Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  The person holding the balloon turned and began to run away from me, very clearly not Garrick. Someone who was not a Passenger was holding a balloon, and it hadn’t disappeared. Scheiße. I lurched into a run after the person and the balloon.

  “Halt!” I shouted, glancing behind me. Now would be a terrible time to attract the attention of the police.

  But I couldn’t let the person get away. Not now. Not with the balloon. They didn’t slow down. Didn’t even turn around to acknowledge me. Warnings clanged through my chest, outracing the adrenaline in my veins. Danger. Let it go. Safer. I nearly stopped pursuing them. Then a car backfired behind me, followed by rhythmic footsteps and a single shout. Vopos.

  Nothing to lose now. Cursing under my breath, I ran as fast as I could on the slippery cement. I grabbed the person’s elbow. “Will you hold up? I just need to ask you about this blasted balloon!”

  She—oh fuck, a girl, it was definitely not supposed to be a girl—twisted against my grip, threw her head back, and let out a scream that couldn’t have not been heard by the exact people we needed to avoid. I shoved her back against the wall, covering her mouth. I glanced back up the alley to see if anyone saw us. Turning my head was a nearly fatal mistake. Her knee jerked up, slamming me between the legs. Stars slashed across my vision. My fingers closed instinctively on her cheeks as I gasped.

  She bit me, and I yanked my hand from her, cursing.

  The Vopos had definitely heard her scream. Voices stormed down alleys all around us, the wet stone making their distance from us hard to calculate. She hadn’t let go of the damn balloon. In the streetlights, I could see the double A stamps for Ashasher and Aurora, the two balloon makers. She had Garrick’s balloon, this girl who was trying to decide what direction to run—like it mattered.

  Didn’t she know? In East Germany, wherever you ran, they followed you. I caught her arm and shook it a bit, trying to get her attention. I spoke slowly, because I wasn’t sure if she was firing on all cylinders. “Who are you? Why do you have Garrick’s balloon?”

  What came out of her mouth was far worse than I could have imagined. It wasn’t her words—“I don’t know Garrick. It’s my balloon. Let me go!”—but her terrible German and her American accent. She was American. Perhaps she’d forgotten to go back to the checkpoint. I could get her there, trade safety for the balloon. That’d untangle this particular snarl in this messy night.

  “What checkpoint did you come through? Where are your papers?” I asked her, trying to keep my voice low and steady. “Where did you find this balloon?”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, trying to yank away from me. “I don’t have any papers. My passport’s in my purse. I don’t even have my phone on me. I have to find Amanda.”

  She could be playing me—and doing a good job because I couldn’t believe this confused girl with a terrible accent could be a spy or have gotten so lost she didn’t know what “papers” meant. Or something had gone unbelievably, terribly wrong. Worse than even a stolen balloon and a missing Passenger. I ran my eyes over her, her thin canvas-cloth shoes, her skirt and short-sleeved shirt. The way she shivered. She wasn’t dressed for this weather.

  Footsteps behind us, shouts echoing off walls, and her second scream restarted my heart. In times of panic, focus either completely dissolves, or sharpens to the point of pain. My brain chose pain. There were worse choices.

  “No time,” I said. To her or to myself, I couldn’t tell. I grabbed her hand, pushing off the slippery ground into a run. I dropped the German because all the saints in the Catholic Church couldn’t save her if she didn’t listen to me now. “Run. Do not let go of that balloon.”

  I’d dragged a screaming toddler through a market a time or two. Running with this girl away from the police who wanted to beat, torture, and imprison us was similar. Exasperated, I stopped and dropped her hand suddenly. She landed with a splat in the wet snow. The streetlights reflected off the tears streaking her cheeks.

  I crouched in front of the girl and pulled that damn red balloon down between us so she couldn’t see anything but the balloon. The reason we were out here after curfew, running around in the snow. The balloon bounced between us, the magic still clinging to it, sticky and sparkling and making my nose itch.

  “You can stay here,” I said in German, as slowly as I could, trying to remember how Mitzi soothed anxious Passengers, “and get caught with this. And they will torture you. They are Volkspolizei, and you do not want to know what it is like in their prisons.”

  Confusion flickered across her face, and she asked in German, “Was?”

  I didn’t have time to explain. I blew out softly, and the balloon bounced against her face. She wiped tears off her cheeks with the backs of her stiff, red hands. I said, “You don’t have any reason to trust me.”

  Her eyes bounced up to me, like I had hit on something she had thought was a big, terrible secret. Of course she didn’t trust me. I didn’t trust her. Trust was a commodity, and neither of us had traded a damn thing for it.

  “You stay and take your chances with the police, girl with the terrible German accent,” I said, moving the balloon to watch the panic crisscross her face. “Or you come with me and stay safe.”

  I stood and offered my hand again. Take it. Take it, lost American girl. If she said no, I’d have to take the balloon from her by force and hightail it out of there. I couldn’t risk my life, and our work, for some lost tourist.

  She wiped her face all over her sleeve and took my hand with the one not clutching the balloon string. I pulled her up off the ground, and nearly into my arms. I jumped back, startled by her proximity, and then by the sound of banging doors, shouts, and someone crying. Lights went on in the second-story windows of the houses farther down the street. We were about to lose the small advantage we had. I pressed the balloon into her chest, wrapping the string around her wrist, and she folded her arms around it, closing her eyes for a split second. Her hand squeezed the string, not letting it go. Not letting the balloon float back up to window level, where other people or the police could see it.

  “Komm,” I told her. And that she understood.

  This time, she did not struggle. I checked a street sign as we passed. I was a little turned around, even in a city I was paid to know like the back of my hand. I was dizzied by the wall, police, and a strange American girl clutching a balloon. My life was always a juggling act. Tonight felt like the dark kept lobbing balls straight at me with no warning.

  We didn’t slow down, no matter what we heard. The Vopos were looking for us. They had been tipped off, either about me or a failed balloon, or maybe they’d found Garrick. This thought made my heart constrict. I’d get him out of prison if I had to. He was my Passenger, and for whatever reason, it seemed like half the Volkspolizei were after us tonight.

  I just needed to find Mitzi. She would know what to do.

  We’d keep the girl safe and then figure out how to get her back to West Germany. Clean, simple, back to business. We could probably just shove her at the border patrol at the wall. Even if there wasn’t a record of her coming in at that gate, if she acted like she had head trauma or something—or if we gave her legitimate head trauma—they might not worry too much. She was just a kid, after all.

  I reached the rendezvous point and dropped the girl’s hand. The small park between two apartment complexes had been risky—anyone could be watching—but we’d found a corner that was largely shielded from the view of the residents. A short garden wall led to an alley running along the back side of one apartment complex, giving us another exit if needed.

  I moved around her to peer into the shadows, looking for Mitzi. The girl with the balloon stood stock-still, her eyes running down the alley like she was considering leaving, but her feet didn’t move. I could run her down if I needed to, but for some reason, I didn’t think she’d leave.

  Finally, a flash by the corner of the apartment building, a flip of blue hair, and I relaxed. “About time you show
ed up.”

  Mitzi came out of the shadows, waiting until she was past the trees and the light of the windows before she pulled off her hat so her hair showed bright and blue, a beacon in the night. She tended to stand out in a place made of gray, black, white, and red. She was the antithesis of the East German regime. It’d taken a lot of cajoling to get her to wear the hat, but she’d been picked up twice already by the police. The next time she might not get so lucky.

  “You brought a friend,” she said, swaying her hips a little like she did when she thought she could tease me, or maybe irritate the girl. Mitzi and I weren’t like that. She was probably the only person in the whole world I actually trusted, and one of only two people I gave a shit about. I wasn’t exactly her type, so as much as we played with each other like a cat and a mouse, we were friends, and friends alone.

  “Thought you might want the company,” I replied dryly.

  She ran her fingers across my chest, her eyes sharp and sparkling. “Hello, handsome.”

  “Not in the mood,” I said, cutting the game short. I tipped my head toward the girl. “Worse than we thought. That’s his balloon.”

  Mitzi turned to the girl who was shaking—from cold or from nerves, I couldn’t tell, and now that Mitzi was here to take charge, I couldn’t really care. I was tired, and I wanted to check the radio waves to find out if Garrick had been picked up by the police.

  “Streets crawling with the Volkspolizei,” Mitzi muttered, taking in the girl. “Think they’re looking for her?”

  That had not occurred to me, and I instantly felt ashamed for not thinking of it myself. I scowled sideways at the girl, who was looking at us, eyes wide. She looked like a damn deer in headlights. It’d be hard to believe, but Mitzi was right. She could be a criminal. She could have done something to Garrick and taken his balloon. She could be…I swore sharply, stuffed my hands in my pockets, and stomped a few steps away from Mitzi and the girl while I tried to gather my thoughts.

  Everything was supposed to be so simple. They’d protect my sister, and I’d do this job for them. For two years…That was the deal. Two years of only minor incidents with my Passengers. Other Runners had all sorts of screwups, but I didn’t. I was good at this. And just like that, it unraveled into a pile of useless threads. All because some American girl had to grab the damn balloon. Wherever she’d found it.

  I didn’t have the time or the energy to handle this, but I didn’t have the option not to handle it. That was one of their rules. Once they gave us the balloon, it was our responsibility. We ran the balloons; we dealt with the Passengers; we dealt with any balloon and Passenger problems. They only had to make the magic and identify the Passengers. We were the ones getting the Passengers over the wall.

  Or, some days, not.

  Complications were not supposed to exist on this side of the wall. Nope. This was not happening—except that it absolutely was.

  Mitzi was asking the girl the same questions I had, but of course Mitzi was succeeding where I’d failed. “Why do you have Garrick’s balloon?”

  The girl frowned, her eyes going over Mitzi’s teal hair to meet my eyes. “I don’t know who Garrick is. I saw the balloon, and I grabbed it. And then I was here.”

  The words punched the breath right out of my body.

  And then I was here, she said. Like she couldn’t remember coming to East Berlin. How come she hadn’t mentioned that yet? How come she hadn’t asked us to take her to the American checkpoints?

  The balloon only made Passengers invisible when it carried them. It didn’t render them unconscious. She should have remembered coming over here.

  Mitzi was so still that I was sure she had stopped breathing. I gripped the key in my pocket so hard it dug into my palm and burned me. The pain cleared my mind, kept me from shaking. “Where are you from?”

  The girl didn’t seem to care that I’d switched into English, though Mitzi’s head snapped around and she growled, low and deep in her throat, an implicit threat in how she stepped toward me. There was nothing to be done about it though. I knew I couldn’t—shouldn’t—use English, not on the streets, but I also couldn’t risk the girl not understanding me.

  The girl peered around the alley and said, “Pittsburgh. If I could borrow one of your phones, I can probably figure out how to get home. Or to the hotel, I mean.”

  Phones. Like we were going to take her to our safe house. I said to her, the tension so high that it walked the distance between us on a tightrope, “But why are you here? This is not a joke.”

  Childish fear burned from her eyes, replaced by sparks and anger. She let the balloon go from her chest and yanked the string, making the balloon bounce in the air. I glanced around quickly, hoping no one’s curtains were pulled back to see the commotion on the street. “Why would I joke about this? We’re here on a school trip to Berlin. I was walking in a park when—”

  Better, I thought, though my heart tripped when she said Berlin. I guess for people who didn’t live in East Berlin, there was no need to clarify. Why would she willingly go to East Berlin? No one came here willingly.

  Mitzi jumped in, her English rough and her accent thick. Her eyes stayed on the balloon, red and simple, the long, white string, the faint double A imprinted on the side. “What park?”

  The girl’s eyes jumped back and forth between us quickly. “I don’t know. I can’t remember. It was near a subway station. There were a ton of huge glass buildings.” She scanned our surroundings and added sourly, “Not here. Clearly.”

  “Not helpful,” Mitzi said to her. Or to me. Both of us, maybe. I glared at her.

  “I’ve only been in Berlin for, like, four hours,” the girl said, emphasizing her sentence so strangely that my brain spun to keep up, even though we were using English, my second language.

  “East or West?” Mitzi asked the question we’d been dancing around for far too long now.

  The girl’s face contorted, puzzled. “Uh, I don’t know? I mean, I guess it used to be the East. Yeah, it must have been the East. There were old pieces of the wall there.”

  I almost fell to the ground.

  Instead, I dropped into a squat, pressing my forehead against my knees and closing my eyes. Snowflakes landed on my cheeks and the back of my neck, but I was too busy trying to breathe to care about the cold. Thoughts of her words used to be the East, the lost look on her face in the alley, and her clothes made for sunnier and warmer days ran around my mind, lighting me up and electrocuting me, battering my mind with their implications, complications, hopes, and dashed futures. Futures. I’d heard about this particular magic, this possibility, when my sister had first dabbled in magic, but it was forbidden.

  Mitzi’s hand closed around one of mine. “Focus. We have to keep her safe—”

  “Did you hear her?”

  “I heard her,” Mitzi said softly. “Kai—”

  “Someone tampered with a balloon, Mitzi.” I pressed my palm into the snow. “I got it straight from Aurora. I didn’t leave it, not once. Did you hear what she just said? That’s the only way it could happen, right?”

  “I want to go home.” The girl’s voice was strong and clear, like she could coax us into returning her to where she belonged. She hadn’t pieced it together yet. Sure, she might realize that this wasn’t a dream and she was damn cold and wet. But she hadn’t figured out the biggest problem.

  Her chin lifted while Mitzi and I studied her, and I had to give her a little credit for that. She was gutsy, even if she didn’t know it. To survive time travel, I guess you’d have to be.

  “We’re not even sure how you got here, kid,” Mitzi said in German. I shuddered and covered my face with my hands again. It was bad enough that she was American. It was worse if what she was saying was true.

  “Balloons are only supposed to go over walls. This is different, isn’t it? Something went wrong.” The girl looked at me, and then she glanced around us, then toward the street from which Mitzi had come, toward the hope of streetlights an
d the wall and wherever she came from.

  My training said this was the part where I put the knife into her gut. Kill her. Let the secret of the balloons go with her to the grave. But the training was for people who cared about the cause. I didn’t. I was here for Sabina, and she was safely tucked in bed. Hopefully. And for all my faults, it was curiosity that I was sure would kill me like a cat. I wanted to know where the girl came from, how she got here.

  “What do you know about balloons?” Mitzi’s English sucked, but she knew how to rise to an occasion.

  “Nothing,” the girl said too quickly, wrapping her arm around herself. We said nothing, and finally her mouth thinned into a pressed line. She exhaled hard through her nose, a puff of white air in front of her face. “I’ve heard a story, okay?”

  “What story?” This time, I found my voice.

  Her eyes dropped to her feet, a strange expression flitting across her face. It took me a breath to recognize it as surprise and regret. “My saba—I mean, my grandfather—he told me about the balloons. I mean, it could be a story.”

  But her hand gripped the balloon string. It wasn’t a story. She knew that now, if she hadn’t before.

  Mitzi’s eyes shifted to me, and she repeated. “A story about the balloons.”

  And sure enough, the girl said carefully in German, “He said there were balloons, magic ones. They saved people.”

  “Oh my god,” Mitzi said, unable to hold on to the revelations from a girl standing in front of us shivering and clutching a balloon. “Kai—”

  “Mitzi,” I said, trying to press a warning into my voice. I didn’t want her to speak the truth, for our sake, and for this girl’s sake.