“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 miss 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.