The Cost of Paradise
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 9
The kid at the gate looked at her badge, and then at her, and then at the badge again.
“Ma’am, this says instructor.”
“Yes.”
“Instructor instructor?”
“I do not know what the second one means.”
He handed it back. “Have a good one, ma’am.”
“Thank you.”
She walked in past him and did not look back, and she told Carlos later that she had known before she reached the first building exactly how the whole day was going to go, and had decided in the parking lot that she was not going to spend any of it being insulted, because being insulted takes energy and she had a class to teach.
They took her through the equipment cage on the way to the range and she did not slow down for it.
There was nothing in that room to surprise her. She had been on the end of American supply for two years — had eaten their rations and used their glass and watched them leave serviceable gear in the dirt because it was not worth the freight home. She knew exactly how the rich army kept itself.
What she could not help doing was the arithmetic.
Optics in foam. Barrels in racks. Bipods still in the plastic. Ammunition stacked past head height with the lot numbers stenciled on the ends, row on row on row, and a sergeant walking beside her talking about consumption.
“How much of this goes in a year?”
“Most of it, ma’am. Training eats it.”
“Training.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She kept walking. Somewhere behind her eyes she was setting that room against a hillside, and it came out the way she had known it would come out before she started, and there was not one thing to be done about it. Men she had left eight time zones away were, at that hour, making one working rifle out of three broken ones, the way they had done it for years, because nobody had ever sent them a fourth.
“We went seven months once with no pay,” she said, not turning around. “Not one of them left.”
The sergeant did not answer, which was correct, because there was nothing to say to it.
“Show me the range,” said Avîn.
There were fourteen of them in the bay and they stood up when the major brought her in, and the major said some things about her background that were accurate and vague at the same time, and then he left, and then it was just her and fourteen Americans who had been told a foreign woman was going to teach them long-range shooting.
Nobody said anything rude. That was not the problem. The problem was the quality of the quiet.
“You have questions,” she said. “Ask them now. I would rather have them now than have you thinking them for six weeks.”
Nothing.
“All right.” She put her hands behind her back. “I will ask for you. You are wondering what I have done. You are wondering if I am here because I am good or because someone owed a favor. You are wondering whether a woman my size can even work the rifle.” A few of them shifted. “These are not stupid questions. If a stranger came to teach me, I would want to know the same. So.”
She let it sit a moment.
“I have been shooting since I was nine years old, because my father needed meat and I was steadier than my brothers. I have been doing this work for pay and for my people for eleven years, in mountains and in towns and in a city that was very bad. I am here because your government decided that what I know is worth having. That is all the answer you get from me about it, and it is more than you will get about anything else.”
A staff sergeant near the back — big, older than the rest, arms folded — said, “How many confirmed?”
It got very quiet.
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“No. I do not carry them as a number and I will not say one out loud to make you sit up straighter.” She looked at him without any heat at all. “If you need a number before you can learn from me, you should go now, because you will not learn anything from me anyway. The number is not the trade. Anyone can have a number. The trade is what happens in the four days before the number.”
The staff sergeant looked at her for a while.
“Copy that, ma’am,” he said, and unfolded his arms.
Somebody in the middle of the room said, “Ma’am, are you going to shoot for us?”
“Do you need me to?”
The room did that thing where nobody answers and everybody means yes.
“All right,” she said. “Once. Because you will not hear me properly until it is done, and then we will not do it again, because I am not a circus.”
They went out. It was a gray morning with a shifting little wind that had been ruining everyone’s groups all week and had put four of them in a bad mood about it.
She did not make anything of it. She did not talk about the wind or explain what she was doing. She lay down with a rifle that was not hers, off the rack, that she had put maybe ten rounds through in her life, and she was still for what felt to the class like a very long time and was probably ninety seconds, and then she fired once at a distance that had been embarrassing all of them for six days.
Boyd was on the glass.
He did not say anything for a second.
“Sergeant?”
“That’s — “ He sat back from the spotting scope. “Yeah. That’s center.”
“Good.” She got up and handed the rifle back to the kid it belonged to. “Now. That was not skill. Understand that or the whole six weeks is wasted on you.” She brushed her sleeve off. “That was one round on a known distance at a paper target that is not moving and is not shooting back and does not have a family. Any of you will do that by the end of the course. It is arithmetic.” She started back toward the bay. “The skill is the four days before. That I cannot show you in a morning. That is what you are actually here for.”
They followed her in. Nobody said anything about the number again for six weeks.
She took them out to the four hundred and watched them shoot and said nothing for two hours.
That unnerved them more than anything. They kept looking back at her. She stood with her hands behind her back and watched, and moved down the line, and watched some more, and did not correct anybody, and after a while they stopped looking back and started actually shooting.
At the end of it she walked to the third man from the left.
“You are strong,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“You are very strong and it is hurting you. You are holding the rifle. Do not hold it. Let it lie on you.” She crouched beside him. “You are fighting to make it still. Still is not a thing you make. Still is a thing that is left over when you stop doing everything else.”
“That’s — okay. Yes, ma’am.”
“Again. And breathe all the way out first.”
He shot again.
“Better.”
“That was better?”
“That was much better and you know it was, and now you are pretending you do not, because you are twenty-three.” She was already moving down the line. Somebody laughed. The big staff sergeant did not laugh, but something in his face had come loose.
She gave them the arithmetic in the first week and it took four days, and she gave them the other thing for the rest of the six weeks and told them on the first day that most of them would never have it.
“The arithmetic you will learn,” she said. “Wind, drop, the time the round takes to arrive, the lie the heat tells you about distance. It is not easy but it is only arithmetic, and a clever boy learns it in a season. Your machines do most of it now anyway.” She tapped the side of a scope with one fingernail. “This is very good. It is better than anything I had until I was twenty-five. It will tell you where the bullet goes. It will not tell you whether to send it, and it will not do the waiting for you, and the waiting is the job.”
“How long’s the longest you ever waited, ma’am?”
“Four days.”
“For one shot?”
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