My stomach churned, and a wave of dizziness and vertigo made me bend over to grip my knees and give my head a moment to stop spinning.

“Sorry,” Kyrine's voice entered my mind, sounding genuinely apologetic, “I thought it would be easier. I suppose I have had far more practice than you. It will get better with practice.” She didn’t sound hugely convinced.

“It’s alright,” I managed to say as I forced the contents of my stomach to stay put. Thankfully I hadn’t eaten anything since dinner the night before. If I’d eaten breakfast that morning, I didn’t think I’d have been able to keep it down.

After a moment had passed and the nausea and dizziness eased, I straightened, expecting Astrid to be standing in front of me, and probably expecting an explanation for my sudden appearance. To my surprise, I found that she wasn’t there. No one was here. I was alone in the enormous training hall.

I glanced around the gigantic space, looking from the assault course to the training dummies, and over to the vast arena. I could just make out the strength stations and car-sized medicine balls in the distance, on the other side of the arena.

This place really was massive. It had seemed big when I was looking down on it from my eye-in-the-sky viewpoint above the mansion, but now that I was actually in it, it felt as big as a football stadium.

Despite its size, the hall didn’t have many places one could conceal oneself. I wondered where Astrid had disappeared to? She must have left, since I couldn’t see or hear anything of her.

Well, I thought, If she’d left the training hall, it was no big deal; I could just tell her about the merging later. I’d come here to train my new creatures after all, and I was eager to see what they could do.

I was about to set about exploring the training hall properly when the silence was broken by a sudden hissing and splashing noise and the sound of a woman singing. Was that Astrid? She sounded like she had a great singing voice.

The exploration of the hall could wait for now, I suddenly decided. I wanted to know where the voice was coming from. I followed the sounds to a small doorway behind the practice dummies. I hadn’t noticed it in the aerial view because it was so small. The door was slightly ajar, and the voice was coming from there.

A blast of steam hit me as I pushed the door open. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself staring straight at a naked Astrid while she stood beneath a shower head.