Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

Mitzi and Ashasher’s gazes hung on us, heavy and stubborn, as Kai turned on the faucet and ran all four of our hands underneath it, rinsing off the poison. His face remained stoic and thoughtful as he turned over my hands, small and pale, in his larger brown ones.

  The water ran teal and the steam rose from the basin, smelling slightly acidic. Kai’s eyes lifted to mine, and his mouth tightened. I almost said I was sorry.

  But I wasn’t sorry. Instead, I whispered, “No ghosts, remember?”

  He squeezed my hands, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

  “Ellie,” Ashasher said.

  I blinked back at Ashasher. Today the feathers swirled slowly, a languid movement, like a finger stirring a small circle in a pond or a pool. “Yes, sir.”

  Kai snorted and Ashasher smiled, a strange and disconcerting break from his smooth and otherwise calm face. His dark eyes, intermittently visible through the feathers, narrowed slightly. “You don’t have to call me, sir, Ellie. You thought I was here to take you home.”

  Kai dropped my hands and gave me a hand towel. I dried them, thinking of the owl towels in my mother’s kitchen. Home. I hadn’t thought that was a possible reason for Ashasher’s presence, and for a split second, my heart skipped a beat. But he wouldn’t have said it like that if it were true. I said, proud of how my voice barely shook, “I thought you were Volkspolizei, actually.”

  Ashasher’s head tipped to the side. His voice sounded gravelly and genuine when he said, “I apologize for any anxiety I may have caused you, dear child.”

  Maybe a month ago, in my time, with my school classmates, I was a child. But I no longer felt like a child. I was no more a child than Mitzi or Kai who ran around with magic balloons and helped the Stasi’s most wanted escape East Berlin. I stayed quiet.

  Ashasher reached into his coat and withdrew a small folded piece of paper. “In lieu of successfully returning you to your time period, the Council has decided to provide you with papers so you may travel as freely as any East German citizen. That is to say, not very freely at all, but freely enough to be in broad daylight.”

  I took the paper with trembling hands. “What?”

  “You can go out,” Kai explained, his voice quiet and gentle. “In daylight.”

  “You’re not a prisoner,” Mitzi added. “No more than the rest of us, anyway.”

  “You could leave,” I said. “On a balloon.”

  Mitzi shrugged. “Not really. We all have reasons for staying. But at least you don’t have to stay in the house during the day anymore.”

  I looked at Kai, then Ashasher. “Can I go out alone?”

  “When your German is good enough,” Ashasher said. I deflated a bit. My German was still rough, even with the radio and newspaper practice. “And we are still working on a way home for you, Ellie. It involves some politics and us learning magic we aren’t supposed to do, but we are working on it.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered. I held the paper to my chest. A brand-new passport. This one could carry me over the threshold in daylight. And the threat of the police had been mitigated, at least a little. I was no longer a vampire by circumstance.

  Chapter Twelve

  ZERBERUS

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, April 1988

  Kai

  Ellie stuck in my head like a burr, and I couldn’t shake her loose. I did the night shifts, didn’t talk much to her, and definitely didn’t take her out again, even though she had papers now. I couldn’t forget the look on her face when I found the rat poison clenched in her hands. I couldn’t decide if she was the bravest or most foolhardy person I’d ever known. Or the way she’d whispered, No ghosts, remember?

  I knew avoiding her was a shitty thing to do. But there were only so many times I could put myself in the position of being alone with a girl from the future who I really wanted to kiss. I nearly did then in the kitchen, in front of Ashasher and Mitzi, and I couldn’t risk that happening. It probably violated some sort of code of conduct to make out with a Passenger. It definitely violated Romipen, our Romani way of life.

  There was just something about her. She was vulnerable without being fragile, and a part of me was jealous of her, and awed by her. Apparently in my head, jealousy and awe made me want to kiss her? It didn’t make sense to me either. The way the doves she made moved unnerved me. I kept waiting for Sabina to say something to Ashasher or Aurora, but she didn’t. And I certainly didn’t mention it to anyone, lest they want her to stay and become one of them instead of finding her a way home.

  Mostly, I didn’t want her to become a Schöpfer. One of them.

  Anyway, work kept me busy and all. I had a new Stasi tail. The Volkspolizei passed by the house too many times for me to be comfortable, and a bald man in a tan coat kept showing up whenever I went out for food or tried to go to the workshop. Whoever he worked for, he made me work to slip away from him. On top of that, we had two musicians in a row, and honest to god, I have nothing against music, but neither of them got the be quiet command. They both sat in those houses playing the music that got them in trouble in the first place. What part of Lie low and keep your head down did they not understand? Every Passenger petitioned the Council to get over the wall. Their spots were valuable.

  The Council was one of those rumors, the same way conspiracy theorists were pretty sure that the West had infiltrated the Communist parties around the world. Like that explained Gorbachev. When would people learn that no leader of any state, free or Communist, gave a shit about us people? We were all out here, flotsam and jetsam, floundering. We only had each other. That’s all.

  I collected cigarette butts on the rooftop and looked for balloons at the wall. But whoever had sent that one off when I took Ellie out was being careful. All the balloons stayed on schedule, and no one else died like Garrick. Mitzi began to relax, but I couldn’t. Something about the whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way.

  I thought about it as I leaned against a tree and I scouted out a potential Passenger for the Schöpfers. A good portion of the petitions were from the secret police, the Stasi. They knew people were leaving. They kept eyes and ears on all of us Runners. We knew that much because they kept tabs on just about everyone who hit their radar. Our movements were unpredictable; we were young; we weren’t infrequently caught after dark and arrested for breaking curfew.

  Truth be told, we didn’t mind so much if it kept them off the Schöpfers. If the Schöpfers were arrested, we’d be shit out of luck. If I got arrested, I’d be shit out of luck, but I wasn’t the whole program. Sometimes we Runners asked what would happen if we got arrested, and the Schöpfers were always vague enough for us to know they wouldn’t risk the whole mission to bail us out.

  This potential Passenger was a former Politburo official. He had copied documents. He was on house arrest, making it hard to move him, but interestingly, his house arrest didn’t seem to stop him from chatting with the police officers outside the door. Rather amiably. I flicked my lighter on and off while watching him. I was trying to figure out if I trusted him or whether he was just a very good plant when a knife blade caressed my throat.

  Not good.

  “Drop the lighter, Runner,” said an absurdly pleasant voice. Male. Melodic. The kind you expect from someone about to drop you to the floor with a red smile.

  The inside of his wrist had an infinity symbol tattooed, and I smiled.

  “Zerberus,” I said, naming the organization that oversaw all Councils. They were our watchdogs, things of fairy tales and legends. They rarely interfered where Councils worked though. This was new. I’d definitely never heard of Zerberus holding any of us Runners at knifepoint.

  I focused on what I knew. The angle of the knife told me he was taller than me. My elbows were probably at kidney level. Convenient. “I love the way you say good morning. It’s so pleasant. Upbeat. Refreshing in this day and age.”

  He was quiet for two beats, then the knife tapped my neck. I flinched despite myself. “You have a mouth, K
ai Holwell.”

  “That’s what all the girls say,” I quipped, but my pulse jumped in my neck, colliding with the knife. He knew my name, which meant he knew more about me than I knew about him.

  “Ah. Come along then. That Passenger is a Stasi informer. He did in fact copy documents, but they will pardon him if he can turn in one or two of you. Not even all of you. Let’s have kaffee und kuchen, shall we?”

  Yes. Because coffee and cake was exactly what I liked to do with strangers who held knives to my throat. I swallowed back a number of witty replies. The knife lifted from my neck and I turned, carefully and slowly in case he’d rather I die facing him. The guy wasn’t much older than me, in his early twenties, with a shaved head and tattoos up the side of his neck. His left arm had a python going down it, ending with the head on his palm, and his right arm was bare except for the infinity symbol. He stood maybe six inches taller than me, but was easily twice as broad.

  Long story short, the guy was a beast. And in a world that was far more hierarchical than it cared to admit, this beast was my boss’s boss’s boss. He pointed at a café down the street, and I willingly followed. I wasn’t inept. The best way to do my job well and save lives was to stay alive.

  We sat down over coffee, and the Zerberus representative—who attracted a lot of attention in the café, and not the kind of attention I wanted to attract—held up his finger to his mouth. He took a ring off his left hand and placed it on the table. It began to hum, low enough not to vibrate on the table but just enough that I could hear it, and the curious looks in our direction turned away.

  “That’s a neat trick,” I said coolly. “Willing to trade for it?”

  “Perhaps.” He leaned back in his chair and gestured to me. “Tell me, Kai. How is your sister?”

  I flinched, pulling my eyes away from the ring on the table. “Better here than she’d be with you.”

  Almost three years ago, Zerberus came for my sister. At the same time, my family wanted to put her in an institution. Leave her behind. Someone said she was a genius. Someone said she was insane. It didn’t matter if they wanted to use her, or my family wanted to forget her for what her magic had done when it ran over her edges. She was still my sister. I brought her here, accepting Ashasher’s offer, because the Zerberus rarely cared what individual Councils did. They didn’t know names. They didn’t care to know names. The Zerberus needed the Council here, where life was terrible, more than they wanted the Council to hand over my sister. At least, so I thought. Until now. I should have known they’d come for her eventually.

  “She is well, then.” The man poured a little milk into his coffee. “My name is Felix Kohn, and you know who I work for. I am not here for Sabina.”

  My chest deflated in relief, but my words still came out with more bite than I intended. “She is not yours to take.”

  “Nor is she yours,” Felix said, raising an eyebrow. “She is thirteen, yes? She makes her own decisions.”

  “If you’re not here for her…” I said, trying to keep my voice even. Not that easy when the person you’d give up just about everything for had been threatened in previous conversations. “Then why do you care about me?”

  “Because you are protecting the Zeitreisende,” he said. “We confiscated the balloon in question before the Council destroyed it.”

  “The broken balloon? The Council…Ashasher and Aurora said that they had to destroy it,” I managed to croak. Ellie. They’re coming for Ellie.

  “That decision was made without consulting us. We were able to confiscate it prior to destruction.” Felix offered me a cigarette, and I shook my head. I needed to focus. “We do not believe that magic was accidental, Kai.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “What happened was not an accident. They said it was an accident, but it was not a ‘chronological anomaly.’ It might not have been the intended effect, but the equations on that balloon were altered subtly and the ink is profoundly different.” He sipped at his coffee. “We’re concerned the Council has been compromised.”

  I looked around at the crowds of people around us. “By Stasi?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Felix shake his head. His pale-blue eyes unnerved me when they fixed back on my face. “No. Tell me what you know about Ashasher and Aurora.”

  Frustration welled inside me. Made the inside of my skin itch. I pressed my lips together and then said carefully, “I don’t know much. Honest. Aurora’s Polish, I think. And Ashasher…I’ve never asked.”

  “Why not?” Felix asked calmly.

  I lifted an eyebrow. “What, you haven’t noticed the feathers? I don’t know what they are or how he controls them, but I was raised to respect magic where it exists. And I’m not messing with that.”

  “Aurora and Ashasher are at the heart of all of this,” Felix said. This I knew. He looked around the café at the others dining around us. “You and I…Would we be who we are without the work we do?”

  I didn’t like where this train of thought was going. “Then why come to me? What if I’m one of them?”

  “You’re not,” he said.

  The dots connected in my head. “You’ve been tailing me.”

  He shrugged. “We have reason to believe that you would not betray the work you’re doing here. You have gone to extreme measures to keep your sister safe, even from elements of Zerberus, and so we believe you’d never willingly or knowingly put her in danger.”

  I shoved the coffee toward the middle of the table and stood up before I even registered his words. “Willingly or knowingly. Is she in danger?”

  “We don’t know, but we do not think that the Council is targeting its own people. Sit down, Kai. You’re attracting attention.” Felix’s voice remained mild. I wanted to punch him in the face as I obeyed. He surveyed me with his heavy brow and those scary eyes. Like he knew me. I pushed back my chair again, and he frowned. “Kai, we came to you for information and for assistance. I want you to tell me if you see anything suspicious or know of anything.”

  I thought about the balloon going over the wall on the wrong night and the missing balloons from the storeroom. The Runner who had disappeared. “Why me?”

  “Because you have Eleanor Ruth Baum,” he said simply. “And I believe you will protect her as fiercely as you protect your sister.”

  “How do you know this?” I asked him. The other part of my brain said, Ellie’s full name is Eleanor? As pretty as she is. Like a damn burr in my brain, that girl.

  “You think we’d let a girl like Sabina, with all her talent and all of her incredible intellect, disappear with just anyone? When you moved her here, we thought about taking her against your will and hers. We worried about her safety. But you proved to be as good a guardian as we could have hoped.”

  Nothing like being told that someone had let you protect your sister to really kick off the day right.

  I said, “What makes you think I’d give you my loyalty?”

  Felix’s smile was small and cruel. “I don’t need it. I just need you to know that I need the information to protect Mitzi, Sabina, and Ellie. Otherwise…” He spread his hands wide, letting his voice trail off. Just like Ashasher had done after the Council meeting.

  Blackmailed. Or close enough. I scowled at him. “And how do I find you?”

  “Here. I like to have coffee here in the afternoons,” Felix said. “Take care, Kai.”

  “Fuck off,” I said as pleasantly as I could. “And thanks for the coffee.”

  I took the coffee cup when I left. I needed another cup at home anyway.

  Chapter Thirteen

  GOD AND THE GHETTO

  Łódź Ghetto, Poland, December 1941

  Benno

  I came home from work one day and found my father sitting shirtless in our freezing home, staring at nothing in particular. I clapped my hands together and exhaled. My breath puffed out slowly, a gray ghost wisp in front of my face. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as I checked the hiding spot for
our bread. There was none left. We’d all go hungry until the next day’s soup. No surprise. Mama said she had a few marks and would try to buy a few beets off a lady in the hatmaking factory.

  “Papa,” I said. “Why are you shirtless?”

  He said, “I traded it for a cigarette.”

  “Are you a fool?” I cried in shock. I went over and shook him by his shoulders. “What did you do that for?”

  All his bones stuck out of his chest. His stomach was wrinkled and rolled over the tops of his trousers. He smelled, but then, we all did. He stared past me at the door and said, “We don’t even have a mezuzah.”

  We didn’t have a mezuzah on our doorway, not a single one, back in Berlin. I didn’t tell him that though. I said, “I’ll try to find one.”

  He nodded and said, “Without it, how can God see us here?”

  “Perhaps God doesn’t care,” I said.

  “You are weak,” he said, “if your faith in God can be shaken by a few evil people.”

  “It’s not a few, Papa,” I said. “It’s a continent. They will not stop until we’re all gone.”

  He shook his head and then made his most rational statement of the night. “You get those words out of your mouth before your mother and Ruth get home. You must not let them hear you despairing.”

  I was not despairing. I was beyond despair. I was flat. I went about each day the same as the day before and the same as the day before that. I had no doubts that tomorrow and the day after that would be more of the same. We could not break bread at Shabbat because there was no bread. We could not say the Kaddish because there was no wine, no water, just dingy snow. Maybe my father said prayers still, in hopes that someone, somewhere, could hear them. But I didn’t. Not anymore.

  I just wanted to do the best job I could as often as I could. Food, and sleep, in the shared bed with my sister, the rats, and the lice, with the sound of Ruth’s remaining cough. This was what I lived for. I lived for trading a few marks next week to the boy who chased after the potato truck with a fork on the end of a stick. He gathered enough potatoes to charge four marks a spud. Ghetto economy.