Yelena kissed as fiercely as she flew, but at first she had been shy. Under the Rusalka’s wing that first night she had blushed so hard she nearly glowed in the dark. “I didn’t know girls . . .” She trailed off. “Did you?”

Nina shrugged. “You hear things.” Mostly it was about men who used each other if there were no women—there had been some like that where Nina grew up. Pretty young women weren’t that common by the Old Man, at least not in a village so tiny; men made other arrangements. Looking at things from a new angle, it seemed reasonable to assume sometimes women did too.

Not that anyone would talk about it, men or women. For men, Nina knew, getting caught buggering meant prison. For women, well, she wasn’t quite so sure, but it wouldn’t be good. An asylum, maybe. Getting booted out of the 588th, certainly.

“. . . Have you?” Yelena’s cheek had burned like a brand against Nina’s shoulder, when she asked that first time. “Before me, I mean. Did you ever . . .”

“Sure,” Nina said. “A few men at the air club.”

“I never wanted to. I guess now I know why.” A sigh. “Men wanted me and I never wanted them. Was it like that with you?”

“No, I like men fine.” She remembered Vladimir Ilyich back in Irkutsk. He was a bonehead, but between the blankets he had made her toes curl. “There were one or two I liked a lot.”

“Better than me?” Yelena had sounded anxious.

“No.” Kissing her soundly. “Because no one flies better than you.”

“Is that all you think about, Ninochka?” Yelena laughed, still blushing. “You don’t bother even looking at someone until you know if they can fly or not?”

“Until I see they can fly, and that they’re brave.” Nina had paused, considering. Was there anything else, any quality that could possibly be packaged in human flesh, that was worth falling head over heels for? Courage. Flying skill. Those were the things that made her weak in the knees; those were the things she’d been pulled toward every time she made a move at someone else. It had always been men before because most of the pilots in the Irkutsk air club had been men. There hadn’t been another woman in the air with verve and skill and guts to match Nina’s own, so she hadn’t even looked at them.

So maybe falling for Yelena wasn’t hard to understand, after all. She was fine and fierce, keen and courageous, the best flier in the regiment. With a roll call of qualities like that, Nina would have lost her head over Yelena whether she was woman, man, or plant. To Nina it was exactly that simple and not worthy of any further thought, but Yelena tended to worry even now—the why of what had pulled them toward each other. “It isn’t natural. It can’t be,” she sometimes brooded, quoting some speech or book Nina had never read. “‘Women, as fully fledged citizens of the freest country in the world, have received from Nature the gift of being mothers. Let them take care of this precious gift in order to bring Soviet heroes into the world.’ We’re supposed to marry and be mothers and workers, above all have children. So this can’t be right, what we do. Is it just the war, turning our heads inside out?”

“Maybe.” Nina had yawned. “Who cares?” It was war: day was night, life was death, sorrow was joy. Who cared about anything but the now?

When they’d been on the southern front, they’d met at the back of the shop where mechanics stashed spare tools, and it had been warm enough to laze afterward skin against skin. Here in Annisovskaia it was cold enough for their breath to puff in clouds inside the shed, and they dived quickly back into trousers and coats. “We won’t be able to meet outside much longer,” Yelena said. She sighed, wincing as her shirt went over her shoulders. “You scratch worse than any rabbit! I should call you kitten instead.”

“Something more dangerous than a kitten,” Nina retorted. “And I’ll find someplace warmer to meet.” It was easier to steal time together than either of them had anticipated. Everyone was too tired after a night’s flying to care if a fellow pilot sneaked out. No one raised an eyebrow if Nina and Yelena clasped hands as they walked to the airfield either, or if Yelena embroidered Nina scarves or Nina dozed with her head in Yelena’s lap. The entire regiment traded kisses and hugs whenever off duty; gave each other presents and pet names. Time was too short not to show your sisters-in-arms that you loved them. Nina had seen other pilots sneaking off discreetly, who knew where to—perhaps private rendezvous with fellow pilots, or with the male ground crew from neighboring regiments.

Still, the two of them were very careful.

“You slip out first,” Nina told Yelena. “I’ll wait three minutes and come after.”

“Nag,” Yelena teased. “You’re as bad as a mother.”

“I’m worse. Because your mother told you to find a nice boy and get married, not go to war and become a pilot, and you didn’t listen. But I’m your navigator, Comrade Lieutenant Vetsina, and unlike your mother, you have to listen to me.”

Yelena snapped a mock salute. Her short curls were rumpled, and her cheeks as rosy as the little pink orchids that bloomed wild around the Old Man, poking their slippered heads up when the snow melted. Nina could hardly breathe, looking at her. I want to hold you, she thought. I would fight the world off for you, Yelena Vassilovna. It was something new, this tremendous wave of protectiveness. It wasn’t like anything Nina had ever felt in her life. It clutched at her with something almost like fear.

Maybe she was afraid of two things, now.

Yelena blew her a kiss, slipping out. Nina waited three minutes and then sauntered after. When she slipped back into the dormitory, she could hear Yelena’s soft breath already slowing toward a deeper rhythm. She’d sleep like a baby now, maybe as much as four hours. Nina wasn’t far behind, dropping off the edge of wakefulness like a stone falling off a cliff.

“Up, rabbits! The Hitlerites aren’t going to bomb themselves!” Major Bershanskaia’s voice, obscenely cheerful. “Up, up, up!”

“Fuck your mother,” Nina mumbled. “Fuck your mother through seven gates.” Peeling open eyelids that had apparently been glued together with cement. “Fuck your mother through seven gates whistling.” Bershanskaia was already gone to the next building, waking the next round of pilots. “One of these days I will cut her throat for being so damned cheerful, and then I will be stood up against a wall and shot, and it will have been worth it,” Nina announced, tugging her blankets to her chin.

“Don’t get shot, Ninochka.” Yelena was already up and halfway into her overalls, as the room filled with yawns and rustles, the rake of combs through sleep-tangled hair. “I don’t want to break in a new navigator, not when you know exactly how I like my tea.”

“Stone cold and tasting like motor oil?”

“Exactly.” Yelena yanked back the blankets, making Nina yelp and fly out of bed. “Up, up, up!”

“I’ll cut your throat too, Yelenushka,” Nina warned, yanking her shirt over her head and tucking her razor’s cord around her wrist. Yelena had a pistol in her cockpit like most pilots, but Nina never went into the sky without her razor.

Another monotonous meal, the sun tilting toward the ground. As they headed for briefing, Nina saw trucks being loaded with armament and cans of fuel. The trucks would rumble out toward the auxiliary airfield closer to the front lines, the U-2s following by air. The ladies of the 588th crammed together to hear Major Bershanskaia give the daily update. Tonight’s target was a bridge used by the Germans to ferry supplies and wounded. Maps were passed out; Nina’s fingers flew over the sketched terrain.

“Comrade Major,” one of the pilots called when the briefing wrapped. “I stalled last night on the fourth run and practically scraped grass by the time the engine kicked in. It was low enough I heard shouts coming from the Germans as they ran for cover.”

“What did they shout?” Nothing to Bershanskaia was unimportant; her eyes were the sharpest Nina had ever seen. Their stocky no-nonsense commander might not have Marina Raskova’s heroic glitter, but Nina was fairly sure she’d cut off a leg for Bershanskaia too. Even if she did want to slit her throat every day for being so damned cheery in her wake-up calls. “What did they shout, Comrade Lieutenant?”

“‘Nachthexen,’” the pilot quoted. “before the engine drowned them out.”

Bershanskaia pronounced the word silently. So did Nina. Nachthexen. One of the other pilots spoke up, the one who had been a language teacher before the war.

“‘Night Witches,’” she translated.

They were all still for a heartbeat. Night Witches. For some reason Nina thought of her father, drunk and furious out on the frozen banks of the Old Man.

What’s a rusalka, Papa? a little girl had asked him, never dreaming that one day she’d be flying through the sky in a plane called by the same name.

A lake witch, her father had answered.

And later on the streets of Irkutsk: I can track wolverines, girl. You think I can’t track my lake witch of a daughter?

Sky witch now, Nina had retorted.