“Certainly.” Yelena curtsied, taking hold of Nina’s right boot. “Does the tsaritsa require anything else?”
Nina wriggled her toes as first one boot and then the other came off. “A bucket of vodka.”
“At once, tsaritsa.” Yelena sank down on the bed next to Nina’s and held out her own feet. “Word is we’ll be staying in Annisovskaia a few months. Till the new year, even.”
“Good. I’m tired of moving around, sleeping in dugouts.” Nina folded her star-embroidered flying scarf over the end of the cot, the same scarf Yelena had been embroidering the night of the first sortie. Nina’s pilot was working on another now, getting out her needles and thread. On the next cot over, a brunette from Stalingrad was mending her stockings; another girl was scraping mud off her boots. At the other end of the schoolhouse, four pilots had lined up for a turn at the only sink. Someone was softly humming. Someone else was crying, almost soundlessly.
“There they go again.” Yelena contemplated her long slender feet in their wool socks, jittering as though they were being run through by electric current. Her knees jittered too. “I wish I knew why they did that.”
Nina shrugged. After a night of bombing runs, everyone showed different effects. Yelena jittered for hours. Dusia went totally silent, curling up on her side and staring at the wall. Some of the girls chattered until they suddenly fell asleep midsyllable. Some cried, some paced, some jumped at the slightest noise—night to night, it was always different.
“You’re made of rock, Ninochka.” Yelena flexed her twitching feet. “You don’t get any effects.”
“I do.” Tapping her forehead. “Always a headache behind my left eye.”
“But you never get moody or weepy or snappish.”
“Because I’m not afraid.”
A curious glance came from the girl polishing her boots. “Never?”
Nina shook her head, matter-of-fact. “Only of drowning. You see any lakes around?”
“You’re crazy,” Yelena admired. “A little Siberian lunatic.”
“Probably.” Nina sank back on her pillow. “Markovs are all crazy, it’s in the blood. But it makes me good at this, so I don’t mind being crazy.”
Whether jitters or pacing or headaches were the postflight reaction of the day, everyone spent their morning working it off. It was always like that, Nina thought, massaging her own forehead until the faint ache receded. Gradually the shakers stopped shaking and the talkers stopped talking, until the room filled with the sound of sleep. For maybe as long as three hours, before sheer exhaustion wore away and everyone began tossing and turning—because the other constant that Nina noticed was that they all slept like shit. Even Nina. Being a little bit crazy and mostly fearless does not help with sleep.
It was in that sweet spot of dead, pure slumber when the entire room lay still as corpses that Nina swung out of bed and padded for the door, tugging her boots back on. She sauntered off toward a storage shed at the edge of the village and slipped inside, waiting. Brilliant sunlight made fingers of light through cracks in the boards, as though a dozen tiny searchlights were trying to find a dozen tiny planes. Nina watched motes of dust dancing in the light, half hypnotized, half dozing. Dust motes dancing like Yak-1s . . .
The shed door creaked open, then shut. There was the rattle of a board dropping down, blocking the door, and then Yelena’s arms slipped about her waist from behind, and in a second’s notice Nina was wide awake.
“Hello, rabbit.” She tipped her head back against Yelena’s shoulder. “Nice flying tonight.”
“I hate getting caught in those searchlights.” A shiver went through Yelena, and she pressed her cheek against Nina’s hair. “That instant when I don’t know which is sky and which is ground . . .”
“Just listen to your trusty navigator.” Nina raised Yelena’s oil-smeared knuckles to her lips. “I can always find the sky.”
“You’re wasted as a navigator, Ninochka. Nerves like yours, you should be flying your own plane.”
“Then who’s going to keep you out of trouble, Miss Moscow Goody?”
“I’m not such a goody anymore!”
“Then say I hate those shit searchlights.” Nina could hear Yelena blush. “Say it, Yelena Vassilovna.”
“I dislike those searchlights very much,” Yelena said primly, and they both shook with silent laughter. They stood still a moment, Nina’s head tipped back against Yelena’s shoulder, Yelena’s arms about Nina’s waist. Nina felt the weightless floating sensation she felt when the engines cut out and she was gliding free and silent through still, pure air. “You’re still