The showers were essentially one large tiled room with four shower heads, two on the left wall and two on the right. There were no partitions of any kind.

Feld and Sondra helped each other out of their filthy clothes as Lucretia turned her water on. When Feld removed his shirt, Sondra gasped, “Oh my! Feld! Your ribs.”

Feld looked down and saw that his entire left side was bruised. When he removed his pants, he saw that the bruise continued down the length of his thigh. “Well,” he said, “you know what they say. If you can walk away from it, it wasn’t a bad crash.” Still, as the adrenaline surge of the past few hours began to wane, Feld became acutely aware of the pains in his left side.

While Feld and Sondra hobbled their way into the showers, they each took inventory of the various injuries they suffered from the crash. While Feld took the worst of it, Sondra’s body was peppered with various bruises, cuts and scrapes as well.

“You two are a mess,” Lucretia commented as they took their places along the opposite wall. Feld was about to comment when a dull thud echoed its way into the tiled room. He locked eyes with Lucretia for a moment before she faded from view. His knees buckled just then as the sickeningly familiar pheromone scent hit his senses hard.

Feld spent the next few minutes in a semi-conscious haze. While he rested the side of his face against the cool surface of the wall, he saw Sondra rush toward him, concern plainly evident on her face. He sees her stop suddenly and turn back toward the entrance. Turning slowly, he sees the Dominar and her blaster standing there, shouting something that he can’t quite hear over the ringing in his ears. Then, reality takes a vacation as the Dominar levitates up off the ground, her back arching impossibly backward, her wild-eyed face pointed to the ceiling, her arms and legs thrashing, the blaster falling uselessly from her panicked grip, a thin, red line forming across her naked throat, the line growing in size and texture until the rivulets gain their freedom and snake their way down to the tile floor beneath her.

He closes his eyes for what was surely a microt or so, but, when he opens them again, cold water is cascading down upon him as he looks into Lucretia’s shimmering gray face. She says something that he can’t hear, but that doesn’t matter much as his stomach empties itself repeatedly upon the tile floor between them.

When he finally finishes, he looks down and spies a bit of blood mixed in with the assorted textures. He looks up into Lucretia’s knowing face and shakes his head slightly from side to side. “We have to leave here, and soon.”