jumped around her. She had no idea if she’d been hit or not. She felt nothing but the roar in her blood.
The plane passed overhead. Nina’s ears rang. She dragged herself up, heart flipping in sudden panic as she saw Yelena’s long form stretched on the ground ahead of her, but then Yelena’s head turned. “Ninochka—” she gasped, and they were both up, stumbling for the scrub. They crawled in, and when the sound of the Messer’s engines droned overhead again they froze, clamped together, Nina’s face buried in Yelena’s shoulder, Yelena’s in hers.
The Messer made another pass over the field.
“Wait,” Nina breathed.
They muffled the cold cloud of their breath in star-covered scarves. Another droning pass, another stipple of bullets.
“You know what they do to women pilots. They’ll rape us and murder us.” Yelena’s whisper rattled faster like hailstones on a roof. “And we’ll be branded traitors for allowing ourselves to be taken—”
“We aren’t traitors. We followed orders—”
“No one sees it that way if you’re caught.” Yelena’s breath hitched. “I left my pistol in the cockpit.”
“Sshh!”
“If they catch us, cut my throat with that razor, Ninochka. Promise.”
Yelena’s face, white as frost now with terror, the most precious thing in the world. “I love you,” Nina whispered. She cupped her bare hand and her gloved hand around Yelena’s cheeks. “I love you, and I will kill you before letting the Fritzes get you, if that is what you want.” Anything you want. I love you enough for anything, even that.
Yelena squeezed her eyes shut, gulping. Nina pulled her closer. The drone of the Messerschmitt’s engine retreated.
They waited.
“Your heart’s beating steady as a drum,” Yelena whispered. “You aren’t even afraid, are you?”
“No. Because we’re safe. No one ever catches a rusalka, much less a pair. We slip through their hands like water.”
Yelena buried her face in Nina’s fur overalls. Nina stroked her hair, looking at the sky overhead. Icy stars winking out with the coming day. So cold. She closed her eyes and saw the turquoise water of the Old Man rising up to meet her, and then her eyes flew open with a jerk.
“You started to doze,” Yelena whispered. “Waiting to see if you would be strafed to death by a Messerschmitt, you actually dozed off.”
“It’s been a long night.” Nina stretched her hearing out as far as she could listen. No buzz of engines, no thump of bullets. “Can we risk it?”
“We’ll have to. It’s almost day.”
“They could be lying in wait—”
“We’d have heard them land.”
They made their way out of the brush. So strange to be on the ground, snow crunching underfoot, strange hills and jagged trees unfamiliar against the horizon. Up in a plane you forgot what it looked like down in the middle of things. Life was either a cockpit or a set of interchangeable airdromes and runways.
Yelena let out a long breath. “If the Rusalka’s wrecked, we’ll have to walk back.”
“Then we walk back, like Larisa Radchikova and her pilot last month.” They’d bailed out in the neutral zone and made it back walking through the active line, both of them sliced head to toe by shrapnel.
Nina and Yelena held their breath as they came back to the Rusalka, canted drunkenly in the middle of the field. The wings were so holed they looked like a screen. Yelena went to inspect the engine, while Nina hopped up to look into the cockpits.
“Well, we still have an engine.” Yelena’s voice floated up as she poked her head among the wires. “And a propeller . . . most of it.”
Nina surveyed the mass of splinters where the instrument panels used to be. “We have controls. Not much else, but we each have a stick.”
“All a U-2 really needs is a stick, an engine, and a pilot.” Yelena reclaimed her pistol, standing back. “I’d rather trust the Rusalka to get us home than try to walk it.” They had no way of knowing if this was German territory or not; they could walk into their own troops or into a nest of Fritzes.
Nina joined her in staring at the propeller. A third of the blade was missing on one side. “Knock a third off the opposing blade to equalize it?” Nina said at last. “It’s already bullet riddled; we could break the end off without tools.”
Yelena looked a little white, but nodded.
Nina tugged her down to eye level. “Yelenushka. Are