traditional toast. Yelena and four others had been the first to get their HSUs a few months back; now they jostled to the front and stripped off their stars. Yelena dropped hers with a clink into the small empty soup can in Nina’s hands, and Nina’s four fellow pilots held out soup cans to receive borrowed stars too. The entire regiment filed past grinning, everyone bearing a tin cup with the daily two hundred grams of vodka allotted to pilots. Normally they let the alcohol go to the men, Bershanskaia’s orders, but today the Night Witches poured all their vodka into the cans of the incipient Heroes, until the gold stars were covered to the rim.
“Drink, drink!” The cry went up, and Nina downed the canful of vodka in one gulp, Yelena’s gold star clicking against her teeth. She surfaced dizzily, and Yelena and the other Heroes lifted cans of their own, crying “Welcome, sestra!” and bolting down the rest of the regiment’s vodka. The others didn’t grudge it, they all crowded around cheering—Nina felt herself kissed so many times her cheeks glowed. She was dizzy with vodka and love. It’s just a medal, she thought as she tried to press the star back into Yelena’s hand, but Yelena pinned it crookedly to the breast of her flight overalls, laughing. Wear it for the day, get used to the weight! Yelena looked so beautiful with her cheeks flushed like corn poppies—“You’re beautiful too,” Yelena whispered back. Nina realized she must have said it aloud . . .
When the alarm blared, she looked up almost sleepily, too warm and content to be startled. But the canteen doors flung wide and there were three panting ground crew shouting. “Fighters coming over the field, the U-2s haven’t been camouflaged yet, get them up—” and pilots and navigators alike jostled out of the canteen, sprinting into the pink-streaked dawn. Nina dropped the soup can and ran blindly after her pilot’s flying dark hair. Yelena was already in the cockpit and the Rusalka’s engine roaring when Nina toppled herself nearly headfirst into the rear. Someone shouted, and the first spider shape of a Messerschmitt appeared. A U-2 to their left took off east over the nearest line of trees, another lifted to the north and dived up for cloud cover, and then there were U-2s rising into the sky in every direction. No orderly conveyor belt; everyone simply flinging the planes into the air and escaping every which way. The Rusalka rose like a bird, straight into the rising sun.
“Do we have the night’s coordinates?” Nina nearly asked, sheer rote habit, and blinked. Something wasn’t right here. She fumbled with the interphones.
“Whazzat?” Yelena sounded curiously fuzzy. The Messerschmitt passed over the airdrome; the strafing roar of its fire followed, and Yelena was yanking the Rusalka upward as fast as she could. “What?”
“Oh.” Nina figured it out. “I’m in the wrong plane.” Galya had headed for their U-2, but Nina had tracked blindly after Yelena and the Rusalka. It struck her as funny, and she giggled.
“Nina?”
Nina’s ears buzzed. Was the plane weaving? “Fuck your mother,” she called out. “I’m drunk.” She’d always been able to hold her vodka like a Siberian, like a Markov, but she hadn’t swallowed a drop in months. The whole world was slipping and sliding. “Are you drunk?”
“No,” Yelena called back.
The Rusalka was definitely weaving. The airdrome had fallen away rapidly below, they were rising into tatters of pink cloud. Disappear in the sky and they’d be safe from any more Messers; they had the fuel to wait it out in the air, not like the time they were chased down. Safe, Nina thought as the airfield disappeared. “What heading are we on?”
Pause. “I don’t know.”
“The compass—”
“The compass is all blurry.” Another pause. “I’m drunk,” Yelena said, and suddenly they were both howling with laughter in their cockpits. A canful of vodka on an empty stomach after a long night’s flying and no sleep . . . We’re drunk as polecats, Nina thought, and that was even funnier. Flying with Yelena instead of Galya; flying in the day instead of the night; everything was upside-down. Then Nina realized they actually were upside-down; Yelena was looping over a tail of cloud. “Got it!” she whooped.
They were up above the cloud floor now, flying along in the rosy morning. Nina squinted over the side of her cockpit, wondering how long it would be before the Messers abandoned the attack. “’Nother U-2 below.”
Yelena waggled their