“Don’t say that,” Katya told her, leaning around Pavi. She waved her spoon at the other side of the mess. “If the meatheads over there can do it, why can’t we?”
“Because we’ll be thrown in prison?” Revna suggested. Tamara had promised her that the Weave was acceptable now. But in the Union, truth seemed to wriggle and squirm like an angry snake, hard to pin down and keep hold of.
Katya shrugged off her worry. “They won’t arrest us after the war. They’ll still need pilots. And I’ll be happy to volunteer.”
“You don’t want to go back to what you were doing?” Magdalena said.
“I only helped my father. He’s a hunter,” said Katya. She waggled her fingers. “I used to disrupt the birds for him. I could knock eggs out of a nest fifty meters up.” Revna couldn’t really imagine Katya tramping through the woods with her meticulous white-blond curls and eyebrows darkened with kohl. She’d assumed Katya came from one of the big reachings, where she could go out and listen to state-approved jazz every weekend. “I was recruited to sew parachutes when the war started, but someone reported me for Weave magic. I thought I’d be sent to Kolshek Prison. The Information Unit brought me here instead.” She turned to Pavi. “What about you?”
Pavi swallowed her mouthful of stew. “I applied.”
“Applied?” They gaped at her. You didn’t write to the army and say you could use illegal magic.
“Yes.” Pavi made a face at her plate. “In Kikuran no one cares whether you use the Weave or not. There weren’t that many of us, and I was the only girl who’d practiced much. Tamara and General Tcerlin visited to recruit. They took away fifteen boys, and me.”
“How can no one care? It’s illegal to use the Weave in the Union,” said Nadya, a navigator who came from Tyrniakh, toward the Union’s southern center. Everything about Nadya seemed severe, from the tight bun at the back of her head to her sharp nose. She’d even managed to make her rumpled and oversized uniform look austere.
Pavi looked Nadya up and down, dark eyes flashing. “We’re not part of your Union. Kikuran is an allied state.”
“You still have to follow Union laws,” Nadya said. “The Weave has to run its natural course. Using it makes it tangle.”
“Most tangles resolve themselves in twenty-four hours,” Pavi said.
“According to who?”
Pavi flared her nostrils. “Why are you even here if you think using the Weave is so bad?”
Nadya blushed but stuck her chin out. “Tamara asked for me specially.”
“Why you?” Katya asked.
“I can spark-power a factory washing machine with my right hand for six hours.”
With Nadya’s credentials established, they turned to Magdalena. Tamara had seen her test scores at the technical school in Mistelgard and tracked her down in Tammin, where she’d been sent to improve palanquin design. “That’s what the university gets for rejecting women,” Magdalena said.
Next up was Elena. “I, um, asked.”
“What, you walked up to Tamara on the street?” Katya laughed.
“No.” Elena shifted uncomfortably, stirring her spoon around and around in her bowl. “I went to her office.”
“You’re ruining your own story,” said Asya, a tiny girl from up north in Ibursk. She had short pale hair and eyes like ice, and scars crisscrossed her fingers, winding up under her cuffs. “Tamara wasn’t home, so Elena waited for three days and most of a fourth. I thought she was ridiculous. But Tamara said yes, so her ridiculousness paid off. I was Tamara’s secretary.”
“Secretary?” Olya challenged. Asya’s scars were as easy to miss as Revna’s prosthetics, and her coldness didn’t really scream secretary material.
Asya ran her hands over her scars. “Yes.” Her glare dared the rest of them to disagree.
So Revna told her story, how she’d been caught up in the bombardment of Tammin. The others oohed appropriately before moving down the line. Revna felt a weight lift from her heart with every story. More and more, it felt as if they were in this together.
Revna liked her new friends—well, she wasn’t sure about Linné, who seemed to spend most of her time getting into arguments about who should do what. The rest were all right, though. And she liked Magdalena the best. Everything in Magdalena’s heart came straight out of her mouth, and most of the stuff in her brain did, too. Over the course of dinner she deliberated the year’s crops (good, considering), predicted the outcome of the war (over by the end of winter), criticized the Union’s leanings in nationalist poetry (soppy), and discussed Isaak Vannin’s latest gift for his wife (a bear). Revna had an opinion on none of it, though she’d heard different news about the crops. This didn’t seem to bother Magdalena, though. It meant she could talk and talk, and never had to argue. She had such an easygoing manner that Revna couldn’t imagine her in the heat of battle. And though other girls pushed on with different conversations, Revna couldn’t help thinking that Magdalena had her own sort of charm, bouncing from one subject to the next with consistent enthusiasm. Revna spent so much time trying to keep up she could almost forget how she missed home.
Routine became law. Revna ate breakfast with Magdalena, then trained with Tamara and the other pilots. Every time Revna pushed herself, she imagined the Skarov hiding right around the corner. She couldn’t decide whether they were waiting to arrest her for using the Weave or waiting to discharge her for not using it well enough.
“Chin up,” Magdalena said at dinner one evening. “No one should be expected to fly a plane in only a couple of days.”
Whatever the expectations should have been, the pressure was strong. By the end of the first week, the engineers had worked out a new hinge for the Strekozy to carry bombs under their wings. By the end of the second, the navigators had begun target practice, blasting their spark to set empty crates alight from ten meters. In between their specialized work sessions, the girls trained together with firearms and gas masks, and on survival skills, semaphore communication, and more. Revna tried to use Papa’s approach to problem solving, but all she could think was Problem: I am a failure. And she had no solutions for that.
At the end of the third week, Elena rushed into the mess and pulled them away from breakfast. “Come out to the field,” she said, pale and thin-lipped. They left in a clatter of spoons and metal trays.
The air outside was brisk, and an overnight rain had muddied the ground and slicked the boards. Angry shouts drifted from the officers’ quarters.
“Is that Tamara?” Magdalena turned back, distracted.
“Just come,” Elena said.
As they approached the Strekozy, a wave of revulsion washed over Revna, forcing her to stop. She felt ugly and hot and closed-in all at once, and even deep gulps of cold air couldn’t draw it out of her. Her prosthetics constricted around her calves.
“What is that?” Katya said. Her hands went to her temples. She looked green.
Revna knew what it was. She’d felt it a few times in the factory when someone farther up the line was having a bad day. And if her secret practice with the Weave had done nothing else, it had helped her learn living metal. Large strands of the Weave ran through the ore and permeated it with semisentience over tens of thousands of years. Living metal could feel angry, anxious, excited, even offended—tied to the people who worked with it. Sometimes you pushed your emotions onto it, and sometimes it pushed its emotions onto you.
Someone had been out here, pouring hate into the Strekozy. And now they radiated that hate, so simple and so powerful that her stomach turned and her mouth flooded.
Revna’s legs trembled in sympathy. She forced herself to move forward, one hand over her mouth to keep from throwing up. The air seemed to grow thick and fight against her.
Graffiti was scrawled on the canvas plane covers. It ran from wing to wing, from nose to tail. There was a slogan for every girl in the regiment.
CARRY BABIES, NOT BOMBS.
YOU COOK BETTER THAN YOU FLY.
CAMP FOLLOWER WHORES.
GO HOME.
The words ran together. In some places they weren’t even legible. But that didn’t matter. The Strekozy had absorbed them, and long after the graffiti was gone, the hate would remain.
No one had to guess who’d done it.
“We’re not going to stand for this,” Elena said. “Right?”
“We’ll go to Tamara,” Nadya offered.
“Tamara already knows.” Linné stood at a distance, eyeing the planes. She was still as stone, but a golden glow peeked through her clenched fists. “What good is it going to do to tell her again?”
“We should go to Hesovec, then,” Nadya said. “Demand that he—”
Linné cut her off. “You don’t demand things in the army. And Hesovec already knows about it, too. Who do you think she was shouting at? If he doesn’t listen to her, he won’t listen to you. He’ll punish you for wasting his time.”
“Forget being official,” Pavi snapped. “Rules are only rules when somebody’s watching. We have to show that we can’t be run off. Harm them like they harmed us.”
But the men’s planes hadn’t arrived yet. Katya wanted to sabotage their rifles; Asya wanted to destroy the ramshackle bar they’d constructed behind their barracks. Linné only said no.
“What do you think we should do, then?” Magdalena said.
Linné chewed on the inside of her cheek. Then she took a deep breath. “Nothing.” The spark retreated up her arms.
Asya flared her nostrils. “We’re not going to do nothing.”
“Do you think you can out-prank a soldier? Everything you want to do—complain, destroy army equipment, make demands—proves that we’re immature, overreacting, and that we’ll never fit in.” Linné kicked a rock. It bounced over the ground and plinked off the body of a plane.
“It’s not our fault we can’t even get close to these planes now,” Asya said.
“But we’ll still be called weak for it. And then we’ll be sent home, and then it won’t really matter whose fault it is.”
“But that’s not fair,” Revna said.
Linné snorted. “You joined the army because you think life is fair?” She crossed her arms. “Don’t start a war. You won’t win it.”
They stood in furious silence, leaning away from the hateful Strekozy.
“You depress me,” Magdalena finally said to Linné. “I thought you should know, considering how hard it is to get me depressed about something.”
Maybe this was it. Maybe they would be sent home. The pilots hadn’t made much progress, and the war seemed to creep on somewhere far away from them. But Mama and Lyfa were protected as long as Revna was here. Something hardened inside her. Her father had been pushed out of the Union, and she wasn’t going to go the same way. She’d come here to ensure that her sister could grow up and her mother could grow old. She wouldn’t lose to a bunch of boys who thought their hate was funny and clever. She’d think of the problems.
Problem: We can’t get revenge.
But they could get even.
“We have to reverse it,” she said. The others turned to her. Revna swallowed. Usually when this many people were looking at her, it was because of her legs. “And then we have to practice, and pass our flying test, and go to war. That’s how we’ll get revenge.”
It would be impossible to dismiss them then. Impossible to insist they couldn’t handle the pressure.
“But how are we supposed to reverse it?” Katya said.
“I used to do it all the time in the factory.” If a riveter was having a bad day up the line, an angry antenna or stray leg ended up in her lap. She’d ensured they were fit for service, which included making them calm.
“We’re not talking about a couple of spare parts,” Asya pointed out.
Revna was trying not to think about that. She moved forward, and the others followed her. The rage pressed against them. You know how to handle this. She pushed on, fighting nausea. Even when she began to feel ugly, tiny, worthless, she wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t real.
The planes quivered and Revna’s prosthetics trembled in sympathy. The more complex a living metal machine was, the more it needed human direction and the more attuned it was to human emotion. It would take a lot of work to return the planes to a functioning state, more than she’d ever tried at the factory.
Magdalena ripped the tarred canvas off one wing. “Let’s start with the covers,” she said.
“Start what?” Linné called from the side.
“They can’t stay,” Revna agreed. The hateful words would cement the emotions the regiment was trying to uproot.
“So you’ll do what, burn them?” Linné scoffed.
They glanced at one another. Nadya flicked her fingers and spark blazed at the end of her hand.
“You can’t,” Linné sputtered. “That’s army property.”
“It’s been defaced,” Magdalena said. “If we burn the evidence, we’re doing the boys a favor, really. What can Hesovec say to that?”
“A lot,” Linné said. But she didn’t run off to report them as they bundled the canvas and hauled it to a dry patch of earth at the corner of the field. She even joined the other navigators as they burned their spark hot and threaded it toward the stack, pushing until the blaze had caught and was higher than Magdalena.
Together they watched it all burn. Linné stood next to Revna, her hands still bright. “Too much vengeance for you?” Revna asked.
Linné’s eyes darted away. “Not enough,” she replied. “But it’s all I’ll get.”
I, not we. Even when they were on the same side, Linné seemed insistent on being by herself. And if she’d wanted revenge so badly, why had she been dead against it? She never backed down from arguments with the other girls. The general’s daughter was a complicated knot, one that wanted to stay tangled.
Visiting the planes became part of their routine. The Night Raiders went to the field after dinner and rubbed them down, washed them with bristle brushes, and spoke softly to them as though they were wary animals.
Pilots took specific planes without being assigned. Pavi sang to hers, and Katya painted the nose of hers in bright swaths of red and orange. At first Revna’s plane grew hot and prickly whenever she touched it, especially when she ran her finger along the steel-edged wing or approached the mesh inside the open cockpit. But living metal didn’t retain emotion forever, and after their first few visits, Revna could walk onto the field without the ugly anger pressing in on her from all sides. The male aviators hadn’t been back, as far as they knew, and the new covers Tamara requisitioned remained pristine.
Revna liked to sit on the wing of her plane with Magdalena, letting the engineer talk while she warmed the space next to her with her spark. She couldn’t use it like the navigators could, but she could make her hands glow warm. Living metal seemed to like that. The Strekozy were barely less flammable than a match, though, and if she set hers on fire before she even took it for one flight, she’d probably be shot for treason.
“The bombs are going to be heavy, no matter what we do. Tamara says that’s a problem,” Magdalena was saying, “but I think if we could cast a thinner bottom, that might help with some of the weight. And the gas bombs are the easiest, obviously. But Tamara says they can’t break against the plane by accident.”
Revna was half listening. The twilight had turned to full night and soon they’d have to go in. Her fingers were already stiff in her gloves, but her residual limbs sweated. The long days of marching, running, and smacking herself into things with the Weave were starting to take a toll on them, and on most nights phantom pains prickled where her feet used to be. A blister had formed at the bottom of her right calf where she’d been smashing it on the ground all day. They were practicing precision. She’d never had to be precise as a child, only unseen. As other pilots showed their strengths, she started to wonder what would happen if they were all ready before she was. How long could she keep her family safe if the army lost faith in
her as an asset?
“I wanted to make some kind of spark extender, so the navigators could fire from a greater distance, but—what was that?”
Magdalena was staring beyond the military chain fence. Beyond the base lay Intelgard’s remaining farmland, and beyond that the plains stretched flat and dark, all the way from the Karavel Mountains, jutting up on the southeast, to the northern edge of the world. A star burned bright, far to the west.
Not a star, Revna realized. It drifted too close, too bright. Too… yellow. Then it was gone.
The regiment scrambled off their planes. Magdalena hopped to the ground and held out her hands for Revna, who ignored the offer and climbed down more cautiously. They moved toward the fence.
More pinpricks of light burst where the mountains became hills. A thin tongue of flame blazed down. “What is it?” Elena whispered next to her.
“It’s a battle,” said Linné from the other side. She pressed her face into the fence, as if trying to push herself through.
“Will it overtake us?” Revna said, thinking of Tammin. She hoped no one else could hear her voice tremble. They weren’t ready yet. She hadn’t even gotten the chance to sit in her cockpit.
“I doubt it. They have targeted the town of Troiya,” Tamara said from behind them. She joined them at the fence, pulling her folded arms against her belly. A bright flame burst again. “That’s an Elda fighter.”
Silence fell, thick and heavy. Revna strained to see the fighter’s shape, a darkness in the darkness. But from here, the aircraft were as invisible as their flames were bright. Finally Katya asked in a tremulous voice, “Are they all Elda?”
Tamara didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was weighted with grief. “No. Each explosion was one of our night fighters from Tereshkogard base.”
Was. As they watched, more night fighters combusted, more streams of fire jetted from the air to the ground. For a long while, that was all they could do. When Tamara spoke again, her voice seemed to echo into a vast silence. “One Dragon can turn a battle against us,” she said. “Just one. Our night fighters are precious and too few. Every time a Dragon appears, the night fighters must choose between fleeing to save themselves and their equipment, or dying to give the troops one more moment to turn the tide. It was the Dragons that leveled Goreva Reaching, the Dragons that set fire to the Berechovy Forest. The Dragons will win the Elda their war if we don’t find a way to stop them. Isaak thinks the Strekozy will be key.”
We Rule the Night Page 8
