Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

Or thank Gödel?

I leave these problems to those who are smarter than me. Maybe I think too much, worry too much. But please don’t search for me. Don’t tell me where I am, where I have been seen, or who’s looking for me.

I don’t want to know.

GENEVIEVE VALENTINE’S (www.genevievevalentine.com) first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti , won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her second, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club , appeared in 2014 to acclaim. Science fiction novel Persona appeared in 2015 and sequel Icon is due later this year. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld , Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts , Fantasy , Tor.com , and others; several stories have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org , the AV Club, and The New York Times . She has written Catwoman comics for DC, and is currently writing a new Xena: Warrior Princess comic for Dynamite! Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable.

1943

IT DIDN’T TAKE them long to find a name for us; almost as soon as they knew it was women inside the rickety planes they couldn’t catch, the Germans called us witches.

It was because of the sounds our idling engines made from the ground, the story went, as if the German soldiers had spent a lot of time with brooms and knew what they sounded like, engineless and gliding fifty feet above them in the dark.

The wires holding the wings in place made the whistle. The canvas pulled taut around the plywood made the hush. I still suspect the thing that sounded supernatural was the whirr of our engines starting up again, as they realized we had already struck them, and it was too late to escape the blasts.

The officer who told us had half a smile on his face; he’d thought of the job as a demotion – most of them did, at first, to be in a camp full of girls – but if the Germans were already bleating back and forth about bounties for the heads of the Night Witches, then maybe he had real fighters on his hands.

Popova cracked a laugh when she heard, turned to me with grin that was all teeth. “I like that,” she said. “Should we start screeching when we sail through, do you think?”

“I think not,” I said. “The best witches know not to give away their position.” And she laughed a little louder than she had to, as if she thought it was actually funny.

A couple of the girls glanced over from across the runway. They never took Popova’s cue in being kind to me, but they were never cruel, and that might have been all Popova could hope for.

“She’d love being called a witch by the enemy; she might already be one,”

Popova said after a second, sounding circumspect, sounding a little reverent. ( She was Commander Raskova; at some point, she hadn’t needed a name any more.)

But Raskova was elsewhere now, with only her shadow cast over us.

Bershanskaya was the commander who lined us up and sent us out. She was as steady as they came, and her humor was thin and dry as air. The first time Bershanskaya heard the name, she raised an eyebrow, and glanced quickly at me before she turned to Popova. Then she nodded, hands behind her, and said, “Let them call us what they like, if it suits them.”

“Suits me, too,” said Popova.

It suited all of them, I think, even if I was the only witch the 588th ever had.

ONE OF THE important things about the 588th was how little it cared where you came from. If you could take the recruiter’s withering stare and the doctors’ lingering hands and the open loathing of the men who ran you through your paces, and you managed to crawl under the stalled train cars to reach the station from the farthest set of tracks they could find to park your train, by the time you got to training they had no doubts about your nerves, and that was all they needed to know about you before they put you in a plane.

I’d come to the 588th out of necessity; my village had reached the end of their patience for someone who seemed always to know when it was going to rain and yet couldn’t call it down for you even if you paid her. Easier to go find an open fight than to wait for the one that was brewing back home.

There was no way I could have accommodated village needs. It’s too hard to do small magic.

From a one-room farmhouse or a palace in Moscow, anyone you ask will talk to you until their tongues turn blue about all the magic they’ve seen or heard of, even if they say they don’t believe in it. They’ll all know how it’s being used against them even as they speak, and the hundreds of whispers shared in the depth of the forest by the witches, who gather there for market days and trade in secret spells in a currency of dirty looks.

It’s all very well to keep people out of the woods at night, but it’s foolish.

There are only three kinds of magic: water, ash, and air. For ash to work, you give blood. For water, you spill tears. For air, you give your breath. They all run out; our gifts are designed to be spent.

The woods will never be a gathering of witches. We don’t live long enough.

OUR PLANES WERE crop dusters, wood frames covered in canvas, held together with metal cords. They were the leftovers of aviation, planes given to people for whom no one had much hope.

But they were so flimsy and so slow that they made a kind of magic – gold out of hay. The German planes couldn’t drop down to our speed or they’d stall out and plummet, so when they aimed for us we turned and they hit nothing but air; their anti-aircraft bombs would pop right through our wings and keep going, bursting a hundred feet above us as we banked a turn and the explosion illuminated our path back home.

Raskova courted us with those planes, showed us how to make them spin and make lazy loops in the air like the plaits of a braid, leapt down from the cockpit with her dark eyes glittering behind her goggles, and you could hear her heart pounding even from where you were standing. It was easy to want to go to war, to make Raskova proud.

And once you learned them, those planes were kinder to us than horses, and to sit inside one was to feel strangely invisible, a thrill crawling up the back of your neck like a ghost every time you settled in.

You settled in four, five, eight times a night: the plane couldn’t carry more than two bombs at once, and you had work to do.

“YOU GO OUT at sundown,” says Bershanskaya.

Her lips are drawn thin, her hands folded behind her, her buttons marching a straight line to her chin. (She didn’t want to lead, when Raskova appointed her. She hated sending us out to die.)

It’s a bridge; we all know why it has to disappear – the Germans can’t be allowed to move anything else into place. But they’ve stopped underestimating us, witches or not. They’re prepared to throw us a flak circus now, every time they see us coming.

It’s rows of guns blooming outward from the ground like flowers made from teeth, and searchlights by the dozens that flood the sky for fifty miles in each direction, and you can’t get free of it no matter how you try; when you twist long enough this way and that way like a rabbit, you start to panic for your life.

We lost a team that way, not long back. Their cots are still folded up on the barracks, two thin mattresses for girls who won’t be needing any more rest.

“You’ll go in three planes at once,” says Bershanskaya.

Next to me, the muscles in Popova’s jaw shift as she realizes what Bershanskaya means.

Decoys. We’ll be drawing fire in our little ghost planes.