The crowd erupted, some racing across the airfield to take the news to others, some flinging arms around each other. Maybe in the streets there were tears and dread, Nina thought, but this was the air club—if war was here, they’d all be in the air, and there was nowhere any of them would rather be. Vladimir Ilyich turned with a fierce smile, and Nina kissed him so hard their teeth clashed. “I’m going to enlist tomorrow,” he said when they came up for air.

“So am I.” Her blood was running hot as gasoline; she couldn’t close her eyes even after she and Vladimir went back to his room and spent the night drinking vodka and rolling around his old sheets. She lay there with Vladimir’s arm across her middle, staring through the dark, hearing a couple arguing on the other side of the wall, imagining a chain of ice floes drifting across the surface of the Old Man, one after the other leading over the blue horizon. The train from her village to Irkutsk had been the step from shore to the first floe as she thought I can fly. Now here was a step to the second floe, as she thought I can fight Germans.

“War isn’t a game,” Nina’s roommate, Tania, said when Nina came home in the morning long enough to change her shirt. They’d been assigned to each other as roommates, sharing an eleven-square-meter room in a communal apartment with eight other apartment-mates. Nina thought it was a hole, but Tania said they’d been lucky to get it. “You shouldn’t be smiling and humming like you’re going to a dance.”

Nina shrugged. Tania was an aspiring Party member, a staunch believer in order and virtue and the state; the only thing she and Nina had in common was a room. “Wars are terrible, but they need people like me.”

“‘People like you.’” Tania picked up her pocketbook, ready for her shift as a blast-furnace operator. “You’re an individualist.”

“What does that even mean?”

“You don’t volunteer for outside work.” Tania was forever volunteering—collecting state procurement quotas from the collective farms, carrying out exercises to improve labor discipline in factories. “You don’t participate in Komsomol meetings—I see you sitting there doing your navigation figuring! You don’t make an effort to participate in proletarian life—”

“It’s not worth the effort.”

“See? The state has no use for individualism. Try to enlist, and they won’t take you,” Tania said with a certain satisfaction.

“Yes, they will.” Nina grinned in that way she knew unsettled her roommate. “They need people who are a little bit crazy. Because crazy people do well in wars.” Her father had said that, whenever he whispered tales of the tsarists he’d killed in the revolution. It was the first time she’d thought of her father in a while—she hadn’t seen him since she left home. She’d wondered often if leaving him meant killing him, if he’d pickle to death in rotgut vodka without someone to bring home game for the stewpot. That had given Nina a twinge of guilt, but she wasn’t going home, not ever, not for a father who tried to drown her. Yet she still wondered from time to time how he was, if he was alive. I hope you are, she thought, because if the Hitlerites get past me in my plane—if they get all the way to the Old Man—then you’re just the old man to bring them to a halt. She could see her father slipping through the trees with his rifle, his knives, his sharp-toothed grin that was just like Nina’s, cutting German throats in utter silence.

“Not just an individualist but a slut,” Tania muttered, stamping out. “I know you were out with Vladimir Ilyich again last night—”

“Do you want to join us next time?” Nina called after her as the door slammed. She was out that door herself a few minutes later, meeting Vladimir and two of their fellow air club pilots. They sang as they trooped down the street, bellowing an old worker’s march that Nina had never learned as a child. There was so much she had never learned, growing up in near-total isolation out by the lake. It was the kind of thing that still put a distance between her and most of the people she knew. It was better at the air club than among the Komsomol girls like Tania; at least at the club there was the unifying passion for flight. Even so, people like Vladimir and his friends had grown up knowing what a city looked like; they knew Party history and could recite Comrade Stalin’s most famous speeches because they’d studied all the right state-mandated subjects. Growing up a peasant was a bonus, but growing up a complete savage, Nina thought not for the first time, had its disadvantages.

Not anymore. As Nina and the others joined the line outside the recruitment office, which already stretched down the street, she could feel that sense of distance draining away. The four of them talked eagerly about the new planes coming, the fighters that would put Hitler’s Messerschmitts and Fokkers into the ground, and Nina belonged. She couldn’t stop smiling.

But when the four of them emerged from their turn in the office, her smile was gone. Vladimir put a hand on her arm. “You can still do your part—”

“Not as a pilot!” The officer who had taken their applications had been brusque: no women to be taken in aviation units. “I have more flight hours than any of them!” Nina had protested, waving at Vladimir and the others.

“Your enthusiasm to serve the state will not go unassuaged. We have need of nurses, communications operators, antiaircraft gunners—”

“Why can’t I be a pilot?” Fumbling for arguments, Nina fell back on Stalin. No one argued with the Boss. “Comrade Stalin himself has commended the drive of women pilots. I have been a flight instructor for—”

“Then do your job, girl,” the officer said sternly. “There will be plenty of training work for you.” And he moved to the next in line.

Vladimir tried now to sneak an arm around Nina’s waist. “Don’t be sour, dousha. Come celebrate with us!” Nina just glowered, slipping back to her shared room where she had taped a single three-year-old newspaper clipping to the mirror: Marina Raskova, Polina Osipenko, and Valentina Grizodubova standing in front of their twin-engine Tupolev ANT-37, grinning like fiends because they had just set the distance record. Nearly six thousand five hundred kilometers in twenty-six hours and twenty-nine minutes. Nina’s heroines, everyone’s heroines—even Comrade Stalin’s, because he’d bestowed the Hero of the Soviet Union award on them all and said “today these women have avenged the heavy centuries of the oppression of women.”

I’m not avenging the heavy centuries of anything by being a damn nurse, Nina thought. But none of the other girls who flew at the air club were taken as pilots either, even as the men were snapped up down to the last spotty boy.

“What did you expect, Ninochka?” Vladimir shrugged. “Only one in four flying at the club is a girl anyway.”

“But I’m better than any of the men they took,” Nina said bluntly. “I’m better than you.”

She said it as a simple statement of fact, not an insult, but he looked offended. “Keep talking like that, dousha, and I won’t offer to marry you before I go.”

Nina blinked. “Since when do you want to marry me?”

“Every man wants a woman to wave good-bye when he goes to war. We could go down to the office, it would be easy.” He flung a careless arm around her waist. “Don’t you love me?”

“You’re a great lay, Vlodya, and you’re a good pilot but you’re not better than me,” Nina said. “I’d only fall in love with someone who can fly better than me.”

“Bitch,” he said, and stamped off to spend his last few nights in some other bed than Nina’s.

All through the summer, the ranks at the air club thinned. The days marched toward fall and newspapers reported Hitler’s barbaric swastika-clad army murdering babies and torturing Soviet women on the western front. Even as far east as Irkutsk the tide of patriotism swelled, war news traded with relish if it was a Soviet victory or fury if it was a treacherous German advance, and Nina’s frustration ate her alive. There wasn’t an aviation unit that would have her; there wasn’t a commanding officer who would give her a plane; there wasn’t a use for what Nina did best—she spent her days training seventeen-year-old boys who barely listened long enough to get a handful of flight hours before they were off to enlist. All the fine talk on the radio and in Comrade Stalin’s speeches about the women of the Motherland proving their worth—what did it come down to? Be a nurse, or train the men.

And then it was September; Hitler’s forces still advancing implacably east, and Nina walked the Angara River, looking over the railings across that swift blue ribbon that threaded the city. Mentally she was flying high in one of the new fighters, screaming through the clouds at a speed to make her ears bleed . . . All at once the skin between her shoulder blades twitched, and she knew she was being tracked. She stopped to fiddle with her boot, slipping her razor up into her hand, and unfolding it inside her sleeve before turning with a mild expression, ready for anything. Anything, that is, but the knife-edged smile that greeted her.