was going to assume everyone she met was an enemy. Get out of here before anyone finds you. But she couldn’t move. Nina thought she’d already left everything behind that there was to leave—her regiment, her sisters, her lover—but there was one more thing, after all: her gallant Rusalka with its painted fuselage and assertive little engine, whose wings had carried her through so many missions, whose shadow had embraced her and Yelena in the grass on long summer days. The Rusalka, so alive to Nina’s touch that she practically sang. Nina had thought there was no more pain left to feel tonight, but she embraced her plane, as much of its body as her arms could hold, and she wailed her agony into its frame.
Then she swiped at her burning eyes and began tearing at the U-2 with her bare hands, stripping cockpit and fuselage as if she were stripping flesh from bones, cannibalizing it of anything that might be useful. She stuffed her knapsack full to bulging, then went to the underbrush and filled her arms with dead leaves and twigs. The woods were damp and muddy from a recent rain, but even if they weren’t, she didn’t care about the risk of setting the trees alight. Grief was draining away to be replaced by white-hot Markov rage, her father’s all-destroying fury that cared nothing for sense or self-preservation. Nina didn’t care if she burned half of Poland and crisped her own bones to ash; she wasn’t leaving the Rusalka to rot. Filling the cockpit with brush, she struck a match from her supplies and flung it into the tinder. The fire caught, kindled, leaped up. Nina stood back, watching the smoke boil. Only when the Rusalka was engulfed in flame, stiffened fabric curling away to reveal the skeletal wooden bones, did Nina turn away. She shouldered her knapsack and followed her own long leaping shadow west into the trees, as the Rusalka writhed and died on her funeral pyre.
A COMPASS. A loaded pistol. Matches. A sack of emergency supplies—sugared milk, a chocolate bar, the extra food she’d snatched from the barracks. The scarf embroidered with blue stars. A roll of stiffened cloth, struts, and wiring stripped from the Rusalka. The razor.
That was all.
Nina exhaled a shaky breath. “Not all,” she said aloud. She had good boots and heavy overalls, her sealskin cap. She had warm summer weather. And she had everything learned growing up on the shores of the Old Man.
Nina walked until she heard the trickle of a stream, drank from her cupped hands, ate half a chocolate bar, then rigged a shelter from the Rusalka’s scavenged cloth and struts. She collapsed under it with the razor in one fist, sleep falling like an avalanche, only to wake in the night bathed in clammy sweat, agonizing cramps racking her legs, teeth chattering as though it were midwinter. Nina had never been ill a day in her life but she was ill now, nose and eyes watering, hands shaking too badly to light a campfire. She huddled under her shelter, trying to rub the cramps out of her thighs, smelling her own rank sweat, and when she looked up she saw her father gazing down at her with yellowed eyes.
“You’re not here,” she said through clattering teeth. “I’m dreaming.”
He squatted down. “How long has it been since you had a Coca-Cola pill, little huntress?”
Two days—or more? Somehow another day had come and gone. Nina could have sworn it had only been an hour since the shakes woke her in the night, yet between one set of shivers and the next, she’d somehow lost a day. That made it at least three days since she’d swallowed one of those tablets that flooded her veins with quicksilver—and for months and months, she hadn’t gone a day without them.
Her father snorted, scornful.
“Go away.” Why did she have to hallucinate him of all people? “I don’t want you. I want Yelena.” She wanted Yelena so badly, her sparkling eyes and fierce kisses.
“You’re stuck with me, rusalka,” her father said. “That lily-livered bitch didn’t want you.”
“Go away,” Nina cried, then cried out again from the pain of her muscle cramps. She closed her eyes for an instant, and when she opened them again it was bright midday. She’d never been so hungry in her life; she drank all the sugared milk and shivered to see how her food stores were all but gone. She managed to stagger downwind of her little shelter