They readied for takeoff. The silence between them was so thick Revna thought she could turn around and take a bite of it. She tried to break it instead. “What do you think really happened to Pavi and Galina?”
“Why do you think I know?” Linné’s voice chilled Revna to the bottom of her spine.
Because your only friends are spies? “Because you’re smart?”
“I don’t know anything that you wouldn’t if you’d joined the army to be part of it, and not to follow Zima around like a duckling. It’s law—if you disappear in enemy territory, you have to explain where you’ve been and what you were doing.”
“They were making repairs,” Revna said.
“Then they have nothing to worry about in Eponar.”
The Skarov would give them something to worry about, and something to pay for. And if Linné didn’t know that, then she was willfully stupid or she was in their pocket. Either way, Revna didn’t feel much like talking further.
They were silent until Tamara directed them off the field. As they lurched into the air, Revna said, “All right. Where are we going?”
“Teltasha Forest,” Linné said.
Dread unspooled in Revna’s belly. “That’s a fair way away.” All the way back home.
“I can get us there and back. Can you?”
“Everyone thinks so except you,” Revna muttered.
“I’ve already told you I know you can fly.” Revna felt the defensive undertone and the beat of Linné’s heart pulsing erratically through the engine.
They stuck close to the Mariszkoy mountain range as they flew out, until the mountains became hills and the Intelgard plains became the Teltasha birch forest. Its leaves gleamed silver and white underneath them, hiding the ground beneath a sparkling canvas. A strong wind gave them clear skies and a bright half-moon, and Revna had to compensate to keep them from drifting off course. The open air was liberating after their stuffy mountain runs last night, but the light freedom Revna felt battled against Linné’s amplified surliness. Her spark was calmer than their former flights, though, so Revna tried not to let Linné bother her. For now the world’s problems couldn’t reach up to touch her as she floated on the air.
The black winding ribbon of the Tolga River cut starkly through the land, engorged from the heavy snow. Revna could make out the way the Weave warped to fit around it, forming little tangles where the water burbled over rocks. Above them the stars collected into a massive river of their own that divided the night sky. The borealis glimmered green on the horizon. Revna looked up, searching for the constellations that Lyfa so loved. Maybe when the war was over, she could borrow a plane and fly with Lyfa, take her closer to the stars.
The trees thinned, revealing a blanket of crisp snow as the woodland gave way to the steppe. Snow lynxes, foxes, and hares left dotted tracks, the only interruption in the smooth white. Occasionally Revna spotted larger tracks, from the paws of some enormous cat, that glinted magical around the edges.
The first signs of war came thirty minutes on, with patches of dark mud where soldiers had trampled the earth. The sharp smell of sulfur pricked at Revna’s nose. Soon after, they began to see bits of detritus, twisted metal strips and spars, dropped packs, pieces of shrapnel reflecting bursts of light.
Then came the bodies.
No one had bothered to make them pretty or presentable. They lay as twisted as the trash that surrounded them, in dark-stained snowbanks. Some were facedown, limbs askew. Others had turned their heads to the side, or to the sky, their arms outstretched as if they’d used their last moments to reach for something unobtainable. In the moonlight Revna could see slices of skull, slices of arm. Slices of middle. She wasn’t sure where the bodies ended and the machines began. She didn’t know whether to weep for them or rejoice at their deaths.
The trail widened as they followed it. Metal pieces took on shape and meaning, becoming the lower halves of rail guns or the insectoid legs of palanquins or war beetles or strange, slim Elda craft that Revna had never seen before. Some of them still twitched, energized by terror in their final moments. The bodies grew more numerous, and the mud was churned as though the earth itself had reached out to take part in the battle. The air began to buzz with the sound of Skyhorses on the horizon, little bees spreading fire. The smell of smoke grew thicker and the ground became hazy.
Something moved below. Long, feline bodies stalked through the snow, converging in packs and racing for the front. They left glimmering paw-prints behind them. Revna was about to point them out when she saw dark shapes loping over the ground, bearing in from the west. These creatures were a canine counterpart to the feline ones below. The dogs raised their heads and howled, and then they were a tangled snarl of bodies, spitting and growling.
“What are they?” she said.
“Skarov,” Linné said. “Ours and theirs.” Something in her tone made Revna shiver. “Look.”
Red outlined the horizon. Smoke created a thin film over the stars as it dissipated. Tammin wasn’t far.
The world around grew brighter, bright as the morning, and as they drew closer, the scope of the fire expanded until it seemed to stretch for kilometers. Revna imagined the red-gold scar marching across the front, pushing the Elda forward. The Strekoza dipped in sympathy. This was nowhere near any of the God Spaces the Elda claimed to want.
She choked on a lungful of smoke. The wind blew northward; if she angled up, they might escape the worst of it. But then how were they supposed to see the signals sent by Kurcik and his men?
A shadow loomed before them. A roar shook their plane in the air. A steel jaw as large as the Strekoza emerged from the smoke, and a seam split open. For a moment Revna was certain that the mouth would be lined with teeth like knives, ready to close on their little canvas-and-wood plane. But the inside was smooth and empty, save for a pipe at the back of its cold throat.
Red billowed in the pipe. Fire. She grabbed the nearest strand of the Weave and hauled on it with all she had. The Strekoza flipped up. Her shoulders slammed against the cage, and the engine cut as Linné screamed. Revna felt a burst of heat as fire spurted underneath them in a stream. The Weave flashed around them, eating the Dragon’s surplus spark. She pulled them through a backward loop. “Power,” she cried, aiming them up toward the sky.
“Fuck,” Linné shouted.
Heat seared the side of Revna’s face. She wrenched them around to port. The Strekoza evened out. Below, a long, dark shape eased through the shifting smoke.
Their first Dragon.
She took them farther up, trying to breathe deep and avoid the smoke and calm the pounding of her heart all at once. Do not attempt to engage, Tamara had said. Would the Dragon pursue them? A hysterical giggle broke out of her. The Strekoza shook as if it were on the verge of falling apart. Linné cursed.
“Do you have to swear like that?” Revna said.
Linné made a disgusted noise. “Do you have to fly like that?”
They’d survived, hadn’t they? “I—”
“Get back on course so we can drop the payload.”
As they drew nearer, sounds of battle penetrated the red fog. Shapes worked beneath the smoke. The thick walls of Tammin Reaching reared up on the starboard side, and men crawled along them like ants.
Oh, Tammin. It bloomed red and gold and black, the dull gray of its buildings replaced with streaks of soot, with spires of orange flame. The even pulse, the clanging and thumping and pounding that gave Tammin its heart and its purpose, had ceased. All her life, she’d felt the steady beat of Tammin like a clock. Now time stood still as the city died.
“There.” Linné tugged Revna’s collar and pointed. A young man, maybe younger than them, stood on the reaching’s walls. He held a pair of filthy semaphore flags. Revna read panic in every line of his body. He gestured with the flags, then ducked as they flew over.
“Where to?” Revna said.
She heard the puzzled frown in Linné’s voice. “I… Double back. He must ha
ve said it wrong.”
Couldn’t Linné admit that her semaphore skills were rusty? “It’s hard to see, with all the smoke,” she said, trying to sound understanding instead of irritated.
The confusion turned to cold disdain. “I saw him fine. He signaled wrong.”
Revna took them back around. The world beneath was a painting in black and red. Hues shifted as the battle moved and fire erupted in pockets all around. The Elda must have dropped incendiaries before launching the attack. She imagined the shelters, bursting with terrified factory workers. But they were safe. She didn’t have to think about—
“Revna,” Linné said. Revna tensed and pulled them back on course.
Mama and Lyfa would be fine. This was what the shelters were for. The regiment would protect Tammin, and as soon as the mission was over, she’d write them a letter. She was here to save them, not think about them. She flew the plane back over the semaphore boy.
“Do another pass,” Linné said. She sounded dumbfounded. The air in the Strekoza hummed with her confusion.
“Even I could see that he did the same thing twice,” Revna said.
“Well, he’s wrong.”
“Maybe he’s not.”
“He’s telling us to bomb the reaching.” Linné’s voice echoed, hard and unforgiving, in the speaking tube.
“What?” Revna strained against the Strekoza’s metal fingers. The plane turned cold. “Impossible.”
“For once we agree.”
She thought of the factory, of the propaganda posters peeling black and blistered outside. She thought of the twisted living metal full of panic and pain. She thought of her little house, engulfed in flame. “You read the signs wrong.”
The Strekoza sped forward with a burst of angry spark from Linné. “I know my semaphore signals.”
“Then he’s confused. Disoriented. What have the others done?”
The rest of the regiment had scattered in the smoke. There was no way to know.
Linné hesitated a moment. But when she spoke, her voice was steady, and her spark was, too. “We find the best Elda target, drop the incendiaries, go back.”
“Drop them now, then.”
“We can’t just drop them. It’s a waste.”
Linné wasn’t supposed to make her feel like a coward. The fact that she was right only made Revna angrier. She suggested whatever caught her eye until Linné agreed to a skirmish between Union soldiers and Elda palanquins. They punched a hole in a palanquin below and were rewarded with a cheer from the Union men.
They turned east and Linné put on a burst of power. Revna leaned forward as if that would speed up the plane. They had to get back to Intelgard. She had to tell Tamara about this mistake.
The light and the noise and the color receded. The air turned sweet and the silence pressed in. They flew over the Teltasha Forest, back over the glassy Tolga River so thick with snowmelt that Revna could hear its sated roar.
Revna concentrated on Linné’s breathing, trying to remind herself she wasn’t alone in the world. Trying to think of anything but Tammin, and the people she knew there, and the people she loved there, and the people who might be dead there.
They landed at Intelgard to find Tamara pacing the field. She took each step as if something on the ground had personally wronged her. She stalked over as Linné cut the power. The Strekoza ceased its humming, and the cage loosened enough that Revna could lean out of the cockpit.
Magdalena hurried over with an incendiary. Her face was paler than the snow on the ground. She passed Revna without a word and ducked under the starboard wing.
“Magdalena.” Revna had to tell her about Tammin. But Magdalena didn’t look up.
Tamara radiated rage. “Commander Kurcik is on the radio. He says he gave you girls clear orders, which hardly any of you followed through on.”
Clear orders? Revna thought of the boy, frantically waving his semaphore flags from a crumbling wall.
Tamara glared past her into the navigator’s seat. “Can you read semaphore signals?”
There was a moment of silence. Then Linné said, “Yes, sir,” in clipped, cold tones.
“Are you sure?” Tamara said.
“You tested me. Sir.”
“Yet according to Kurcik, you avoided the specified target and wasted your incendiaries.”
“You can’t mean the reaching—” Revna began.
Tamara’s fist came down on the side of the cockpit with a slam that froze Revna’s blood. “You promised to follow orders when you joined. You promised again when you began your training, and yet again when you finished it. Now apparently all of you think you have a better grasp on the war than our high commanders? You made the entire regiment look foolish and unreliable. And now Hesovec is right. How are we supposed to win a war with soldiers like you?”
Mama. Lyfa. Reasons chased one another across Revna’s mind, but words turned to ash in her mouth. Linné, for once in her life, seemed similarly speechless.
Revna couldn’t tear her eyes away from the dash, but she felt Magdalena come up beside her and put a hand on the cockpit. She reached out and squeezed it with everything she had. “You can’t ask us…” You can’t ask us to burn our home to the ground.
“If the Elda take Tammin, they’ll have access to major weapons factories and the surrounding farmland.”
“But it’s our home,” Magdalena interjected.
“It’s a target,” Tamara snarled. “They cannot have it. No cost is too great.”
“But we’re supposed to protect the Union,” Revna added.
“You’re supposed to follow orders!” Tamara screamed. Every inch of her trembled—or maybe those were the tears dancing in Revna’s eyes.
“Please, Commander,” Linné said. She didn’t sound angry. She didn’t sound cold or matter-of-fact. She didn’t sound like Linné at all. She sounded devastated.
Tamara gripped the cockpit so hard Revna felt the pressure through the living metal. “I’m not asking you, Zolonov. I’m telling you. If you’re not willing to do the job, then you can go back to your palace in the capital and give your spot to another girl.”
They were silent.
“Well?” she said, spreading her arms.
“We can follow orders, ma’am,” Revna whispered.
Tamara took a deep breath. Then another. Then she rounded on Magdalena. “Get back to work. If I have to speak with any of you again, you’ll all be punished for insubordination. Now stop wasting the night.” She stomped toward the edge of the field, where a knot of engineers shrank away from her.
Magdalena’s face glistened in the light of her lantern. “D-direct order f-from Kurcik,” she stammered around her tears. “Destroy Tammin Reaching. Raze every building. Burn every crop.”
The words were like a hammer to Revna’s heart. “No,” she said.
“Everything,” whispered Magdalena. “Come back safe.”
So they burned everything. They started with the factories that remained, tearing the buildings apart brick by brick, shattering glass and blowing holes in the equipment. They watched as a munitions factory exploded, leveling the buildings a block in every direction. They dropped Union bombs onto Union buildings, at the direction of Union soldiers and under the watch of no Union god.
In the fire and shadow and smoke, she lost track of what she destroyed. She saw the shell of her palanquin factory, the husk of the commissar’s office and the city hall. She saw a gaping crater where a shelter had collapsed, and turned her head away as they flew by. If she didn’t see the bodies, she didn’t have to know.
The offices were gone, the rich mansions long burned. The homes nearest the reaching’s wall had collapsed in the first bombardment. Only the workers’ quarter remained.
The houses were stacked side by side like toys beneath them. Her hands shook. The Strekoza pulsed with nausea. Elena flew past her and a hole opened in a roof below, bursting with red and orange. Tiles spilled from it like tears. The city screamed like a beas
t in pain.
“Revna,” Linné said. She barely heard. Her mind was static. “You have to line up the shot.”
The buildings began to crumple, one by one. Smoke thickened, rising to swallow them. But Revna could spot one little house still standing. The birch tree in front spread its naked arms like a prayer.
“We have to. Tamara will throw you out.”
Her heart beat thick and fast. You’re cursed, you’re cursed.
Linné’s hand hovered by her shoulder. “Revna,” she said again.
The Weave wrapped silky threads around them, tangling as they turned. Linné cut power and Revna brought them down in a perfect dive. Linné released the bombs and powered up. They flew away.
Revna didn’t look back.
They flew until the city was gone. Then Magdalena attached bombs of liquid fire, and they bombarded the farmland that had fed Revna all her life. The whole world crackled and roared around them. The stink of charred grass and roots, the too-sweet scent of the apple orchards burning, mingled with the smell of melting steel. And beneath it Revna caught a sharp odor, meaty and coppery and musky, acrid and thick, burning meat and seared liver and so much worse.
She didn’t want to think about the smells. She didn’t want to think about any of it.
They flew until the sky in the east was lighter than in the west. When Magdalena ran up empty-handed, Revna knew it was finally over.
She sagged in her chair as Linné cut the power. She didn’t want to move, not even to stretch her legs. She could sleep in the cockpit for all she cared. Only she didn’t want to sleep. She didn’t want the dreams she’d have.
Behind her, Linné sniffed. Revna turned her head as far as she could. Linné rummaged in her pockets, then blew her nose loudly. Linné, crying.
Linné caught her staring. “It was a bad thing we did tonight.”
It was, perhaps, the kindest thing she’d ever heard Linné say. The only reply she could think to make was “Tammin was my home.”
But Tammin had also been useful and surrendered by necessity. The Union’s orders on that were clear.
We Rule the Night Page 20