I didn’t find out what had really happened until Raskova told me herself. They had overshot in the mist, and when it parted they were suddenly over the Sea of Okhotsk, where the water in winter is the milky flat of a corpse’s eye, and they didn’t have enough gasoline left for the crossing – they’d flown too high to avoid being shrouded by the fog for a day and a night. They had to turn around and pray for landfall before they dropped out of the sky.
The navigator’s seat – a glass bauble at the front of the plane – would be torn to shreds in a crash, and they were hurting for altitude and out of fuel and gathering too much ice to carry.
Raskova marked a map and jumped for it.
Her copilots crashed into the taiga, the bottom of the plane in shreds from the landing, and waited for her. Even after the rescue crew got to them, they refused to budge. They took watch by the plane for two more days, until Raskova staggered out of the woods.
It had been ten days. She’d had no food or water with her, and no compass when she jumped.
(There was no magic in her – not the sort that I had – but you wonder about witch blood in some people, when they manage things that no one should have managed.)
But more amazing to me even than her ten-day journey was the ten-day vigil the other two had kept, sheltering with the plane that had tried to kill them, without enough supplies, without knowing if she would ever come.
Doubt gnawed at me whenever I thought about it, more doubts than I ever had about being shot at, more doubts than I had about my chances of loosing a bomb just where it needed to go.
How long would they have waited beyond ten days? How long would I wait when it was my turn? Would I walk ten days in the wilderness rather than lie down and die?
Osipenko was dead. Wasn’t even a strafing run; she’d just been going from one place to another, and her plane had turned on her.
Grizodubova had been sent elsewhere for the war effort. None of us had ever seen her. She was leading a defense and relief outfit near Leningrad, with real bombers and not crop dusters. She was commanding men.
I wondered if she and Raskova ever saw each other, or if they wrote – if it was safe to write. It would be easy to forgive if they had parted ways; it was wartime, and their duty to the nation lay before them.
But sometimes the nights are long and dark, and you feel so alone that you think everyone else must have someone closer than you do, and you think: If they don’t still speak, it’s because they’re both waiting for death, and can’t bear to come close and then be parted.
Then you stare up at the leaking roof and wonder if all each of them carried now was a phantom. When something wonderful or terrible happened, did one of them sometimes glance over her shoulder to look at the other before she remembered she was alone?
SEBROVA VOLUNTEERS TO be one of the three planes against the flak, and Popova volunteers second, and before I can do more than glance at Petrova for her agreement (she’s already nodding at me) I’m volunteering, too, because I have few enough friends here. Where Popova is going, I want to go.
It’s a foolish thing to do, volunteering to die on a German gun, but I volunteered for that a long time ago. I’m a quick draw on the controls, so I’ll be of some use, and anything’s better than sitting around waiting, wondering if Popova made it out.
Outside, I smoke a cigarette I won off Meklin at cards and watch the sun going down. I wish I had time to do everything that needs doing.
Popova sits next to me on the fence, lets out a breath at the streaks of gold and pink suspended just above the grass. When she taps me on the shoulder I hand her my cigarette.
She’s a marvelous pilot – light and nimble – but you’d never know it from the way she smokes a cigarette, single loud pulls that leave a cylinder of ash that drops wholesale to the ground.
After a little while she hands me a piece of chocolate from inside her pocket, grainy and already melting across my fingertips. I pop it into my mouth and lick my fingers clean, flushing a little at the bad manners, but Popova only winks. I wonder how long she’s held on to it, doling out to herself one piece at a time on nights she thinks she’s going to die.
“You’ll be all right,” she says.
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” I say. “It’s you I worry over.”
She casts me a look and half smiles. My lungs are acrid, suddenly. I pinch off the end of my cigarette to preserve the rest.
She shrugs. “We never let them get any sleep,” she says, jamming a pin into her cropped hair and wrenching her cap on over it.
(Petrova sometimes reaches behind her to smooth a braid that isn’t there. I’ve never seen Popova do it. I wonder what became of Raskova’s dark brown braids, gleaming and pinned to her head as she spoke to us and made us into soldiers.)
Golden hair sticks out just at the edges, half curls below her ears. “I’d hate to see us coming, too. Let’s hope they’re too tired to aim.”
I want to smile or laugh, but I’m staring at my plane and feeling ice down my spine. Why this should be so different I don’t know – slightly more impossible than impossible isn’t a measurement that has much meaning – but I look at the trees instead, after a moment.
“How did you decide to do this?”
I don’t know why I ask. We’re all meant to be without a past, and equal. They were carpenters and secretaries and farm girls, but they’re pilots now, and it shouldn’t matter how they got here.
Popova raises her eyebrows at the setting sun like it’s the one who’d asked the rude question. There are only a few minutes left until it’s dark enough to load up and set off. I should be going back to barracks and getting my gear.
She says without looking at me, “A plane landed near our house, when I was young.”
Young – she’s nineteen now, I think, but I don’t say anything. Rude to interrupt. Not that it matters; she doesn’t elaborate. It’s the biography of a masterful pilot who knows better than to waste a gesture.
She glances over. “And you?”
“Oh, I’m a witch,” I say. “Flying comes naturally.” And she grins as she drops from the fence, snaps her goggles into place.
“Good thing it can be taught,” she says and takes off for her plane.
It can’t, not really. You can teach the mechanics of a plane, but either you have the flight inside you or you don’t.
Her strides kick up puffs of dust in her wake that cover her footsteps; at nightfall she casts no shadow, and for a moment she looks like I’d imagined witches to be, before I knew better.
When she’s gone, I unroll the cigarette and scoop up her ashes from the ground with the blade of my knife.
It’s a sharp blade; I never even feel the cut I make. When the paper gets wet enough, I use the tip of the knife to mix it and drag a line of blood and ash under the nose of Sebrova’s and Popova’s planes.
I do it quickly, my eyes stinging, my heart pounding.
Then they’re coming from the barracks, and I’m out of ashes and out of time and have to step away and get my gear. We’ll need to make sure the altitude gauge is fixed before we’re off the ground.
Petrova, my navigator, is already there, frowning underneath the propeller and tapping our windshields. As I haul myself onto the wing, I press one bloody thumbprint into the canvas just behind her seat, where she’ll never see.
Blood magic doesn’t work as well when you’re asking for yourself, but I’ll protect who I can, however it comes.
EACH OF US carries two bombs. It’s decided in the last seconds before leaping into our planes that Sebrova will be first, I’ll be second, and Popova will make the final drop, after they’re already on to us. I don’t like it, but I keep my hands on the controls as we enter the flak zone.
The engines sound impossibly loud – three of them, and we don’t dare cut them with what we have to do, so there’s nothing for it but to go closer and closer, knowing they know we’re coming, waiting for the bullets to start.
(I mis
s the sound of the wind through the wires; it had always sounded to me like an owl on my shoulder, and it was a comfort as you were moving in for the drop.)
The first floodlight is almost a relief – it’s something to do, at least, instead of just something to be afraid of – and I wait two seconds longer than my instincts scream to, just enough that the nose of the plane catches the light, that it can almost but not quite follow me when I snap a turn to one side, dropping out of their sight. A spray of bullets arcs behind me, whistling clean and hitting nothing.
I don’t look for Popova. It’s not safe.
Instead I drop steeply so the searchlights casting at my prior heading can’t find me, and pull up at the last second with my heart pounding in my throat and the engine grinding underneath me. I cut through three lights at once, a dead hover for a moment as gravity gets confused, the blinding flashes underneath us reminding me to bank left and out of the line of fire.
I hear a series of dull thunders, then a thudding rip – a wingtip’s been struck. Nothing serious, it’s a lucky hit for them, that’s all, but my lungs go so tight I have to wrestle them for breath as I circle back. There’s already ice on my tiny windshield; there’s ice in my throat when I breathe.
Then I see Sebrova’s plane arcing up to meet us. She’s done it; the thunders were her bombs hitting home.
It’s my turn.
Petrova gives me the all-clear, and I do a big, lazy loop well out of the scope of the spotlights – I glimpse Popova, barely, practically cartwheeling and vanishing into the dark – breathe deep through my nose as we sail over the iron garden. Sebrova’s been kind enough to mark the way (a fire’s already started next to the drop site), but I want to be careful, and only when Petrova gives the sign do I tilt us five degrees closer to the Earth, no more, and let the unfastened bombs slide forward, hurtling toward the ground with a cheerful whistle.
I sweep up and to the left, taking my place on the flank, and the plane shakes for just a second as the payload explodes, a warm burst of orange in the black night. Petrova whoops; I grin for as long as I can stand the wind in my teeth, which isn’t long, and then push through the acrid scents of fire and guns and panic toward my secondary position.
Popova’s plane drops so fast I think for a second, my grip seizing on the controls, that she’s been struck, but it’s just the way she handles a plane – I hear the whirr of her engines above the tuneless wind as I cut straight across and through the searchlights, distracting them from her, letting them waste two arcs of ammunition trying to pin me as I drop and spin out lazily, letting the wind pull us the last few inches to the top of the arc.
But it’s too bright when I get there, far too bright, and I realize with numb panic that they’ve got me locked, and the next round of bullets will hit home.
I try for more altitude, already knowing I’m too late, and I wonder wildly if I can point the plane at the ground so hard that Petrova and I die without pain. We have to die – we can’t let the Germans take us – but she shouldn’t suffer.
Really, the way to go out is a bullet through the heart. The Germans could oblige. It would keep them from wondering where Popova’s gone.
Better this than ten days in the wilderness, I think; better this than to wait at the Sea of Okhotsk.
I let out my breath until there’s nothing left (blood-ash-air, I think dimly, someplace with no hope left, blood-ash-air), and bank the turn straight into the center of the circling lights.
I die that way, the way Raskova died, with a tailspin and then nightfall – but not on this run. On this run, the spray of bullets never comes, because Popova’s plane soars straight in front of me.
The Germans are only tracking two of our planes, and with the interruption they can’t tell whether or not they’ve tricked themselves into a double image with the swinging searchlights, and in the few seconds where the lights freeze in place as they try to decide what to do, I bank as hard as I can and cut down and out and back into the dark, fingers aching, pointed for home.
We’re the last to get back. When I climb out of the plane I can barely stand; I don’t know where all my blood’s gone. Bershanskaya’s come to meet us. When she nods, I find it in me to straighten up and nod back.
Popova’s leaning against her plane, a few feet back from the mark of my blood and her ashes that she’ll never see. There are three bullet holes through one of her wings, like a smattering of freckles at the tip of someone’s nose, but she’s there.
She grins around a square of chocolate, calls over, “What kept you?”
I PUT BLOOD and ashes on every plane that goes out after that.
Once I duck out between the planes and see Bershanskaya watching me, her hands behind her. She doesn’t ask what I’m doing there. I never say. It doesn’t matter. It’s what I’ve given over, and you can’t call it back.
It’s on my plane, too, the night I go down, but I never expected that to protect me for long. They all run out; our gifts are designed to be spent.
A little while from now, Popova will go on a raid and get caught in German fire. When she makes it back to the base, there will be more than forty bullet holes in the plane. There are bullet holes in her helmet.
No one will understand how she survived it; no one can imagine what protected her.
HUNGRY DAUGHTERS OF STARVING MOTHERS
Alyssa Wong
ALYSSA WONG (www.crashwong.net) is a Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author, shark aficionado, and graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static, among others. She is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University, and a member of the Manhattan-based writing group Altered Fluid. She can be found on twitter @crashwong.
AS MY DATE – Harvey? Harvard? – brags about his alma mater and Manhattan penthouse, I take a bite of overpriced kale and watch his ugly thoughts swirl overhead. It’s hard to pay attention to him with my stomach growling and my body ajitter, for all he’s easy on the eyes. Harvey doesn’t look much older than I am, but his thoughts, covered in spines and centipede feet, glisten with ancient grudges and carry an entitled, Ivy League stink.
“My apartment has the most amazing view of the city,” he’s saying, his thoughts sliding long over each other like dark, bristling snakes. Each one is as thick around as his Rolex-draped wrist. “I just installed a Jacuzzi along the west wall so that I can watch the sun set while I relax after getting back from the gym.”
I nod, half-listening to the words coming out of his mouth. I’m much more interested in the ones hissing through the teeth of the thoughts above him.
She’s got perfect tits, lil’ handfuls just waiting to be squeezed. I love me some perky tits.
I’m gonna fuck this bitch so hard she’ll never walk straight again.
Gross. “That sounds wonderful,” I say as I sip champagne and gaze at him through my false eyelashes, hoping the dimmed screen of my iPhone isn’t visible through the tablecloth below. This dude is boring as hell, and I’m already back on Tinder, thumbing through next week’s prospective dinner dates.
She’s so into me, she’ll be begging for it by the end of the night. I can’t wait to cut her up.
My eyes flick up sharply. “I’m sorry?” I say.
Harvey blinks. “I said, Argentina is a beautiful country.”
Pretty little thing. She’ll look so good spread out all over the floor.
“Right,” I say. “Of course.” Blood’s pulsing through my head so hard it probably looks like I’ve got a wicked blush.
I’m so excited, I’m half hard already.
You and me both, I think, turning my iPhone off and smiling my prettiest smile.
The waiter swings by with another bottle of champagne and a dessert menu burned into a wooden card, but I wave him off. “Dinner’s been lovely,” I whisper to Harvey, leaning in and kissin
g his cheek, “but I’ve got a different kind of dessert in mind.”
Ahhh, go the ugly thoughts, settling into a gentle, rippling wave across his shoulders. I’m going to take her home and split her all the way from top to bottom. Like a fucking fruit tart.
That is not the way I normally eat fruit tarts, but who am I to judge? I passed on dessert, after all.
When he pays the bill, he can’t stop grinning at me. Neither can the ugly thoughts hissing and cackling behind his ear.
“What’s got you so happy?” I ask coyly.
“I’m just excited to spend the rest of the evening with you,” he replies.
THE FUCKER HAS his own parking spot! No taxis for us; he’s even brought the Tesla. The leather seats smell buttery and sweet, and as I slide in and make myself comfortable, the rankness of his thoughts leaves a stain in the air. It’s enough to leave me light-headed, almost purring. As we cruise uptown toward his fancy-ass penthouse, I ask him to pull over near the Queensboro Bridge for a second.
Annoyance flashes across his face, but he parks the Tesla in a side street. I lurch into an alley, tottering over empty cans and discarded cigarettes in my four-inch heels, and puke a trail of champagne and kale over to the dumpster shoved up against the apartment building.
“Are you all right?” Harvey calls.
“I’m fine,” I slur. Not a single curious window opens overhead. His steps echo down the alley. He’s gotten out of the car, and he’s walking toward me like I’m an animal that he needs to approach carefully. Maybe I should do it now.
Yes! Now, now, while the bitch is occupied.
But what about the method? I won’t get to see her insides all pretty everywhere –
I launch myself at him, fingers digging sharp into his body, and bite down hard on his mouth. He tries to shout, but I swallow the sound and shove my tongue inside. There, just behind his teeth, is what I’m looking for: ugly thoughts, viscous as boiled tendon. I suck them howling and fighting into my throat as Harvey’s body shudders, little mewling noises escaping from his nose.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten Page 37