NOT A SHELTER

She had come in through the side door because the side door was closer to where the vehicle was parked, and she had not eaten since the previous evening.

Nobody looked at her twice. That was the entire point of the hoodie.

She got a tray, took a coffee and two pieces of toast she did not particularly want, and sat down on the floor with her back against the end of a table at the quiet end of the hall, because the dog would not settle on the tile in the middle of a room with three hundred people moving through it and she was not going to make him.

She put one hand flat on his shoulder.

The dog lay down and put his chin between his paws and did not take his eyes off the door.

They had been there about four minutes when the specialist arrived.

He was about twenty-five. Very short pale blond hair in a high-and-tight, clean-shaven, the kind of tall square young man who has been told he has command presence by somebody who meant it as a compliment. His name tape said GRIFFIN. He had been on that installation for four months.

He stood over her with his hands on his hips.

"Hey lady, this is a military mess hall. Not a shelter. Take your mutt and get out."

She did not get up.

She looked up at him, and her face did not do anything at all — no offence, no fear, no apology. She had a narrow face and dark hair pulled tightly back into a low bun with nothing loose in it, and she was about forty-five, and up close she was not the person he had decided she was from six metres away.

"He's not a pet," she said.

Her voice was low and completely flat.

Griffin laughed. He had an audience by then — two tables had stopped eating, the way tables do.

"I don't care what you call him. And civilians don't get to make rules on my base."

She looked at him for about a second and a half.

Then she stood up.

She did it without hurrying and without using her hands, which is harder than it looks from a flat sit, and when she was upright she was a head shorter than he was and she did not step back to give herself room the way people do.

The dog came up with her. He did not make a sound.

"You should be very careful," she said, "who you call a civilian."

That was the first warning. Nobody in the hall understood that it was a warning, including Griffin.

"What are you gonna do?" He tilted his head at her. "Lecture me from inside that hoodie?"

There were people laughing by then. Not many. Enough.

"No," she said. "I'm giving you one chance to walk away."

That was the second warning, and it was the last one, and she gave it in exactly the same voice she had used to say that the dog was not a pet.

Griffin leaned in.

"You're nobody here," he said. "Remember your place."