the rose away and pulverized it, raising her hand and letting the rigid wind stream carry away the shredded petals. She wept alone in her cockpit on her six hundred and sixteenth flight, soaring west, never looking back.
BY DAWN, wolf packs of Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs would be roaming this airspace. Until then, Nina had the advantage. I am still a Night Witch. As long as the dark lasted, she could hide from the whole world.
How long would it take to cross Poland? Beyond was Germany, the belly of the beast—would it be safer to turn south, aim for Czechoslovakia? Wherever she touched down, how was she going to find safety speaking no language but Russian, with no money to her name? She flew through a war-torn world filled with blood and barbed wire, and as soon as the fuel gave out and she had to put foot on the ground, she was quite probably dead. That conviction had shone in the tear-filled eyes of her fellow pilots: here was trouble even their crazy little Siberian couldn’t fly free of.
On and on she flew in the murk of cloud, hunched over her controls. West and west and west. Below somewhere would be Warsaw in its dying spasms—then Warsaw was behind her, or she assumed it was. A malicious headwind kicked up, and the Rusalka labored. Nina eyed the fuel gauge. The altitude and the speed were already eating through her tank. The wind grew rougher, and her heart fell. A U-2 could cover more than six hundred kilometers on a full tank in good flying conditions, but in this spiteful headwind Nina wouldn’t make four hundred.
“Fuck your mother,” she muttered, but rage wouldn’t get her farther west; nothing would but fuel, and she was nearly out. The night was far from over and the needle on the gauge scraping near empty when Nina brought the Rusalka down out of the clouds. No lights below of cities or towns, not even any scattered farmhouses. Nothing but a dark swath of forest, stretching as far as Nina’s night-trained eyes could see. She brought her plane down until she was sailing along the treetops, looking for a clearing. A U-2 could land on a dinner plate, the saying went, but you still needed a dinner plate. She supposed remotely that if she couldn’t find one, she’d crash among the pines and die spiked by branches or burning in her cockpit.
The engine quit. The fuel gauge stood at empty. The U-2 began to drop.
Nina glided down silently in her last bombing run, only this time there were no bombs to drop, no engine roar propelling her back up into the clouds. Just down and down and down between the treetops.
There—a clearing. Part of Nina was disappointed. The siren croon of oblivion hadn’t entirely gone away; in the back of her mind it kept up its seductive whisper. But she couldn’t take the coward’s way out when a runway stretched in front of her. She lined up the Rusalka and brought her down in a perfect three-point landing, branches cracking as her wings brushed past walls of trees. Flying wires snapped. Something else broke with a judder like a spine cracking. Then at last they were still, and Nina sat in the cockpit with her breath coming in short gasps. She heard the rustle of leaves, smelled leaf rot and bark. Her nose had grown accustomed to harsher smells, gasoline and engine grease, but one breath of this tree-laced night and she was back in the vast woods around the Old Man, trailing after her father as he taught her to track through the taiga.
Nina climbed stiffly out of her cockpit and jumped to the ground. A little moonlight filtered down, enough to show that a blade of her propeller was gone. “That’s it, then,” she said aloud. Her half-formed hope of stealing some cans of gasoline from somewhere and fueling up the Rusalka again spun away. Without a machine shop there was no fixing a halved propeller. Nina had spent most of her waking hours in the sky since she was nineteen and had first slid into a cockpit, but now she’d have to content herself with this rickety human shape and its inadequate feet: the Rusalka would never fly again.
Get out, Nina thought, get out of here. Anyone—German patrols, Poles looking for enemies, fugitives sniffing out travelers to rob—could have heard the U-2 land; anyone could decide to investigate, and until proved wrong, Nina