had killed Morris, and the guy who shot Tommy.
I fired again, and a chip of bark blew away two feet above the outline’s head.
“I can’t do it, Mary,” I said, dropping the gun onto the ground and standing up.
“Now you’ll have to resight the scope,” she said, picking up the rifle.
“Didn’t you hear me? I can’t do this!”
“Just practice,” she said. “You can do it. You’ve been beating everyone in camp for weeks. You’re beating me, and I grew up with guns. I had my first twenty-two when I was ten, and my dad had been teaching me to shoot his guns since I was seven. And as of our last competition, you came in third place out of twenty.”
“That was a fluke. So what if I shoot like this when we’re in Munich? What if I’m shaking so hard I can’t even look through the scope? I’m supposed to be a sniper. At this rate I’ll kill our own people who are down on the ground.”
“Two bad shots don’t make you a bad sniper. You probably just need water and something in your stomach.”
“I see him every time I shoot,” I said.
Mary was quiet. She was looking down at the rifle in her hands, checking the scope to see if it was damaged.
Without looking at me, she said, “I know you do.”
“How am I supposed to live with that? And don’t tell me that it’s better to kill one person than lose billions, because I’m so sick of John saying that. The Players are legitimate targets—we need to stop them. Even kill them if they don’t listen to us. That sheriff was one of the good guys. He didn’t need to die. He shouldn’t have even been there. Damn Eugene.”
“I agree,” she said simply. “It was Eugene’s fault. I worry every day about you and Kat. Kat’s smart, but Eugene is a screw-up. He’ll get you killed if something doesn’t change.”
“Well, we’re out of time for things to change. The meteor can’t be postponed, and that means that we have to send the invitations.”
“We have time. The Olympics don’t start for another two weeks.”
I took the rifle back from her and aimed at the closest target—a white fir with a big red dot spray-painted on the trunk. It was only 25 yards away. I fired.
“Wide right,” Mary said.
I fired again, aiming to the left of the tree trunk.
“Hit,” she said.
I fired again. And again. And again until the magazine was empty.
It didn’t take long to break camp and load our equipment. We left the tents and the rest of our camping gear—our Coleman stoves, sleeping bags, coolers—and just took what we thought we would need. One day Mary was going to come back and return to her old life, maybe. But for now the camp was secluded in a place where no one should stumble across it until hunting season. And if they did, they wouldn’t necessarily know it was us. The only thing she insisted we clean up was the thousands of brass shells at the gun range. She wasn’t worried about her family finding a shooting range—they were all shooters, and there was another range somewhere else on the ranch—but the sheer quantity of spent shells made it obvious that this range was not for casual use.
It was nearly three in the afternoon when we started driving to Reno. Mary and I rode in the Suburban, the second vehicle in our little convoy. We wanted to leave the van behind—it was what we used to rob the gun store, and it might have been seen by someone—but we just had too many people and too much gear. We planned to ditch it as soon as we found something else.
We had pooled our money together as soon as we got to the ranch. We didn’t have enough, though; it had cost Lee and Lin quite a bit to secretly obtain enough C4 and thermite for our invitations. We’d have to find another business to rob to get the kind of cash we’d need for plane tickets: traveling to Munich was expensive in itself, but first we had to fly people to all kinds of unusual places. My squad was going to Istanbul for the Minoan Player and then Baghdad for the Sumerian. Lee and Lin had to get into China, which was almost impossible. We had to get to Syria and Ethiopia and India, and all those flights would be pricey, not to mention the hotels we’d need, and food, bribes, and tickets to Munich.
No one had made plans for anything after Munich. No one had even brought it up. I think we were all too nervous.
Our caravan of vehicles—the Jeep, the Suburban, the van, and the Skylark—stopped at a grocery store in Susanville. Douglas and Barbara, who had spent much more time out of camp than the rest of us, went inside to buy dinner.
“Everybody else stay in your vehicle,” Walter said over the walkie-talkie. “Molly, can you find a new license plate for the van?”
She was in the Jeep, ahead of us, and jumped out. She walked confidently into the back of the parking lot.
“How long is it to Reno?” Bruce asked from the driver’s seat.
“Ninety minutes,” Mary said. “And I don’t care what anyone else says: I’m taking the first shower.”
“Tired of washing in the stream?” Kat asked. “I may fight you for that shower.”
“How many rooms are we getting for the twenty of us?” Jim asked. “I vote we splurge. I want a bed.”
“A bed,” I said, relishing the thought. “I haven’t gotten a single good night’s sleep in forever.”
“I’m with you guys,” Bruce said. “But I’m not the one holding the money. I’m just driving the car.”
“I donated my life savings to this,” I said. “And I’m getting a bed.”
Mary squeezed my hand. We had shared a tent, along with Bruce and Larry. I had gotten used to nuzzling up next to her, wrapping my arms around her as we slept.
Mary had become a part of me, more than I had ever thought possible. We spent every waking minute together. We knew how to press each other’s buttons. When we ran the hills at camp, I could tell when she was just tired or when she needed real help—and she did the same for me. When she was fussing with the camping gear, making dinner or stoking the fire or sweeping dirt out of the floor of the tent, I knew what must be troubling her. I knew her thoughts, and she knew mine.
And she helped me as I struggled to get over killing the sheriff. When I woke in the middle of the night, screaming and fighting against the claustrophobic confines of my sleeping bag, she could whisper me back to sleep.
When this Calling was over, I would have nothing left—no home to go back to, no money to live on, no friends I could turn to. Except Mary.
But could I truly turn to Mary? Now that she was going off with Bruce, I … Well, I didn’t know. What if something happened to her?
I had to get that out of my head. I shouldn’t be paranoid. This had been the plan for two months, almost. I should have come to terms with it.
Ahead of us I saw Molly climb back into the Jeep, the old license plate in her hand. She worked fast.
It took 20 more minutes for Douglas and Barbara to return from the grocery store, and they had a full cart. I wished that it could be a hot meal, but at least it was food. They stopped at each vehicle and handed off bread, cold cuts, mayo and mustard, and far more snacks than we’d ever need: potato chips, Hydrox cookies, Hershey bars, caramels, Ring Dings, Twinkies, and several six-packs of Fanta, 7Up, and TaB.
Mary took the bread and cold cuts and took sandwich orders from everyone in the car. It wasn’t fine dining, but it tasted fresh, and it was the first meat we’d eaten in months that hadn’t been cooked over a campfire.
We