Endrei Travassen can’t stand fireworks. Not for the usual veteran reasons. She only ever heard the big guns over comms or as faraway echos. Her window blinds are drawn to keep out the light but the sound, the whistles and pops and bangs, fill the sky over the city. A yearly reminder that the war is over, and she lost.

A reek of sex and sweat tinges the meagre bedroom’s cool air. The girl, nude save for her lace choker, drools onto Endrei’s knee, staring up with glassy blue eyes as she rolls her hips along the tight black laces. She’s been dosed with starlight. Cheap backstreet shit, not the stronger concoction they’d used in the Handler Corps. Just enough to get the little pet nice and spacey, the dim light of a bedside lamp dancing across her sweat-slicked skin. It’s cute. Not like the dogs had been, of course. Not hitting the same. This watered-down brew will wear off, and the girl will be a person again. She’ll wonder why this refined forty-something is living in a cheap apartment on the dodgy side of town.

Endrei squints, tries to imagine the Imperial black rose in the centre of the girl’s forehead. The stem tracing down to the tip of her nose, leaves spread out like arms to curl around her eyes. That’s how Endrei had marked her hound. A little tradition that had emerged among the Handler Corps, a visible cementing of one’s ownership over their dog. Endrei’s had been a tall brute, all red hair and muscle with a nasty scar across the bridge of her nose. Hardly fitting for the beautiful order the Empire had strived for. It amuses Endrei, thinking her former hound might still be out there, that rose emblazoned on her face. A constant, unmistakable indicator that she had once been leashed.

The Empire had marked Endrei just as clearly, of course. It’s why she has to wear brown contacts to hide the pale blue of her eyes, and dye her long tidy braids black so their bone white isn’t revealed. It’s why she has to lie about what she did during the war; ask her now and she’ll tell you she was a comms technician. It wasn’t just the dogs who’d been filled with drugs and unspeakable little machines. Endrei had been told it was to dull her emotions, keep her head clear. Let her do her job in silence.

She’d once came upon another handler in a shadowy corner of the base’s hanger, beating on her own skull with a hammer. “It’s so bright, Travassen,” the other woman had slurred, calm as a clear sky, a dark slurry of blood and wet hair running from her temple. “It’s too clear. It’s too quiet.” In her eyes, total clarity, even with her own brains running down around them. “It’s too fucking quiet,” she’d said. Then, before Endrei could run in and wrestle the hammer away from her, she smashed it down again onto the back of her head and crumpled into a spasming heap. Endrei swears she can still hear the wet crunch in her deepest dreams.

Endrei gets it, to an extent. She felt it as well- still feels it. A cool, calm void in her head. The simple absence of those little thoughts and voices which might otherwise cloud her way. She has the fortitude to stand it. But it is so disconcertingly fucking clear. It’s the quiet of the deep forest, when the birds stop singing in a predator’s presence.

The girl’s panting grows as she bucks faster, harder.

Endrei orders, “Come.”

And she does, breaths breaking into a haggard moaning which breaks into a hoarse cry. She quivers and Endrei can feel the warm spill of her orgasm across her boot. The older woman lets her temporary pet breathe a moment, resting her brown head against her knee.

Finally the girl turns her face back up. Dim-eyed, dripping sweat, smiling weakly. “Was I good, miss?”

Endrei puts on a practised smile. “Yes, puppy,” she says. “You did very well.”

The girl’s smile widens, a shaky little breath escaping her. Wet drips onto the cheap bedroom carpet. Endrei tilts her head. The boots were the only thing she was able to sneak out of the Empire’s carcass, when she’d fled halfway across the world to escape its death throes. “You did make a mess though, didn’t you?”

Outside, the fireworks are still popping and crackling. Breaking Day, they call it. Celebrating the Empire’s announcement of surrender as it bled out from a thousand cuts. This is the tenth now.

Blinking slowly, the girl takes a moment to sort through the constellations in her mind. “Oh.” She looks to the bootblacking kit in the corner. “I’ll...”

“Not like that,” Endrei cuts in. “Not yet. You have to clean it another way first.”

Again the girl stares into a hazy cosmos, slow to comprehend. Then she dismounts, almost falls over as she does, and lowers her face to the slick she’d left across the boot. She swallows. Then, she begins to lap up her dampness.

Endrei sits back and sips her wine, and tries to feel something more than the light pressure of tongue against leather.