Night Witches (9 page)

‘Never underestimate what a young person can do,’ Reef replies calmly.

She coughs and laughs at the same time then throws her choke away. ‘You should know, Starzak, you should know. I’ve got clearance to see your record, remember . . .’

Know
what
? No time to wonder. Our Storm is waiting!

Just before I stow my keypad for take-off a message comes through from Reef.

hey rain

hello reef

i’ll be thinking of you on your first mission – good luck.
Then, after a pause, he adds
rain, perhaps i shouldn’t tell you this, but i think of you all the time

I smile inside . . . then I get a flashback to the sight of Reef standing with Roke, two Scrutiners together, at the edge of the airstrip after my test flight. I start to wonder,
what
does Reef think of when he thinks of me?

A
irborne.

I patch into the primitive communication system Fenlon has installed in the Storm’s cockpit. You have to speak into a tube and hear voices through two lumpy receivers inside the flying helmet.

‘Hey, Zoya, can you see the map OK to navigate?’

Zoya’s voice crackles loudly in my ears.

‘Not a problem. That’s Rimm over there, and those are the lights of the westbound Transnation railway. We’re on target for Sorrowdale. You know what? It must burn Furey to know we’re going to bomb her home town.’

‘What do you mean? I thought she lived in Corona?’

‘Yeah, since she got famous, but she comes from Sorrowdale, didn’t you know that? Guess you and her have something in common.’

I want to turn and look at Zoya to see what she means, but the wind is getting pretty strong and I have to keep firm hold on the control stick to steady us with each buffeting.

‘I’m from Sea-Ways. I’ve never lived in Sorrowdale, you know that . . .’

‘Maybe I got it wrong, but I once heard my father say you guys moved from there when you were small –
smaller
, ha ha – to get away from Lim lands. I’d do the same. Being so near the Morass would creep me out. Do you think . . . I mean, have you wondered about why we got picked for the Storm squadron, since we’re not really experienced for anything? Do you reckon it’s something to do with what happened after the crash?’

I sense, rather than see the dark mass of trees and mist that is the Morass, not far to the south of our flight path. Up here there is no Aura, there are no Scrutiners. We can speak freely. Trust each other. I could tell Zoya all about the weird things – the way time stretched in the Morass, the death visions, everything.

‘Pip? Did you hear me? Is this stupid speaker relay working?’

I could tell her about the normalcy test I took with Roke, about the black feathers, about Papi giving me Pedla’s bane-metal protection charm. It would be wonderful to share all these abnormal things and know Zoya’s on my side.

‘Pip? I
said
, do you think there’s something about the Morass that means we’re on the squadron?’

I take a deep breath. ‘Honestly? I’ve no idea.’

‘Doesn’t Reef tell you anything? He must like you. Everyone’s noticed he’s always watching you.’

I gulp emotions down. ‘Not really.’

Before Zoya can ask any more questions I see the faint wing-lights of Lida’s Storm drop altitude ahead of us. We’re close. Oh god, this is real. This is actually going to happen. Suddenly our engines seem painfully loud in the night’s silence. Surely the Crux will have heard us –
seen us
– coming? The Storms really are lumbering toy planes compared to proper technology.

‘Can you get a fix on the target?’ I ask.

‘Dead ahead,’ Zoya answers.

There it is. Sorrowdale. A Rodina town crawling with Crux soldiers. Can our little Storms make a difference when the Nation’s best bombers have failed?

Lida’s Storm drops even lower, then
up
! Bombs away!

She gains height rapidly and banks round to the right. I hold my breath. The night explodes. We cover our eyes against the sudden flare. Has she hit the town? I can’t tell; can’t make sense of the confusion on the ground.

The second plane approaches. New bombs fall. Henke and Rill make it through, trailing the echo of wild words in their wake –
Death to you all! Death for the death of our parents!

Our turn next. I’m sick with tension. This is it! I hear a few feeble spurts of anti-aircraft fire as we dive. Zoya lines up the weapon sights and releases the wires, just as she’s done a thousand times in the simulator – bombs away! It’s like sowing seeds of death, not life.

I give us a surge of power to climb, curve and escape. The blast follows but doesn’t catch us. We whoop and cheer like we’ve just won the whole war in one go . . .

We’ve barely touched down at Loren again when Yeldon’s at the plane. He’s stripped down to a vest so his biceps show better.

‘Thought you said it’d be dangerous!’ he shouts to Zoya over the noise of the propeller. ‘You haven’t even got any bullet holes anywhere.’

Zoya sticks her tongue out at him.

‘Hold steady while we refuel and rearm.’

‘Same again!’ Zoya sings, as I throttle forward and off we go . . . a black bird-machine heading back to war.

Halfway to the target on our second sortie the sky splits open and sharp splinters of rain spike down. Aura said it would be clear!

I hate spring rain because it’s thick with sticky tree spores drifting from the Morass. When I was little Zoya used to tell me if you didn’t wash the spores off straight away they’d root in your skin and grow into a forest. She also told me if you kissed a boy with thick eyebrows you’d give birth to furry rablets, but I spotted
her
doing that once and no rablets appeared, so I learned not to believe
everything
she said. Come to think of it, Yeldon has quite thick eyebrows . . . but now is not the time to think of kissing, or I’ll be right back on the subject of Reef Starzak, that half-hidden smile on his lips, and his soft message –
i think of you all the time.

I flick a switch that sets the wipers swiping across the low windshield at the front of the cockpit. They can’t keep up with the downpour. They sweep, I peek, then water pelts again. I feel it running down my neck and spine and pooling round my boots.

I want to ask Zoya what she meant about my family being from Sorrowdale, but daren’t. Not when I’m on my way to bomb the place again. Not when my parents have always said I was born and bred in Sea-Ways.

All night we fly. All night we bomb, until dawn comes teasing the skyline, then we strip, dump our sodden gear and collapse into our bunks, too wired to sleep, to tired to talk. Come evening we’re ready to go and pound the enemy again.

Just as before, Lida and Petra lead our formation. They reach the target, drop bombs and veer away. Everything’s looking good for Henke and Rill’s run-in until a sudden blade of light stabs the sky. A search lamp! Steen Verdessica would just love the religious poetics of this – bringing light to the unbelievers.

Nothing poetic about what happens next.

Like a lightning bolt, I think –
Don’t look at the light
, but there’s no way to warn Henke and Rill, caught in the lamp’s beam.

Rill’s Storm seems to skid in mid-air. It tips over and begins to spin. Rill must be blinded, Henke too. Unconnected, they can’t tell which way is up quickly enough. They’ll have no chance to come out of the stall in time.

Zoya shrieks, ‘Rain – break formation! Abort the mission!’

Her words mean nothing to me. I’m pushing the Storm to its maximum airspeed, urging it on, willing the seconds to stretch so I can somehow break through normal laws of time and motion to catch my friends before they find the ground.

I
start to shake. The plane shakes too, worse than normal engine shudders. I see nails working loose from wooden panels. Screws untwisting. Fabric unstitching. Light burns on my face from the search lamp. In this strange dance of slowed-down moments I feel as if I can count the photons spreading out in a wave of dazzle. The plane’s not the only thing unravelling. I feel this tremendous pressure pushing from the inside outwards until it seems as if I’m unpeeling like fruit skin. Some strange power sings,
Let me out! Let me burst free!
I clamp it down, struggling, almost literally, to hold myself together. I am normal, normal, normal.

Below us Henke and Rill are turning, diving, falling . . . hitting a Sorrowdale house –
bam
. Time zooms back to normal. Their Storm blooms into a hideous flower of orange fire that rain quickly batters into foul black smoke.

My voice is loud but rough from the ash in the air. ‘We’re close enough to the target, Zoya, release the bombs!’

‘They’re shooting at us!’

‘I know! Release the bombs!’

‘I can’t, the wires are jammed!’

‘Then fly the plane for me!’

Thank god – or Fenlon – for dual controls. While Zoya pilots the Storm I strip off my bulky flying gloves and heave myself half out of the cockpit to find that the bomb-release wires are totally twisted. Only one thing for it. Before I can talk myself out of such madness I’m climbing on to the lower left wing. The Storm tilts. I grab a wooden strut for support. It creaks . . . but stays firm. Zoya gets control; I get my balance. The search lamp swings round towards us.

‘Don’t look at the lights!’ I call.

‘Don’t fall!’ Zoya screams.

I think . . . 
If you don’t know you
can’t
do something, maybe you can
. With my eyes closed I feel for the bomb wires. They’re taut and strong. I yank them hard. Nothing doing. If only I had a knife, like the one Reef used in the Morass. That’s too bad – I don’t, and these bombs have to come off
now
. I pour all my anger into my hands. Wires cut, blood wells out, but they . . . almost . . . nearly . . . yes –
snap
!
A wire-end whips past my head, cutting the fabric of my flying cap. One by one the bomb cylinders fall.

‘Pull up!’ I call. ‘We need height!’

‘Get in the cockpit!’

‘More height!’

I hang on tight, drinking in the back flow from the propellers, then hoist myself into the pilot’s seat once more. Our bombs land and burst and the search lamp goes dark for ever. How’s
that
for poetics, Steen Verdessica!

We get away. We live. For now.

Marina Furey comes squelching across the sodden bioground of the airstrip, holding a lo-glo lamp that casts a weak circle of light around her. Her uniform is sodden and her hair is plastered to her scalp. An allergy to spring spores has made her eyes sore and her nose turn red.

‘Power down!’ she shouts hoarsely. ‘That’s enough for one night.’

The ground crew come slogging over to see what’s going on. I can’t bear watching while they’re told the news. Henke and Rill – dead. I can’t believe that’s all there is to it. One mistake and you’re gone for ever.

‘With all due respect . . .’ says Lida.

‘Yes, keep it respectful,’ Furey warns.

‘Sorry, but . . . what are we supposed to do? Let the Crux get away with it? That was
Henke and Rill
who went down. We can’t just grab towels, dry off and go back to bed for the day as if nothing’s happened! We could manage several more sorties – really pummel the murderers to pieces.’

Furey shakes her head, scattering drops of water. ‘Aura says that’s it for the night.’

‘Aura’s wrong.’

I slap my hand over my mouth as soon as the words come out. Oh god-who-doesn’t-exist, how could I even
think
such a thing, let alone say it out loud, in front of Marina Furey of all people?

Quickly Zoya jumps to my defence. ‘She means, Aura doesn’t have a complete picture, since none of us could connect at the time. Right, Pip?’

I’m wanting to die and thinking,
I am a weed sprouting, I will get yanked out
 . . .

‘S-something like that.’

Furey folds her arms and glares at me. That’s enough to wilt a grown man, let alone this weed.

‘If you’ve got something meaningful to say, Rain Aranoza, I’m willing to hear it.’

I hear Papi’s words in my mind –
Don’t look at the lights
– and I remember the silent swoop of corvils in the forest.

‘I think . . . and we can check with Aura, obviously . . . but I think I know how we can surprise them again . . .’

It’s not a genius plan, just a cheeky one. We set off with only two Storms in the next sortie. If my idea doesn’t work, then . . . then Papi can turn up to my funeral saying, ‘
Told you she couldn’t tell ground from sky
’ and Mama can cry for the rest of her life, saying, ‘
She wasn’t good enough
.’

Lida’s face is grim as she gets back into her Storm.

‘We’ll call this plane
Revenge
from now on,’ she says.

In the orange circle of an outdoor light I see Mossie checking bomb wires before catching a quick kiss from Petra, hopefully not the last one ever.

‘What’ll we call our plane?’ asks Zoya. ‘Shall I ask everybody?’

Call it
Anger
, I think in secret. ‘Call it whatever you like,’ I answer aloud.

Lida insists on flying as head of our mini formation. Just as before, the first Storm has the element of surprise. Petra releases a lovely sprinkling of bombs that land on a herd of traptions gathered in Sorrowdale’s suburbs. Anti-aircraft fire flares up, then silence. They’re listening for the next bomber. They won’t hear me and Zoya. Some way from Sorrowdale I cut the Storm’s engines, with the only sound being the sweep of wind on our wings.

Lower, lower, lower we glide, like a corvil scouting for meat. The white cross of a Crux flag flutters from an old god-house tower as we pass over. I could almost leap from the plane and land on a rooftop. There are trees in the town, real ones, that shouldn’t be growing so far from the forest. Some are bomb-splintered stumps, others are tall, black silhouettes. We slice their leaves and make the branches shiver. When our latest batch of bombs fall I’ve barely time to flood the engine with fuel and climb to safety.

Do I hear Crux cursing the smoke-choked sky as they run from the flames?

‘
Witches!
’ they spit at us as we rise. ‘
Night witches!
’

We fly, we glide, we bomb, until Umbra slumps below the horizon, stained with plumes of black ash. My last view of Sorrowdale is of a few Crux survivors retreating over roads and fields. The town is ours again – what’s left of it.

Back at Loren I land our Storm but don’t let the propeller blades swing still. Now it’s light the real bombers are being towed from hangars to fly missions away from the Morass. I’d like to see them do what we’ve done! I sense Zoya shivering in the seat behind me, from cold or shock or both. Stiff-legged and pale-faced, the rest of the squadron are gathering near the hangar. Reef stands tall amongst them, eyes only for me.

I can’t speak to him yet. There’s something needs to be done.

‘Zoya?’

‘Pip?’

‘You OK?’

She pauses. ‘I think so. That was scary.’

‘I know, only . . . there’s one more sortie we have to fly.’

‘There is? Did you get ac-reqs from Aura already?’

I shake my head. ‘We’ll need a spade.’