Kallidora Rho

SELECTED WORKS

WARHOUND - A set of stories set in a shared mecha universe, beginning with WARHOUND itself. Sartha Thrace, ace mech pilot, is always so confused. She’s a rebel, so why is she fighting on the wrong side? She’s a free woman, so why is she wearing a muzzle? She’s a hero, so why do her comrades treat her like a rabid dog? Sartha Thrace is so fortunate that her beloved Handler is always there to help her understand

The Subordinate - Olive, a mousy, workaholic middle manager with a strained relationship hires her old college bully as an assistant - and soon finds herself slipping back the abusive power dynamic they once shared

Wolf's Clothing - After the war, an ex-pilot struggling to play the role of benevolent handler for a pack of hounds unable to adjust to civilian life begins to fall apart as she encounters the real thing

Smoke and Teeth - Adam Novak attempts to rescue his older sister from the college professor who has bimbofied her, but has his assumptions about the culprit - and himself - inverted when he’s taught something crucial about how the world works: Gender has teeth

Gold - After being cheated on, Lara goes to a therapist to deal with the uncomfortable fantasies she's been experiencing. But Dr. Imani proves to have an unorthodox approach - and a golden, crystal pendant

Love The Bomb - Captain Leah Mandrake tries to save her girlfriend, Major Tao-jian Kong, from the sleazy, leering Bomb Handler who has transformed her into a living vessel of the apocaylpse. But does Tao still want to be saved? And how long does Leah have before the countdown runs out?

Failfate - An overtaxed heroine exchanges her noble destiny for the destiny of a debauched loser with no responsibilities… but learns that fate has a way of coming back to haunt you

Dragontaint - Princess Rhianwen is saved from a dragon's captivating spell by a heroic knight - but soon finds her rescuer exhibiting the same possessive, draconic tendencies as her captor

Mirror Shine - A conservative straight woman finds herself developing strange tastes and fixations after she spills coffee on a trans leatherdyke and is forced to polish her boots

Best Timeline- A magical girl is defeated by a time-warping villainess who alters the past in order to alter the magical girl’s personality

Shared Interests - Brittany snoops on her nerdy, perverted, slobbish little sister’s computer in a hunt for dirt - but thanks to a strange computer program, the two of them suddenly end up with a shared interest in hopeless masturbation

Halobreak- An angel in the process of falling comes to a demoness who offers to shatter her halo - and with it, her mind

---

When I think about my older sister, Marina, the first memory that comes to mind is of the time she beat the shit out of my bullies. I was seven years old, and I was always the kind of kid who liked to play dolls with the girls instead of sports with the boys. Just one of those things that comes with your big sister being your first, best friend, I guess. I learned the hard way that I was supposed to be ashamed of things like that; the other boys had me on the ground, sobbing, when she appeared above me, looking like a saint through the stained glass veil of my tears. In her own way, she’d always been something of a sensitive kid. Tomboyish—more of a boy than I was, the bullies liked to say—and usually too sensible by far to involve herself in playground brawls, but she had been bullied plenty herself for her weight; thanks to that, she wasn’t about to stand by and watch while her little brother got the same treatment. Watching her throw hands on my behalf filled me with two conflicting emotions. On the one hand, an immense, swelling sense of love, admiration and gratitude, and, on the other, a deep, gnawing sense of shame that I, as a boy—as a man—hadn’t been able to stand up for myself. That day, I wanted nothing more than to be just like my big sister.

No wonder I spent years wondering about my gender. Our parents are pretty laid-back and were always perfectly happy to let me experiment. But as I grew up, I grew comfortably into my own masculinity. I have no issues with my body, despite being a scrawny nerd. All I want to do is live up to the example my big sister always set for me, as a person and as a feminist.

The second memory that comes to mind when I think of her is of how, last summer, when she came home from college, everything I loved and respected about her had been scooped out and replaced with nothing but cotton candy.

What now sits across from me, at a table in the smoking area of some awful campus bar, can scarcely be called my sister. Gone is the tomboy. Gone is the smart, sensible big sister. Gone is the modest, inhibited young woman. It’s like something else is wearing Marina’s skin, something bubblegum pink and bottle blonde. I wish it was. I’d sooner believe in horror story doppelgangers than accept that my sister has become some kind of grotesque, anti-feminist parody. All around us at this bar are male and female students, always in pairs, all of them flirting, peacocking, giggling, drooling, leering. The girls are all dressed so skimpily, all showing so much skin, all performing the trite femininity of a bygone age to attract partners, and I cannot stand the way that my sister now fits in perfectly.

She even insisted this be where we meet. I have no idea why. It’s not like she smokes.

“Hey Adam! Sooooo,” Marina drawls, her every word punctuated with an airheaded giggle and a nauseating amount of vocal fry. “What are you, like, so desperate to talk to me about, anyway?”

The way she talks is appalling. The way she looks is even worse.

A pink string bikini top stares me in the face. Along with it, matching pink, heeled sandals, and a pair of Daisy Dukes that almost disappears between Marina’s plush hips and the chubby expanse of her exposed belly. That’s it. That’s all she’s wearing—and goodness, doesn’t she know it? She seems so pleased with herself, and it makes my chest tighten with pangs of disappointment and shame. I’m no prude, but this isn’t my sister. She isn’t like this. Isn’t some party girl. All around us, heads are still turned in her direction, eyes still caught by the spectacle of the plump slut my sister has become swinging her hips as she waltzed into the bar and sat down opposite me.

I don’t want them to see her like this. Nobody should see her like this.

“Jesus, Marina,” I mutter, my revulsion getting the better of my tact. “What the hell are you wearing?”

“Marina?” Marina scrunches up her face in a cutesy pout. Like she’s a brainless pop star on American Idol, playing to the cameras. “Oh, oopsie! I guess I never actually, like, told you—it’s just Mari now! Way cuter.”

“Mari?” I roll the diminutive around my mouth. It’s abhorrent. That’s not my sister. My sister was always proud of her name. Always hated people trying to shorten it.

“Uh-huh!” She beams at me, oblivious. “Anyway, cute outfit, right?”

As she poses and preens for my approval, a conflicted tooth snags me. What if I should be happy instead, seeing her so happy and so confident? It’s always been such a struggle for her. I’m her brother. I’m a man. Is it really my place to judge her? To tell her how she’s supposed to dress and present? Is the way she’s embracing her body really so wrong? Then Marina lets out another ditzy giggle that makes her chest heave, threatening to spill out of her sorry excuse for a top, and it reminds me: yes. Yes, it is. I can’t count the number of times I heard Marina lamenting being so well-endowed in that department. A proud feminist, she always hated the way it made people treat her. Like she was stupid. Like she was there for them to enjoy. It’s one thing to come to terms with your body. It’s another thing to have your morals and sensibilities completely inverted. Christ, she’s visibly enjoying being ogled by the other students at the bar. This isn’t what a woman is supposed to be. Not in this day and age, and we both know it. She’s the one who taught me that. What’s happened to her isn’t natural.

Somebody has done something to my sister.

“Yeah, um…” I begin awkwardly. I need to take it slow. Feel her out. “Your outfit is actually part of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Oh, yeah?” Marina flashes me a perplexing wink. “Wanna talk about girl clothes, sibby?”

I blink. Sibby? She’s never called me that before. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Marina impishly waves away my question. “Toooootally nothing to worry about.”

“Right.” Weirder and weirder. But I press on. “Your outfit. Don’t you think it’s a little… much? It’s such a huge change for you. And it’s, well… isn’t it kind of opposed to everything you always talked about?”

“Jeez, sibby,” Marina snorts. “You sound just like Mom and Dad.”

I suppose I do. They’re hardly more pleased with Marina’s transformation than I am. The only difference is, they seem to view it as a disastrous but inevitable college girl phase. They sent her back at the start of the semester armed with nothing more than a lecture about safe sex and rectifying her plummeting grades. They don’t see what I see: that Marina wouldn’t do this on her own. I dread to think who’s responsible. Some older grad student, perhaps, or a sleazy, graying male professor. The very notion makes me start trembling with rage.

Now that I’ve followed in her footsteps to college, I have to save her. I’m her brother. I’m a man now. It’s my duty.

“Look, I…” I grasp. “Obviously you can dress however you want. I’m just questioning whether this really is what you want.”

“Huh?” Marina’s doe-like eyes brim with naive curiosity as she peers at me. “I don’t get it.”

God, she really doesn’t, does she? It’s like the light inside her head has gone dim. The gormless ‘O’ formed by her parted, pouted, pink-glossed lips is a portal into utter vacuity. Where is the intelligent, dignified older sister I always looked up to? “I mean…” I sigh. I’m getting nowhere hinting at things. “Marina, is so-“

“Mari!” she interrupts, chipper.

“Mari,” I concede, exasperated. “Is someone making you do this? Forcing you to dress and act this way?”

I’m braced for all sorts of different reactions. Outrage. Evasion. Fear. I am not at all ready for Marina to simply sit back, fold her arms, and flash me a sly smirk.

“Kind of, like, real interesting for you to assume that someone had to force me to be more feminine, sibby,” she titters. “Feel like maaaaaybe that reveals a little more about you than me, huh?”

“Huh?” This is ridiculous. My sister looks perfectly smug the way only a truly dumb girl can, even though what she’s saying is incomprehensible. “No, that’s-”

At that moment, as I open my mouth to speak, I suck a breath and inhale smoke. A woman smoking at the next table has exhaled fumes in my direction. Caught off-guard, I can’t help but break into a fit of hacking coughs as I feel the smoke infect my lungs and seep into my veins. My train of thought is ruined, and my head feels desperately light for lack of oxygen.

“That’s what, sibby?” Marina asks, seemingly untroubled. Guess she’s gotten used to air as foul as this.

I’ve lost the sentence on my lips but, light-headed as I am, I can’t forget what I came here for. “Look, sis, I’m worried about you!” I beg. “Can’t you see? This isn’t you. None of it. The clothes. The hair. The way you talk. If it was just a makeover, that’d be one thing. But, God, your grades. You’re going to flunk school at this rate, and that’s one thing you never would have let happen! What about the rest of your life?”

Like before, Marina appears utterly oblivious to my desperation. She reacts with little more than an amused, indulgent eye-roll. “Sure. You’re the one who needs to be worried about me. Totally.”

“What…” I groan, and give up. It’s not worth trying to make sense of where this is coming from. I’m having a hard time thinking clearly after that dose of secondhand smoke, and the fact that Marina can’t see why I’m reacting this way is merely proof that there’s something truly wrong with her. “Yes! I am! Look, just… is there anyone pressuring you? At all? Has anyone given you, I don’t know, any strange drugs? Maybe there’s someone pushing you to do this. Encouraging you. Right? There has to be something.”

I need to hear that this isn’t my sister. Marina sighs like she’s merely humoring me, and makes a big show of panting a finger on her cheek and stretching her lips to one side as she thinks. “Oh!” she exclaims. “Well, there’s Professor Lambert, obviously.”

The name triggers a flood of adrenaline. A professor. Of course. “Professor Lambert?”

Marina nods enthusiastically. “Uh-huh! Professor Lambert helps me out with school. Been helping me, like, figure myself out, too.”

At once, it all falls into place. An older professor. Probably some divorced, sleazy piece of shit who gets off on having his female students wrapped around his little finger. Now I just need to figure out how he’s done this to Marina. “With school?” I snort. “Doesn’t seem like that’s been working out.”

“No, no, it’s been great!” Marina squeals. The eager stars in her eyes as she speaks about him put butterflies in my stomach. “See, Professor Lambert helped me get it: girls don’t need brains!”

That hits me like a thunderbolt. My blood runs cold. “What?”

“Girls don’t need brains!” she repeats, chipper. “School is, like, soooo easy now! I don’t even have to try. Just gotta worry about looking pretty.” She giggles, infatuated. “Professor Lambert says girls just need to look pretty.”

It’s so much worse than I thought.

I bury my face in my hands to hide the tears of anguish beading up in my eyes. This is beyond perverse. I’ve heard plenty of nonsense about liberal colleges brainwashing their students, but never it happening the opposite way: a proud, sensible, intelligent young woman turned into some sickening porno caricature, like an awful, patriarchal wet dream. My grief gives way to anger. I ball my hands into fists. I have to do something right this second.

“Hey,” I hiss through gritted teeth. “How about you take me to Professor Lambert’s office right-”

Another plume of smoke is blown directly into my face.

The way it makes me bend double and cough is maddening and humiliating. I’m completely unable to handle it. It’s like the wisps of black smoke hanging around me are strings, and I’m their puppet. I’m trying to man up, but I can’t fight my own lungs. Deprived of air, my head once again becomes perilously absent and light. Through my coughing, I turn and spit a curse at our neighbor. Some older woman, cigarette in hand, who barely seems to notice. I’d love to give her a piece of my mind, but I have more pressing concerns. Besides, a man shouldn’t yell at a woman, especially in public.

“OK, Adam- or, uh, sibby.” Strangely, my sister seems unaffected by the smoke. She takes full, deep, grateful breaths, like that black cloud is the freshest air she’s tasted all day. “Don’t you think it’s, like, time to tell me what this is all really about?”

“H-Huh?” I bleat. What is this all really about? For a perilous moment, I forget. My mind is entirely blank. It’s like the hot air I just inhaled is filling my head, displacing my thoughts.

“I think.” Marina sits forward and folds her arms over her chest. “This is really about you.”

“It’s about… me?” I mean to sound incredulous. Instead, I sound awestruck. Is she right? Is this about me?

“Sure it is,” my sister presses—then leans forward, conspiratorial. “C’mon, sibby. It’s OK. You can totally tell me. Pinkie swear.”

“Tell you?” I echo, still caught in this strange, smoky mental lacuna.

“Your big secret,” Marina whispers teasingly. “Don’t worry. I already know.”

I don’t know what she’s talking about—but strangely, I want to tell her, and my desperation brings me to the point of pleading. “W… what’s my secret?”

Her grin widens. A smirk of pure certainty and victory. “You’re trans.”

My jaw drops, and I howl with laughter.

In a way, I’m grateful for the insanity. It hits me like a bucket of ice water, and everything snaps back into place. This isn’t about me at all—and I’m sure as hell not trans. It’s a ludicrous deflection.

“No, I’m not,” I manage eventually, once my laughter dies away.

“Oh, sweetie.” Marina’s face shifts from a smug grin to a smile of overflowing familiar love. “It’s OK! I promise! I’m actually totally excited to have a little sister instead of a little brother.”

Now that the hilarity of the suggestion has faded, anxiety creeps back into my mood. She actually believes this, doesn’t she? I shake my head in a bid to clear the accumulated smog. I have stepped into a world inverted. This dimly-lit, smoke-filled bar feels like an underworld. Sitting across from me, my sister might as well be possessed by some strange, dim-witted bimbo demon—and she’s telling me that I’m a trans girl? None of it makes any sense.

“Marin—Mari, whatever—where the hell is this coming from?” I demand.

“Isn’t it obvious?” The next look that dawns on my ruined sister’s face is one of fawning pity. “Look, sis, I totally mean it! I accept you! You’re valid! I know it’s, like, hard to accept. For real. Super duper hard. Professor Lambert was telling me alllll about it.”

“Professor Lambert!” I interrupt, grateful for the lifeline. “He’s been talking to you about… me? Whatever, it’s not important right now. What’s important is-”

More smoke, blown directly into my face from off to one side. The clarity I had only just snatched back dissolves into the acrid, ashen fumes as I, once again, break down into coughing, swaying so hard as I do that I almost slip from my chair. By the time I recover a measure of bodily self-control, my temper is at its limit and I round angrily on the smoker. “Hey, would you mind knocking that the fuck-”

“Mari, you don’t mind me butting in, right?” The older woman’s chair scrapes against the floor as she stands and slouches over to our table. I can only watch with an incredulous scowl on my face as she sits down directly next to my sister. “Your brother’s quite the charmer, isn’t he?”

Appallingly, Marina only giggles and presses herself against the intruder’s side. “Sister, silly! Like you were telling me!”

“Right.” The older woman’s thin lips crease into a vile shape. “Sister.”

Woozy as I am, I can still put two and two together. I stare aghast across the table, rapidly revising the assumptions I’d made earlier. “Professor Lambert?”

“Professor Iris Lambert. And you’re Adam Novak. I’ve heard so much about you. The pleasure’s all mine, I’m sure.”

This is not the balding, aging, sleazy male academic I had been expecting—although if it were possible for a woman to play the role, this might be her. Iris Lambert looks to be well into her forties, judging from the streaks of grey through her short, black, well-kept hair. She wears a gray blazer and slacks over a tight, ribbed, black turtleneck, and the eyes that peer out from behind her large, round-rimmed glasses shine with an unwholesome mirth that has no place in an educator. As I watch, she takes another long drag on the cigarette in her hand. Some weird, long, unbranded roll-up, best I can tell. I brace myself, but this time, I’m not the intended victim. Lambert blows the smoke straight into my sister’s face.

Marina coughs only a little—then blushes and giggles like a flustered schoolgirl getting Valentine’s chocolate.

Even if I wasn’t light-headed from smoke inhalation, I’m not sure I’d be able to make sense of this. Marina’s Professor Lambert is… what? A lesbian? She certainly looks the part; her smart outfit puts her on the handsome side of androgynous, even if her figure leans the other way. The way she wraps an arm around my sister’s rounded waist, wearing her like a fine accessory, seems to confirm my suspicions. But why would a lesbian do this? Lesbians actually like women, and Lambert looks like the type I’d expect to find teaching classes on queer theory and the philosophy of gender. The lines she has Marina bleating about brains and looking pretty are beyond mystifying. This, from a female academic? It’s enough to make me wonder if I’m misunderstanding—but then I catch that look in her eye once more, and notice her tighten her grasp on my sister’s hip. Like she’s daring me to stop her.

And I will.

“What have you done to her?” I growl.

“I simply provide a little guidance, here and there. It’s the least I can do, as a mentor.” Lambert’s voice has long since been cut to ribbons by the disgusting habit in her hand. It rolls over my ears, a low, throaty mix of sandpaper and velvet. There’s a certain magnetism to it—or at least, there would be, if not for her blatant lack of sincerity.

“Bullshit!” I retort. “What kind of fucking guidance do you call this?”

“Hey!” Marina pouts, clinging to Lambert’s arm. God, everything she does is so unbearably cutesy now. “Don’t be, like, mean! Professor Lambert is soooo supportive of you being trans, and all.”

I choke on my laughter. “And what the fuck is that all about?” I demand. The only reason I’m not screaming is that I don’t want to cause a scene. So far, nobody seems to have noticed the commotion. “Shouldn’t you know better than to treat a woman this way, Professor? You, of all people?”

Professor Lambert’s laugh is a low rumble that speaks to years of curdled malice. “Wow. Mari wasn’t kidding. You really are a regular little Boy Scout. A freshman all over, that’s for sure. Don’t worry, kid. I’ll be more than happy to teach you a thing or two, too.”

Her attitude—her sheer arrogance—has me seeing red. My light-headedness is almost gone. “Fuck you,” I hiss. “You won’t get away with this.”

“Get away with what?” Professor Lambert laughs. The sound is as coarse as her voice. “What have I done? You can’t even tell me that much, can you? From any reasonable person’s perspective, you’re simply accosting a tenured academic because you disapprove of your sister’s lifestyle choices. Maybe you should calm down, Adam. Stop being so hysterical.”

The fact that she’s half-right pisses me off all the more. I’d like to think that any reasonable person could see what’s wrong with the awful scene playing out before me—a middle-aged professor shamelessly groping a student half her age—but it remains true that I have no evidence. For the moment, though, all that matters is prying Marina away from this loathsome creature. “I’ll…” I splutter, grasping for a plan—for a bluff, even—but nothing comes. It’s this fucking bar. Even when I’m not having smoke blown in my face, it hangs around me in distracting wisps that make every breath stale. “I’ll… I’ll…”

“Yeah, that’s about what I expected,” Professor Lambert sneers. “Mari, you know what to do.”

She turns to Marina, as if I’ve that easily dismissed. As if I’m that little of a concern. In the moment, I certainly feel little. I feel powerless—but when Professor Lambert takes a lazy drag on her cigarette before forcing her tongue down Marina’s throat in a grotesque kiss, something in me finally snaps. I can’t just sit by and watch. Professor Lambert might be a woman, but she’s clearly as much of a sleazy creep as any man I’ve ever met. I don’t want to be the type of guy who gets rough with girls, but there are limits. I bolt to my feet, dash around the table, and grab Marina by the arm. Still gratefully sucking down her professor’s secondhand smoke, she doesn’t offer a word of resistance as I haul her to her feet and away from that creep.

“Marina, we’re leaving,” I say, as firmly as I can muster. “I’m taking you home, where we can talk about this properly. And you, professor, you’re going to-”

My sister kisses me.

I’m blindsided. As soon as her lips touch mine, I go limp. I find myself leaning into her embrace as a strange, slimy pride rises within me. The kiss should disgust me. It’s Marina. It’s my own sister. Instead, the moment makes undeniable sense. I’m a hero, saving the girl. What reward but a kiss? It’s a tale as old as time. I know those thoughts are unworthy of us both. Backwards, even. But I can’t keep them at bay. Not with all of Marina pressed against me.

Not with Marina exhaling Professor Lambert’s cigarette smoke straight into my mouth.

By the time I realize that my mouth is beginning to taste of ash, it’s far too late. The breath I take in an attempt to cry out only fills my lungs with the inky substance, now thirdhand—from Lambert’s lips, to Marina’s, to mine—but still a far more potent hit than I’ve had before. Within moments, my head is empty. It’s like passing out, only I’m still here. Still upright. Still watching—albeit, at a strange distance from myself. My thoughts evaporate into the smoke as it fills my head.

Marina breaks off, tittering with pride and glee. I am left swaying, uncertain, open to guidance. Professor Lambert is waiting to provide.

“That’s better,” she smirks, before tapping at her cigarette. “These things are bad for you, you know. Unless you know exactly what’s in there because you’ve put it there yourself—and unless you’ve built up quite the tolerance to it. Now, why don’t you sit back down?”

Why don’t I? No reason at all. It’s the most natural suggestion in the world, and I’m grateful for it. I sit back down in my seat.

“There we are.” Professor Lambert’s smile is nothing short of monstrous, but that observation washes over me like water off a duck’s back. “I think we got off on the wrong foot, you and I.”

Just like that, I think so too. I nod vapidly. “Yeah.”

“I’m glad you agree.” Professor Lambert laughs. “What you might not understand is that I’m here to help—you and your sister both. You can trust me. I enjoy guiding the youth, I really do.”

A thin wisp of a smile rises to my face. Professor Lambert enjoys guiding the youth. Her pack-a-day voice immediately etches itself onto my brain, effortlessly, wiping away all of my accumulated suspicion and hostility. It’s simply a nice thought. A trustworthy thought. A professor who enjoys guiding the youth.

“And you need a lot of guidance,” Professor Lambert continues. She’s right; I nod. “So listen to me, kid. I’ll help you figure things out. Just like your sister.”

All I can do is nod now. A little bobblehead brother, with this older professor pushing against my frontal cortex. I really do need a lot of guidance. There’s nothing inside my cheap, plastic shell but formless smoke.

“She needed a lot of guidance too.” Professor Lambert laughs again. Marina, back at her side, is practically purring. “More than you, in a way. When she first saw me, she had this whole, big idea about me being some kind of mentor. About me being a safe person. Can you imagine?”

Strangely, I can—and now the image blossoms before my mind’s eye. Professor Lambert, for all her open sleaze, with a heart of gold and a smoke-stained halo. A safe person.

“What she didn’t understand is that I always liked things better back in the old days,” Professor Lambert drones, hunching forward as she sucks on her cigarette. “Back when girls were girls. Dumb. Pretty. Easy to take advantage of. Oh sure, I had to deal with plenty of nonsense to get my position. But once I did, it was like an all-you-can-eat banquet. Now, though? Now, girls run their shrill little me-too mouths about things like that. Nowadays, boys like you call themselves male feminists and act like sensitive, cloying white knights. It’s exhausting. How did things get so bent out of shape? None of you get it. You think gender roles are like childish costumes you can put on, take off, play around with, whatever. You think gender is a thing you can simply wave away. Like it’s all just smoke and mirrors. Wrong.”

My head is still full of fumes. I can’t think, much less follow a tirade like that. Nonetheless, I hang on Professor Lambert’s every word. Mari does too, a wide-eyed, faithful disciple. Much of the meaning is lost on me, but the effect is not. I feel her rhythm as it builds to a crescendo, and I understand that I am about to receive wisdom.

“See, gender has teeth,” Professor Lambert leers. Once again, her hand is at my sister’s hip, groping and squeezing, making her squeal with idiotic delight. It doesn’t make me angry. Not this time. It doesn’t reach me. I am rapt. I am listening. “Gender is mean. At your age, I learned the hard way that gender has winners—and losers. I worked my way through years of entitled male bullshit, but here I am, at the top. I’m a winner. I get the prize. But you?” The awful smile sharpens. “It’s time to come to terms with being a gender loser.”

The sinister promise sends a ripple through my smothered mind. I try to reach through the smoke, letting fear stir me. It’s no use. I’m too weak. I’m a gender loser. Professor Lambert’s words carry the heavy ring of truth. I’m young, and uncertain, and I can’t even do the one thing a good man is supposed to be able to do: save the woman I care about. Compared to me, Professor Lambert is like a figure out of myth. Cigarette in one hand, pretty girl in the other. Matured. Experienced. A consummate winner, carrying off her own, twisted form of dykey masculinity better than any man ever could. Sleaze and greed are her raiments. My corrupted, dumbed-down sister, her trophy. Compared to her, I am nothing. All I can do is wait to be put in my place.

“But if there’s one thing I like about these modern times, it’s that they have a nice little name for what you’re going to be,” Professor Lambert croons. “And all kinds of ways to make you as pretty as I want. So listen carefully.” I do. I lean in. I take a breath. When Professor Lambert speaks next, the hammer falls. “You’re transgender.”

Once again, it hits me like a bucket of ice water—but this time, I freeze. It courses through my veins, and I feel the surest foundations of my identity become brittle. I cannot laugh it off as I did before. I bend to Professor Lambert’s sickly-sweet guidance—but I do not break. It’s just too much for me to get my head around, and that leaves me questioning. Leaves me doubtful.

“N-no,” I mewl. “I’m not.”

“It’s OK, sis,” Marina urges. I can’t tell if she understands what’s happening. I can’t tell if I do, either. “Just accept it! We’re all totally on your side.”

Her words are as sharp a scalpel to my psyche as Professor Lambert’s. Just accept it. It echoes through me, all the more potent for coming from the sister I feel such overbearing admiration for.

“I…” I’m drowning. “I…”

“All those years spent looking up to Mari here,” Professor Lambert suggests. She speaks now as a therapist, diagnosing me with condescending faux-kindness. “And you tried to tell yourself it wasn’t because you wanted to be a girl, like her? That kind of self-deception is very common among trans people, you know.”

“I…”

“You want to be like your sister, don’t you?”

That goes down easy. Dangerously easy. “Yeah.”

“Exactly like your sister,” Professor Lambert insists. “Right?”

I can sense the trap coming. Not well enough to actually avoid it. “Y-yeah.”

“And.” Professor Lambert seizes on the opportunity with evident relish. “Your sister is a girl, isn’t she?”

I’m already nodding—but something about her word choice, and her utterly derisive tone, manages to summon an objection from within me. A habit my sister spent years drilling into me rises to my defense. “N-not a girl…” I protest. “A… woman.”

Professor Lambert laughs so hard she almost chokes. “A woman?” she says condescendingly. “No, sweetheart. No. I’m a woman. Your sister is just a girl. Just look at her.”

I do. And with Professor Lambert’s words choking the sense from my mind, the scales fall from my eyes.

Respect, nurtured and treasured for years on end, curdles and dissolves. I look at Marina, and I see Mari. I see a giggling, airheaded ditz who has thrown her dignity to the wind to cling to Professor Lambert’s arm. Her blonde hair, her pink clothes—there’s something so undeniably regressive about it. A skimpy Barbie doll approximation of femininity. The way she bares her plump, curvy body for all to see is the final straw. She’s making a sex object of herself. That’s not what women do. As an ally, I’ve always believed that. I respect women, of course. But not Mari. Not anymore.

My sister is just a girl.

And I want to be just like her.

“She…” I tremble. “She…”

“You want to be a girl.”

Little by little, word by word, a new vision of society is being chiseled into my smoke-filled head. Thanks to Professor Lambert’s astute guidance, I’m coming to understand that my previous perspective was hopelessly binary. Men and women—those two poles defined the axis of my thinking, even if I did acknowledge that there are people who don’t conform to either term. What unfolds now before my mind’s eye is far more elaborate. Far more charged.

Man and woman, yes—although in Professor Lambert’s presence, men strike me as a needless afterthought. But girls also. There’s masculine versus feminine, and winner versus loser. Armed with this second axis, everything becomes so much clearer. The world is an inverted pyramid. Those who cannot handle gender’s teeth—those like Marina and I—slide to the very bottom, collapsed into girlhood to suit the role assigned to us not at birth, but through our own failure to play by the age-old rules of the game.

“I…” The abyss calls to me, and Mari is its vessel. Thanks to her, the bottom rung sings a siren song. I see the position of utmost, girlish abasement and I desire it—all because of her. My ultimate role model. I can no longer look at her with respect, but my admiration holds true, however twisted it’s becoming. She’s a perfect girl. Everything a gender loser should be. “I…” I want to be just like my sister. I want- “Nnnoooo!”

I’ve held out long enough. The smoke is beginning to fade. My head is beginning to clear. I’m left to pick up the pieces, and survey the damage. Which is a strange way for me to think—Professor Lambert is a safe person. She enjoys guiding the youth. She’s doing her best to teach me how the world works—and yet, she’s wrong about this. At the base of my gut is an instinctive sense of revulsion at her words. It’s hardly fair to the professor, but I can’t bring myself to agree with her.

“No?” Professor Lambert seems more amused than perturbed by my challenging her. That’s good. I wouldn’t want to seem ungrateful.

“N-no.” I’m still uncertain, but as my head clears my conviction grows. I can’t be a girl. Can’t be the kind of gender loser the professor has been filling me in about. I need to step up. Be a man. Save my sister.

Save her. Like she’s nothing more than a damsel in distress.

I guess that fits. She’s just a girl, after all. I can’t even remember what, exactly, I’m supposed to be saving her from, but the logic remains compelling. Mari is a girl. A trophy. If I want to be a winner, I need to lay claim. Take her. Fighting to right myself, I overcorrect, and an old, very different kind of toxin begins to stain my mind. With it, I begin to look at Professor Lambert as a competitor. She’s been such a help to us both—but I need to prove myself. It is both boyhood aspiration and jungle law: to be a man, I have to pry what’s mine out of a rival’s hands. Mari is mine. Not that I want to fuck her—she’s my sister—but family is close enough. A man looks out for his blood.

There’s no alternative. Not if I want to be anything but a loser.

Professor Lambert seems to take note of the way I sit up a little taller and puff out my chest. She takes a small case out of her pocket and rolls a fresh cigarette.

“Maybe I was wrong about you, kid,” she admits. She snaps her fingers; Mari reaches into her purse for a lighter, and lights her up. “Want a smoke? If you can handle it, anyway.”

“Sure,” I reply. Her grudging respect makes me uneasy. As a man, it stokes my pride—but I’m painfully conscious of the fact that I’m role-playing. None of this really suits me. It isn’t how my sister would act. “Course I can.”

Still, I can’t back down from a challenge like that. Not now that I’ve set my sights on Professor Lambert’s girl. I want to be a winner. She hands the cigarette across the table. I take it. I’ve never smoked before in my life, but I do my best to follow her example. I bring it to my lips, brace myself, and inhale.

As soon as the acrid smoke hits my lungs, I explode into coughing.

There’s definitely more in these than just tobacco. That’s one of the last thoughts I have before all the rest are burnt to ash. Another is how utterly humiliating it is to choke and splutter like this. The brand of toxic masculinity that had briefly been fermenting within me won’t stand for it. I feel weak. I feel like a pussy. Like a loser—and then, I feel nothing at all. I am nothing. I am smoke, and hot air, and I am ready to be given form.

“Ridiculous,” Professor Lambert cackles, as she reaches across the table to retrieve her cigarette from my unresisting fingers. “And typical. Losers like you fall for anything.”

It’s true. I do. I’m so lost in the smoke I’m not sure what I fell for, but I know Professor Lambert is right. She’s always right. She’s a winner. She provides guidance. That’s as much as I can wrap my head around. The doses I received before are nothing compared to this firsthand flood of mind-altering bliss. I feel it now: the high the nicotine brings, leaving me delirious, awestruck, open to suggestion. I understand it now: I can’t handle it. This is not for me. I have lost. I am a trophy to be claimed. A blank slate.

“Let’s try this again,” Professor Lambert purrs. Her voice is like smoke itself. “You’re trans.”

I’m trans.

In this dim, sleazy, campus dive bar, I am reborn. The word ‘transgender’ is stamped on the untempered clay of my psyche, red-hot enough to bake it solid. For the rest of my life, I will remember this moment as my cradle. It will forever be the moment I became myself. My resistance is long gone. I am wide-eyed, credulous, accepting.

I am trans.

But what does that mean? The new core of my identity is, to me, a mystery. I’ve always supported trans people—and doesn’t that make so much sense, now?—but I don’t know what it’s like to actually be trans. I am a book with blank pages, only the title written. Luckily for me, Professor Lambert is here to provide guidance.

“You want to be a girl,” she supplies, eyes bulging behind her glasses, registering a lurid, perverse interest that I parse, somehow, as benevolent.

“I want to be a girl,” I echo, awestruck. Of course I do. Is that it? Is that the core of it—that I’m a boy who wants to be a girl? My longstanding admiration for my sister takes on a new hue. She’s a girl. She’s exactly what I want to be. My dream of manhood dies on the vine.

“Right.” Professor Lambert’s grin is a jagged half-moon. “And the crazy thing is, these days? That’s more than enough. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. More girls in the world suits a woman like me just fine. But remember what I told you: gender has teeth. Time to meet the fangs, sweetheart.”

I blink, uncomprehending. I’m still lost and smoke-addled. What the professor is telling me sounds scary, but I know I can trust her. She knows so much better than me.

Which is why it hits me so hard when she leans over the table and gleefully tells me: “You want to be a girl, so you hate your body, don’t you?”

“I…” Before I know what’s happening, there are tears in my eyes. “I hate my… body.”

It makes sense.

I want to be a girl, and what kind of girl likes having a boy’s body? Not a trans girl, that’s for sure. Even I know that much, but when it comes from Professor Lambert’s lips, it bites. It bites deep.

“For example, I bet you hate your body hair, right?” she suggests. I nod.

“Y-yeah,” I breathe, aghast. The more Professor Lambert speaks, the more my dysphoria crystallizes. Suddenly, all the hairs on my arms are like thousands of black needles poking into my skin. Desperate to hide them, I retract my hands into my sleeves—but it’s not enough. I can feel them all down my legs, scraping against my jeans. It’s unbearable.

“Hate your lack of curves too, I’m sure,” Professor Lambert adds. “Girls are supposed to have those.”

“Right,” I sob miserably. “Yeah.” My sister is all the confirmation I’ve ever needed of that. She has no shortage of curves—and I don’t. What am I supposed to do? I’m so bony and angular. How am I ever going to be a girl like this?

“Lots of trans girls hate their deep voices, too,” Professor Lambert adds idly. I know she’s trying to help me, to explain, but her every offhanded comment compounds my torment. It’s like she can see right through me, and can speak into the world every truth I’ve ever tried to hide. “And the way you dress—that’s not very girly, is it?”

“S-sorry,” I squeak, struggling to force myself into a higher register. She’s right, of course. Jeans and a hoodie? Girls don’t dress this way. Not when they’re trying, anyway. Girls dress like my sister. Pink tops and Daisy Dukes. But they have curves to show off, and I don’t. What am I supposed to do? It’s so unfair.

“Oh, and that name of yours,” my mentor remarks. “Adam. That’s not a girl’s name, is it? I bet you can’t stand it.”

“C-can’t… stand…” I whimper. “B-but…”

Do I have to hate that, too? That’s what I’d plead if I could bear to hear the sound of my own voice. Adam. It’s not a girl’s name, that’s for sure. But it’s the only name I’ve ever known. It means so much to me. It means everything. It’s a good name, a strong name—that’s what Mari always told me, when I needed to pull myself together as a little kid. It is who I am. I can’t let that go, can I?

“Yes, you can’t stand it,” Professor Lambert drives home. She is implacably thorough in her guidance. She won’t let me labor under falsehoods. “What kind of girl could? I bet every time you hear it spoken aloud, you flinch. Adam, Adam, Adam.”

I recoil from the verbal blows. She’s right, of course. The discordant split between the blunt, masculine name and the girl I hope to become is unbearable. I should give in—she knows best—but for some reason, I can’t bring myself to. Maybe I really am a girl. Stubborn, sullen, hysterical.

“S-s-stop,” I plead, though I can’t tell exactly what I’m begging for.

“You know what trans people call names like that, Adam?” Professor Lambert jeers across the table. I have to remind myself that she’s guiding me, even if it hurts. Sometimes tough love is best. “Deadnames. Isn’t that a nice thought? You can just let your name die, Adam. It’s that easy.”

“No, no, no!” I’m in a panic now. My gut tells me I’m in freefall. My lungs scream at me that I’m huffing down poison. “Just… just g-give me a moment.”

“Hush, sweetheart,” Professor Lambert soothes—and I’m so very grateful for her patience and kindness. “It’s OK. Let Iris Lambert fix you up. Go on. Let it slip away and out of mind. Let it die.”

“N-no, please!” I beg, but it’s too late. I can feel it happening already. I am nothing. A vapor, dancing on her wind. I can’t fight it. My memory is already fading. “I’m Adam. I’m Adam. I-I’m Adam. I… I’m Adam. I’m….” I say it over and over like I’m giving mouth-to-mouth, trying to keep it alive with my breath. But it’s no good. Each repetition is more painful than the last, a thorn of unwanted masculinity driven deeper and deeper until I can bear it no longer. Until I relent. Against my will, it is a mercy when the name slips into the sunken graveyard of my repressed memory. “I…”

I don’t know my own name. Or rather, I don’t have a name. I am being reborn; I am between lives. This awful smoking area is my womb, and Professor Iris Lambert my mother. Like all mothers, she has a blessing to impart.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” she says, grinning at the tears staining my cheeks. “You can do so much better. I’ll even help you with that, too. I’m not the most creative with names, I admit. Marina to Mari—not exactly a masterstroke. But for you, I think there’s an obvious choice.” She draws a breath, and lets me savor the anticipation of my becoming. “Your name is Eve. Enjoy it, babygirl.”

Eve.

The first woman—no, the first girl. Because she didn’t come first, did she? Adam—for some reason, I’ve always hated that name—came first of all, and she was made just for him out of no more than a discarded bone. A trophy. A loser for a winner. A girl, naked, created to go forth and multiply and do little else besides. Suddenly, the tears in my eyes are joyful and sparkling. It’s such a beautiful, special name. A girl’s name. And how many trans girls get to keep the name their maker gave them?

“My name is Eve.” I whisper it like a prayer of thanks.

My older sister, Mari, reaches across the table. She’s been a silent, starry-eyed spectator for some time now, but when she clasps my hand in hers, I see that she shares my joy. “You’re my sister, Eve,” she squeals. “I’m so, so, soooo happy to meet you at last.”

What could make a girl happier?

But there’s so much more to do. I become conscious of the fact that this first step, however significant, is only the first. The dysphoria Professor Lambert helped me recognize is torture. I can’t stand to be here, in public, being looked at. Not when I know everyone around us probably sees me as a man.

Professor Lambert is, as ever, perfectly attentive to my dread. “Hey,” she ventures, smoky voice dripping with faux-kindness. “How about we get out of here, and I’ll teach you how to truly be a girl?”

I nod emphatically. There’s nothing I want more.

Mercifully, Professor Lambert is quick to whisk us out of the bar and toward her campus office. We walk through the night together, my sister and I each with one of Professor Lambert’s arms wrapped possessively around our waists. It’s wonderful. Almost makes me feel like a real girl, but for the fact that I can tell where the older lesbian’s attention truly lies. She makes no secret of the way she ogles and gropes my sister’s plump, gorgeous, exposed body, whereas I am, for now, a mere work in progress.

I end up ogling my sister too. I want to be just like her. And perhaps, with a little guidance, I will be.

Professor Lambert’s office is, like her, old-fashioned, and stinks of tobacco every bit as much as the bar. Stepping through the doorway is like stepping through a portal into the nineteen-fifties, all earth tones and mid-century modern decor. Once, that would have struck me as a red flag. Now, my values are hopelessly polluted; I see it as a mark of taste, and the heirloom of a simpler, better age. Professor Lambert deposits my sister and I on the smart, orange, wood-accented couch, then lights up again; a quick glance reveals that the fire alarm has long since been disabled. Once her cigarette is tucked between her lips, she opens a small drinks cabinet at the back of the room and pours herself a glass of scotch. After a sip and an appreciative sigh, she is ready, and we begin.

“First lesson,” she instructs, perching on her desk and leaning back easily. “Girls take whatever they’re given.”

“Right.” I nod tremulously. It’s a monstrous commandment, but I’ll swallow it whole. The short walk has brought me some way back to sobriety, but true sanity is forever out of reach. I’m clearheaded enough to be afraid of what’s happening to me, but my dysphoria is greater than my fear. As bad as being a girl might be, being a man is worse. “Yeah. OK.”

“So,” Professor Lambert grins, “open wide, Eve.”

A quiet voice at the back of my head begs me to refuse, but the euphoria I feel at the use of my new name sings far louder. Gratefully, I sit forward and open my mouth. Professor Lambert takes a long drag, enjoys the flavor, and then blows acrid smoke directly into my waiting face. I cough and splutter but, like a girl should, I take what I’m given. Within moments, a familiar, smoldering fogginess settles heavy across my mind. I am once again primed to burn my life to ash, and be rebuilt.

“Look at your big sister,” Professor Lambert tells me. “You want to be just like her, right? So take a good, hard look. What do you see?”

I turn to Mari and look. Not just look, study. She is, to me, the very definition of girlhood; I can’t let anything slip my notice. What do I see? I’m not sure. Where to begin? Her soft, curvaceous body? Her girly clothes? Her bleached, blonde hair? It could be any of them, but the more I stare, the more it is her eyes that transfix me. There’s so little left in them now. A mere void, an empty ocean of vapidity. They transport me back to something Mari told me before, and provide me with my answer.

“I see…” I ponder unsteadily. “She’s… she’s so dumb.”

At that, Professor Lambert howls with laughter so hard she almost spills her drink. “I love a clever student!” she applauds. “That’s right, Eve. Your big sis is quite the airhead. Dumb as rocks. See, girls don’t need brains.”

“Girls don’t need brains.”

Mari echoes her professor with a look on her face like she feels proud of being able to remember even that much. The awful absurdity of the moment helps to bring me back to myself. We exchange mismatched looks, hers smug, mine freshly horrified at what I am about to lose. I try to tell myself that change is always scary. A chick must be terrified as it leaves the egg. But deep down, I know I’m not ready for this.

“So, Eve,” Professor Lambert leers. “Want to be dumb like your sister?”

The imminent possibility she suggests stirs such primal fear in me that my survival instinct, almost vanquished, comes roaring back. “N-no,” I shake my head frantically. I’ve always been proud of my intelligence. For most of my life, it was the only thing I had to be proud of. “N-no. Please. Not that.”

“Oh?” Ever the indulgent mentor, Professor Lambert is charmed and amused by my efforts to think for myself. “But don’t you want to be a girl?”

I do. More than anything, and that’s what makes this so hard. I want to be a girl, and girls don’t need brains. I try to reason with myself. To push against the boundaries of my own thinking. Can’t I be a smart girl? Is that so wrong? Yes, the warning pang of dysphoria tells me, as it overwrites all the feminist values my sister once worked so hard to plant in my head. Girls don’t need brains, and my gender is far too new and fragile for such radical nonconformity.

“Y-yes,” I protest. “But… but… but…”

“But, but, but,” the professor echoes mockingly. “At least you’re starting to sound like a typical girl with a head full of nothing. But you want to do better than just sound like a girl, right? You want to be the real thing.”

“Yyyyes,” I whine. Her words spear me through. The thought of being a mere impostor is unbearable. I have to live up to my sister’s example. Still, there are some things I just can’t bring myself to give up. “But…”

“Don’t worry, Eve.” Professor Lambert sighs theatrically, pivoting on a dime to simpering sympathy. “I know you’re new to all this. Maybe if I explain a little more, you’ll be able to get your ditzy little head around it. See, girls don’t need brains because girls are just meant to look pretty.”

“Look… pretty…” I echo. All of my feeble willpower is currently occupied with trying to convince myself that I don’t need to reduce myself to a giggling, moronic ditz in the name of my transition. This suggestion, infused with the force of a thousand cultural stereotypes that I’ve been steeping in since birth, seeps into my porous mind with ease.

“Objects,” the professor goes on. “Ornaments. Nothing more. Like a nice, decorative vase. Pretty on the outside, empty on the inside.”

“That’s…” I whine, even as I yield to the force of her twisted ideology, “so degrading.”

“Well, sure,” Professor Lambert agrees, her lechery barely disguised beneath the veneer of a kind counselor. “But sometimes, you have to separate the personal and political. Starry-eyed kids like you always miss that. You’re so proud of your pretty little ideals. I was the same way, you know. Until I realized that dating women doesn’t get me wet the way preying on girls does. Point being: yes, it’s degrading. But it’s what you need, isn’t it?” Her grin widens. “It’s what gets you off.”

It’s what gets me off.

Those words hit me just like the smoke from Professor Lambert’s drugged cigarettes. The reaction is physical, before it’s mental. Before I can even begin to process my new, fetishistic sexuality—inextricably linked to my new, fetishistic gender—I feel it as an ache, a heat, a raw need.

Being pretty gets me off. Being objectified gets me off. Because I’m a girl.

“You get off,” Professor Lambert adds, as though that wasn’t bad enough, “on showing off your body. On the way everyone looks at you. On the way they see you as a girl: young, dumb, and an easy fucking slut.”

The ache doubles. Triples—but with it, so does the horror. Gender has teeth, and I am more aware than ever of the jaws into which I am falling. I see it playing out before my mind’s eye: a life lived in the gaze of a thousand predatory eyes, empty of any meaning but that of being consumed. It terrifies me. It gets me off. I need to be a dumb, easy slut, and I can think of nothing worse. I have dreams. I have aspirations. I have life goals that I want to achieve.

But the need…

My gaze falls upon my sister. Saving her—that’s one of my aspirations. Or at least, it was. Now, I’m not so sure. As I look at her, the old, familiar insecurities take on a new hue. Not man enough—only, instead, it’s not girl enough. I always looked up to her, but now, more than ever, she is the embodiment of everything I desire. Foremost among my feelings, emerald-bright, is envy. I see the way she bares her body. I see the way everyone looked at her in that bar, like she was nothing more than an easy piece of meat. God, I want to be her. My sister is my ultimate transition goal.

And she’s a dumb, airheaded, bimbo slut.

I want everyone to look at me that way. It gets me off. I lose myself in the fantasy—until something insistent between my legs seizes my attention.

Professor Lambert notices my hard-on too. “Look at that,” she teases. “You really do want it. And from looking at your sister? Maybe it’s true what they say: trannies like you are just depraved perverts.”

My cheeks redden. I shake my head in numb denial, by the tide of my arousal is still rising. After all, Professor Lambert is looking at me like I’m the dumbest girl in the world.

“This is what I call a teaching moment,” Professor Lambert coos. “Go on, kid. Get comfortable. Do what comes naturally. Enjoy yourself.”

The very thought makes my breath catch in my throat, but I cannot disobey her. Clumsily. I unfasten my jeans and tug them down to my hips. My underwear too. I’m already painfully hard, and I begin to throb from my nascent exhibitionism as Professor Lambert stares and laughs. I cannot help but do what comes naturally. I wrap my hand around my shaft and begin to stroke.

“Guess we weren’t working with much to begin with,” Professor Lambert quips. I whine, and stroke harder. “But let me ask you, Eve: is that how girls get, when they’re turned on?”

I freeze—except for my hand, anyway. A fresh pit of dysphoria opens beneath me. No, of course it isn’t.

“No,” Professor Lambert concludes. “See, girls like you don’t get hard.”

Oh. Girls like me don’t get hard. She called me a girl.

Buoyed by that poisonous euphoria, my smoke-addled brain begins rewiring itself in earnest, severing the nerve endings and blood flows that I’m currently using to gratify myself. I whine an instinctive, incoherent plea as my pleasure recedes and my cock shrinks in my hand—but already, gender’s teeth are sinking into my psyche, rewarding me with bubbly glee at the thought that I am, by my impotence, becoming more than a girl. My mental rewriting is far from complete, though, and the process is not painless. Sparks fly as my new and old genders scrape against one another. As a girl, I’m delirious with happiness. As a boy, nothing could be more humiliating. The synthesis I arrive at is to sob and shudder and try desperately to coax my softening cock back to life, even as a dumb, gleeful, unhealthy grin dawns on my face.

Girls like me don’t get hard, and now I never will again.

“That’s better!” Professor Lambert’s mocking laughter is echoed by my sister’s airheaded giggle. Both of them drive me crazy. “Now you’re starting to look the part.”

“I-I am?” I ask hopefully through my tears. The very suggestion is a ray of sunlight. It’s all I want.

“Sure,” Professor Lambert offers generously. She’s such a supportive ally. I’m so grateful. “It’s another piece of the puzzle, anyway. Gender’s a performance. Your generation loves stuff like that, right? Act the part. Get into the role. Call it method acting. Hell, you can get off on that too.”

With that, I become suddenly conscious of a thousand tiny shortcomings in my presentation. The way I sit. The way I hold my body. It’s all so grotesquely mannish. I need to do better—but I don’t know how. I’ve never thought about this before. But, as she ever was, Mari is my guide. I want to be just like her, and I look to her now, sitting beside me. I try my hardest to sit the way she sits: legs together daintily, chest pushed out outrageously. Given my lack of curves and assets, the results are lackluster.

“God, look at you! Ridiculous!” Professor Lambert laughs, confirming my worst fears. I shrink into myself, overcome with shame. “Hey, no, it’s not that bad,” she clarifies, seeing my distress. “Well, it is. But that’s good.”

My brow furrows. “It’s good?”

“Of course!” Professor Lambert explains. “You think girls are meant to be taken seriously? Of course not. You’re a spectacle. You’re entertainment. Enjoy it. Get off on it.”

Professor Lambert is so wise. She has an answer for everything. Her words open my eyes—and hers, dripping with lurid mockery and condescension, take on a very different character. I know how she sees me. I know how I look. Ridiculous. Dumb. Slutty. But with her guidance working its way through my mind, suddenly I enjoy it—not just being those things, but being seen that way. My gender is a spectacle. I am nothing if I am unperceived. And I can see for myself that, to Professor Lambert, I am very definitely a girl. A gender loser, to be exploited and enjoyed.

The humiliation lights a fire within me. I reach down and spend a few moments pawing at my limp, useless surrogate clit before the lack of pleasure defeats me. “It’s g-good,” I moan with absent bliss. A thousand new mantras circle me like wisps of smoke. I am unmade, yet again, and reborn. “I-I’m… entertainment.”

“That’s right.” Professor Lambert’s eyes glow as bright as the lit tip of the cigarette dangling from her fingertips. I feel that burning heat raking over my body as she looks. She is entertained, and that is the ultimate affirmation. “Act the part. Look the part. And think the part.”

“T-think the part,” I echo, even though I can sense what’s coming.

“Think the part,” she reiterates. “And girls don’t need brains.”

“Girls don’t… girls don’t… w-wait, nnnoooo!”

Again the abyss calls, and it does so in Mari’s simpering, ditzy, giggly voice. It pleads with me to give in. To throw my mental faculties into the void, and become paper-thin, superficial, and stupid—exactly what a girl should be. It sounds closer to suicide than transition, but validity is my poison, and it’s a hell of a drug. The notion grows more and more tempting with each passing moment. Arousal swallows my better judgment, and I become infatuated with just how easy it would make it to act the part. Fantasies of the way everyone would look at me if I was as dumb as my sister makes my entire body grow flush with heat.

But I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I barely remember the reason. My refusal is a mantra. An axiom. That’s all I have left.

“No?” A vein at Professor Lambert’s temple throbs. She’s losing patience. That terrifies me.

“N-no.” Still, I cling to what’s left of myself. I can’t help it. I want to be a girl, I do, but this is a bridge too far.

“No.” The outburst I’m trembling in fear of doesn’t come. Instead, something worse, as the professor sits back and shrugs. “Fine, then. Maybe you aren’t a girl after all.”

My chest tightens like it’s been caught in a vice. I shake my head in numb horror. No. No, not that.

“You had every chance,” Professor Lambert laments. “But I guess it’s just not to be. Not if you’re not willing to take the plunge. Not if you’re clinging so tight to things that girls shouldn’t have. Perhaps you’ll just have to be a man after all.”

Have to be a man.

Those words feel like a death sentence. They plunge me back into confusion, new suggestions layering atop old, all sense of orientation and reason threatening to disappear into my mind’s fog as inevitability and desire go to war. I want to be a girl—but maybe I’m not. Perhaps I have to be a man after all, even though there’s nothing that horrifies me more. Dysphoria has me in its grip, and as I contemplate a life lived in that gender—the wrong gender—it strikes me how foolish I’ve been. Professor Lambert has been nothing but helpful, and I have looked the gift horse in the mouth.

“S-s-sorry,” I beg. “I’m… sorry… I-I…”

“And what a man you’ll be.” The smile on Professor Lambert’s face warps into something awful and vindictive. I shrink from it. I can’t question her benevolence, so I’m forced to conclude that I deserve it. “Just look at yourself. Posing and preening like an effeminate freak. Unable to get hard. Obsessed with being like your sister, even though you never will. It’s pathetic. It’s disgusting.”

My self-esteem crumples utterly under the weight of the humiliation. Professor Lambert is right, as ever. The tattered remnants of my masculinity still have enough bite to them to ensure that I feel it bone deep. The gnawing shame at the thought of being that much of a failure of a man is haunting. An impotent, emasculated boy. It’s the very definition of a gender loser. But within this agony, there is a light that points the way. Somehow, the stinging arousal I feel as Professor Lambert humiliates me makes me feel as though, perhaps, I can still be what I want to be.

“Please!” I moan. “Please… I want… I w-want…”

“Oh? Yes?” Professor Lambert sips her drink, savoring my surrender. “You want to be a girl? You want to be a dim-witted, slutty, bimbo like your sister?”

I do. God, I do. “I… I…” But I can’t bring myself to say it. I still know, on some level, how wrong it would be to let my mind fall into that vapid abyss. It’s simply that I can’t face the alternative.”

“Failed boy, or dumb bimbo?” Professor Lambert presses. She’s shown me what gender truly is: power. She has it, and wields it against me like a sledgehammer to a marble statue. “Those are the only choices for a loser like you.”

“C… can’t…” Desperation commits me to foolish hubris. “C-c-can’t I be a s-smart woman l-like you?

Professor Lambert’s laughter resounds, blacker and bleaker than ever before. The untempered, liberal, male-ally feminism I came to college with snaps like a twig in the face of her proud, defiant predation. “No. No, you can’t. I had to win the hard way. I had to learn the way the world works. You’re just a dumb little brat clinging to your own sister’s skirt. You’re nothing like me, and you never could be. Go ahead and put that idea out of your mind forever.”

It’s gone. Forever. For me, gender is binary. At least I get to make the choice for myself.

“Come on, Eve.” I’m at the brink, and she just keeps pushing. Her guidance is like the sun’s merciless glare. “What do you want? Tell me what you want.”

With that, the truth slips out. My will, far beyond its limit, gives up on agency itself. “I-I want you to decide for me!”

The professor’s eyes widen briefly in surprise. Like she can’t believe her luck. I’m shocked by my own words too. Shocked by the fact that, facing down a chemical lobotomy, I couldn’t even make up my own mind. It’s the final proof that I’m getting what I deserve. But at least I can satisfy myself that I’m doing the progressive thing. I’m letting a woman take charge.

Professor Lambert seizes on the opportunity. With gleeful fondness, she whispers words I will engrave on my heart. “Good girl.” The tears in my eyes become joyful again. It’s like I passed a test. I answered the way a girl should. Girls don’t need brains, and girls are entertainment. Why should we make decisions for ourselves? Professor Lambert takes yet another long drag on her cigarette, savors it for a long moment, and then blows it into my face. Greedily, guilty, I suck down my own obliteration, choking only a little as Professor Lambert focuses her gaze on mine. “Eve. You’re a stupid, airheaded, dim-witted, empty-headed bimbo. And that’s all you’ll ever be.”

For a moment, as her words become true, I have just enough awareness left to regret it.

With the drug still in my lungs, the suggestion hits me with the force of a sledgehammer. I sway, so light-headed I’m dizzy, and for a moment, I take it for nothing more than the effects of the secondhand smoke. But after a few seconds, as I begin sucking down fresh air, I realize that it’s getting worse, not better. The harder I try to bring everything back into focus, the more it slips out of reach—all of it. The day’s headlines, stray facts, the contents of my college degree—all retract as I reach for them, leaving at the heart of my being a yawning emptiness full of hot, pink air. My thoughts slow, thick as treacle. My dawning sense of incapacity both terrifies and excites me. I will never again follow an intelligent conversation. I will sit there, giggling, eyes wide and awestruck. I will be nothing more than decoration. I will never be taken seriously again.

It’s so humiliating. It’s so hot.

What haunts me as I diminish is the unshakable sense that a person is supposed to be more than this. I’ve seen first-hand what I am to become. Mari, my sister, is a mockery of feminism and womanhood, but that thought only works to damn me. After all, I want to be just like her. The certain knowledge that I will prompts a giggle from my lips. The first of many. All the reasons I should resent and resist this—my values, my pride, my once-treasured masculinity—evaporate. I cannot understand them anymore. That’s embarrassing; it leaves me flustered, moaning, giggling. It gets me off. Girls don’t need brains. And I’m finally becoming a girl.

Amidst the fugue of my collapse, I look over at Mari. We share a look, and giggle together. I see myself reflected in her eyes. We’re the same. Vapid. Airheaded. Dumb. It’s a blissful thought. It’s all I ever wanted. I have a long way to go until I truly match up to her example, of course. But as ever, she is my role model. She’s shown me exactly what a girl is supposed to be.

And Professor Lambert is ready to show me so much more.

As I giggle and drool the last remaining intelligent thoughts out of my head forever, she slips out of her blazer and unfastens her belt. “Atta girl,” she pants lustfully. “Now let me teach you how a girl makes a woman feel good.”

***

Gender has teeth.

And, like, pills, and lasers, and needles, and scalpels, and all kinds of other scary stuff! I have to deal with it all, it’s sooooo hard. It hurts so bad, but I never complain. It’s just what I gotta do to be a girl. It’s crazy expensive too. I can’t keep track of the numbers, obviously. But Professor Lambert told me how to pay for it all. Something about, like borrowing against my college fund?

She’s soooo smart. Makes sense. She’s a woman. Not a girl like me.

I’m so so soooo grateful she helped through all those scary appointments. Loads of men in suits using words that give me the worst headache ever! I never get what they’re talking about until the professor says it in small words I can understand.

Big tits. Pretty face. Cute ass. No more gross hair. That’s what they’re giving me.

All the pain is totally worth it. And after a few years, my dream comes true. I’m finally just like my sister.

When I think about my big sis, Mari, I guess the first memory that pops into my silly head is of that first night I became a girl. Once the professor got done fucking my brains out, Mari took me back to her dorm room. She taught me, like, all kinds of stuff. It was super hard to follow at first, but she was soooo patient and nice, and now it’s all basically as easy as pie! Stuff like clothes, and lipstick, and how to grow out my hair. She’s so nice to me. I couldn’t ask for a better big sis. And after I was so, like, weird and mean and judgmental! Guess she could tell I was just projecting, or whatever. I asked her about it one time, and she said that, like, us girls just have to stick together. That’s girl power for you!

And I guess the second memory that pops into my head is when we met up recently, after I got done recovering from getting my fake tits put in. It was like looking in a mirror. Professor Lambert was sooooo pleased. It’s been super hard—she’s made me eat a whole bunch, too. Something about wanting to make us a matching set? That’s such a cute idea. She took us out to a bar in our pink tops and tight shorts, and people kept asking if we were, like, identical twins. Except, some of them used some big, fancy word for it. Monozy-something. They kept laughing at me when I couldn’t even say it back to them.

It was really, really good. I love it when people affirm my gender.

Then the professor took us back to her place and had us make out a whole bunch. That was really hot too. I love it when she looks at us. At me. It feels so, so good to know I’m finally the girl I was, like, always meant to be. Born in the wrong body, as we say. Clearly, I was meant to be born into Mari’s. I’m just like her now. It’s all I ever wanted.

The only difference is that she has a pussy, and I have my perma-limp little clitty. Professor Lambert wants me this way. It always makes her laugh.

The only drag is, our parents have started being so annoying about all this stuff. I don’t get it. They were totally supportive at first! But now they keep sending me all these weird texts, saying that they’re, like, worried about me, or whatever. Ugh. Didn’t realize they were so, like, bigoted. Our mom even says she’s gonna come and take us home from college, which is really stupid cause I dropped out ages ago! I just like going to sorority parties.

But I think it’s gonna be OK. Professor Lambert knows exactly what to do. She’s so smart, and she always has a plan. She helped me get my silly little head around what’s really going on.

Our mom is, like, this cool, high-powered career woman. But deep down, I think she’s always wanted to be a girl.

---

I would like to express my gratitude for the generosity of all those who support me on Patreon, and to give a special thanks to the following patrons in particular for their exceptional support:

---

Tonight is Ruby’s night.

I’m in no mood for it. Before I descend the tiled steps to my basement bar, I toss back dry a dick pill and two painkillers—one for the headache I already have, one for the headache the little blue performance-enhancer is going to give me—around the cigarette drooping from my lips. Once that burns out, I spit it to the ground and grind the butt into the filthy, half-melted snow beneath my combat boot. No matter how hard I try, one fag won’t last all night. I could light another, but there’s no sense putting it off.

Even on the worst days, my bar—my territory, if not my property—is an oasis, set against the smoke-sky shithole that is Arkturgrad. Out here, in the city, I’m just another demobbed dogface. I always keep my head down, but the way I pace my strides and hold my shoulders gives me away, and we all know they’d prefer we simply took ourselves off to die in some quiet, forgotten corner rather than blight the bright, red future they’re building. The one we broke ourselves fighting for. I’m one of the lucky few fit enough for a bureaucratic posting, but my new so-called comrades don’t spare more words than they have to in my direction. They look at me like they’re waiting for me to snap and try to rip out their throats—or my own.

Fine. So be it. Out here, I’m nobody. In there, I’m the whole world. Still, it takes me a moment to prepare. I force my aching back straight. I smooth my long, black coat with my hands and scrape the polluted slush from my soles against the last step. I pant into my hands to warm my face and then, most importantly of all, I let the expression of numb, non-threatening apathy slump from my countenance and replace it with a painstakingly-composed smirk of easy, confident command.

Once I am transformed, I open the door and cross the threshold. I step into my kingdom.

It’s a shit kingdom, I’m under no illusions about that. The wooden furniture is kitsch verging on parody, especially for the basement of a block of faceless, concrete apartments. I’ve no love for the checkerboard floor, or the humming, low-hanging lights, and still less for the stench of piss and cheap vodka. But what matters is that, as I enter, all heads turn. A few oddball regulars, a few stray civvies, the bartender, an old woman, a vet from an older war with a soft spot for us mutts—but most importantly, my pack.

“Scarlett,” I greet.

“Welcome, sir!” comes the reply.

“Bailey.”

“Welcome, sir!”

“Lola.”

“Mmrr.” Lola can’t talk much, most days, but her smile and crisp salute are sufficient.

“And…”

I scan the room. Ruby isn’t here yet. A calculated taunt, I’m sure. I sigh. More shit to deal with. Just what I need. The rest of my little pack is spread about lazily, and I elect to sit at the bar next to Scarlett while I wait. As I settle, she hails the bartender with a finger and, a moment later, places a glass of vodka in front of me.

“Your drink, sir,” she offers happily.

“Thank you,” I reply with a fond smile. A handler must distribute her affections carefully and evenly but inwardly I am not shy to say: Scarlett is my favorite. She and I share a bed most nights—to hold, far more often than to fuck.

“How was your day, sir?” Scarlett chirps. In my presence, her smile is brighter and, with her red-curled hair, she shines the way she should have done, if she hadn’t been forced into kennel and cockpit.

“It was… hard.” It slips out before I can still my tongue. I grimace and take a sip of vodka to keep it busy. No use. It’s already half-said. “Another headache day. I keep falling behind on my quotas.”

Scarlett’s brow softens in concern, but her doe eyes shine with an admiration undimmed. That’s a comfort. “I’m sorry, sir.” She gropes around for a solution, and finds something close. “May I polish your boots later?”

“You may.” They need it after today’s weather. So do I, and so does Scarlett. Service is her sweetness, and I am ever grateful to receive it. There’s little any of my poor mutts can do for me, in truth. Less of them made it out of the cockpits. It’s why I work, and why I wear the cap and the coat. Someone has to.

“Thank you, sir.” Her gratitude soon ebbs; fresh, anxious lines etch themselves into her pock-marked forehead. “Sir, I thought… I was hoping we might… have another scene together, soon?”

I stiffen the way I used to when I felt shells exploding against my mech’s armor. “Ah.”

Scarlett retreats a little. It pains me to see it. Why did she have to bring it up now, of all times? “Sorry, sir. It’s just… it’s been a little while.”

It has. I can’t hide from that. “I only just sat down, Scarlett,” I reply heavily.

She shrinks. “Sorry, sir.”

The silence that follows ties a knot in my breast.

“I can’t,” I tell her irritably, as if in reply. “It’s Ruby’s night. You know she’s been acting out.”

“I… didn’t mean tonight,” Scarlett looks pained. Why? What’s she got to be pained over? “Just, soon.”

“I only just sat down,” I hiss. “We’ll talk about it later.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

That’ll be enough to quiet her for the night, but not enough for the tightness in my chest. Downing the rest of my drink doesn’t loosen it either, though I’m comforted by the thought that, in a few drinks’ time, I won’t feel it regardless. In the meantime, though, this murderous awkwardness demands filling, and my sour mood rushes to provide.

“I spend all day at work,” I growl. “Slaving away while all the rest of you do nothing. I finally clock off, I come back here to keep taking care of you, and all I have to hear about is what I’m not doing?”

“S-sorry.” Scarlett’s gentle voice cracks beneath the weight of my ire. She looks at me and sees God. It feels good that it’s so easy for me to hurt her. In here, I am powerful. “Sir, I…”

“I do everything for this pack.” There’s enough truth to it for the words to ring like thunder in both our ears—but that doesn’t make it fair. It’s not like they don’t work when they can, but shipbreaking at the yard is irregular at best and there’s little else they can manage. The half-healed port-scars on the back of Scarlett’s neck are an ever-present reminder of the fact that I’m one of the lucky ones. “Can’t I get a little patience in return?”

“O-of course, sir,” Scarlett trembles. I’m crossing a line, my inner voice says. Nobody’s been more patient with me than Scarlett. She has needs too. But I don’t want to listen to that voice. “I-it’s not important. You’re right. You do so much.”

“That’s right,” I sniff. “It’s not important.”

I hate to do this to her. I do—but there’s no other way. They don’t understand what it’s like to live under this kind of pressure. Not the danger of the foxhole or the vanguard, just the constant, grinding, everyday war of attrition against the entire world. They’re spared from facing it head-on—because I’m sparing them. If things would only let up, even for one day, it would all be so easy. I could give them all their fill. But it never does, so I ration myself out as best I can. And tonight is Ruby’s night.

My second drink arrives. I down it in moments. The crestfallen expression on Scarlett’s face presses into the side of mine like a rusted nail. My guilt and anger yawn apart to leave an empty chasm, and my mood starts plunging into it. Can’t she try to show me a good time? Can’t she smile? Can’t I see a nice, pretty, grateful smile? But then, what right do I have to expect that, given how long it’s been? I’ll have to make it her night soon. She deserves it. It won’t matter if it takes a little longer. We’re a pack, after all. A family.

And I’m all they have.

A breath of vile, icy air rushes through the room. I turn to see Ruby arriving, shit-eating grin exactly as wide as I expected. It’s time. Wish I had another drink in me—my headache is still beating against the inside of my forehead—but perhaps it’s for the best. I stand and compose myself for a moment. Once you’ve been crammed into enough death-trap cockpits, hunching to keep your head low comes as naturally as breathing; correcting the bad habit is a constant effort, but an important one. After all, She never hunched.

“Hey, girls,” Ruby tosses out. The daring look she throws me lets me know that I’m to consider myself included. “Sorry I’m late.”

She’s playing at nonchalance even though we all know she’s on tenterhooks. The first step of an old and tired dance. I approach her before she can sit down.

“I told you to present yourself at nineteen hundred hours,” I remind her tersely—but not angrily. Anger would be all wrong.

“Yeah, as I said.” Ruby laughs like she can blow me off with ease. “Sorry I’m late.”

She moves to push past me. I stand in her way, and we square off. She’s a short one, but spunky. A bratty little pug of a woman, from the soles of her combat boots to the frosty tips of her short hair. Every part of her is asking for what I’m going to give her.

“I don’t need stupid mutts who can’t follow simple instructions,” I hiss. “Are you stupid, Ruby?”

Ruby’s sapphire eyes shine with adrenaline. She draws herself up, challenging me. “You don’t need? Whatever.”

“Call me ‘sir’, when you speak to me, mutt.” How long will she draw this out today?

“Pfft,” Ruby scoffs. “C’mon, Thalia. No need to pretend, yeah? We all know you’re not a real handler.”

Ice hits my veins. It had to be this, tonight? I want to scream. I want to sigh and tell her to fuck off. But the rest of the pack is watching. She’s playing her role. I must play mine.

“What did you say to me, mutt?” The hate in my eyes as I stare daggers at her should be a warning, but it only serves to goad her on.

“You’re just like all the rest of us.” Ruby chews lazily on her words like they nothing to her, but the way she shivers lets me know she’s savoring each act of daring. The anticipation before the fall. “One of the people’s hounds, playing at being a person. Playing at being so high and mighty. Maybe I’m getting a little tired of it, is all.”

Shut up. I’m desperate for her to just shut up. Why does she have to be like this? Why does she get to be like this, and I just have to put up with it? Good thing I don’t. Not for much longer.

“Last chance, you worthless fucking mongrel,” I spit. “You will speak to me with respect. You will call me ‘sir’ or ‘Handler Thalia’, or I will send you to get put down like the useless waste of breath you really are. Understand me?”

The slight gasp that slips her pierced lips lets me know that I’m on the right track. This is what she wants. What she needs. My vitriol is her oxygen, and how does she thank me? By puffing herself up like an overinflated balloon, and meeting my gaze as level as she can.

“Make me, bitch,” she growls.

I punch her in the gut. Ruby stumbles back, winded. She can’t fight back—that’s one of the rules. I’m free to advance on her and hit her again, then grab a fistful of the short, pale fuzz on her head and use it to pin her up against the wall while I slap her across the face.

“Stupid dogs need to learn stupid lessons,” I sneer. The violence is invigorating. The adrenaline banishes my headache. I’m in the scene. “And if you’re too fucking lobotomized to understand a few words and numbers, I’ll speak in a language even an abused puppy understands.”

Another punch sends her to the ground. I don’t stop there. I kick her. And again. And again. And again. And again. The more I let loose, the more the heavy, black, leather coat draped across my shoulders feels like it weighs nothing at all. As Ruby’s bruised arms drop, letting my boot crash into her ribs, everything that’s been fermenting inside me all day comes uncoiled and releases itself. I look down at the bloody mess I am hammering my packmate into, and past the bruises, past the whimpering, past even the erection straining against her pants, I see worship. The look of daring is wiped from her eyes, leaving those brilliant, blue orbs dulled and glazed with utmost loyalty and adoration. Like Scarlett, she looks up at me, and sees God.

The transformation sends blood rushing exactly where I need it. The little blue pill is kicking in, right on time. With both bliss and poison singing in my veins, I grab a chair from a nearby table, sit down, and unzip. “Ready to make yourself useful, mutt?”

“Yyyyessssss, Handler T-Thalia,” Ruby bleats, hauling herself upright. The poor thing is lost to bliss now, her smirk melted into an expression of drooling, fawning lust. “I’mmmsoorryyysir.”

“Atta girl.”

I beckon for another glass. A risk, but I can probably finish before vodka dick gets the better of me. After a few moments, Scarlett presents me with a fresh glass. I down it and, as I do, study her face. She’s smiling now. My mood settles. All is right again. As Ruby goes to work between my legs, I glance around. They’re all smiling. Scarlett, Lola, Bailey—each of them is rapt, torn between envy and pride. I am their handler, and I always will be. I have forged myself into the star around which they orbit. And for that, for those looks of love in their eyes, no matter how hard it gets, it will always be worth it.

Tomorrow, I’ll try harder to remind myself of that.

***

Tonight is Bailey’s night.

Putting Ruby in her place earned me a few days’ good rest. The rest of them have been feeding on her defeat, chasing each other's tails with giddy teasing and fond recollection. All of them have been here waiting for me after work ever since, sparing me the need for any more theatrical confrontations. Ruby, above all, is glowing with the memory and on her best behavior. As meek as a comfort girl, and the bruises I left her with will keep her that way for at least a week.

But now Bailey is the squeaky wheel. She had a work placement interview this morning, and apparently it went badly. Little surprise, but it’s sent her spiraling. The kind of shit I deal with every single day would leave any of my packmates a wreck, and Bailey has a particular way of getting in her own head—which means I need to pull her out of it before she does something stupid again.

It always has to be me.

Since Bailey isn’t one to force it the way Ruby does, though, I’m free to relax and gird my loins at my own pace. So I sit in my bar, waiting for the painkillers to pick in, listening to one of the old songs playing over the radio. Some kind of warbling, revolutionary ballad that gets on my nerves, even as it leaves me with a strange fondness. Maybe I knew the song, once. Maybe it’s what got me to join up.

“Your food, sir.”

“Thank you, Scarlett.”

Scarlett smiles and sets down a bowl for me. Beet soup and a lump of old rye bread. About all we can afford. Nothing grows on this lump of ice. We fought for the future, but now they have to build it—and since it isn’t built yet, every food shipment has to go a long way. The real kicker is that under the so-called ‘Transitional Economic System’, you still need to earn every scrap. The future belongs to the workers, so if you don’t work, you don’t eat. So much for our sacrifice—not that I’m inclined to whine about the food, really. It’s the kind of thing they fed us in the kennels. I’m used to it. Anything finer and I’d spend all night nursing my stomach. Besides, Scarlett is a dab hand in the kitchen. She makes a little go a long way when she has the energy. I should give her that scene soon. She’s earned it.

That prospect sits heavy in my belly as I gnaw on the dry bread. Another task for the list. A handler’s work is never done. Speaking of which: huddled in the corner at the far end of the bar is yet another thing I need to take care of.

My pack has long since learned to be wary of strangers. Anyone who wanders into a bar like this is either lost or looking for trouble. I need to figure out which applies to the squat figure currently hunched over her drink, head down. She’s ex-military; I can always tell. Could be she’s nothing more than a soldier come to drown her sorrows. In that case, there’s no bother. Could also be she’s a hound like us. In that case, it gets complicated. Some of us are more damaged than others. If she’s looking for a new pack, I need to make sure she’s not a walking disaster, and even if she’s not, it’ll be complicated. Pack dynamics are fragile, and a new dog is a new mouth to feed—in every sense. Fortunately, I got a look at the back of her neck the last time she got up to piss. No scars. No hound.

There’s one more possibility, of course.

I’ve heard stories about ex-handlers trawling bars, looking for victims. I don’t know if I believe them, but I do know what kind of monsters they are and I’m not taking any chances. I remember Her. She didn’t make it through the war, thank fuck, but plenty of Her ilk did, and the revolutionary government is even more eager to sweep them under the rug than it is us. No justice for us martyrs. Handlers are still out there, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let one just waltz into my bar and start sinking their hooks into my girls’ heads.

Once I’m done mopping up the dregs of soup with my bread, I stand and ease myself over to where the stranger is perched. “Hey,” I hail, friendly as my mood permits. “I can’t offer to buy you a drink, but I wouldn’t mind a little company for the one I’m about to have.”

“Suit yourself,” grunts the large woman buried under the shapeless jacket.

Once it’s clear that’s all I’m going to get, I sit down beside her and rap my knuckles on the bar to summon a glass of vodka. “Mind if I ask your name?” I ask as it arrives.

The hunched pile of ill-fitting clothing next to me shakes as she laughs. “Looking for someone to warm your bed?” Her voice, a bitter gurgle, tells me she’s spent plenty of nights alone, and expects plenty more.

“Scoping out prospects, let’s call it,” I reply jovially. We both know I’m giving her the third degree, but there’s no harm in keeping it friendly. Luckily she seems to see it the same way.

“Call me Val,” she offers. “And you?”

“Thalia.” She isn’t interested, but again: what’s the harm? “What brings you here, Val?”

“This.” She lifts her glass, half-empty, and taps it twice against the counter.

That’s all the answer I get. Maybe all the answer I need. This woman looks nothing like a handler. She’s heavyset, and the way she carries it suggests she’s gained the weight recently. A handler would never—nor would they let their cheeks glow rosy and their breath stink from the booze. Her hair, faded tawny and shoulder-length, is a mess, and on her hand I can see the spot a wedding ring used to sit. She’s a mess, all in all. “Fair enough.” I down my drink, then make to stand. “Thank you for your service, eh?”

Something about that grabs Val by the ear. She turns her head sharply to look at me and now that it’s not tucked behind her collar I get to see her face, wrinkled and puckered like an old apple, and behind it, the small, dark pips of her eyes. She drinks in the coat and the cap, and the redness fades from her face like autumn turning to winter. It’s like she’s staring down a nightmare—but she’s quick to hide her horror behind a mask of alcoholic indifference.

“What’s the matter?” I press, smirking. I just can’t help it. “Seen someone like me before?”

“No,” Val replies, a little too quickly. I grin. Her fear is tastier than the borscht. A petty pleasure? Certainly, but I’ve earned it. My guess is that Val served alongside a dog team at some point and saw more than enough. I’m sure I wouldn’t cop to it either.

“Glad to hear it,” I tell her. “Enjoy your drink, Val. I’ll see you around.”

I shouldn’t needle her. It’s not smart. But it doesn’t matter. She’s clearly harmless.

That’s one task off the list. Soon, the other—but first, more drinks. One shot of vodka, then two, then three. Each one sounds like a better idea than the last, until I’m stumbling drunk—and then it’s showtime. Bailey’s night.

Bailey, my poor, sad little puppy. Always hiding—in the corner, or behind me, or behind her own hair, although that’s mostly to cover what a cockpit fire did to half her face. Given a chance, she’ll simply fade into the background, and then out of the room, and then you won’t see nor hear from her in a month until she’s coming out of a facility with a fresh grid of scars all over her thighs. But I won’t give her that chance. She’s one of my pack. I won’t leave her behind. I’ll give her what she needs, and what she needs is simple: attention. She needs to be seen and touched and caressed and beheld and fucked, until her own reflection in my handler’s eye drags her out of herself and into the real. It’s beautiful, the moment the chains on her soul shatter beneath my hands and she breaches, like a moth from a cocoon, into something glowing and sensual and present. It’s beautiful—and it’s hard. She can go for hours sometimes, and I’m already fading.

Nothing for it but to get it over with. My back hurts and my head throbs and the room is spinning, but I am a handler. I am perfection. I call Bailey to my side, bend her over a table and begin to ravish her in front of everyone—in front of my adoring hounds, in front of the bartender who’s seen it all before, and in front of Val, pretending not to stare over her glass. Let them watch. Let them all watch. Let them see what I can do to a girl. What a handler can do to a hound.

After a brief orgy of fumbling, Bailey’s haggard fatigues are torn away and her slender body is bared to me. I warm her against the cold. My fingers and my lips and my tongue beat the frost and the shame aside, until she is red and raw with longing more than embarrassment. Her green eyes glow, her ginger hair is strewn a mane, and all over she is as bright and rich as summer’s memory. But still, she needs more of me. Always more. I strain until I ache to give her pleasure, and I wonder, when will it be my turn? When will I lie back, easy, drowning in another? I should be now, but the battle against the alcohol in my system makes my every effort torturously mechanical. Get it up, handler. Don’t fuck up, handler. Don’t let them down, handler. I set myself against the task until it is all the same, all the ugly flesh, all the ugly noise, all the sticky tabletops and dusty floortiles, with Bailey at the heart of it, and I her shadow, and against her light I fade, and I-

I come to in my own bed.

It’s later. Much later. I passed out at some point, I guess, but the throbbing inside my skull brought me around. Someone must have poured me here. As I stir and groan, she appears: Scarlett, eyes full of worry.

“Water,” I croak.

“Yes, sir.” It’s there at once; I’m infinitely grateful. “And…” More painkillers. Scarlett is too good to me.

“Thank you,” I manage. It’s so kind of her to do this, and almost embarrassing how much of a mercy it is to have Scarlett here to see to these little things—not that my quarters are deserving of a maid. All of us hounds live at assigned dormitories in requisitioned residential blocks. Each of us has little more than a kitchen unit and a bed. On my wage and their pensions, we can’t afford a real apartment to share. Still, with Scarlett busying herself under the ailing, orange glow of the old stove, it almost feels like home.

“This’ll help, sir. For your stomach.” Scarlett’s next blessing is a cup of apple tea mixed with honey and cinnamon. A rare treat; even if it’s only from a stale bag, the tea’s sweetness is enough to revive me and settle my belly. Scarlett knows how I get when I drink, and she doesn’t want to see her beet soup again.

“Thank you,” I repeat, then sit up in bed. Even now, I cannot fade into rest. Anxiety, my bosom companion, gnaws at my chest. “How did it go? With Bailey?”

“Well enough,” says Scarlett, even though her face says: not quite. “She was happy.”

“That’s good.” I can’t remember more than flashes. Based on those, I have my doubts, but for now I decide to believe Scarlett. She’s a good girl. “That’s good.”

“She’s very grateful for what you do, sir.” I set down my tea on the bedside table, and Scarlett climbs up into my bed. There’s scarcely room for us both, but we make do. “We all are.”

“Right.” They’re all grateful—and they all want more. The dozens of things I could say tie my tongue, so I slump back once more and let Scarlett settle against me as I stare dizzily up at the yellowed ceiling, at the peeling beige flowers of the wallpaper, at the white, lacy curtain over the window, its corners already given to ice and mold.

This is an awful place. I’ve hated it since the day I arrived. This planet. This city. This room. But my Scarlett is here.

“Sir,” she ventures carefully, just as I was drifting off. “Perhaps… would this be a good time to talk about our next scene?”

My mood plummets. The end of the day, and I still have something to worry about? I tense, though if Scarlett feels it, she doesn’t let it show. For some reason, even her patience is starting to piss me off. I bet it feels like a luxury—or charity. Or maybe it’s malice; why does she only ever bring it up at the worst times?

“Later,” I murmur drunkenly, trying to banish that unworthy thought. “Another time.”

Scarlett says nothing. Eventually, once my nausea passes, unconsciousness claims me anew.

***

Tonight is Lola’s night.

A regularly scheduled event. Lola can’t express her needs the way the others do, so I make sure to give her time each and every week. For her, it’s maintenance—and for me, a chance to redeem myself. I can’t be blamed for struggling under the weight of all the burdens I carry. I know that and so do my hounds, but I cannot stand the way they look at me as I stumble, as I must have done with Bailey while I was blackout drunk. I don’t remember, but the pity in their eyes rains down on me harder than any barrage and colder than any snowfall. I see, reflected back, all of the excuses and lackluster nights, all the missed scenes and disappointments. I need to banish them. I need to remind them that I am their master and their handler, and that they should look upon me with awe.

Tonight I will. I have the skills. No drinking beforehand. I’ll turn my dingy, shitty little basement bar into a concert hall where I stand, at the head, conducting their cries of adulation. Let them see. Let them all see what I can do.

Lola is perfect for showing off with. Her craving is restraint. She needs the nights she can let the animal inside herself out. Where she can buck and writhe against her bonds and feel that she will not slip, will not be allowed to fall, and once she is done and all her strength is spent, she goes limp and weak, tongue lolling out of her mouth, and looks up at me in unadulterated worship. There are a dozen ways to do it. A straitjacket Lola took with her on her way out from the military. A set of leather cuffs and restraints I made for her from scraps and cheap hardware. But the best—the most impressive—is what I have with me now tucked away in my coat’s voluminous pockets: jute rope, neatly stowed in several tight hanks, ready to be wrapped around Lola’s form.

I run a hand over the rope, savoring the sensation, imagining how they will look and feel against Lola’s skin, while the other brings my cigarette to my lips. I’ve stepped out for a moment to smoke. Not necessary, really—I could smoke inside, as others do—but I enjoy the quiet peace of it. Quiet as the winter wind allows, anyway. I’m chilled to the bone out here, but all the same, I make the cigarette last. Tonight, nicotine’s fading headrush will be my only ally in the war against my throbbing migraine. I linger until I can draw no more from the ashen stump between my lips, then toss it aside. Time to get on-mission.

The warm air inside rushes to meet me as I open the door, tasting of stale vodka and the cheap fuel oil burning in the corner stove. Eyes turn to meet me too. A dozen pairs. packmates and regulars alike. Val has rapidly become one of those. That seat at the end of the bar now has her name on it; she sits, she drinks, she says little, but she watches my pack and I with obsessive interest. I’ve been enjoying her impotent little fascination. Lola bounds toward me, eager as a fresh pup; she always knows when it’s her night. I muss her hair fondly for a moment before donning the arrogant, dispassionate mask she longs to see.

“Heel, Lola,” I tell her. She’s at my side already, but the word calms her. Stills her. “Good girl. Now strip.”

That’s a command every hound has learned well. Lola makes quick work of her clothing; she’s bundled up in layers of it against the cold, and underneath there are layers more of fat and muscle. Lola’s a big girl, especially for a hound. Probably one of the reasons the cockpit wasn’t kind to her. Adorable as she is now, sometimes I wonder what she was like before. Maybe that pretty face was once sharp and expressive instead of slack. Maybe those brown eyes saw more than stars. She could have been quite the Amazonian beauty, but now her long, tawny hair is a perpetually-knotted bush that hangs lopsided around her.

I extinguish that train of thought before it takes me anywhere dark. For us, there is no before and no after.

“Up,” is my next command, once Lola is naked. I rap my knuckles against the top of an unused table, then snap my fingers. “C’mon, girl. Up.”

Though a little clumsy, Lola manages to scramble her way onto the table without unbalancing it. With every instruction obeyed, her smile shines brighter. She becomes the fireplace around which the room gravitates. All eyes on her. Something prickly stirs in my heart. Don’t they see me, too? Don’t they see that this is my light? My heat?

I extinguish that train of thought too. Why can’t I focus?

“Paw,” I tell Lola. “Both of them”, I clarify, when she only offers the one hand. I retrieve one of the short hanks of rope, unravel it, and bring Lola’s wrists behind her so I can wrap it around them, watching as she shivers at the jute’s coarse kiss. She’s in paradise already. Even my calling them her paws has her radiating euphoria. As I tie the knots, I spare a glance at the room. I want to see the admiring looks on my pack’s faces. I want to see the strangers and regulars watching in terrified awe of my power.

I look at Ruby, then Bailey, and then my eyes seek Scarlett. She isn’t with the others. At first I worry she’s missing, but then I find her.

Scarlett is sitting at the end of the bar, cosied up with Val.

It could be nothing. It could be—but I see instantly that it’s not. However innocent the outward appearance, in Scarlett’s heart it’s anything but. I recognize the way she presses close to Val, starry-eyed, attentive, smiling and doting. I recognize the way that, as Val finishes her glass, Scarlett hastens to ensure it’s filled again immediately.

That is my smile. My service. My hound.

Fury rises incandescent in my gut. My nostrils flare—but beyond that, I show nothing. It wouldn’t do. In this place I am master, and a handler does not fear things like a hound pouring another woman a drink. Scarlett is mine, I tell myself. I have nothing to worry about, I tell myself. And moreover, I have a job to do.

Resolutely, I plow ahead with the scene and begin to lay rope across Lola’s body, ready to transform her into a work of living art that will quiver and whine and moan to the beat I set. At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. As I begin to work a longer piece of rope around Lola’s arms in a series of loops, pulling back her shoulders, and binding them tight, the realization hits me: I have not done this in months. Too many lapsed sessions, too many nights spent too tired to practice. The skill, hard-won, has slipped through my fingers—fingers that now turn numb and cold as I clumsily twine and intertwine the ropes, hoping against hope that the muscle memory will come.

It doesn’t. And everyone is watching.

I am watching.

Watching Scarlett and Val. My memory is a patchwork blanket, but every look between them is emblazoned there in fire. They lean in and share a comment, then a laugh, and I boil with sticky need to know what’s being said. What’s the joke? Who is it about? The way they sit now, you’d think they’d known each other for years. Scarlett is a flower in spring’s full blossom, proud to be plucked and worn abreast. Val is a fat, fledgling bird of prey, bared to spread her feathered wings around my little light. The simmering affection of the scene sends me into shellshock. I feel like I’m the cockpit again, hell before me and following with me, just a scared dog, and I-

“Mrrraf!”

Lola’s pained cry jolts me awake. I look down and see that I have been pulling too tight. Her shoulders are pulled back at an atrocious, dangerous angle while her head is craned to look at me, trusting, puppy-dog eyes full of wounded confusion. I look at the ropes I’ve been laying and knotting. They’re a tangled mess. They resemble not at all the intricate tie I was supposed to weave. I glance around the room. Bailey and Ruby look at me with eyes full of concern—and worse, fear. Not fear of me, but rather existential dread at the thought that their god, their star, is so fallible. Then I look to the end of the bar. Scarlett hasn’t even noticed. But Val? She’s looking straight at me, and her lips are turning upward into a smile.

Before I know what’s happening, my hands beat the door aside, my feet scrape against the icy steps, and I’m out into the Arkturgrad winter.

With moons and stars overhead choked by smog, there is no telling how long I spend racing through the snow-carpet streets, gripped by a panic I have not felt since I was a pilot. That was years ago now—years spent rebuilding, but now all that is in ruins. The blocky buildings that rise all around me seem to taunt me with it. They, too, are years in the rebuilding. This is the future we fought for, but it rests beyond my horizon. I’m one of the lucky ones. I have more than most. A pack, a family—but I can’t keep my shit together well enough to enjoy it. I have one job. To be their handler. It’s all I want and need, but each day I fall a little further apart, and all the people living in these concrete apartments would shun me if they saw my coat or the scars on the back of my neck. What am I for, if not this? What is my place, if not at the head of the pack?

They are the only people I can remember who have ever needed me.

After what is surely hour of wandering, I arrive back at the bar. Where else? Besides work and a meager home, there is no other place for me. Head down, I glance around only long enough to confirm that my pack isn’t here. They’re out looking for me, most likely. I should repay the favor. Instead, I huddle down at the bar and order a drink.

Then five more. My world shrinks to the shimmer of vodka on the surface of my ever-dwindling glass. It’s good for me. Keeps me warm and quiet on the inside. Keeps me from looking around the room. I don’t want to know if the other patrons are staring at me. I just keep drinking, and cantankerously wave the bartender away when she tells me it’s time to close up. She can let me do it. It’s not the first time. She douses the stinking heater on her way out, leaving the room dimly-lit, and leaves a tall glass of water next to me along with the bottle of vodka. It’s a kindness, I suppose. For some reason it just pisses me off.

Once the twilight before dawn arrives, there is so much vodka in me that my bitterness is drowned ocean-deep. I feel only the faint currents that rise to the surface, churning eddies that make me sway and retch. Fatigue nips at my heels, and my headache is worse than ever. The bar is growing cold and so am I, however tight I pull my coat. I need to be in bed. Any bed. But first I need to piss, and I’ll be damned before I let Scarlett catch me at my apartment with it running down my leg.

The bar’s bathroom is never heated and rarely cleaned, meaning it’s as cold and filthy as outdoors. It sits on the corner of the building, light filtering through frosted, high-placed windows, now a cold blue as morning’s first fingers reach down through the snowfall. Though more asleep than awake, I manage my business, then step up to wash my hands. The sight of myself in the ancient, dusty mirror feels like a shard of glass being pressed into my eyeball. I’m a ruin clinging to an outfit, and seeing the rest of the filthy bathroom reflected behind me is far more than my damaged, drunken mind can take. My stomach churns in warning. I clutch at my temples.

“Headache? From the implant?”

I nod.

“Here, there’s… won’t mean much, but this is what I always used to do for mine.”

A meaty hand feels its way up the back of my neck. I bristle at first, but the touch has a certain quality to it that sets my nerves at ease. Fingertips feel at my scars, then the points nearby where bones meet. Suddenly they press hard, and I feel a great source of tension inside me loosen. I sigh, grateful for the respite.

Then I process that I am not alone.

“Get… fffuck!” I whimper, stumbling back. I turn and, in the dark, see the worst face it could have been.

“Easy,” Val says, voice all gentle warmth. “You’re deep in the glass tonight. Take it easy.”

“F-fuck off,” I hiccup. “What’s it to you?”

Val recoils, and has the temerity to look wounded. “Just… I’ve been there too. Frequently.”

“You…” I scoff; does she think she knows anything about me? I hate that there is anyone here to see me like this. I hate Val for being the one to see it. Then I remember what I saw earlier. “Get the fuck away from m-my hound!”

“Your…” Val’s face twists for a moment, then slackens. She retreats, palms raised and cheeks flushed. “It’s not like that, alright? We were just talking.”

“Jjjjust.” I know what I saw. Talking? Please. Nobody talks to us. I break out in uneven laughter. “Bullshit! You know what we… we…”

I frown. Val knows what we are. But she knows more than that. What she just did to my neck—no regular soldier would know a thing like that. Only one person touches a hound that way, even if mine never bothered.

“Handler,” I hiss. “You’re a fucking handler.”

“W-woah, I’m not!” Val replies, but the fear in her eyes tells it all. “No, that’s all-”

“Yes!” I seize on her recalcitrance; once again, I feel powerful. “I should—we should—fucking gut you, bitch.”

“I’m not a…” Val shakes her head furiously. “I’m not. That’s not who I am.”

“You were,” I sneer. “Now you’re… fuck… fucking… hanging around us. Some kind of hound chaser?”

“No!”

“Didn’t get enough of it in the war?” I leer. “What, your… your wife’s pussy not good enough after a few years of dog dick?”

“Careful!” Val growls. Her defensiveness delights me.

“O-Or let me guess,” I snort. “You just like to watch. Hear… hear that one a lot. Or maybe you just fucking… can’t even get it up without a bunch of trannies like me licking your boots, huh?”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Val’s properly angry now. Good. That’s good. “I was trying to help you!”

“Bet you were hoping I’d fall at your feet over it,” I sneer. I’m still drunk, but the adrenaline hitting my system makes me confident. In here, pale blue light dancing off my leathers, I am taller. Stronger. “Why else would… would you keep lurking around us?”

At last, the monster before me has the decency to look ashamed. “I-I-I thought you might understand!” she bleats. “Outside, I’ve never seen another… I-I, I don’t know. You seemed like y-you had something figured out, maybe. I thought… I thought you might…”

She trails off, but I can hear what’s on the tip of her tongue. “Help you?” My face twists in mockery; my reflection in the mirror is a leering gargoyle. “Accept you?” Ugly, uneven laughter erupts from my throat. “We hate you! We hate all of you! Look what you did to us! If you had… had any fucking decency you’d have given your service weapon a blowjob on the way out!”

Val goes quiet for a moment. Her face is veiled in the shadow of her jacket’s collar. Then: “That’s fucking rich, given how you’re dressed up.”

I shake as if struck. “What the… fuck did you say?”

“You hate handlers, but you’re dressed up like one?” Val’s humorless laughter is the sound of something dark uncoiling. “What, that’s the only way they can get off? If you’re playing pretend? Or maybe it’s more about you. Maybe you’re the one who needs to pretend.”

Despite all I’ve drunk, fury brings clarity, not cloudiness. Val’s forgotten something. Before anything else, I am a beast of war. “I’ll fucking kill you.”

I fly at her, hands raised. I might not be at my most coordinated, but I’m more than strong enough. Val’s been drinking too, and handlers never were ones to get their own hands dirty. I beat her arms aside with ease, then begin to rain blows down on her heavyset body. She slumps back against the wall, letting out ugly grunts. I press forward. I keep hitting. It’s easy. It’s so easy. Why didn’t we do this all along? She’s only human. I can make her small. I can make her afraid—just like I’ve been afraid all these years.

“S-s-stop!” Val coughs. “I-I’m sorry!”

“Fuck you.” I spit. I won’t stop. Doesn’t she know? None of it ever stops. Not the bad dreams, not the shitty days, not the headaches and humiliations. Why should any of it ever stop? Ever since the war, everything’s been upside down. I spend all day getting kicked by my hounds, so now I get to kick her. I get to let it out—and the best part is, nobody will ever blame me. This is exactly as right as it feels. When I’m done, my hounds will clean the blood from my boots, and there will be one less war criminal in the world. They look at me and see God again. Even the exertion the beating feels good. I’m nauseous, yes, and my head pounds, but I’m hot and full and eager again, and with each blow, I feel something passing from her to me, some essential mote of power, like the very personhood She took from me is something I can dig out of Val’s broken ribs and cram back into my skull and maybe then I’ll-

“Hound! Failsafe: Syem-Na-Tset.”

Everything stops.

The code word slams into my head like a hammer blow, leaving me a rung bell, shaking, limbs otherwise frozen. The voice of the people is the voice of God—that’s what they drilled into us, and the woman before me speaks now with all of that authority, stirring in me a loyalty that glows brighter than fresh-forged steel. I remember this feeling better than I remember my own mama’s embrace—yet years of dormancy have blunted the effect of the brainwashing. I can tell. The pressure, the compulsion, the paralysis—it’s not what it once was. I could resist. I could fight this.

“On your knees, mutt.”

Obediently, I sink.

I could fight this. But countless drinks, a throbbing migraine, and twenty hours awake have taken their toll on me as well. The willpower I need to struggle is buried beyond my reach. I can’t find my fire. What would I be fighting for? More nights like these? I promised myself I’d never kneel again, but instead of that promise it is the the handler’s command that echoes through my damaged skull, and from my knees I am awash in the presence of something greater.

Rising to her full height before me is Colonel Valentina Karahalios, her name one of many etched into my subconsciousness. She towers now like a mountain above the horizon, a volcano erupting with a great, unfathomable force once bound up tight within. Before her, I am in abject terror—but more than anger, her manner speaks to the poisonous ease of a lapsed addiction. Her face is dark, but the blue light of morning halos her in a shimmering aurora that peels away at the edges of my vision.

“You’ve taken something that doesn’t belong to you,” the handler thunders. “Bad dog.”

“N-no,” I whimper, scrambling backwards until I hit the wall. Her slightest disapproval would have me quivering. Her palpable anger is an atrocity.

“I’m going to take it back.”

“N-n-no, please!”

My stuck pig’s shriek echoes around the empty bathroom, but there is none to hear it. None but the monster before me, who now bends down to plant a hand on my face. She pries my unresisting lips apart, then pushes fingertips deep, deep, deep into the core of my being. I begin to buck wildly, weakly, as I feel something rising to meet her, a heat so great it burns my throat—and in its absence, leaves me cold.

“There we go,” the handler tells me mockingly. There are more words too, but those somehow pass beneath my perception, sewn like poisoned seeds and turned under the soil. “Go on, girl. Go on. That’s it. Drop it. Give it up. Let it go.”

The heat passes into my mouth and then spews forth, and the last thing I remember is a great, blazing light filling the room as Colonel Valentina Karahalios plucks something from my lips; a spark, bright as the sun, that I reach for one final time as she bears it up, up, and away forever into the deep black shadow She casts over all.

***

Tonight is Scarlett’s night.

That one thought presses itself to the front of my hungover awareness as I wake to discover myself still slumped on the bathroom floor, my own vomit half-frozen down my front. As I scramble through filth up to my knees, limbs aching from a night spent on hard tiles, I’m left with a murky awareness of danger.

There is a handler preying on us. She’s going to take something from me. And Scarlett might be slipping through my fingers.

I dare not look at my own reflection. With what few paper towels I can scrounge, I try to wipe the sickness from my chin and clothing but succeed only in smearing it everywhere. My shame grows in tandem with my fear. I can’t let Scarlett see me like this. I need to be perfect for her. Which means I need a change of clothes—which means I need to go to work, where I have some spare shirts in a locker.

Mercifully, the bar is yet to open. I’m free to lock up without another soul to see and head out once more. The winter chill has never bitten deeper, and my head is so painful I consider going to the nearest clinic, but the hours of waiting are more than I can bear. It’s already noon, if the glow through the smog is anything to judge by. I shuffle to the monolithic government building I work at, but fail to slip in and out unseen. I’m forced to make my excuses to my supervisor whilst the other workers peer at me. The world around me is still spinning. A kaleidoscope of pitying faces—pitying, but not surprised. It’s like they all always knew this day would come. As soon as I change clothes, I flee home with my head down. Each step I climb on the way up to my dormitory takes an hour’s strength, and I pause outside my door for a long moment, catching my breath and bracing myself.

Wear the mask, Thalia. You’ve done it a thousand times. It’s all she needs.

My key turns the lock. Inside, it’s already warm. Scarlett stands at the stove over a pot of apple tea kept at a simmer. She turns to look at me, smiling, though her eyes are big, round, anxious headlamps.

“Welcome home,” she says, veiling worry with warmth. “Tea?”

I eye her warily. This isn’t how I meant to begin, but the aroma calls to my unsettled stomach. “Please,” I blurt out.

Good as gold, Scarlett is quick to settle me at the small table beside the stove. The cup of apple tea tastes of home itself. “There we go,” Scarlett murmurs gently, taking her seat opposite. “Thalia, I’m so glad you’re safe. We were all so worried.”

I nod guiltily. The tea and the tone of her voice transport me back to all the other times we’ve had conversations like these. “How’s Lola?”

“She’s fine,” Scarlett promises softly. “Worried, mostly. Not injured.”

“Good,” I murmur. “That’s good.”

Whilst I sip, Scarlett begins to hum to me. A little old folk song. The words, if I ever knew them, are long since lost to me, but the melody still stirs within me a sense of childlike comfort. I’m so, so tired, but closing my eyes for so much as a moment makes me so dizzy that the painful cacophony raging against the inside of my skull begins to raise yet louder complaints. Scarlett notices my plight and slides a pair of pills across the table toward me.

“Let’s get you into bed,” Scarlett suggests, as I swallow the painkillers. “You need your rest.”

At first, I nod agreeably. Here, all is normal and safe. Now that I have warmed up from the winter cold, I can feel a fever beginning to flicker to life within me. Bedrest is my only choice—but before my anxiety is blanketed by fatigue, it nips at my heel once more.

“No,” I protest. “First, you and I need to-”

To my shock, Scarlett interrupts me with a click of her tongue. “Thalia, please. Whatever it is, I’m sure it can wait. You don’t seem well.”

Her unprecedented insubordination bolsters my resolve—and awakens in me an uncomfortable awareness of something terribly, terribly wrong. “What did you just call me?”

Scarlett blinks innocently. “Thalia?”

The chair rattles against the floor as I bolt to my feet. “You will call me ‘sir’ or ‘Handler Thalia’, mutt.”

The very proclamation drains what little strength I’ve recovered, but that momentary weakness is nothing compared to how it feels when Scarlett, calm and unmoved, fixes me with a warm, loving, but pitying little smile. “I don’t think we need to play that game anymore, my darling.”

At once, the fever surges to claim me. It’s all I can manage not to slump against the wall as I burn up from the inside. “I-I am your handler. I own you. You’ll… you’ll…”

“Thalia, listen.” Scarlett sighs in sympathy. Her smile, disgustingly genuine, is a hot knife carved into my swimming vision. “It’s OK. It’s all OK. You don’t need to push yourself anymore.”

“Push?” I am a pane of glass, red-hot from the kiln. Scarlett can see straight through me as my edges warp and peel. “That’s… have you been talking to Val?”

“So you do know!” Scarlett’s smile widens; I groan softly as its edges draw blood. “Yes. We spoke at the bar, then she came to see me late last night. We talked everything through. Things will be so much better from now on.”

“She did something to you!” I launch myself at Scarlett wide-eyed, grabbing her by the shoulder. She doesn’t flinch. “S-she has some… some failsafe! Some codeword they left in our heads.”

“She used no such thing,” Scarlett insists. How can she be so blind? There’s no way Val would have let her remember.

“S-she told you what she is?” The fear in my belly curdles to fury. “Y-y-you should’ve… Scarlett, you know what they did to us! How can you talk about her like… like…”

Scarlett simply shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t you see, Thalia? She’s like us. She’s one of us. With her, we can be a real pack again. Even you.”

“N-n-no!” Mere minutes ago, I was a block of ice. Now, my forehead is drenched in sweat. Weakly, I lean forward, bearing my weight against Scarlett to try to push her to her knees. “W-we are a real pack! I. Am. Your. Handler!”

“Thalia…” That look of pity. It unmakes me.

“Call me ‘sir’!” I bark. “You… you… w-we promised.”

That is all I have to fall back on now. A promise made in the long, withering days after the victory, when it was clear none of us would make it through without each other. I wish I had more. I wish I had the authority of the coat I wear. But Scarlett remembers our promise, doesn’t she?

“Alright, Thalia.” Scarlett does not buckle under my weight, but her voice signals a kind of weary acceptance. “Alright.”

“I just told you what to call me,” I hiss. “M-mutt.”

My voice lacks conviction and I wince at the way it cracks, but Scarlett is kind enough not to react. She simply closes her eyes, then opens them again. Our scene begins. “Yes, sir.”

“I should put you in your place.” That’s what she wants, isn’t it? What does she want? “I should…” What should I do? The words will not come. There must be something. I fall back on what’s easy. “Kneel.”

“Yes, sir.”

In a smooth motion, Scarlett folds her long, pleated skirt beneath her and falls to her knees. Her face gives nothing away, neither resistance nor enjoyment. She is as perfect for me as she ever was. A perfect submissive—and a perfect mirror. In her, I see my reflection. In her, I see nothing.

“You…”

Scarlett will do anything I command. Of that, I’m sure. But what should I have her do? What does she want? I know her well enough—or so I think, but as I look at her now, she proves strangely inscrutable. My every notion is stillborn, counterbalanced into the abyss by a thousand tiny worries and anxieties until I am left utterly paralyzed. Perhaps it’s the wrong question. What Scarlett wants shouldn’t matter, should it? Then, what do I want?

I don’t know that either. I’m tired. I’m running a fever. I want to rest.

But I can’t.

“Suck my cock,” I blurt out uncertainly. It’s the first thing that comes into my head, but as soon as the demand leaves my lips, it feels childish. Crude. Embarrassment makes the heat inside me burn all the hotter.

“Yes, sir.” If Scarlett frowns on the order she doesn’t show it. Instead, obediently, she shuffles forward and begins to unfasten my belt. The sight of her on her knees before me, submissive and eager to please, should stir something in me.

It should. But it doesn’t.

As Scarlett frees my cock from its confines, I try to comfort myself with the thought that I can settle into this pleasure for as long as I need to awaken my spark—but then I discover, to my horror, that her expert touch leaves me just as cold as everything else about the moment. As Scarlett runs her fingers over my soft nub, trying to coax it to life, I close my eyes and try desperately to think about anything at all that might strike my passion. Anything except Her, anyway. But the minutes wear on and the mood sours awkwardly, and when I open my eyes I find that the smile on Scarlett’s face has become one of pitying comfort as she plants little kisses on my still-soft cock, a tender but patronizing facsimile of the voracious service I demanded.

There is no use pretending this will work. I can’t get hard.

That’s to be expected, I tell myself, after what I’ve been through. I don’t have the blue pills that usually help; even without those, I could normally muster something, but the sickness burning behind my brow makes it impossible. It’s not my fault, but this was a bad idea. I need to try something else.

“Stop,” I instruct. Scarlett does so. She looks at me with big, expectant eyes; I brace myself for mockery, but none comes. She is too good for that. Too loyal. And yet, I feel nothing. What’s wrong with me? This is a nightmare. A fever dream. “G-good girl,” I tell her weakly, as though it were a task completed and not a mutual humiliation.

“Yes, sir.” I almost wish for mockery instead. Maybe then I’d feel that urge to put her in her place. Instead, I’m left casting about for something to do. Anything. Since Scarlett’s mind and mine are equally opaque, all I can think to do is desperately search the whirling room around me for inspiration. I find the answer at my own feet.

“My boots,” I spit, before mastering myself. “Polish my boots, m-mutt.”

“Yes, sir.”

That’s all I’ve heard from her this entire scene. Against my wishes, as Scarlett goes to retrieve her cleaning kit, a knot of resentment begins to form in my belly. It’s so easy for her. All she has to do is whatever she’s told. She’s free all the agonies of choice. All the burdens of leadership. She can simply obey, and enjoy the blissful feeling of reward submission provides. It’s been years, but its taste still lingers on my tongue. It always has. Why has it never been my turn? If only all I had to do was kneel, and say ‘yes, sir,’ and-

No. I can’t let myself think that way. I don’t think that way. It’s the fever talking. It has to be—or else it’s what Val did to me. If I don’t believe that, I’m letting them win. Not just Val, but Her. All those monsters. If I don’t believe that, I’m admitting I’ll never be more than what they made me. But however much that stiffens my resolve, it isn’t enough to keep me from recoiling slightly as Scarlett brings a damp rag to my boots and begins her work.

After a night in the bar bathroom and a morning of Arkturgrad’s snow and filth, they need the attention more than ever. As Scarlett busies herself with the task, though, it proves no different from the misguided blowjob. Standing over her, watching, I feel strangely restless. I cannot shake the sense that I should be doing something. My hands twitch; they want for a task to work at. I try to stifle the impulse with affirmation: this is exactly how it should be. I, her handler, receiving the service that she, my hound, provides. It doesn’t work. I’m uneasy. Like my fever, my anxiety keeps rising.

Am I doing a good enough job? Am I playing my role? Is Scarlett enjoying herself? Would she enjoy something else more? Is this form of service too selfish? Is it too much like the chores she performs for me each day? Do I need to make it more exciting for her? Should I care? Would She? Would Val? What would Val make her do? What has Val already made her do?

When I confront her, will her boots be polished to a perfect, mirror shine?

“I-I need to sit down,” I pant, the fever-heat within me growing strange as I dwell on the mental image. Scarlett watches me, concerned, as I slump back into the chair, one arm draped limply across the back.

“Are you sure you don’t need to rest, Thalia?” Scarlett begs. She’s so worried about me, and it’s making this so hard.

“S-s-sir!” I cry. “Keep going, m-mutt. If my boots go to damp, I’ll… I’ll… just, get them perfect.”

Scarlett purses her lips for a long, worried moment, before the: “Yes, sir,” comes. Then she crafts her lips into a smile, as if to reassure me. Do I look like I need to be reassured?

Though she returns her attention to my boots soon after, I cannot shake the feeling that she has seen right through me. I am not enjoying this. I should be. I always did—even if, sometimes, it was a battle to find the strength to hold up my end of our pack’s bargain. When I put myself forward as handler, it was because I alone was suited for it. I had the spark—but now it’s gone. Burnt out by the years, final embers snuffed out between Val’s fingertips. It’s never been further from me. I feel the space in my breast where it once blazed, a damp, hollow spot, the absent desire giving way to a corrosive yearning. It grows colder and hungrier with each passing moment, yet everything else is so hot I want to start tearing at my sweaty skin for relief.

“Are these clean to your satisfaction, sir?” Scarlett asks.

I look down at her. My vision is like an oil slick. I can’t see my boots. The only thing I can see is Scarlett’s smile—and now I see it for what it truly is: patronizing. She is humoring me, like a mother with a stubborn child. She’s kind, oh yes, but when she looks at me, she does not see God. And she never will again.

“Y-y-yes,” I bleat. I’m on fire. My entire life is burning down. “Good… good dog.”

“Yes, sir.” That smile, that maddening smile! “With your permission, I’ll polish them now.”

The most I can manage is a curt nod, and even that sends sweat dripping from my brow and leaves me perilously light-headed. The leftover scent of apples and spices is too much, somehow; cloying and sickly, and when Scarlett opens her tin of boot polish, the acrid scent sends me into paroxysms of nausea. I’m melting down. I am succumbing to sickness. Too late, I realize that I need water. I force myself to my feet; too late, I realize that I should have ordered Scarlett to get it for me. I collapse against the table, sending my teacup falling until it shatters against the tiles. I almost follow but Scarlett, my Scarlett, is there to catch me. Slight but strong, she bears me upright again.

“Alright,” she tells me, with firmness I haven’t heard in an eon. “That’s enough.”

“N-n-n-no,” I whimper. “N-no, this… this is… t-this…”

This was my last chance. I see that now. I neglected Scarlett for too long, and now she’s slipping from my grip. I keep up my stammered, incoherent protest all the way to my sickbed as Scarlett drags me there, but I have not the strength to resist her as she lies me down and fusses over me.

“Don’t worry,” Scarlett tells me lovingly. “Don’t worry, Thalia. It’s all going to be alright.”

I nod feverishly, fervent in my eagerness to believe her. I cannot believe otherwise. It would rip me in half.

“I… l-love… you,” I risk. Those words have often been on my lips these difficult years, but they’ve never left them. Not until now. A handler shouldn’t. But I must tell her. I must make her see what she means to me.

And she does. Her eyes widen in surprise, then soften in affection. She coos as she sets a glass of water at my bedside, helps me out of my sodden clothes, then presses a damp rag, blissfully cool, against my forehead. “I love you too,” Scarlett replies. “That’s so… yes, my love, it’s going to be alright. Don’t worry. We’ll be together soon. You, and I, and all of us.”

“S-s-s-sssooon?” I drool. The sheets beneath me are already soaked with sweat. My own skin is a marsh. “N-no… s-stay, stay!”

“I can’t, my love,” Scarlett says apologetically, as she furnishes me with medicine. “She told me to go to Her.”

“H-her?” At that, I go still. The trembling reverence in Scarlett’s voice is fuel to this new, awful fire. My thoughts begin to grow dim as they consume themselves, fighting for air. Anxiety, hope, envy, dread, each battling for primacy.

“You can come too. As soon as you’re better. She told me as much.” With infinite tenderness, Scarlett lingers for a moment at my bedside; as I reach for her, infant-weak, she squeezes my hand in hers, then bends to kiss my cheek. But after, as her lips graze my ear, her whispered voice is honey and thunder and merciless promise. “You’ll see. She’s so much better than you.”

My entire body betrays me. In one motion, I spasm, limbs stiff and back arched. My eyes begin to roll back to behold the inferno of my broken mind, each muscle whining pitifully against the way I seize and contort, and now—now!—I feel myself growing so stiff with need that I rub myself to near-climax against the itchy, woolen bedsheets, Scarlett’s testament to Val’s superiority ringing in my ears.

Now, at last, Scarlett permits herself a faint giggle at my pathetic display. “Goodbye, Thalia,” she says as she rises to her feet and away. For all that she has been through, she wears the face of a maiden again, ready to walk her wedding aisle like they did in the days the churches still stood. “Come for me, my love. We’ll be waiting.”

As Scarlett departs, so too does my conscious mind—but sleep is not rest. In fitful, feverish dreams, I dwell in fire. I dwell in Val and Scarlett’s awful dance, and in their heat, I am melted and remolded. All that is impotent and needless runs away like snow in spring, like a dream that never truly was, and what remains is stamped with a white-hot brand, inscribing, in place of an old, seeping scar, a new name. A new purpose. A new master. As the brand goes cool, I am cleansed—and I am lit from within by a flame that will burn eternal.

***

Tonight is my night.

I sleep for a full day and awake the next evening, and once I do the world feels more like a fantasy than any nightly phantasm ever has. My fever is broken. My headache is gone. My body is light. With a blissful smile settled on my face, I prepare myself. I dress as nicely as I’m able, while my coat and cap rest on a dresser, long forgotten. I don't need them anymore, not even as proof against the winter cold. My new faith keeps me warm. It is only excitement that leaves me shivering as I walk the virgin snows covering the empty streets that lead me all the way to the bar.

To Her bar.

From outside, I see that the heater is burning bright. Raucous sounds leak from within. Chatter, moaning, music, clattering glasses. The place seems, for once, like more than a graveyard for soldiers yet lingering. It seems alive. I am late to the party, but I feel neither shame nor envy. It’s my night. The party is for me. I savor one last breath of night, descend the steps, and enter. Once I see Her, my eyes go wide in rapture.

Colonel Valentina Karahalios sits at the center of Her bar with all the majesty and authority of one of the kings we fought to bury. She occupies an entire table to herself, laden with as lavish a meal as the bar’s kitchen can furnish; nobody dares sit beside Her, but the whole room turns on the axis of Her moods, Her laughs, Her stray comments, Her sheer presence. She is arrayed in full leather panoply: cap, coat, boots, pants, vest, all bearing the scars of years spent folded in a footlocker yet now radiant black from a fresh conditioning. They have never suited anyone better. This is not the same Val I intimidated with ease a few days ago. This is something else. A monster come unshackled. An awful light freed from its bushel. Legs spread, She now bears Her bulk with ease, like She deserves all the space She takes up and more, and Her weary, wary face has relaxed into a thin smile of supreme, aristocratic authority.

I look at Her, and I see God.

“Welcome, mutt,” our handler says. “Good of you to join us.”

An eager, taunting titter goes up around Her pack.

Her pack, not mine. They draw close to Her now, Her inner circle, eyeing me warily as though unsure if I am intruder or supplicant. Ruby stands behind Her, hair a mess, face sporting a fresh black eye, and she has clearly never been happier for it. Bailey knees before Her, thighs wrapped around Her boot, her rhythmic humping and panting as much music as what’s playing over the sound system. Lola is at Her other side, resting on haunches, a leash wrapped around her neck and a blissed-out-grin on her face. And then there is Scarlett, my Scarlett.

Scarlett stands just beside Lola, vodka bottle in hand, ready to refill Valentina’s cup at any moment. As She notices my gaze lingering on her, Valentina’s thick branch of an arm snares her waist and pulls her, giggling, into Her lap. Our handler makes no secret of the way She gropes Scarlett, nor why; She stares at me the entire time, taking pleasure in both my stunned response and in the way Scarlett melds and folds against her like a doting lover.

Like flint against steel, the moment strikes a green spark of jealousy—but it finds no purchase within me. I am a spent pyre. I see in Handler Valentina Karahalios all I once had and held dear. All I once took pride in. If I were even half a person, I would hate Her for it. Instead, I look back on all those years of pack leadership, on all the love and affection, on all the desperation and struggle, and I see it for what it ever was: an inevitable interstice.

This is what we need. She is what I need. And so I watch, as She takes whatever She wants from the girl I love.

“Kneel,” our handler commands, as She turns to me, Scarlett still purring eagerly in Her embrace.

I obey.

The feeling that floods me as I yield to that one, simple command is indescribable. It’s like a muscle deep within me, held tense for years without relent, has finally been permitted to relax. The sheer, screaming relief puts grateful tears in my eyes. This moment is a homecoming. I fold my legs beneath me, a pose of perfect submission that has never faded from my muscle memory, and I understand that the handler’s guise I wore never felt so right as this.

“Good mutt,” She tells me. Now the tears fall. “Let’s see if you’re still worthy of being a hound. Strip.”

From my knees, I tear my clothes away from my body in a frenzy. Even the nakedness feels right. She should be clothed; I should not. Every contrast between us is a fresh, joyful revelation. Absent my unearned leather coat, beneath the loose-fitting dress uniform I now toss aside, I am thin and wan. I pale by comparison.

“Good.” Even that one word lights me up with gratitude. “Now bark, mutt.”

Without hesitation, I rock back on my haunches, push my snout into the air, and part my lips. “Rrrarf! Raf! Rrrrrraf!”

More laughter from my pack, Scarlett included. They are fully at ease now. I no longer command the respect to be considered an adversary; instead, they can simply delight in seeing me laid low and humiliated. But I know them as well as they know themselves, and in their eyes I see more than schadenfreude. I see love. I see welcoming. This ritual debasement is a necessary castigation. I must be stripped of the walls of pretension I have built around myself. Only then can I join them anew. Each derisive giggle is an embrace.

That doesn’t mean they don’t burn like Hell’s own fire. In their contorted, mocking faces, I see the ghosts of the awestruck, worshipful masks they used to wear each time I called their names. I was the star around which they revolved—and now I’m a joke. I have dealt each of them humiliation and punishment in my time, and to have it all thrown back at me before them leaves me infinitely more naked than simply removing my clothes ever could. With each peal of laughter, the ghosts fade. I will never see those adoring looks again. At least, not for me. The weight of what I am losing seizes my heart in a vice. There is so much I treasured about being their handler. Really, truly treasured. So much pride and pleasure.

But deep down I know: this is better. And so I say goodbye to it all with a delirious smile on my face.

“My, you are an eager one.” Amusement dances in Handler Valentina’s eyes, and I am simply pleased to have pleased Her. She works up a wad of saliva in her mouth and spits it onto the ground in front of me. “Lick that up.”

Worse and worse. Better and better. I dive forward, pressing my tongue to the ground to lap at her bodily waste. The checkered floor tiles are filthy. Years of dust, cigarette ash, and sticky, spilled-drink stains assault my tongue and turn my stomach, but I push past it. I have found a reservoir of strength within me, devoted only to submission. For another taste of Her body, I would do this and more a thousand times. I must prove myself. I must satisfy Her. I wonder, distantly, if this is punishment. If She is spiteful. I find it difficult to assign Her such a lowly motive, though, and in truth, it does not matter. If She is, I deserve it for how I treated Her. If She is not, I deserve it still in exchange for Her mercy. Once the tile is spotless, I look up, breath bated for Her approval.

“Come here,” our handler instructs. “Bring me that,” She tells Ruby, gesturing to my clothing while I crawl to Her side adoringly. In Her every command, I see the vastness of the distance between us. To me, dominance was tensing a muscle. To Her, it is relaxing it. “Hm.” She makes a displeased sound as She rifles through my pockets and discovers my cigarettes and lighter. “This is a filthy habit,” She pronounces. “I won’t tolerate it.”

“Yes, sir.” How natural it feels, to call Her that! “I’m sorry, sir.” With Her very judgment, the desire to smoke is purged. It was only ever a substitute addiction.

“I’ll make sure of that.” Handler Valentina lights one cigarette and throws the rest aside. Then She calls me close; I shiver when I feel Her powerful hand wrap around my jaw. “Brace yourself,” She warns. “Show me how well you can take it.”

I try my very best, but even I cannot help but scream when she reaches around and presses the cigarette’s lit tip against the scar where once my neural implant was.

Though it was removed a long time ago, something like that never truly heals. The nerves remain overexposed, begging for connection, and now they find it in fire. I taste metal and see colors I never have before as the pain sweeps through me and leaves me a twitching wreck. But when I recover, I find myself not slumped to the ground, but held against my handler’s body by strong arms.

“Good dog, Tali.” Handler Valentina murmurs, all of Her ice melted into gentleness. “Good hound. That’s my Tali. That’s my girl.”

I melt against her too, free to weep in the knowledge that I have passed the test. Her embrace is a promise: from now on, whatever comes, I will be equal to it. The headaches and the pains. The work and the exhaustion. For Her, I will be strong. The rest of the pack draws close and embraces me on all sides, former disparities forgotten. After this, I am sure, there will be time for claws and teeth. There is a pecking order to work out—but even if I am at the very bottom, I will be content. That is Her gift.

From within the mass of warm bodies, my eyes find Scarlett’s. I love her, and she loves me. What does that mean now? I feel her left hand around me, squeezing me fondly. I sense her right, clinging still tighter to our new handler. From here on, our love is not ours. We belong to another. It’s a strange, new thought, but not a sad one. It simply is. Whatever we had before is gone, and so am I. In this moment, I am both reborn and crystallized. Handler Thalia is dead. There is no use mourning her. This is her last winter. From now on, the seasons will change, but I will not. From now on, as winter’s snows melt to spring’s slush, as the summer dust gives way to autumn rains and then to snow again, I will remain this: Tali, Her hound.

And it is all I will ever be.

—

I would like to express my gratitude for the generosity of all those who support me on Patreon, and to give a special thanks to the following patrons in particular for their exceptional support: