Danny was standing to the left of the line with his arms loosely folded, his black shirt open over the grey tee, sun making nonsense of his blond hair, a water bottle untouched in one hand. He had taken his last shots like a man signing his own photograph, all ease on the surface and calculation underneath. He was watching her now without the smile from the handover. That was something. At the handover there had been cameras in his eyes even when there were no cameras in front of him. Now, for once, he looked like a competitor watching a course of fire he had already completed and could not alter. She found, unexpectedly, that she respected the plainness of it. He could not unshoot his score. She could not shoot hers in any place but the present. Between those two facts there was almost fairness.
Her boots were already dusty. She had changed them twice in her head that week, argued about tread and ankle and luck, and had ended in the same worn pair she trained in before dawn, the pair with the left heel ground a fraction lower from all the mornings she had stood in the kitchen doorway listening to the weather on the radio and shifting her weight without knowing she did it. Her mother had looked at the boots by the back door the night before she left, in the one phone call in which Rose Callen had allowed herself to say directly that she was proud and frightened in equal measure.
"You'll wear the lucky ones, then," Rose said.
"They're not lucky. They're just broken in."
"Same thing, at our income," said her mother, and Willa had laughed in the kitchen of the small house in a way that came back to her now, at the line, like a hand briefly on her back. Then it was gone, because sentiment at the wrong minute could soften the wrong muscles. She loved her mother too much to use her as a charm. Rose was on shift. Rose was ladling something institutional and nourishing in a school kitchen two counties away and checking her phone between trays, on a break she had traded for, with her supervisor's reluctant permission. The voicemail was already in Willa's head. She did not need to play it here. *You already know how to stand, baby. The rest is just people watching you do it.* Willa set that sentence down too, gently, beside the boots and the heat and the smudge on Grant's page.
A range volunteer, a boy of perhaps seventeen in a cap far too clean for the work, unclipped the gate in the low fence at the side of the firing line and held it open. The gesture was formal beyond his years. He had been instructed, evidently, that finalists were to be let through as if they were entering somewhere that mattered, and he was performing the instruction with his whole earnest face. Willa thanked him. His ears went red. She would remember that later — not because it was important in the official sense, but because it was the last normal human thing that happened before the gravel.
"Callen to the mark," Grant said.
She picked up the rifle.
It had been resting in the open case on the table, checked and checked again, its wooden stock warm not from the sun but from hands. Danny's hands, the armourer's hands, Grant's eyes passing over it. Her hands now. Weight is never only a number when you are tired of being watched. It ran up her forearms and into the familiar places in her shoulders, the places Tom Callen had built in her before she had language for them, one corrected elbow and one held breath at a time. The scope caught light and threw it away. The sling hung in the exact unremarkable drape she liked.
She had expected, in the smaller hours of the night, a dramatic feeling. A surge, a ringing, a conviction that history was bending its neck to look at her. She felt instead the usual homely inventory: throat dry, left knee very slightly uncertain, palms at precisely the dampness that was manageable, the khaki of her shirt sticking between her shoulder blades where her low bun dripped one escaped strand against her neck. Two chest pockets. A pen she did not need in the left one, because Tom had always carried a pen there at a final and she had copied him at sixteen without asking herself why, and now at twenty-three she knew perfectly well why and carried it anyway. Tradition, she thought, is just grief with good manners.
The gate clicked shut behind her.
That click was louder than the applause had been.
She walked.
No one who has not done it believes how long a short walk can be when it is measured in other people's expectations. The final mark was not far. On an ordinary training morning she covered the distance without thought, usually with a mug in the other hand for the first half of it, dodging the sprinkler puddle in winter and the ants' highway in summer. Today each step announced itself in the gravel — a crunch, a settle, a small betrayal of sound — and the rope and the faces and the phones receded at a pace that felt entirely out of proportion to her boots. The ground radiated heat up through the soles. By the third step her eyes had started their old watering at the corners from sun and dust, and she blinked in the rhythm Tom had taught her, not squeezing, just letting the lids fall and lift as if nothing under them were precious or in danger.