Willa did not turn at first. Turning was not forbidden; only foolish. But at the unaccompanied point, with the rifle in her hands and the mark still ahead of her, she permitted herself one look over her shoulder, because a finalist is also a human being and because Grant himself, at the table, had turned fully in his chair to see.
Chief Walter Hargrove was coming down from the stand with his binoculars on their strap against his chest.
He was taller than his legend when you saw him outside a photograph, though age had folded some of that height inward, into a stoop of the shoulders that the black jacket did not bother to disguise. The jacket bore the blue-and-gold patch on the sleeve that placed him — coach, official, safety chief, the exact title shifted according to who told the story, but always the patch meant a man who had once trained people who went on to be measured in Olympic light. His cap sat low. His face under it was long and unsentimental, with the patience of stone in a river. The binoculars were large and black and absurdly serious, an instrument from another era of his life, hanging against his ribs like a second, heavier heart.
He said something to Grant as he passed the table — too low to carry, though Willa saw Grant's mouth answer "Last shooter, sir," and then, after a pause in which Hargrove's eyes found her out on the gravel, "Callen."
Hargrove said nothing that reached her. He nodded once, in the direction of the plate, or of her, or of the day generally. He took his place not at the table but at the end of it, in the strip of shade that belonged to nobody and therefore, she understood, to him by seniority. He rested one hand flat on the warm wood. The binoculars stayed down. That restraint steadied her more than any speech could have done. Hargrove would look when there was something to look at. He did not gawk at girls walking.
"Callen," Grant called, and this time the small amplifier was on, so her name acquired a faint metallic halo, "approach your mark when you are ready. The line is yours until I close it."
The courtesy of *when you are ready* was standard and she knew it was standard, but it still gave her three seconds of pure, irrational gratitude. She nodded without looking back again. The last steps took her out of the shade of nothing into a light so complete it felt like a substance she was wading through. Gravel gave up its heat. Her boots found the firing mark — two pale boards half-sunk in the sand at the exact prescribed place, worn silky by a generation of soles — and she stood between them and felt the small, immense click of alignment happen somewhere below conscious thought, heel and toe and the remembered stance falling into negotiation with the ground.
She turned, fully, toward the target.
Up close it would have been an ugly, ordinary thing: plate, rust, legs, the pin's round head at the centre catching who knew what light. At this distance, down a lane of heat and gravel, it became the whole reduced world. Everything else thinned. Danny thinned. The phones thinned to black seeds in other people's hands. Hargrove's binoculars thinned to a withheld judgement at her back. Even Grant, even the clipboard, even the smudge where her father's name had been rubbed off her own — weather. All of it, weather.
Willa lifted the rifle a fraction, not yet to her shoulder. She rolled her shoulders once against the shirt's damp back. She felt the bun pull, the studs in her ears warm as buttons, the pen in her left pocket brush absurdly against her ribs when she breathed. Her hands knew their places before she told them. The sling, the wood, the cool ambition of the metal. Her father's voice was not mystical and it was not loud. It was instructional, which is to say it was love in the only suit it owned.
*Look at one thing only.*
She settled her feet in the gravel. The sound they made was final and small.
*Let everything else be weather.*
Behind the line, as if the day had been holding a breath it now decided it could not be responsible for, the crowd went completely, voluntarily, beautifully silent. In that silence Willa Callen, the last shooter, alone on the gravel, began to raise her rifle.
Chapter 8: The First Shot
There is a moment, inside the raising of a rifle, when it stops being an object and becomes an argument about where your body ends.
Willa had tried to describe it once, at nineteen, to a girl from the summer programme who had asked whether standing ever stopped feeling unnatural, and she had failed so completely that the girl laughed in a friendly way and Willa joined her, because the honest answer sounded like superstition when you said it in words. It did not stop feeling unnatural. That was the point. The body knows it is not a bench. The body has opinions, temperatures, grievances, a pulse it refuses to lend out on request. Standing well was not the art of silencing any of that. It was the art of giving each complaint a seat so far from the table that it could not reach the bread.
The rifle came up.
Wood to her cheek first — no, not first, but the cheek was where she became aware of it first, the stock's worn smoothness finding the place it had found ten thousand times, a place tender in the way of all repeated pressure. Her father had reshaped that contour years ago for shooters smaller than himself, had rasped and oiled it on the porch while the radio talked about rain that never arrived, and now it met her face in the sun like something that had been waiting politely. Her shoulder took the butt. Her left hand found its support. Her right settled where it belonged. Elbow, hip, the long negotiation of balance. A rifle raised standing is a house built while standing inside it.