the open sky, Nina was done with Party euphemisms. “Wait until the last instant, then run for the navigator’s cockpit. They won’t be able to stop us. They’ll report us both dead before the time my arrest warrant arrives, and we’ll be free as birds with no disgrace attached to the regiment. How far west can we get, the two of us and a U-2 full of fuel?”
“Into Poland?” Yelena gestured at the ugly trampled ground around them, the smoke-smudged western horizon. “It’s crawling with Germans—”
“Where else can I go? Anywhere behind our own lines, I’ll be found. It’s west for me, or it’s propeller first into the nearest battery of guns.”
Yelena winced, turning away from Nina’s hands. “You don’t have to go. You’ll be acquitted—”
“No,” Nina cut her off. “I flee now or I die later—a few days, a few weeks, even a few years, but I’ll die. I can make my way through Poland, maybe even farther. To a new world.” She had no idea what she was going to do, dropped into war-racked Poland, but she knew she and Yelena could survive together. “Come with me,” she repeated, grasping Yelena’s hands in both her own. “The West, Yelenushka. Where black vans don’t come in the dead of night because your neighbor wants your apartment—”
“Don’t say that!” Yelena cried in reflexive fear of eavesdroppers, but Nina threw her head back in defiance.
“Why not? They’ve already denounced me. They can’t do it twice.” The satisfaction of that was fierce. Take me away from my regiment, my plane, my friends? Nina thought to the vast barren country that had sired her. I’ll turn my back on you without a second glance, you frozen heartless bitch. And I’ll take your finest Hero with me. She and Yelena would be so much better, if only they could escape the Motherland and wait out the war. No arguments about Party politics or Comrade Stalin, nothing to divide them. She’ll see what this place is, if she sees it from the outside. I’ll give her everything else she wants—an apartment by a river and babies playing on the floor. Nina was ready to tear those things bare-handed out of the unknown capitalist world if she had to, tear them out and lay them at Yelena’s feet if only she’d come west tonight.
But her heart seized, because Yelena’s head was shaking back and forth.
“My mother is in Moscow,” she said. “My aunts and uncles are in Ukraine. I can’t leave them—they’ll all be denounced and arrested in turn, if there’s even a whisper I deserted.”
“Bershanskaia will report us shot down, heroes who died fighting—”
“So I let them think I’m dead? Let them grieve? I’m the only child my mother has left.”
I don’t care about your family, Nina thought. I only care about you. But she didn’t say it.
“It’s not just my family,” Yelena went on. “I can’t leave the regiment.”
“I’m leaving the regiment!” Nina lashed back. “Do you think that’s easy?”
“No, no, I didn’t—I meant—” Yelena’s face contorted, tears shining in her dark lashes. “Ninochka, I can’t leave them for you. I can’t betray them. They need me.”
“I need you.” Nina wanted to shout, but it came out a whisper. Her hands were so cold, gripping Yelena’s in the sunshine. “They’ll fly on without you. None of us are irreplaceable. Slot another sestra into the cockpit and keep flying, that’s the regiment’s way. But you’re irreplaceable to me.”
Yelena tore her hands away. “You’re asking too much,” she cried. “Leave my family, my regiment, my oath, my country—”
“Your country is throwing me away,” Nina yelled back. “Six hundred and fifteen successful bombing runs, and they’re going to put a bullet in my head or work me to death in a gulag, all because my father is a drunk with a foul mouth. I don’t have a family or a regiment or an oath, thanks to this country. You are all I have left.”
Yelena was still shaking her head, but in blind stubbornness. “They won’t shoot you. It’s all a mistake.”
“Wake up! This place is rotten—”
“How can you think that? You fought for the Motherland for more than two years—”
“Because it’s all someone like me is good for.” Nina realized she was shouting, but she couldn’t stop. “I’m good in the air, I’m good on the hunt, and I’m good at surviving, so I gave it all to this regiment because of the women in it. I’d cut my heart out for any of them, but all