"It has not always been the plan at these things," Hargrove said.
"No," Grant agreed. "That is why we printed the card."
Their exchange reached Willa only as a low official murmur, which was correct. She did not need a champion at the table. Champions at tables had been the bane of her adolescence, men who intervened to give her a turn, a prize, a photograph, a scholarship application they were sure would be received kindly because of who had signed it, until she could not tell which of her attainments had been built and which had been bequeathed, and had gone through a grim, lonely season at eighteen refusing everything with a committee's letterhead and almost refusing the sport itself. She needed, exactly, a printed card, a checked rifle, a name read properly and a firing point she was allowed to walk to in her own time. She needed the rules to be no warmer and no colder for her than for Danny Mercer, who received, as if by right, the full weather system of fame. She could handle weather. It was special climates, manufactured on her behalf, that suffocated.
So she waited while the range officer completed his circuit beyond the line. She waited while a banner at the covered stand, printed with the name of a feed company in letters that had faded from red to a hopeful pink, flapped once and subsided. She waited while the small dust devil that had been worrying the far corner of the car park all morning finally unravelled into ordinary air. Inside the waiting she built, as her father had taught her without ever using so large a word for so practical a thing, her privacy. Breath in, and the rifle was a weight. Breath out, and the rifle was a task. Breath in, and the crowd was a collection of people who had paid for parking and brought their children and meant, in their individual ways, considerably less harm than their collective shape suggested. Breath out, and Danny Mercer was a talented man afraid of a changing story. Breath in, and Rose Callen was lifting the lid off a school oven, checking her phone between trays, telling a kitchen assistant that her daughter was shooting today in a tone that asked for no comment. Breath out, and Tom Callen was not a ghost at her shoulder but a set of sentences in a notebook in the top drawer of her dresser, one of which she carried now like a smooth stone in a pocket. Look at one thing only. Let everything else be weather.
The range officer returned. A flag changed its meaning. Somewhere behind her a man coughed, apologised for coughing to a person who had not minded, and was hushed by the apology as much as by the cough. Grant stood. The act of a seated official standing at a final is a punctuation mark everyone can read, and the crowd read it and pulled itself straighter along the rope, phones settling into their final positions like birds finding a wire. Willa felt the punctuation in the air against her neck.
"Finalist to the point," Grant said.
Willa stepped forward, onto the ground reserved for the person whose name had been read, and the gravel took her boots with the small, definite sound she had been listening for since Danny Mercer had tried to hand her a borrowed future along with her own rifle. She did not look back to see whether he was smiling. She did not look sideways to the table to seek Hargrove's assessment or Grant's approval. She looked, as she crossed the last few feet of public ground and entered the lonelier ground of the firing point, at one thing only. The pale sand ran out ahead of her, undisturbed except for the tracks of officials who had walked it at dawn. Beyond it, small, rusty, almost humble against the scale of mountains and sky, a steel plate waited on two legs for whatever she had come to tell it.
Behind her, so quietly that later accounts would disagree about whether it had been said at all, Danny spoke to the man beside him, and his voice had lost the last of its performance polish.
"Watch her feet," he said. "She has not moved wrong yet."
Willa set down nothing. She carried everything she had to the line, and the line, at last, was hers.
Chapter 3: The Standing Final
Before Sheriff Ellis Grant read the rules aloud, he did what he had done at every final for nineteen years, which was to look down the table at the clipboard, look up at the crowd behind the line, and wait until the noise had spent itself. It never spent itself all at once. On a desert range the noise carried. A man in a straw hat was explaining to his neighbour why a scope made no difference at all if you could not hold your own weight, and the neighbour was explaining back, louder, that it made all the difference in the world. Somebody's phone was playing a scrap of music. A child kept asking when the shooting would start, in the patient, merciless way of children who have been promised a thing and intend to collect it.
Grant let it run. He had a gold badge on a tan shirt and a pen in his pocket that he had already tested twice on the corner of the page, and he knew that a crowd told to be quiet too early would spend the rest of the morning finding ways not to be. So he waited, with his cap low against the sun, until the voices thinned to coughs and shifting boots and the creak of the shade awning over the officials' table.
Then he stood.
"Final of the State Standing Rifle Challenge," he said, and although he did not raise his voice very much, the range had been built, by accident and by years of habit, to carry a voice from the table out across the gravel. "Five shooters qualified. Five shots each. Standing."