then the other. A wordless rustle rose through the throng, and for a moment all the Night Witches pressed closer. Silent fingers touched Nina’s shoulder, her back, her hair as she moved through her sisters. Someone gave her hand a brief, fierce squeeze—she didn’t know who.
“Tell Galya to keep a lighter hand on the stick,” Nina said not too distinctly and set off across the airfield for her plane, first walking, then running. From the corner of her eye she saw Yelena for the last time, face contorted, bent almost double in red-haired Zoya’s comforting arms, then the regiment lapped around her, hiding her from view before the wrong eyes could take notice of her grief, pulling her along in the mass of boots and overalls jogging for the line of U-2s. Nina’s heart kicked, but she didn’t look back. She was never going to look back, look east, look in the direction of the Old Man. To look back was to drown. To look forward was to fly.
She found herself stepping up onto the wing of the Rusalka. She hadn’t consciously decided to take her old plane, but she should leave her own U-2 for her navigator—Galya was going to need every advantage a familiar plane could give her, now that she’d become pilot. Yelena wouldn’t be fazed by an unfamiliar new plane, Yelena could fly anything . . . no protest rose behind her, so Nina dropped down into the Rusalka’s cockpit. It smelled like Yelena’s soft hair, and Nina bit her lip until she tasted blood. She brought the engine to life, and agony subsided a little in that familiar thrum.
All around her, the other U-2s were awakening. No outsider would be able to say tomorrow that the regiment had deviated from routine: often they sang on the airfield, always they ran to their planes, and now the preflight checks proceeded exactly as usual. If someone asked questions later about tears and sad faces, Nina had no doubt Bershanskaia would bring forth a plausible story about the regiment being downcast because of recent losses outside Ostrołęka. The Night Witches would keep the secret.
Ground crew ran to light the runway, just a flicker to mark the point of liftoff. Nina remembered Yelena groaning last month, Soon they’ll be expecting us to land by the light of Bershanskaia’s cigarette!
Enough, Nina thought as the Rusalka was waved forward. Enough.
Stick forward. Speed gathering under the wheels. Nina took the air, feeling her arms disappear into the wings, her blood into the fuel line. Behind her the Night Witches followed, an arrow-straight line into the rising moon. Nina knew Yelena would be flying second right behind her.
Six hundred and sixteenth flight. The last flight.
Last time rising away from the airfield. Last time leveling off at altitude, skimming through silvery wisps of cloud. Last time descending toward the target. Last time cutting the engine, sinking down in a silent death glide. Nina took a deep breath, held it. Keyed the engines back up in a roar, felt the nose rise, and as the blinding white fingers of the searchlights stabbed the sky, triggered her bombs off the rack. She flung her U-2 on its wingtip and sailed on past the target, luring the ground fire and the lights to follow her and leave the ground dark in her wake, perfectly set for Yelena to ghost through with her own load of death. Nina felt the familiar blindness of the lights pinning her against the vault of the sky, heard the chain of explosions below, and saw shells blooming into red and green and white bursts.
Nina released her long breath, sinking down and down and down so the pilots behind her could truthfully witness that their lead pilot had failed to pull up and vanished on the descent. Twisting, she could see Yelena slip out of the lights, turning back. Nina leveled the Rusalka and kept flying low and straight into the blackness. What lies west? a little girl had wondered on the frozen shore of a vast lake. What lies all the way west?
Like it or not, Nina was now going to find out.
As she climbed back above the clouds and dim moonlight filled the cockpit again, she saw the dried rose wedged into the instrument panel. The rose she’d plucked from one of Marina Raskova’s funeral wreaths and brought back for Yelena, carefully dried out and tucked beside the altimeter. My Moscow rose.