Chapter 3

The orderly room was a low, beige building two hundred yards from the dining facility, set behind a line of bare oak trees that hadn't leafed out yet. Maya Vane walked there straight from lunch, her blouse stiff with dried gravy, her boots still carrying the dust of the morning's formation. She didn't go to her barracks to change. She didn't stop at her locker. A man like Doss would read any delay as fear, and she had no intention of handing him that.

The door was propped open, letting in the spring air. A clerk sat at the front desk, a young specialist with wire-rimmed glasses and a name tape reading WILLIAMS, typing something slow and careful on a keyboard older than she was. She looked up when Vane came in, took in the gravy-stained blouse in one flat glance, and said, "He's in the back."

Vane didn't ask how she knew. She just walked past the desk and down the short hallway to the office with the open door.

Doss was sitting behind his desk, leaning back in his chair, reading something on a clipboard — a training roster, by the look of it, columns of names and dates and check marks. He didn't look up when she filled the doorway. He let her stand there for a long moment, the silence stretching like wire.

Then he set the clipboard down and looked at her, and his eyes were flat and hard, the pleased smile gone entirely.

"Shut the door."

She shut it.

"Sit."

She sat in the hard plastic chair across from his desk, the kind that wobbles if you lean back, and folded her hands in her lap. She didn't lean back. She sat straight, chin level, and waited.

Doss studied her the way he'd studied the roster. Column by column, looking for the mark that didn't belong. "Nine days back," he said. "Nine days, and you already got a reputation."

Vane said nothing.

"You know what they're calling you now? Down in that dining facility? They're calling you the girl who made Sergeant Doss walk out of his own mess hall." He said it with a thin smile, like he was telling her a joke she wouldn't get. "That's a nice reputation to start with."

"I didn't make you walk out," Vane said. "I finished my lunch."

The smile got thinner. "Careful."

"I'm not being careful. I'm being accurate."

Doss leaned forward and put his elbows on the desk, steepled his fingers, and let the silence stretch again. When he spoke, his voice was quieter, and the Southern drawl had flattened out into something harder. "Here's how this works, Specialist. I run this dining facility. I've run it for three years. I decide who sits where, who gets seconds, who gets told to move along. I decide what the standard is, and I hold people to it. You understand?"

"I understand."