She felt no anger about it.
That surprised people when they learned the truth of her later, that there had been no anger in her, not even at the end.
Anger was a thing you spent. She had learned a long time ago, on a roof in the dark with a man dying in her lap, exactly how little of herself she had to spend. And she had never wasted any of it since.
So, she sat. She watched the door. She waited for the man she knew was coming, because she had told him where she would be.
Silas Webb wiped the same clean spot on the bar twice, and then a third time, and made a decision he had not made in a great many years.
He reached under the register for the old phone, the one with the numbers worn off the keys, and he stepped back toward the kitchen door where the noise was thinner. And he began, with a thick finger, to dial a man he had not called since a funeral.
The mockery by then had become a sport.
It happened the way these things happen, by accretion. Each man adding a little, none of them deciding to be cruel, all of them deciding to be funny.
Someone gave her a nickname. The Major, they called her, because of the way she sat, because it sounded right, because it was a way of pretending the joke was on her and not on their own unease.
Someone raised a glass.
"To the Major," Cain said.
And the bar laughed and drank. And the woman watched it all in the mirror with the patience of a tide.
There is a thing that happens in a crowd of young men when one of them decides on a target. And it is older than any uniform.
The cruelty does not belong to any single one of them. It is passed around like a bottle, each man taking a small pull and handing it on, so that no one drinks it all and no one feels the weight of it. A joke here, a laugh there. A nickname that nobody invented and everybody repeated.
The woman had seen it a hundred times, in a hundred rooms, on a hundred objectives. And she understood it for exactly what it was.
Not hatred, which at least has a spine. But the simple animal comfort of a pack that has agreed on who is outside it.