Then there is Margeaux.
Her Stars are custom cast in Corrander gold and purple, and they sing through the air, cutting a path directly to the target and leaving a metallic echo in their wake. My second throws are solid, but my Stars seem to hang heavily by comparison. They all find the target except for the last—?an outlier that feels wild leaving my hand. It bounces from the target rather than sticking and drops me even further behind Margeaux’s established thirty-point lead.
I look up at the scoreboard and force myself to take a deep breath. Shirley leads me by ten points, a slim margin to hold for the final round. But Margeaux’s score is fifty points beyond that, and I have only three more chances to catch her. My blood courses with adrenaline. I’ve spent too many hours practicing, sweating, aching, dreaming, to lose like this. I have one more chance to make those months of work worth it.
Mrs. Percy flips me a discreet thumbs-up from the sideline. At the urging of a shrill whistle, the target springs to life and begins to move along its tracks.
Shirley steps to the line for her final throws, and her hand shakes when she reaches for her Stars. The first hits the target along the outer rim, but the second leaves her hand violently, flying past the target to land in the grass like a heavy jewel. She picks up her final Star with the air of someone who has already conceded her loss, and she throws it without conviction. Her final score isn’t enough to meet even Margeaux’s second round.
Which just leaves me to catch her.
“Final round for Aila Quinn, from Sterling,” the announcer says, and gestures me forward to the line.
I am still in this, I tell myself. There’s still the smallest possibility I could win.
But the tingling feeling I sometimes get, the one that tells me my next throw is going to be good, is missing. I try to summon it as I watch the target move along its path. There’s a cool breeze on my face. Someone in the crowd coughs. The Stars feel heavy in my hand.
I try to call to mind my mother’s face.
But suddenly I can’t.
I frantically search for memories of her, any of them, but all I can picture is little more than a blurred shadow. She has just slipped away, like sand trickling between my fingers. Like everything in this cursed place, I think fiercely.
I turn without really looking and hurl the remaining three Stars from my hand at the same time.
They soar through the air and rock the target almost simultaneously.
The crowd gasps, and I turn to look.
The first has landed on an inner ring, just to the right of the bull’s-eye. But the second and third have sunk in almost to their hilts, centimeters away from dead center. Two bull’s-eyes.
My breath catches in my lungs. Their force is making the candle swing lazily, back and forth, as if it’s trying to decide whether to fall.
After an endless moment the candle finally slows and returns to resting. Its fuse, holding one hundred points within it, remains unlit.
Sterling’s crowd jumps to its feet anyway, chanting my name in unison when my points are posted and I vault into first place.
I step back, and a tiny sprout of hope shoots up. I try to push it back down, but there is no stopping it.
Margeaux suddenly seems much less sure of herself. She moves to her line, mouthing something under her breath. The banners flutter as the crowd quiets. She steals another glance in George’s direction and steels herself. Then her arm cracks like a shot as she sends her Stars rocketing through the air.
The first one hits the outer edge of the target, narrowly avoiding a complete miss. The second falls nearer to the bull’s-eye, but still in the outer ring. I watch her score tick up on the board, calculating the difference. Her final throw has to be a good one, or else I’ve won it. I fix her with my steel eyes, willing her to let me have this. Suddenly wanting it as much as I’ve ever wanted anything before.
Margeaux winds up and hurls her final Star. It arcs through the air in a straight shot, as if the target is drawing it there by force, and every eye in the stadium watches it hit the candle. It slices through the wax, hard and clean.
This time, the candle does not hesitate.
Its lit wick topples forward and catches the fuel in the grass, and the word Corrander blazes and pops in the ground just beyond my feet.
Margeaux’s fans shriek and raise hundreds of tiny flags in the air, a field of violets and marigolds. The red and silver flags wither as everyone from Sterling sits back down.
I blink numbly at the candle. The tiny sprout of my hope is ripped out, all the way down to its roots. I can’t believe that after all this time, in only a handful of seconds, I’ve lost.
I force myself to go to Margeaux and extend my right hand.
“Congratulations,” I say. Before she can respond, the Corrander fans surround her, lifting her above their heads, and I seize the opportunity to slip onto the sidelines.
“Aila!” Mrs. Percy pulls me behind a corner of the stands where we can’t be seen. “You did well,” she says. “It was a very good showing for your first time, and you’ve made us all proud.”
