Characters: Kayla, Michael. Rating: K. Genre: Family. Warnings: None

"Oi. Kayla."

Kayla jumped, not expecting the voice to come from behind her as she stuffed her few belongings into the small dresser near her bunk, the one the cabin counsellor had told her was hers, now. She spun in place to see the short – he was about her height, but six years older, apparently – black-haired boy standing behind her, arms crossed.

Her gaze was immediately drawn to the empty quiver strapped to his hip. She'd been promised a chance to use the archery range after demanding it when she saw it, but the afternoon was fading fast and the chance hadn't come yet.

Kayla was getting rather frustrated about that. Archery was the thing she was good at, a constant even when her world crumbled around her ears and the truth about her other dad came out, and she was itching to pound several arrows into a boss, if only for the familiarity.

"What?" she demanded. The older boy – her half-brother, apparently, but also her head counsellor and maybe she didn't remember his name despite being told it earlier – scowled before jerking his head towards the door of their cabin.

"Archery range is free," he said, and she was out of the door faster than she could loose an arrow. Either he'd known she was going to do that, or he was simply that fast, because the older boy kept up just fine. She didn't need a guide back to the armoury, where they'd made her leave her recurve ("no bows in the cabin, camp rules. Yes, it sucks and we all hate it"), but didn't complain when he took the lead anyway.

The armoury largely failed to hold her attention – the swords and shields and spears didn't appeal to her in the slightest – but the corner dedicated to archery was another story entirely. One rack of bows, she'd been told on her earlier tour, were generic camp bows, available for use by anyone who could draw them.

The other rack was the personal bows, almost all belonging to her cabinmates (and half-siblings, children of the Greek god of archery). She'd been instructed to leave her recurve there earlier, and made a beeline for the bright green case, the same colour as both her dyed hair and her riser. She didn't pay any attention to the other boy until she had her bow assembled and strung, quiver full of arrows at her hip.

Then she looked over, impatient for the all-clear to head to the range, and her eyes widened as she took in the bow in his hands.

Da was an Olympic coach. She was familiar with several types of bow, but many of them were theoretical rather than ever seeing them in person. The armoury tended towards longbows as a standard, apparently stuck a few decades – if not centuries – in the past for the most part, but there were a few others she'd been meaning to get a closer look at.

The one in her cabin counsellor's hand was one such bow. Admittedly, with his height it would have been rather comical to see him try and draw a longbow (Kayla had tried; it was very awkward to draw a bow so much taller than her), but at his age a child's bow would have been a little ridiculous.

"You shoot a horse bow?" she asked bluntly, staring at the exaggerated curves of the limbs, far more curved than her own recurve limbs. They might be short, but their shape stored enough energy to keep them on par with longer bows.

"Hungarian hunting bow," he confirmed as he reached for a handful of arrows and filled his quiver. He had far more arrows than she did.

"What's the poundage on that?" Kayla had to ask, eying the bow in admiration. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, all wood and horn, if she didn't miss her guess, and a far cry from the carbon fibre of her own.

He shrugged. "We don't usually bother with that," he admitted, and she blinked. "Here it's less about bow stats and more about what you can do with it. But," he gave a proud grin, "this one's forty pounds."

"Forty?" Kayla's voice strangled itself in her throat as she looked at the older boy who was no taller than her and barely broader. "You can draw at forty?" She was barely over half that!

"Of course I can," he dismissed as though that wasn't a ridiculous draw weight for someone their size. She waited for him to return the question, but he didn't, instead heading for the door of the armoury. "Ready to shoot some arrows?" he threw over his shoulder, and she scrambled to keep up as he strode across the grass towards the range.

The range wasn't like any ranges she was used to. Sure, it had bosses lined up at various distances with a standard target face on each, but there were other targets strewn around almost carelessly – halfway up trees, facing almost the wrong way, flat on the ground – and yet other objects laying around with tell-tale holes in them.

The older boy strode up to the shooting line without looking back at her, then in one fluid motion nocked an arrow, aimed and released. Then he did it again, and again, and Kayla snatched up her scope from a pocket in her quiver to peer at his shooting as he continued with a stream of arrows. Far more than a standard end of six, he seemed determined to send out every single arrow in his quiver without a break.

Kayla had never seen shooting like it. It just wasn't done in modern archery and breached almost every etiquette and competition rule she could think of. He wasn't just shooting at a single target, he was loosing an arrow at every single one of them, including the ones that weren't proper targets, but had clearly been repurposed as such.

He was hitting dead centre on every single one.

Could she do that? Da had let her do some show-off shooting, but even that paled in comparison to what she was seeing here.

Kayla had never been the type to back down from a challenge.

She squared her shoulders, straightened her back, and strode up to the shooting line beside her new older half-brother. Nock, draw, aim-

Release.

Switch targets. Nock, draw, aim-

Release.

And again.

She ran out of arrows long before she shot at all of them, but her cabin counsellor seemed to have anticipated that because suddenly there were extra arrows in a quiver staked to the ground by her feet. Not perfect for her, but close enough and she snatched them up to keep shooting with.

The standard targets on the range she matched him perfectly, nestling her green and orange fletching next to his gold and red so close they were brushing each other – at least, up until the seventy metre mark. After that, her shots started going a little awry, but that wasn't surprising. Seventy was about her limit; it was competition standard, too, so she hadn't bothered to try for further.

Seeing her companion shooting well past the hundred metre mark with pinpoint accuracy ignited the sudden desire to keep increasing her range. His far heavier draw weight had something to do with it, of course, but then again, Kayla wasn't going to be stuck in the low twenties forever.

On the unconventional targets, however, her aim suffered drastically. She hit them all – that much, she could say – but her arrows landed varying distances from his, and none so close that she could be smug about it.

Kayla huffed, irritated.

"You'll get there," the older boy told her with a shrug. It wasn't the most encouraging body language in the world, although his words sounded certain. "Competition shooting is all very well and good for mortals, but it won't do you much good in battle," he continued, a harder edge creeping into his voice.

Battle. Kayla had fought off a few monsters on her journey from Canada to Long Island, but her satyr guide had done most of the work. She shuddered.

"First, practice the awkward targets," he told her, his voice leaving no room for argument. He sounded a bit like Da when he was coaching, like that. "Once you can get them from standstill…"

He trailed off and she looked at him, confused, only to see him plucking another few arrows from a quiver on the ground to put in his own quiver.

Then he broke into a run, ignoring the shooting line and any safety rules at all, but Kayla's inner Da's shrieking was almost immediately overpowered by awe as he drew, nocked, aimed and fired arrows while running, jumping, and even doing a backflip off a tree.

Every arrow hit dead centre.

He came to a stop in front of her, smirking. "Then you can practice them while moving."

Kayla looked at him, then at the targets with their arrows perfectly centred.

Then she grabbed another arrow from the quiver by her feet and nocked it on her string.

"Challenge accepted."

I couldn't resist this duo, sorry. I tried to keep the jargon to a minimum here:
"riser" is the part of a modern recurve bow you hold
"limbs" are the pieces of wood/equivalent that extend out from the riser (or grip, for bows that don't have riser)
"poundage/draw weight" is how much weight is on your fingers at full draw
"end" is how many arrows you shoot at once, typically six in outdoor shooting
"boss" is the thing that target faces are pinned to

I've more or less kept all the technical stuff within realistic(ish) parameters for kids their ages (10 and 16 in this story), but there's some exaggeration because they're Apollo kids. Michael is a good big brother and I will die on this hill. He's also a show-off.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari