been made over into a dormitory, rows of cots laid out hospital ward fashion. Nina flopped onto the nearest one without even pulling off her boots. “What’sat yelling?”
“Raskova,” someone said, laughing. “The commander tried to give her a room of her own with a double bed, and she’s shouting she’s going to bunk down in shared quarters just like us.”
“I would die for Raskova.” Nina yawned, eyelids sinking. “I would cut off my leg for her. Carve out a kidney.”
“All of us would, malyshka . . .” Nina’s last sensation that night was someone pulling off her boots.
A cold gray morning dawned, and the women of Aviation Group 122 were up with the pale sun, tumbling out of bed, pulling bedclothes tight. “When do we get our hands on the new fighters?” Men stared when the women trooped across the base in their uniforms. Nina returned the stares every bit as rudely, but the more well-bred girls hurried along with blushes rising in their cheeks. “I’m not used to being gawked at,” Yelena whispered. “Not like this.”
Nina slowed her own steps to a swagger, staring down a mechanic smirking from the nearest aviation shed. “Get used to it.”
The first order of the day was a mass visit to the garrison barbershop. “Those braids and curls are coming off, ladies! Raskova’s orders, line up for a chair,” an officer called as the women clustered rebelliously, fingering their long plaits and muttering. No one seemed eager to step forward; Lilia was already arguing with a barber. Nina tugged the razor out of her boot and unfolded it. She looked around, challenging, and when she had enough eyes, she gathered her hair up in one hand. It was tangled and dirty after ten days without a bath, and with one sawing swipe Nina sheared it off. She dropped the fistful of hair on the barbershop floor. “Come on, rabbits.”
Yelena put her chin up, shaking her long dark braid over one shoulder, holding out a hand for Nina’s razor. Nina slapped it into her palm, even as the other girls began filing grimly toward the barbershop chairs, and that was the moment it all ceased to matter—the differences that had made Nina tongue-tied on the train. Hundreds of women from hundreds of different worlds had unloaded at Engels, country girls and city girls, those with degrees and those who knew nothing . . . And now they were simply the recruits of Aviation Group 122, identically shorn, and all their worlds combined into one.
“THIS WAR WILL be over before we’re declared ready.” Outside Engels the fight was passing them by—Nina chafed whenever she thought of the Fritzes rolling unopposed over all those carefully dug tank traps; thought of the barrage balloons hung in the air all over the Motherland and the trainloads of crying children being evacuated out of cities, half the time heading straight into the advancing German lines. Leningrad was slowly starving to death that winter, people murdering each other for ration cards and bread . . . But in Engels, the training was never-ending.
“You girls are lucky,” Marina Raskova scolded them. “There are boys being rushed out to the male regiments with only sixty-five flying hours, no better than machine-gun fodder. I didn’t bring you here to be machine-gun fodder.”
“But we’ve got better records walking through the door than those boys being rushed out through it,” Nina objected. “Why are we the ones still sitting in Engels?”
“We can’t afford to fail,” replied sober-eyed Yevdokia Bershanskaia. She was older than most of them at nearly thirty, already tipped for command. Not that she wanted to lead; she wanted to fly fighters. But everyone wants to fly fighters, Nina thought, so someone’s going to be disappointed. “We’re the only female pilots going to the front. There are plenty saying it’s foolish giving planes to little girls when there are more than enough male pilots to fly them. To keep our planes, we’ll have to be perfect.”
Perfection meant ten separate courses of study per day, plus another two hours of drilling, from classroom to airfield and back. At night they were rousted out of bed by the blare of a Klaxon to form up on the icy parade ground; Nina tried putting her coat over her nightshirt once to save time, but Raskova—always neat and bright-eyed no matter the hour—spotted the hem flapping above her boots and made her do laps about the airfield with the icy wind blowing through her bare legs. She