Maybe not.

Not quite a sky witch, or even a water-bound lake witch. Something else. Something new. Nina looked around at the ladies of the 588th, all of them that made up something the world had never seen before, and saw smiles tugging lips, flashes of teeth showing in private, pleased grins. Night Witches.

“Well,” one of the navigators said at last, “I like it.”

A burst of laughter, and Major Bershanskaia clapped her hands. “To the field, ladies.”

A line of U-2s took off into the darkening sky for the new airfield, little better than an old turnip patch. The pilots hopped out, making way for armorers and mechanics. Everyone bounced on their toes, eyes on the sky. Exhaustion forgotten, hunger forgotten, shakes and shivers and bad dreams forgotten. The moon was rising, a plumper crescent than last night. Nina sniffed the night wind, heady and mountain scented, setting her blood on fire like a river of gasoline. Yelena tensed, ready to run, eying the Rusalka across the field.

Bershanskaia gave the chop of her hand that silenced all conversation. “Ladies, to your planes,” she usually said. But tonight it was “Nachthexen, to your planes.”

And they were all sprinting for their lives, sprinting for their planes, laughter crossing the lines in a fierce ripple. Yelena rode the crest in front, and Nina was bursting a lung somewhere in the middle of the pack. Twenty-four hours had turned like a wheel and here they were, back on the conveyor belt. Somewhere up ahead Yelena cried, “Too slow, rabbits! Rusalka first!” A few heartbeats later, Nina caught the wing and went flying into her cockpit.

And one by one, the Night Witches took to the air.

Chapter 22

Jordan

May 1950

Boston

Jesus, Jor.” Garrett laughed as he jumped down from the cockpit of the little biplane. “I thought you were going to try and climb out.”

“I can’t believe you trained for war in a plane like this. It’s cloth and plywood!” Jordan swung a leg carefully over the edge of her own cockpit. “I wonder if any of my shots will turn out. Trying to focus through goggles and wind shear . . .”

“I haven’t seen you snapping away like that in a while.” Garrett lifted her down from the wing.

“I’ve been busy. And it’s not like I’m going to make a career of it.” That used to be a bitter thought, but Jordan supposed all dreams hurt when they finally withered up in the glare of real life. What was the point in toting a camera everywhere, taking classes, sinking hours into photo-essays that no one would buy? She had a shop to work in, a sister to help look after. A wedding to plan.

“Mom wants to talk to you about flowers for the church,” Garrett said as though reading her mind, chocking the biplane’s wheels. “She wondered what you thought about orchids.”

“Um.” Jordan didn’t have any opinion about orchids, but as a bride-to-be, she supposed she’d have to acquire one. Last Christmas Garrett had replaced his college ring with the expected diamond—a pear-shaped stone on a gold band, dainty and pretty. The thought of a fall wedding after Garrett graduated had seemed safely distant, but the ring had been the first pebble in a landslide as plans started falling into place with alarming speed: a September ceremony, a honeymoon in New York, Ruth in pale pink gauze as flower girl. Jordan’s little sister was ecstatic. Everyone was ecstatic.

Jordan pushed off thoughts of orchids and centerpieces and raised the Leica, snapping Garrett beside the plane. “We’d better get back. I’m opening up the shop at one.” The little airfield sat northeast of Boston: a crumbling business that hung on, Garrett said, by renting out its small collection of outdated biplanes for flight instruction, crop-dusting, and joyrides. Jordan returned to the car, and as Garrett squared things away with the mechanic, she tried fluffing her hair in the rearview mirror. When she had turned twenty-one last June, she’d decided it was time to swap the schoolgirl ponytail for something more adult, but now she wasn’t sure the hairdresser had done her any favors. “We’ll take some of the length off,” the woman enthused, “then curl the back. You’ll look just like Rita Hayworth in The Loves of Carmen. Did you see that one, honey?” But the Rita Hayworth effect required a lot of pins and curlers, and however much Jordan twirled and tugged in the morning, a good breeze had the whole dark-blond mess lying limp as a dishrag.

Whack it all off and top it with a beret like Gerda Taro, the long-smothered voice of J. Bryde whispered—the part of Jordan that still had silly daydreams about trading her pin curls and crinolines for a sleek leather trench and heading for New York with the Leica over one shoulder. But Jordan put that thought back where it belonged, turning to Garrett as he jogged over. “When can we come back? This was fun.”

“Whenever you want.” He hopped in over the driver’s-side door. “I’ve been working here, every other Saturday. Pat—Mr. Hatterson, he owns the place—he’s on the ropes. I put in a couple days a month, give the weekend joyriders a few loops and spins, and Pat pays me in flying time.” A quick glance. “It doesn’t scare you, me flying? Mom says it gives her the shivers now that I have my license. She keeps saying I already broke one leg flying, and a man who’s going to be married soon needs to think of his family.”

“Fly all you want when we’re married,” Jordan proclaimed, using the word she usually managed to avoid. “It doesn’t bother me a bit.”

Garrett leaned over and gave her a good, long kiss. “You’re quite a girl, you know that?”

“I do know that.” Jordan leaned forward, murmuring into his ear. “Do you still have that blanket in your trunk?”

She should feel him grin against her cheek. “Yep.”

“Anywhere around here a girl and her fella could get lost?”

“Yep.”

Shortly after the college ring had been traded in for its half-carat cousin, Jordan had decided a different kind of trade-in was in order. You once wanted to travel the world with a string of European lovers in tow, she thought. At the very least, you can graduate from making out in the backseat of a Chevrolet coup.

It was with a certain amount of snickering now that they drove off in a spin of tires and dust, not back toward Boston but farther past the airfield, down a smaller dead-end road. Garrett got the blanket out of the truck, bowing elaborately toward the trees. “After you, miss.”

“Do you have—” Jordan tried her best to be a woman of the world, but she wasn’t quite past euphemisms when it came to what her girlfriends in school had always just called those things. “You know.”

Garrett patted his wallet. “I was a Boy Scout, remember? Be prepared.”

“I hope this wasn’t in the Scouts’ manual.”

“If it had been, I would have paid a lot more attention to my Scoutmaster . . .”

They found a thick stand of trees and brush, well out of sight of the car, then spread out the blanket and tumbled onto it. The first time they’d ever done this (four months ago, in an apartment borrowed from a friend of Garrett’s) Jordan had expended considerable thought on exactly how one got from fully dressed and kissing to naked. Given all the fastenings on everything that the New Look required for a woman to look fashionable, there didn’t seem to be any graceful way to take everything off.

“Here’s my sister’s copy of Forever Amber,” her friend Ginny had advised, handing over a dog-eared volume. “I took it from under her mattress. Ten descriptions of women undressing in front of men, according to the attorney general of Massachusetts.”

“He was paying awfully close attention considering he said the book was obscene,” Jordan had observed.

“He also noted there were seventy references to sexual intercourse. I only found sixty-two, but I was reading in a hurry before my sister missed it.”