She looked at Yelena’s wide eyes and cupped that much-loved face between her hands. “Come with me,” Nina heard herself saying, heart beating in her throat. This was not planned either, but among the torrent of emotions running riot through her chest—shock at her own coming arrest, rage at her father, stark liquid grief for the loss of her regiment—something lighter joined the maelstrom: a feather touch of hope.

“Come with me,” she repeated, and suddenly the words were spilling eager and blunt. No speaking in vague generalities now—here under the open sky, Nina was done with Party euphemisms. “Wait until the last instant, then run for the navigator’s cockpit. They won’t be able to stop us. They’ll report us both dead before the time my arrest warrant arrives, and we’ll be free as birds with no disgrace attached to the regiment. How far west can we get, the two of us and a U-2 full of fuel?”

“Into Poland?” Yelena gestured at the ugly trampled ground around them, the smoke-smudged western horizon. “It’s crawling with Germans—”

“Where else can I go? Anywhere behind our own lines, I’ll be found. It’s west for me, or it’s propeller first into the nearest battery of guns.”

Yelena winced, turning away from Nina’s hands. “You don’t have to go. You’ll be acquitted—”

“No,” Nina cut her off. “I flee now or I die later—a few days, a few weeks, even a few years, but I’ll die. I can make my way through Poland, maybe even farther. To a new world.” She had no idea what she was going to do, dropped into war-racked Poland, but she knew she and Yelena could survive together. “Come with me,” she repeated, grasping Yelena’s hands in both her own. “The West, Yelenushka. Where black vans don’t come in the dead of night because your neighbor wants your apartment—”

“Don’t say that!” Yelena cried in reflexive fear of eavesdroppers, but Nina threw her head back in defiance.

“Why not? They’ve already denounced me. They can’t do it twice.” The satisfaction of that was fierce. Take me away from my regiment, my plane, my friends? Nina thought to the vast barren country that had sired her. I’ll turn my back on you without a second glance, you frozen heartless bitch. And I’ll take your finest Hero with me. She and Yelena would be so much better, if only they could escape the Motherland and wait out the war. No arguments about Party politics or Comrade Stalin, nothing to divide them. She’ll see what this place is, if she sees it from the outside. I’ll give her everything else she wants—an apartment by a river and babies playing on the floor. Nina was ready to tear those things bare-handed out of the unknown capitalist world if she had to, tear them out and lay them at Yelena’s feet if only she’d come west tonight.

But her heart seized, because Yelena’s head was shaking back and forth.

“My mother is in Moscow,” she said. “My aunts and uncles are in Ukraine. I can’t leave them—they’ll all be denounced and arrested in turn, if there’s even a whisper I deserted.”

“Bershanskaia will report us shot down, heroes who died fighting—”

“So I let them think I’m dead? Let them grieve? I’m the only child my mother has left.”

I don’t care about your family, Nina thought. I only care about you. But she didn’t say it.

“It’s not just my family,” Yelena went on. “I can’t leave the regiment.”

“I’m leaving the regiment!” Nina lashed back. “Do you think that’s easy?”

“No, no, I didn’t—I meant—” Yelena’s face contorted, tears shining in her dark lashes. “Ninochka, I can’t leave them for you. I can’t betray them. They need me.”

“I need you.” Nina wanted to shout, but it came out a whisper. Her hands were so cold, gripping Yelena’s in the sunshine. “They’ll fly on without you. None of us are irreplaceable. Slot another sestra into the cockpit and keep flying, that’s the regiment’s way. But you’re irreplaceable to me.”

Yelena tore her hands away. “You’re asking too much,” she cried. “Leave my family, my regiment, my oath, my country—”

“Your country is throwing me away,” Nina yelled back. “Six hundred and fifteen successful bombing runs, and they’re going to put a bullet in my head or work me to death in a gulag, all because my father is a drunk with a foul mouth. I don’t have a family or a regiment or an oath, thanks to this country. You are all I have left.”

Yelena was still shaking her head, but in blind stubbornness. “They won’t shoot you. It’s all a mistake.”

“Wake up! This place is rotten—”

“How can you think that? You fought for the Motherland for more than two years—”

“Because it’s all someone like me is good for.” Nina realized she was shouting, but she couldn’t stop. “I’m good in the air, I’m good on the hunt, and I’m good at surviving, so I gave it all to this regiment because of the women in it. I’d cut my heart out for any of them, but all I can do for them now is leave and let them tell the world I’m dead. I don’t care about the Motherland, Yelena. She’s a frozen mass of dirt, she was here long before I got here, and she’ll be here long after I’m gone. She got two years of my service, but she’s not getting my death. The Motherland and Comrade Stalin and all the rest can fuck themselves through seven gates whistling.”

Her Moscow rose couldn’t help recoiling. Nina seized Yelena’s face between her hands, yanked her to eye level, and kissed her savagely.

“Come with me,” she said again, against Yelena’s trembling mouth. “Come with me and leave it all behind, or you will die here.”

She put her whole heart into those words, everything she had, everything she was. She could feel her pulse thrumming like the Rusalka’s gallant little engine just starting to spool up for the fight. Yelena was going to burst into tears, she’d cry her heart out in Nina’s arms, and after that it would be all right. There was time. They could go.

But though Yelena’s long dark lashes were wet, not a tear fell. “Maybe it is all rotten,” she said, so softly she was all but inaudible. “But if the good ones leave, who’s here to make it better after the war?”

In Nina’s chest, the engine died.

Yelena leaned down, touching her forehead to Nina’s. “I know why you have to leave, Ninochka. It’s leave or nothing. But I can’t give up my homeland and my oath for love.” She managed a small smile under swimming eyes. “That’s the kind of thing that makes men say little princesses have no place at the front.”

Silence stretched out between them, as vast and frozen as the Old Man. Nina’s lips parted, but she had no more words. Not Don’t leave me. Not Go to hell. Not I love you. Nothing. She took a stumbling step backward, tripping over a clod of earth.

Yelena steadied her with an outstretched arm, tried to pull her close. “Ninochka—”

Nina wrenched away. One more kiss, and the huge sob building in her chest would tear loose. One more kiss, and she’d be the one crying her heart out in Yelena’s arms and vowing to stay, vowing to denounce her father, vowing to take ten years or twenty in a gulag if her pilot would only wait for her. One more kiss and she would be utterly undone. In the old stories a rusalka could bring a mortal to their knees, perishing in ecstasy after a single kiss that seared like ice.

Maybe Yelena had been the rusalka all along. Not small, shaken Nina Markova who felt like she was dying.

“Nina,” Yelena said again, softly. Nina didn’t look back. She stumbled to the edge of the airfield, tear-blind, lips sealed on her own pleas, standing there with her head bowed. She saw the gold star still pinned crookedly to her own breast—Yelena’s HSU—and tore it off blindly, hurling it to the mud. The alarm went up to signal the briefing; pilots would be spilling out of canteen and barracks to hear the night’s mission. Nina stayed rooted to the spot, eyes squeezed shut. She heard Yelena move past her, light footsteps in thick boots, and thought desperately, Don’t touch me. I will shatter if you touch me.

A single in-drawn breath as Yelena stooped to retrieve her gold star, then she was gone. Nina stood at the edge of the airfield, watching the sun fade and a quarter moon began to rise as Bershanskaia delivered the evening’s briefing somewhere inside. I will shatter, Nina kept thinking, the thought circling like a conveyor belt of U-2s. But she didn’t shatter. She just stood numb, waiting for her heart to finish breaking, for that hateful quarter moon to finish rising, for her last flight as a Night Witch to begin.

Chapter 35

Ian

July 1950

Boston

Tony returned from his shift at McBride’s Antiques looking like a cat who had got into the cream. “Good news.”

“Did Kolb try to bunk?” Ian looked up from their paper-strewn table, hopeful. He’d had a week of diner coffee and was tired of it.

“Not that good, no. Kolb is headed home as usual, Nina ghosting along in his wake. Your little Soviet popsy is a natural tail.”

My little Soviet popsy is at least speaking to me, Ian thought. Nina’s temper seemed to be of the tinderbox variety, fast kindled and fast out—the morning after stamping out of the diner in a rage, she’d greeted him with her usual breeziness and showed no compunction about dragging him off to the couch when Tony left. Bloody hell, it was complicated having an affair with your own wife.