Iridian

15. DIVISION

.memory (fragment #14)

"Ichi." Step forward, punch.

"Ni." Slip sideways. Block.

"San." Pivot and kick.

On the surface, it wasn't too hard to follow. I had the advantage of sharing the mind of someone who'd been doing this a long time. What I didn't know, he did, and he told my body how. We flowed through the kata at the exact same cadence and pacing to the fraction of an inch. It was like a dance that I could do with my eyes closed despite having worked at it for only a few weeks. The only problem was—the training hurt like hell. I might be sharing Dante's mind but I didn't have his stamina or his endurance for pain. My physique was simply not in the shape required for such rigorous activity and I knew it frustrated him when I couldn't keep up.

I hadn't been keen on taking on the Iridian form of martial arts. I'd never been the physical type—my main form of exercise being the climb up and down my apartment stairs instead of using the elevator, back when I was still a regular human. Sure, being able to use to the Nexus to leap onto the upstairs balcony from the ground was a thrill but punching sandbags and bouncing somersaults off the floor was not my cup of tea. I didn't have Dante's agility when it came to being airborne. He said I was thinking too much instead of letting my altered physique take on the task. I just figured gravity worked more on me than it did on him.

My reasons for agreeing were entirely driven by desperation. I'd already given up on privacy as far as Dante was concerned. There was no such thing as privacy with him lounging about nonchalantly in my head almost all the time and me in his.

That's the keyword right there. Almost.

We discovered that when one of us was asleep, it was like a door had been closed and the other regained some of their individuality. We had become relatively used to being in each other's heads though there were parts of Dante's mind that I strangely couldn't touch and he was polite enough not to explore all those open spaces in mine, but we often spoke in choral or spoke for each other when we were in the same room. We even took on aspects of each other's personalities—I became quite close-lipped while Dante would walk into breakfast with a cheerful smile and a bright good morning. That certainly made Llewellyn and Paige look up in surprise the first time it happened.

"That wasn't Dante. That was Arden speaking. Dante's over there, reading the papers with that frown on her face," Atreus put bluntly, pointing in my direction with his fork without even glancing up from his omelette.

True enough. I was drinking strong black coffee while Dante was pouring the tea that I usually preferred in the mornings. I don't like my coffee black. At least, I didn't. Apparently I'd developed a taste for it. I'd also developed a preference for plain white tees and blue jeans which was the exact same thing that Dante was wearing. We both swore audibly when we noticed the matching garments.

Obviously, his personality was slightly more dominant since I was taking on more of his characteristics than he was taking on mine, though I did catch him sitting on the terrace once, playing with a stray cat that had wandered by. I liked cats but I'd never detected partiality on his part for any animal before. It was awful, not being really sure where a thought originated from. Me or Dante?

There had to be a way to create some level of separation so we could function individually and that was when we stumbled upon the sleep solution. Unfortunately, Iridi don't require much sleep under normal circumstances and we were coming close to driving ourselves and everyone around us to madness with our merged personalities. So, barring taking sleeping pills which would have been medically unsound, we decided to tire ourselves out so one of us could sleep while the other stayed awake and had some alone time for a couple of hours. The best way to induce that was hard, physical activity.