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

WE LOST OUR hair to be here.

They made us cut it when we were first preparing for combat; for practicality, the commander said, though I had seen one or two of the training men glare at a line of girls walking off the field those first days, their long glossy braids swinging at their waists, and I always wondered.

I didn’t mind, for myself – my hair was the watery brown of old deerhide, and there was no husband or want of a husband to stay my hand from the knife. For me to cut it just meant fewer pins I’d have to scramble for every time the sirens went up. But you can’t tell girls for a hundred years that her hair is her crowning glory and then one day tell her to hack it off and not have her pause before the scissors.

We all did it, in the end, every last one of us submitting to the shears, slicing one another’s braids off to the jaw.

Recklessly, I offered to burn the hair for any girl that wanted. It was forbidden to leave the base alone – it wasn’t safe – but some things go deeper than regulations, and some superstitions aren’t worth testing.

You never leave so much hair where anyone can take it from you; petty magic has uses for that, and none of them are good.

I was an odd fit in the barracks, just strange enough that we all knew I was strange, but this superstition was so well-known that not even Petrova looked twice at me as they each thanked me and handed me their braids of brown and black and gold.

As I headed for the woods with three dozen braids draped like pelts across my arms, Bershanskaya saw me. She was standing outside, near the engineers who were patching the planes. Her hands were behind her, and she had the narroweyed look of someone who had been watching the sunset longer than was wise.

I held my breath and kept going. If she called out to stop me, I’d keep walking until she shot. Some orders are holy; I had a duty deeper than hers.

She didn’t say a word, but she watched me carry the plaits like a sacrifice into the cover of the trees.

In the woods, I built a fire and burned them – one at a time, until there was nothing left. I didn’t start a new fire for each plait (we were tied close enough to withstand a little ash), but it was powerful enough that I was careful. I breathed steadily in and out; I thought carefully about nothing at all.

When I came back after dark, stinking of singe, Bershanskaya was standing outside the barracks and scanning the edge of the woods, waiting.

“Commander,” I greeted when I was close enough, and waited for whatever she would do to me.

For a long time she looked me in the eye until it felt like I was canvas stretched across a wooden frame, and I could feel the question building on her tongue in the space just behind her front teeth, where people’s worst suspicions lived.

If she asks me, I thought, she’ll have her answer.

(I could cut myself deep enough to bleed. Blood and tears would summon something, I could hope I had enough willpower to make her forget what I’d done.)

She stepped aside, eyes still on me, and as I passed she said my name low, like she’d checked my name off a very short list; like a spell.

Raskova would have asked me. I don’t know if that’s better or worse.

IN 1938, WHEN I was still in school, Raskova had flown across the country for glory with Polina Denisovna Osipenko and Valentina Grizodubova. When they were recovered after their landing, the news was everywhere: that she and her copilots had broken flight records in the Rodina, that it was a marvelous feat of flying, that they were heroes of the nation.

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.