I can do for them now is leave and let them tell the world I’m dead. I don’t care about the Motherland, Yelena. She’s a frozen mass of dirt, she was here long before I got here, and she’ll be here long after I’m gone. She got two years of my service, but she’s not getting my death. The Motherland and Comrade Stalin and all the rest can fuck themselves through seven gates whistling.”
Her Moscow rose couldn’t help recoiling. Nina seized Yelena’s face between her hands, yanked her to eye level, and kissed her savagely.
“Come with me,” she said again, against Yelena’s trembling mouth. “Come with me and leave it all behind, or you will die here.”
She put her whole heart into those words, everything she had, everything she was. She could feel her pulse thrumming like the Rusalka’s gallant little engine just starting to spool up for the fight. Yelena was going to burst into tears, she’d cry her heart out in Nina’s arms, and after that it would be all right. There was time. They could go.
But though Yelena’s long dark lashes were wet, not a tear fell. “Maybe it is all rotten,” she said, so softly she was all but inaudible. “But if the good ones leave, who’s here to make it better after the war?”
In Nina’s chest, the engine died.
Yelena leaned down, touching her forehead to Nina’s. “I know why you have to leave, Ninochka. It’s leave or nothing. But I can’t give up my homeland and my oath for love.” She managed a small smile under swimming eyes. “That’s the kind of thing that makes men say little princesses have no place at the front.”
Silence stretched out between them, as vast and frozen as the Old Man. Nina’s lips parted, but she had no more words. Not Don’t leave me. Not Go to hell. Not I love you. Nothing. She took a stumbling step backward, tripping over a clod of earth.
Yelena steadied her with an outstretched arm, tried to pull her close. “Ninochka—”
Nina wrenched away. One more kiss, and the huge sob building in her chest would tear loose. One more kiss, and she’d be the one crying her heart out in Yelena’s arms and vowing to stay, vowing to denounce her father, vowing to take ten years or twenty in a gulag if her pilot would only wait for her. One more kiss and she would be utterly undone. In the old stories a rusalka could bring a mortal to their knees, perishing in ecstasy after a single kiss that seared like ice.
Maybe Yelena had been the rusalka all along. Not small, shaken Nina Markova who felt like she was dying.
“Nina,” Yelena said again, softly. Nina didn’t look back. She stumbled to the edge of the airfield, tear-blind, lips sealed on her own pleas, standing there with her head bowed. She saw the gold star still pinned crookedly to her own breast—Yelena’s HSU—and tore it off blindly, hurling it to the mud. The alarm went up to signal the briefing; pilots would be spilling out of canteen and barracks to hear the night’s mission. Nina stayed rooted to the spot, eyes squeezed shut. She heard Yelena move past her, light footsteps in thick boots, and thought desperately, Don’t touch me. I will shatter if you touch me.
A single in-drawn breath as Yelena stooped to retrieve her gold star, then she was gone. Nina stood at the edge of the airfield, watching the sun fade and a quarter moon began to rise as Bershanskaia delivered the evening’s briefing somewhere inside. I will shatter, Nina kept thinking, the thought circling like a conveyor belt of U-2s. But she didn’t shatter. She just stood numb, waiting for her heart to finish breaking, for that hateful quarter moon to finish rising, for her last flight as a Night Witch to begin.
Chapter 35
Ian
July 1950
Boston
Tony returned from his shift at McBride’s Antiques looking like a cat who had got into the cream. “Good news.”
“Did Kolb try to bunk?” Ian looked up from their paper-strewn table, hopeful. He’d had a week of diner coffee and was tired of it.
“Not that good, no. Kolb is headed home as usual, Nina ghosting along in his wake. Your little Soviet popsy is a natural tail.”
My little Soviet popsy is at least speaking to me, Ian thought. Nina’s temper seemed to be of the tinderbox variety, fast kindled and fast out—the morning after stamping out of the diner in a rage, she’d greeted him with