“Yes, well, the newspapers said they sound like a washing machine, too,” Maitland said. “I suppose we’d best be careful when we do our laundry, girls.”

Parrish nodded. “I don’t want to run the risk of being flung down while hanging up my knickers.”

“It was a very old De Havilland,” Talbot said in her defense, “and it did sputter and then die rather like a flying bomb.” But that only made it worse. The girls began calling her De Havilland and Triumph and any other motorcycle name that was handy, and whenever a door slammed or a pot boiled over, someone shouted, “Oh, no, it’s a flying bomb!” and attempted to tackle her from behind.

The ribbing was all good-natured, and Talbot didn’t seem to bear a grudge, even though she’d been taken off active duty and assigned secretarial tasks and had to hobble about on crutches. She seemed far more upset about her lost lipstick and having missed the dance than about her knee.

On their way home from an incident the next morning Mary and Fairchild went to see if they could find the lipstick, but either it had rolled into the storm drain or someone had seen it lying in the street and taken it. They did find Talbot’s cap, which had been run over and was obviously beyond repair. And on the way home, they passed the railroad bridge Mary had gone to the dance to see—or rather, what was left of it. “It was hit by one of the first flying bombs that came over,” Fairchild said casually.

And if you’d mentioned that sooner, Mary thought, I’d have known my implant data was accurate, and I wouldn’t have injured Talbot.

To make amends, Mary offered Talbot her own lipstick, but Talbot said, “No, that’s too pink,” and set about concocting a substitute out of heated paraffin and merthiolate from the medical kit. The result proved too orange, and for the next few days the entire post was utterly absorbed—in between incidents, some of them grisly—in finding something that would reproduce Crimson Caress.

Currants were too dark, beet juice too purple, and there were no strawberries to be had anywhere. Mary, helping to carry the body of a dead woman with a broken-off banister driven through her chest, noticed that her blood was the exact shade they needed, then felt horrified and ashamed of herself and spent the rest of the incident worrying that one of the other FANYs might have noticed the color, too. It was almost a relief when they spent the journey home arguing over whose turn it was to have to wear the Yellow Peril.

If and when any of them got to go out again. With Talbot injured, they were shorthanded, and they’d already been pulling double shifts. And Hitler was sending more V-1s over every day. The newspapers reported that anti-aircraft guns had been placed in a line along the Dover coast and that the barrage balloons had been moved to the coast from London, but clearly neither of those defensive measures was working. “What I want to know,” Camberley said, exasperated after their fourth incident in twenty-four hours, “is, where are our boys?”