But Bershanskaia was shaking her head. “The state does not take chances.”
Well, then, Nina thought.
For a moment they looked at each other, then the major sighed, folding her hands on her desk. “Even a good Soviet citizen feels fear at the prospect of an arrest,” she said, more conversational. “But a good Soviet citizen would know to bow to the will of the sentence, join in denouncing her father, and thus have a chance at saving herself.”
“For what?” Nina asked. Instead of a bullet, getting ten or twenty years in a labor camp near Norilsk or Kolyma?
Bershanskaia switched tack. “We have been lucky to have sterling records among the regiment. If any of my pilots transgressed, I would not be able to speak for them.” She didn’t flinch from Nina’s gaze. “Though it would grieve me.”
Nina jerked a nod. The regiment came first. For any officer, it had to. Bershanskaia already had to be sick with worry over the regiment’s future. Since the very beginning, the ladies of the Forty-Sixth had to justify their existence with every bombing run, had to be perfect—and now they had a rotten apple in their midst, the tainted daughter of an enemy of the state. What would it mean for the regiment? They no longer had Marina Raskova to speak for them as Comrade Stalin’s favorite aviatrix. Nina nodded again without bitterness. Bershanskaia couldn’t speak for her, not one word.
“Acquittal, of course, is entirely possible. You are not wrong that a sterling record of service will weigh in favor.”
It doesn’t matter, Nina thought. Even acquitted, she would never return to the Forty-Sixth—she’d be tainted by association with treason. She was finished here. She’d never fly again with Galya at her back; she’d never sip oily tea in the cockpit between runs; she’d never line up a target behind Yelena and the Rusalka . . .
That was when the agony hit her in the gut as though she’d been stabbed by an icicle. Yelena. What would she do when the van came for Nina? When would it come? It must be soon, if Bershanskaia had sniffed out advance notice of the arrest. It was always in the small hours of the night that enemies of the state were dealt with—the noise of the car stopping, the officious rap on a door. Yelena and the Night Witches would be halfway through a night’s bombing runs at the time Nina was taken away with a guard on each side.
Dimly, she wondered how this was happening. How a day beginning with vodka and laughter and kisses in a pink dawn had come to this evasive recitation of horror and condemnation.
“For the regiment,” Bershanskaia was saying in guarded tones, “things must happen . . . quietly. There mustn’t be trouble.”
The words triggered Nina in pure reflex. She felt her every muscle snap taut, felt the individual hairs on her head like hot wires. Her teeth locked down a feral hiss before it could escape. She remembered Comrade Stalin’s Not one step back. The weight of her father’s razor sat just inside her sleeve—a flick of the wrist would drop it into her hand. She didn’t know what Bershanskaia saw on her face, but the major stiffened.
Nina forced the words out through the gate of her teeth. “I’m no good at quiet, Comrade Major.”
But you are good at trouble, her father whispered in poisonous amusement, evidently deciding to speak up again. You’re a Markov. Trouble always finds us, but we eat trouble alive. Nina was not going to sit meekly in lockup, grounded from flying, until her accusers arrived to take her away. The moment a thug in a blue cap came to take her by the arm, came to take her east, the razor would drop into her hand and she would paint the room red. They’d get her in the end—unlike her father she had nowhere to run—but it wasn’t going to be easy, it wasn’t going to be clean, it wasn’t going to be quiet. Bershanskaia saw that very clearly; she exhaled behind her desk.
Nina stood there shaking, fury copper-bright in her mouth. So, she thought. Haven’t changed much, have you? All the warmth and camaraderie of the Forty-Sixth, all the softening of Yelena’s love . . . it still hadn’t taken very much for Markov’s daughter to come out, the rusalka bitch born in lake water and madness. Not very much at all.
Her knees gave out and she sat down abruptly in the