boys’ club. The Speaker of the House, Congressman Colton Sperling.

  Damn, she thought. That is one pretty man.

  She watched him in the mirror behind the bar as he got closer, her heart beating faster as he approached. His square jaw, ice blue eyes, and immaculately trimmed, short black hair, would make any woman do a double take—but she wanted him more than other women did. She wanted him in a way they didn’t.