Daughters of the Night Sky

Moscow winters, as I learned as a girl, can in the course of a few minutes go from merely unpleasant to the sort of cold that tears at your flesh. When I was a young girl, maybe seven years old, I got locked out of our apartment one afternoon in January. Mama thought I was with Papa; Papa thought I was with her. I’d actually gone to the bakery to buy pryanik, sweet gingerbread baked into small cakes and stamped with pretty designs or cut into shapes. I had collected coins from Mama for doing little tasks for her and finally had enough for the massive pryanik shaped like a matryoshka doll. I had no idea when I might be able to persuade my parents to let me buy the coveted treat, so I let each believe I was with the other and ate the honey-and-spice confection in clandestine solitude. The kindly shop owner, Comrade Brusilov, even gave me a cup of strong tea that smelled of musky spices and campfire smoke to accompany my cake, knowing my little savings wouldn’t stretch to include it.

I savored every bite of the gingerbread and every sip of the tea, oblivious to the trouble I would be in when my parents discovered my deceit. When at last I could find no reason to delay my return, I walked slowly back to our building only to realize I had no way in. I waited for one of them to come home, but it was at least two hours before either had need to return. Mercifully Papa arrived home before the frostbite set in, but I didn’t miss it by much. With a vow never to pull a similar stunt again, I asked for an emergency key that night and never again left without it tied to a ribbon around my neck.

I thought of that key as a talisman against the vicious bite of winter, but now, as I craned my neck around the small windshield to get a clearer view of our target, the wind ripped like claws at the unshielded skin on my face. The snowflakes matted my lashes, making it next to impossible to see the target I was to mark with my flare.

I removed my gloves, pinning them tight between my knees—there was no replacing them—and prepared to lob the metal flare over the edge of the plane onto the target. The frozen metal stuck to my hands, warmed by the wool-lined gloves, but there was no way to remove the flare’s cap while my fingers were covered.

“Taisiya!” I yelled into the archaic interphone, longing for a modern radio and decent instrumentation. The trainers from Engels were infinitely more sophisticated than this. I looked down at my chronometer as we neared the coordinates. “Five…” I opened the flare. “… three… marked!”

She swooped back around, releasing the dummy bomb on the next pass. We both peered over to see the bomb fall to the earth about a hundred meters from the target.

“Dammit,” she growled a moment later, loud enough for me to hear.

Even with a map, I wasn’t sure how well I would have been able to mark the target. A smooth flight in a modern trainer plane in broad daylight was a different proposition altogether from a training flight in pitch dark in the middle of March.

As we taxied our plane to the hangar, Polina and Renata rushed out to prepare the plane for the next run. We had three more runs to make before dinner, after a grueling morning of tactical training. The rigors of our last months at the academy were nothing compared to this, and I found myself cursing Karlov for every run he’d held me behind. Each one of those hours would have made me more valuable to the war effort. I didn’t have experience navigating for anyone other than Vanya and Tokarev, while Taisiya had flown with a half dozen other navigators.

I would have to learn Taisiya’s style, but it took only minutes in the air to see she was nothing short of exceptional. She didn’t have Vanya’s swagger, but she had all of his confidence. It made concentrating on maps and targets much easier when I didn’t have to worry about the competence of the pilot. I thought of poor Tokarev from the academy and felt pity for whoever was navigating for him now.

“Come sit and rest where it’s warm while they get the plane ready,” Taisiya prodded me when my eyes remained locked on the gray sky, watching the flimsy wood and canvas contraptions putter about the horizon. That sleek metal fighters could take flight was a marvel; that these dilapidated machines managed it was a miracle.

“I’m going to watch the next run,” I said. “You go.”

“You have to learn to conserve your strength, Katya,” Taisiya chastised. “I need you on form.”

“I’m fine. You can bring me some water when you come back.”