through the tree that eventually snagged him up short. A shattered rib had pierced his lung, or at least Ian guessed that was what had happened. It killed him slowly over the course of seven hours, shredding his lung as he hung there screaming. Ian remembered every moment of those hours: first telling him to be still, not exacerbate the injury; then trying and failing to pendulum-swing close enough to help; finally just hanging there listening as the boy’s voice ran out, from screams to the occasional monotone mutter of Gramps . . .
“By the time he died I was hallucinating,” Ian managed to say. “Dehydration and shock—it turned Donald Luncey into my brother—into Seb. I knew it wasn’t him, I knew Seb was sitting in a stalag in Poland, but it was still him, down to the last freckle. My little brother was hanging dead in the tree next to me.” Hanging there for most of a day as Ian, mouth leather dry, shivering in the cold sweat of horror, stared at his corpse. Ian had tried to focus on the ground below instead, and that twelve meters under his swaying boots seemed to double, an impossibly long fall into darkness.
“Ah,” Nina said. “Is why you have your thing, the thing about heights.”
“Foolish, really. I didn’t even fall. I was found soon after; they rigged me down safe. Quite lucky.” Lucky, but maybe not entirely sane, Ian sometimes thought. It was five years after the war was done, yet still he had the dream and in the dream it was always Seb, right from the beginning. Donald Luncey wasn’t even there; start to finish it was his brother he couldn’t save.
“Don’t brood, luchik.” Nina upended ketchup over her hamburger like she was drowning it in blood. “Brooding is no good.”
“You never brood, do you?” For all that she moved in such a cloud of anarchy, Nina was very even-keeled—rather remarkable, Ian thought, considering what she’d lived through. He wondered if flying in combat had drilled that into her, or if it had already been there—in her, and in her fellow Night Witches. “Most assume women have no place at the front lines, but after hearing about your friends in the regiment—”
“Women are good in combat,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “We don’t compete like the men do. Is all mission, no proving who is better with stupid stunts.”
“You told me you once climbed out on a plane wing at eight hundred meters, you little Cossack. If you want to talk about stunts.”
“Was necessary!” She smiled, but there was a shadow behind it. “My pilot yelled at me for that.”
“Good for her.” Ian studied Nina’s lively face, suddenly gone still. “I can see how much you miss them. Your friends.”
“Sestry,” she said softly.
He could guess the word meant sisters. “Were they all like you?” She shrugged, and he imagined hundreds of Ninas, handed planes and set loose on the Führer’s eastern front. Bloody hell. No wonder Hitler lost the war.
“No one ever did what we did before.” Nina picked up her hamburger, dripping ketchup. “We pay for it, what we do. Dreams, twitches, headaches . . .”
“I know what you mean.” Ian tapped his left ear. “It’s never been quite right after that bombing run in Spain nearly did it for me.”
“My ears too, not so good as they were. U-2 cockpit is noisy. And those years being awake all night every night—I still never sleep all night through.”
“Don’t be ashamed of it. You were a soldier.” Not like me with my pointless nightmares, Ian thought, wry.
She seemed to catch his unspoken thought. “You went to war too, luchik. You go to war, you have a lake or a parachute after. Everyone does.”
“Soldiers do. They’ve earned it. I wasn’t a soldier. Nightmares are for those who fight, not those who scribble. Maybe I was at the front, but I could leave any time I wanted. They couldn’t.”
“So?” Nina asked. “Same risk for either soldier or hunter.”
“Hunter?”
“Hunters,” Nina said. “You. And me—well, I was soldier and hunter, but important part is hunter. Very different from soldier.”
“I don’t quite follow.”
“Soldiers fight wars. It gives them nightmare—a lake, a parachute. It makes them want to stop, go home.” The hamburger was gone; she sat spooning up ketchup by itself, like soup. “Hunters in war face same risks, same fight, so they get a lake or a parachute too. But we don’t have the thing soldiers do, other people do—the thing that says stop. We have