“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—”
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?”