Not one step back? Nina thought, weighed down by exhaustion as heavy as a lead blanket. Try that for yourself, Comrade Stalin. See how much you feel like advancing through those fields of burning grain. Or through those piercing searchlights surrounding the antiaircraft guns, that feeling of being pinned and exposed like a butterfly tacked to a board. The first time they had been caught in a searchlight the Rusalka had sheared sideways, falling into a stall, and for a dizzying moment Nina had not known where the horizon was, only that she was blind and shells were exploding all around them. When her internal compass righted itself, she found herself screaming, Flip, Yelena, we’re inverted, FLIP—and blindly Yelena rolled them right side up and they were out of the searchlights and lurching toward home. Nina hadn’t been able to get out of the cockpit when they landed. Her legs simply refused to work. She sat there until they worked again, not really knowing what else to do, and then dropped out of the cockpit like a sack of turnips to stagger out, vomit matter-of-factly beside the runway, then make her report.

Face a barrage of antiaircraft guns, Comrade Stalin, Nina had thought when she heard Order No. 227, when it was read out that soldiers caught retreating were to be shot. Then we’ll talk about not one step back.

Yes, it felt like a great deal longer than three months. Every night you came back, you thought of the ones who hadn’t, like the three who had died last week when their U-2s collided in a muffling mist and two planes had shredded apart and spiraled to earth in pieces. Petals of burning flowers drifting through the air.

And yet, Nina thought. And yet . . . Every twilight the pilots and navigators gathered bright-eyed, bouncing on their toes as they waited to take to their planes. All of them tugging for the sky.

By the time the Rusalka returned from its tenth run, pink streaks of dawn showed and Major Bershanskaia called the halt. “Back to base airdrome, ladies.” The U-2s lifted off again in a tired line, wagging wingtips at one another, heading like a row of geese for home.

Annisovskaia was home for now: a tiny Caucasus village in the Grozny region where the local secondary school had been commandeered and crammed with foldout cots. The local village women looked at them warily at first, but they were used to female pilots now, and a squat babushka lifted her gnarled hand as Nina and the rest trudged past. “Kill many Germans, dousha?” she asked Nina as she did every night, showing near-toothless gums in a merciless grin, and Nina called back, “Almost enough, Grandmother.”

They trooped into the canteen, groaning at the sight of breakfast. “Stale biscuits and beets,” Yelena said with a sigh, grabbing a plate. “Someday they’ll feed us something different and we’ll all fall over dead from shock before we get a mouthful.”

“Hot kasha with mushrooms,” Dusia said mournfully. “That’s what I miss most.”

“Borscht absolutely heaped with sour cream . . .”

“Raw cabbage,” Nina said, making little nibbling noises like a rabbit, and they all laughed. “Someone wake up Zoya, she’s facedown in her beets again.”

No one, Nina had observed, was able to fall asleep right away after a night of bombing runs. It didn’t matter if you were so tired that you’d been dozing off over the stick on your last run—as soon as you returned from the canteen to your cot, eyelids that had been stone-heavy flew up like untied window shades, and girls who had trudged off the airfield in yawning silence were chattering like magpies.

“—fell into a stall, I swear my wing clipped a shrub before I pulled up—”

“—updraft tossed us halfway to Stalingrad before Irushka got us leveled out—”

Nina skinned out of her overalls, flinging herself down on her cot. “Boots, rabbit,” she called to Yelena, sticking her feet out. “I can’t bend over.”

“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 trembling,” she said, running her fingers back and forth over Yelena’s twitching ones.

“It’ll wear off in another hour. It always does.”

“I can make it wear off sooner.” Nina turned, tugging Yelena’s head down for a kiss, pushing her back toward the shadowed back wall where she’d already tossed down her coat. Some days they were too exhausted to trade anything but a few drowsy kisses, but this morning their hands were eager, Nina’s fingers helping Yelena’s shaky ones with buttons, stray shafts of sunlight painting Yelena’s ivory skin—skin that flushed pink as the inside of a shell as soon as Nina’s hands slid over it. Yelena’s head tipped back as Nina’s lips traveled the insides of her elbows, the space behind her earlobes, the skin over her hip bones, the inside of her knee up toward her thigh, all the tender places that took her to pieces. Nina felt her pilot shatter, quietly, biting down hard on the side of her own hand to keep silent, and the last tremor went through Yelena, leaving those jittering fingers peaceful and still. “There,” Nina said softly, and Yelena sat up and caught her in fierce arms.

“Come here—”