We Rule the Night

by Claire Eliza Bartlett

  The other girls shifted, enough for Linné to notice they were getting out of her way. They moved when they could and turned their backs to her when they couldn’t.

  Well, that was fine. She didn’t want to be friends. And she should go to the commander. She’d keep a clean record and maybe the rest of them would learn something for once.

  They’d be expecting that, of course. It was why Elena ignored her, why Katya tossed her pale curls, why Olya smiled extra wide, and why Nadya shrugged one shoulder. Linné had never told on anyone in Koslen’s regiment, and she wouldn’t become known for tattling in this one. Even if she did want to go back to her old life, she wasn’t going to do it by becoming a snitch. When she’d served under Koslen, she’d snuck out after hours with Tannov and Dostorov to poach rascidine cigarettes from the officers’ quarters and drink confiscated brandy.

  She hated to admit it, but dancing wasn’t the same.

  Revna watched the dance floor with a wistful expression. Not quite knowing what to do, Linné sat down beside her. Revna’s eyes widened in alarm; it was too late for her to pretend that something interesting had happened on the other side of the room. It almost made Linné laugh—the only person who would talk to her was literally her captive audience.

  If only she could think of something to say.

  Everyone else made it look so easy. But Linné’s lessons in discourse had taught her more about politics than small talk. She kept her mouth shut and waited for Revna to say something instead.

  Revna tapped her finger on her thigh in time to the music. The idea that she might be trying to ignore Linné was more irritating than her silence. “Enjoying yourself?” Linné finally said, even though she thought the question was stupid.

  Revna paused, giving Linné a sidelong look that indicated she agreed. “I loved dancing, before,” she said. “I was never much good at it, but it’s more fun to be out there than to be sitting on the side.”

  Linné thought of asking what sort of an accident Revna had been in. But she remembered Revna’s expression when she’d arrived in the barracks. The way she winced every time the sound of her feet made someone look down. Instead, Linné kept her eyes on Olya as she paraded a bemused Nadya across the squeaking boards. Olya’s laugh was different tonight, free, more genuine than Linné had ever heard it. “That would never be me,” she said. “If I had to dance formally one more time, I’d probably saw off my—shit.” She caught herself far too late. “Sorry.” The apology came out insincere. She really should have listened to her tutors more during the conversational lessons.

  “I guess you’re not fond,” Revna said stiffly.

  Linné searched for something else to say. “I was such a failure that my tutors hired someone to teach me martial arts instead.”

  Revna looked at her. “Really?” The judgment had slipped from her voice, revealing curiosity underneath.

  “Mostly kicks and stances,” she replied. “Our housekeeper never let me do anything that would bulk up my arms like a peasant.” Shit again. Though the laws of the Union officially proclaimed that all were equal, she’d sounded like a would-be aristocrat of the worst type.

  Revna cocked her head and scrutinized Linné’s arms. “It didn’t work.”

  Magdalena appeared in front of them. Her cheeks were flushed from dancing. “Is everything all right?” she said to Revna, tilting her head toward Linné.

  Linné rolled her eyes. If Magdalena wanted to talk about her from two feet away, she could have picked a better code.

  “Everything’s fine,” Revna said. She turned back to Linné. “Did your father really let you learn to fight? He didn’t mind?”

  “He wasn’t around much.” Linné fought the urge to squirm. It was one thing to talk about home, another to talk about her father. And she didn’t want to think about him, about what he might say if he saw her now. “Why did you join up?” she asked, more to divert attention than because she cared.

  “Tamara asked, and the money’s better than the factory wage.” Revna took a breath to add something, then seemed to change her mind.

  “Tamara Zima saw you in person?” Linné said. “And she didn’t care that you can’t walk?”

  Wrong thing to say. “I can walk,” Revna said, and her tone had a definite frosty edge. She lifted one steel leg, turning it so that Linné could see the ball of the ankle. “And you don’t need flesh legs to use the Weave.”

  She had a point. “But have you ever used them in battle?” Linné knew that it was a cruel and unfair question. But war was unfair. It was messy and filthy and bloody, and it belonged to the people who could fight it. Revna might be a genius with the Weave. Being in a war was not the same as fighting one. And for all they claimed victory tonight, these pilots hadn’t seen anything yet. “How long will it take you to get to your plane every night?”

  “Leave her alone.” Magdalena moved closer, folding her arms. Using her size to intimidate. “She has as much right to be here as you do. Maybe she has more. Dozens of girls could take your place.”

  “And no one would suffice for yours?” Linné said. “What your rights are has nothing to do with it. What matters is whether you can do it.”

  And then she was there, with the thick summer rains lashing, cowering inside the carapace of a war beetle that wouldn’t press forward no matter how much spark the driver poured in.

  She was shooting the man who’d walked into the minefield because he needed a midnight piss and he went the wrong way.

  She was defying Colonel Koslen as he told her to leave a casualty behind. She was pulling the man through the mud. She was feeling him die anyway, against her shoulder.

  She was on the retreat in her first-ever battle, running for her life as snipers took out their regiment from the rear forward.

  “What happens if we have to abandon the base? What do you do when we have two minutes to get to our planes? What happens if we have to jump out as fast as we can, when something’s wrong and we have to bail? How fast can you run on those feet?”

  Her heart pumped as though she’d run laps for Colonel Hesovec. A cluster formed around them, muttering. Their eyes bored into her. She needed to fix this. To calm herself and the others down.

  As with dancing, she’d never really gotten the hang of it.

  “She’s a great pilot,” Katya said. “Revna deserves her spot.”

  “It’s not about what she can do in the plane,” Linné snapped. “The war doesn’t just happen when we’re in the plane.” And people who thought they were ready for it, that they were special somehow—they got the worst shock of all.

  Revna had begun to tremble. Magdalena put a hand on her shoulder. “If you’re only going to criticize, you should go. You can run to Tamara if you want—we don’t care. Leave Revna alone.”

  Linné squared her shoulders and met Magdalena’s eye. “Would you fly with her?”

  “What?” Magdalena said, stunned.

  “Would you be the navigator? Would you risk getting killed because she can’t run fast enough? Would you risk watching her die for the same reason?”

  There was a moment’s pause—a moment too long. It gave enough time for Linné to see the emotions play their way across Magdalena’s face, shock and shame and anger. Finally she said, “I’m not a navigator. But if I were, I’d fly with her.”

  “That’s easy to say when you never have to prove it.” A cold, bitter triumph bloomed in Linné’s belly. She hated that she was right. She hated that it satisfied her.

  “Leave,” growled Magdalena.

  The trumpet on the radio turned to a melancholy piano. No one danced to it. Some stood around Revna, hands on their hips, shielding her. Others watched the conflict from a safe distance. Outraged expressions abounded. But the silence spoke, too.

  Linné left them there. Let them be self-righteous and hypocritical. She was mean, cruel, heartless, and all the other names they flung at her. But she was honest. They worshipped a commander with no experience command
ing, but they didn’t even want to look at Linné. This war would destroy them and they hated her for saying it.

  The wind outside had turned even more bitter. Tomorrow will be worse than today, she thought as she fought against it. She went back to her bed, and she lay down, but sleep didn’t come.

  Near ten bells the door opened and Revna’s telltale footsteps thunked across the room. Linné probably imagined that they paused as they passed her bed. But she couldn’t mistake the sniffling sounds that the other girl tried to suppress in her pillow.

  She’d done that. Maybe the rest of them hadn’t helped, but she’d done it. She felt sick.

  A couple of hours later they filed in, speaking in hushed tones. Linné was still awake. Revna was still crying.

  Nobody said anything to either of them.

  9

  UNITY IS STRENGTH

  Revna refused to act like a victim after Linné’s display in the mess. It had been years since someone had attacked her and her disability so blatantly. Usually people acted like the rest of the girls—silent when they needed to be noisy, faithless when they needed to show loyalty. She imagined Linné with her jaw on the ground, watching Revna soar. Linné could spark, but so what? Everyone had the spark and thousands of people could use it. Only a few could do what Revna did.

  Win one war, and you’ll win all of them, she reminded herself. She was at Intelgard for a reason, and it wasn’t to get pushed around, belittled, or arrested.

  And when she ended the war, she wouldn’t do it for the Union or people like Linné. She’d do it for her family, for her friends, for herself.

  Flying invigorated her, though doubt still needled in when she put her hands in her pilot’s gloves. Every time the Strekoza’s giant fingers closed on her, she trembled and her prosthetics twitched. But her Strekoza loved her, and when Tamara powered up, Revna lost herself to this glorious new creature that could go anywhere, do anything. The Weave limned her sight in silver and showed her the Ryddan countryside as she’d never seen it before. The farmland was churned by never-ending autumn rain, and the plains beyond the base wove gold and green together as the grass and the scrub took over. It was easy to believe that some god of the land had painted it in bright swaths, heedless of the snow that would blanket it two-thirds of the year.

  Revna learned to steer the plane with the slightest movements, adjusting to the wind and the weather. She learned to make the plane roll and flip, to pull it by brute force. She learned to see Intelgard’s ramshackle mess for what it was, to recognize the plains beyond it and the southeastern Karavels ridging the horizon. Twice they flew beyond the Karavels, though they always turned back before they could catch even a glimpse of the front.

  Tamara flew with every pilot, and the pilots spent long hours practicing techniques on the ground while they waited. She flew up to twenty-two times a day, pouring her spark into the throttle. Her hair turned dry and brittle, her skin ashen. The Strekozy sucked the spark from her greedily, teasing out her life one needle prick at a time. Whenever she rolled up her sleeves, the girls could see bruise after bruise and dozens of tiny dots where the blood had risen to the surface, like a tattoo. But she never stopped. Once, she fell asleep behind Revna, and their plane grew so heavy Revna thought they’d drop straight out of the sky. She had to yank on the Weave with all she had as the aircraft drifted down.

  Tamara came to with a start. “Good use of force,” she said in such a crisp voice Revna almost believed she hadn’t nodded off. “I know it’s not something we like to talk about, but if something happens to your navigator, you’ll feel it. You won’t be able to fly the plane for long, so your safest bet is to set down in home territory and send up an emergency flare.”

  Revna knew she was trying to cover for her exhaustion. Mama did the same thing. And what else could Tamara do? Hesovec wouldn’t help them.

  It took Tamara another week to approve them to fly with navigators. When she told the pilots, they sent up a cheer that rattled the weak walls of her office. They trooped to the mess as if they’d already won their first battle. “Here’s to us not crashing and dying tomorrow,” Katya said, raising her tin cup as they sat down.

  “Hear, hear,” they chorused. Nadya released a shower of cold spark that bloomed like fireworks, and they shrieked as it fell on their heads and necks. She could do anything with her power. Revna supposed it was too much to hope that Nadya might partner with her.

  Some of the men laughed derisively on the other side of the mess. Linné, sitting alone against the wall, snorted and went back to reading her survival manual.

  “Miserable hag,” Magdalena said in a low voice. “Her life must be unbearable.” She choked on a bite of gristly pork. “Like this food. Pass the salt.”

  Katya handed it over. “She looks like she can’t decide whether to kill herself or the rest of us.”

  “It doesn’t look like things are so bad for her,” Revna said, nudging Magdalena. The dark-haired soldier who had challenged Linné to a shooting contest sidled up to her.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Katya. Her spoon clattered to the table. “That’s the third time this week.” The table fell silent as every head craned to get a good look.

  The dark-haired soldier caught them staring. He smiled, a little self-conscious, and saluted them. Then he walked back to the unofficial male side of the room, leaving a red-faced Linné glaring at all of them.

  Revna pretended to examine her allotment of dry bread. “Anyway,” she said, even though she didn’t know how to continue. Linné went back to her book. But she didn’t turn the page, Revna noticed.

  “Flying,” Katya prompted them, letting a thin stream of greasy stew fall from her spoon into her bowl.

  “Come on,” said Pavi, rolling her eyes. “It’s nothing she doesn’t deserve.”

  Katya leaned forward. “How is it that she’s the first of us to land a boy?” she said, not quite softly enough. Revna saw Linné’s hand crumple the book’s corner.

  “Maybe pretending to be one gave her some insider knowledge,” Pavi said.

  “She’s not landing a boy. I’m not defending her,” Nadya said when Katya shot her an incredulous look. “But rules are rules. And if anyone knows the rules…” She nodded in Linné’s direction.

  “And we don’t really know what he was doing there,” Revna added. She didn’t have to defend Linné; Linné wouldn’t do the same for her. But she still remembered what it was like to be whispered about.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We all saw him at the firing range,” Olya butted in. A bitter smile turned the corners of her mouth. “‘Be a nice, sweet girl, Olusha. That’s what men like.’ I should never have listened to my mother.”

  “Maybe I should have listened to mine more,” sighed Katya, playing with the cuff of her uniform. She’d embroidered a firebird entwined in a ring of ivy, and it danced in the light of the lanterns.

  Revna shrugged. She’d never ached for someone, not in a way she thought a girl ought to when she was in love. And when boys looked at her, they looked at her legs first. They always saw the rest of her after. “It’s one man,” she said. “It’s not like they’re all falling over themselves to get at her.”

  The blond man in the Skarov coat walked past. All sound cut off, like a radio switched to silent. Revna bit back her next sentence, and she wasn’t even thinking anything incriminating. That was the Skarov effect on people. When they walked by, you shut up.

  He nodded to them. He was the friendly-looking one who smiled at everyone he saw. It didn’t put Revna at ease in the least. Her fingers clenched around her spoon. For a terrifying moment she thought he would sit down among them. She wouldn’t break bread with him. She couldn’t do much for Papa, but she could do that.

  He passed their table and went right up to Linné. He leaned in, and though conversation had come to a standstill, he spoke too softly for Revna to hear. But whatever he said, Linné shut her book and grabbed her tray. They walked back across the mess togethe
r.

  “I knew it,” Olya said.

  The Skarov stopped.

  Olya froze, eyes wide. Revna felt a flash of pity for her. Didn’t she know that the Skarov heard everything?

  “I beg your pardon?” he said, taking half a step in her direction. His words were like a knife stabbing into a thick blanket of silence. No one moved. Revna could barely breathe. They were flouting Union law as it was; couldn’t Olya resist making snide remarks?

  The man waited, all politeness. As if he had posed a perfectly innocent query.

  “Nothing,” Olya finally squeaked.

  “My mistake.” He inclined his head in a little bow.

  Linné stomped out of the hall. The entire table exhaled as the Skarov followed. Someone across the room made a joke, and the mess filled up with noise.

  Olya let her head drop to the table. Questionable stew slopped over the side of her bowl. “I’m a dead woman,” she moaned, digging her fingers into her hair. Giggles erupted all around her.

  “Cheer up.” Magdalena patted her shoulder. “You’ll probably only be mildly tortured. Keep your cool and all you’ll lose is a couple of fingers.”

  “It looks like you’ve made a few friends,” Tannov said as they left the mess.

  “Shut up,” Linné said, tilting her head to the sky. Sleet spattered the wooden boards, the first advance of Commander Winter toward the front.

  “Is that any way to address your dedicated Information Officer?”

  She didn’t care. Maybe she’d regret it later, but right now Tannov could think what he wanted of her. Everyone else did—the dark-haired soldier who’d badgered her three times this week, the girls who huddled in defensive groups whenever she passed. “If you came to get me for interrogation, then it hardly matters what I say now. If you came to be my friend, then you can be a bit nicer about it.”

  “Why does everyone think that my job is to torture people?” Tannov said. He lit a rascidine cigarette and offered one to Linné. She never said no to a free cigarette. “I want a drink. A real one. Come on.”