Chapter 4
On a Thursday morning during my second week at Fort Bragg, three vehicles arrived at the range in a tight formation. The room changed before the doors opened — Patterson straightened by a fraction, Morrison went still, and the particular quality of quiet that descends when rank of a certain level enters a space settled over everything. A woman with two stars on her uniform stepped inside with Major Kowalski and a colonel behind her. Major General Sarah Mitchell did not need to announce herself or raise her voice. She simply told Patterson to carry on.
I was sent back to the line.
One hundred meters. Center. One-fifty. Center. Two hundred. Center.
Then Patterson moved the target to three hundred.
Even Morrison spoke at that. The range was not configured for this kind of day-one evaluation. The light was wrong — the afternoon glare coming in through the range's east-facing vents was shifting in the way light shifts when it wants to complicate things. The wind had changed three times in the last hour. Every person in the room understood that what was happening was no longer training. It was a question being asked in the only language I had been raised to answer.
I went prone. I found the stillness that lives between heartbeats. I listened to the air the way my grandfather had taught me — not to the sound of it, but to the texture of it on skin, the pressure of it against the side of the face, the way it moved and the way it paused before moving again.
May you like
I fired.
Kowalski walked downrange. When he came back, his face had changed in the way faces change when something expected hasn't resolved into the prediction. "Slight left of center," he said. "Four centimeters."
