Down the flat of the range the sound came back to her a fraction late, thinned by distance and heat, and then it was gone into the gravel and the mountains and the held breath of the people behind the line, and there was only her own breathing to deal with again, and the weight of the rifle, and the familiar, unhelpful wish to know. She did not turn. She did not lift her head to search the far sand for the little rusty plate, because the plate was too far to read with a naked eye and because Tom Callen had written it out for her years before she understood why it mattered, in the notebook she still kept in the drawer beside her bed, in his impatient, slanting hand.
Look at one thing only. Let everything else be weather.
Weather, then, the murmur that rose behind her. Weather the phones coming up again in a ragged row. Weather the sun on the back of her neck and the grit that had found the edge of her boot when she walked out onto the gravel. Weather, above all, any thought of Danny Mercer standing back there in his black open shirt over his grey t-shirt, blond in the hard light, watching her with the particular smile he had worn when he handed her the rifle, as if the result had already been decided and all that remained was the entertainment of watching it happen.
"Again," Sheriff Ellis Grant said from the officials' table, not loudly. His voice carried because the range, after a shot, had the decency to go quiet for a little while. She could picture him without looking: tan shirt, gold badge catching the sun, name plate straight, pen uncapped over the clipboard, the cap with its embroidered patch shadowing his eyes. Grant saying the word the way an official should say it. Not encouragement. Not doubt. Procedure. A word that made a clean space and put her name inside it.
Willa worked the bolt.
There is a kind of honesty in a movement you have done ten thousand times and cannot dress up for anyone. She kept the rifle where it belonged, settled against her, and her hand found the bolt the way a hand finds a banister in a dark house it grew up in, not by searching but by memory living below thought. The metal was warming in the sun. The wooden stock held the heat differently, deeper and slower, and against her cheek and her hands it seemed to belong to another season altogether, to early mornings when the range was empty and the mountains were blue and her father stood three paces behind her saying nothing at all, which had been his best way of teaching. The bolt lifted, drew, and the spent world of the first shot was cleared away, and a new one took its place, and she closed it down with a sound that was small and definite and entirely hers.
No one behind the line could see the work her mind did in those seconds, which was as it should have been. From out there she must have looked like a figure in a photograph that kept being taken: a young woman of twenty-three, dark hair pulled back in a low bun, a few strands worked loose and stuck to the side of her neck, small stud earrings that flashed when she turned her head a fraction, a plain khaki button-up shirt with two chest pockets, a dark belt, standing alone on pale gravel with a scoped rifle, doing it again. The cameras liked repetition. It gave them something to hold.
What they could not film was the inside of the repetition. That was not the same the second time, and Tom had known that too, and had tried, in his notebook and in his life, to make her ready for it. The first shot at a final was a creature of preparation. You arrived at it with all your rituals intact. You had listened, before you came down to the line, with your phone pressed to your ear in the shade of the officials' awning while the other finalists joked too loudly, to a voicemail you had kept for two years and could have recited by heart.
Rose Callen's voice, slightly too close to the phone, slightly laughing at herself for leaving a message at all, saying, "It's only me, love. I've put the potatoes on. Whatever happens out there, you have already done the hard part, which was turning up and staying. Ring me when it's done, not before. I know what you're like."
The second shot had none of that protection. The second shot had a result behind it, even if she refused to look for it. It had the beginning of a pattern, which was a dangerous thing to want too early. It had the crowd beginning, very faintly, to change its mind about what sort of afternoon this was, and a changing crowd was louder weather than a mocking one. The mocking kind you could set aside like wind you had already measured. The interested kind crept. It leaned in. It wanted to be part of it. It made a girl back into an instructor's daughter or a story for the drive home, and either of those could pull her eye sideways off the one thing.
So she breathed, and let the rifle rise as she breathed, and did the plain work of standing.
Standing was the honest position. Tom said that the first time he let her attempt it for a full string, when she was fourteen and affronted by how unfair it felt compared to the bench, where a person could rest the world on sandbags and pretend the shaking was not theirs. "Bench tells you about the rifle," he had said, out on this same gravel, though in those days the target frames were wood and the plate at the far end was newer and less rust would have dared to show on it. "Standing tells you about you. There's nowhere to hide. That's not a punishment, Willa. That's information."