Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  This felt implausibly real. I hadn’t known about the ghost stations or that the Potsdamer Platz station had been one of them, but this was the old, run-down version of the one I’d seen. The one I’d seen had people from Sweden and people from China and people from the United States standing next to Germans, not just East and West Berliners. The one I saw had friendly people handing out maps and giant maps on the wall where everyone tried to figure out how to get wherever they wanted to go.

  This station was empty and the walls stripped. This station didn’t want people inside it. It had no intention of helping us get anywhere, and our presence felt unwanted next to the decaying tiles and tired sign.

  “It looks different then, doesn’t it?” he asked and then blew out a hard breath. “No, stop. I’m not supposed to ask. I just said I wouldn’t.”

  “You already know the wall comes down. What’s a little more information?” We stood there in silence for a moment and then I added more softly, “It’s used. It’s the shiny, busy platform I told you about when I first came here.”

  Kai’s arm brushed against mine. “One day, I’ll stand there too. But there’s the chime. We need to move. The guard will be by soon.”

  I didn’t argue this time when he began to walk, and I had to keep up as he headed down a long platform into darkness. Then he dropped my hand abruptly and jumped onto the tracks, followed by a rush of silence and then the loud, echoing clap of his feet slapping, wet and determined, against the base of the tracks. I couldn’t turn back now, so I gritted my teeth and slid down from the platform onto the wet, dark tracks.

  We walked a few steps before a thought occurred to me. “Why don’t you use the tunnels to escape? They go into West Berlin, don’t they?”

  He turned his head slightly but I couldn’t read his expression in the dark. “The trains run too frequently. You can’t run the tracks fast enough between places of safety for how often and how fast they run the trains.”

  I hesitated, but could not avoid the next question. “You’ve tried.”

  “Not me,” he said, turning back toward the darkness. “Others. Many others. No one’s made it.”

  Calculated risk, I thought again to myself. Everyone thought they were invincible enough until they were not. Everyone thought they were desperate enough until they were not. I stared down the tunnel. I was trapped in a land and time of magic and intrigue, a place where balloons helped people escape terrible regimes. Would I run? I stared into the dark and tried to think about how long we had been down there. How fast could I run, and how far apart were the stations? Then, abruptly, I realized that I wouldn’t try it. I couldn’t try it. I didn’t know if that was my cowardice or risk assessment. Maybe both.

  After a few minutes of walking in complete darkness, the kind where you forgot whether you were walking straight or forward or uphill or downhill, Kai explained the ghost stations to me. The previous stations were still used by West German trains to pass through on their way to other stations.

  “Why did you leave England?” It seemed safer to ask questions in the dark.

  I heard his footsteps hesitate at first, and I thought he might not answer me. Then he did. “My sister. She’s…She’s a little different. And she has magic. Some wanted to institutionalize her. Some wanted to use her magic for evil. I brought her here to protect her.”

  “She’s lucky to have you,” I said softly, because I didn’t know what to say. People fled Germany just a generation before Kai because it wasn’t safe to be different here. And he had to come here to find sanctuary. A few years made such a difference. Time seemed increasingly illogical the longer I was in 1988.

  “Yes,” was his reply, but it wasn’t proud or egotistical. It was simple. She was lucky to have him.

  “What’s up with you and Mitzi?” I asked, braver in the dark.

  His steps paused. “What do you mean?”

  I considered my words for a moment, because I couldn’t figure out how to ask whether she thought I was a threat and decided to say instead, “I can’t tell if she likes me or not. She’s hot and cold.”

  And the more often you and I touch, hold hands, and banter, the harder she is to read. But I didn’t say this. Not even in the dark of the tunnels.

  “I think she’s tired,” Kai said softly. “You’re just another friend who isn’t German. Another reminder that she’s had a hard time with her own people.”

  “Why?”

  “Dangerous to be gay in East Germany,” Kai said. “She’s a liability.”

  “They said that? Kai, that’s terrible.”

  “It is. It’s not you, Ellie. And it’s not really her either. It’s…” I couldn’t see his hands, but I could imagine the gesture. “All of this.”

  I let go of my other questions to concentrate on walking in the dark. Nothing could have prepared me for the stench of dampness that never found air, for the crystallizations that formed on the walls and felt like grit on my palms. The air was sour, thick, clinging to my hair and skin like fingers ghosting over me. We reached the iron door at the end of the tunnel with the rusted bar that groaned and creaked when Kai wrestled it to the side.

  Kai opened the door. “Come in.”

  The room took up several stories, the ceiling rising far above our heads with thick beams of exposed steel crisscrossing at several levels. All the railings were painted a gross yellow, like the kind they used on roads. Caution! Do not fall over this very obvious railing! The walls were gray stone where they weren’t covered with maps, fluttering yellowed papers, and bookcases. On the main level were three rows of huge, long wooden worktables with green-and-gold desk lamps, all glowing warmly. Stacks of books and papers covered the tables. Wooden chairs with low backs and arms were pushed out and in, and dragged all over the room. The worn carpet by the chalkboard had several purple, red, and green floor cushions, and the couches were a dull brown with piles of blankets in all colors. A poster commemorating the 1980 Olympics was taped to the wall nearest to me.

  “What is this place?”

  “The workshop. This is where they write the magic for the balloons.” Kai picked up a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Too deep in the tunnels. Stasi never find us back here. It’s the safest place to work.”

  The equations on the page didn’t make sense to me—math wasn’t exactly my forte—but I recognized them: the variables, the square roots and imaginary numbers. How magic could come out of math was another mystery. The list of unknowns in this world was increasing steadily. I put the paper down on the table and ran my fingers over the damp mark left behind on the wood from a cup not too long ago. No one was there now, but they had been here recently. I glanced up at the upper levels, at the ladders connecting steel beams that served, I think, as walkways from bulletin boards to bookcases to bulletin boards.

  A chalkboard had a list of names, one of whom was Kai’s next Passenger, the one we just saw. I tapped my finger on the board. “What happens next for her?”

  “We’ll take her to a safe house, draw her blood, write the balloon, bring her and the balloon as close to the wall as we can, and send her over,” he said. “We’re using a safe house in another sector since you’re in our normal one.”

  I flinched, a little guilty. “Am I taking up space? Can you save fewer people because of me?”

  He startled, dropping the piece of chalk he was using to check off the woman’s name on the board. “What? No. Ellie, no.”

  I wasn’t sure if I believed him, not after everything I’d seen. I nodded and walked away from the chalkboard to a bulletin board with a map tacked to it. Flag pins stuck out all over it, and a tiny cursive font detailed names, but not addresses. Adiela in Cape Town. Peter in Northern Ireland. Rashaad in Iraq. Ebrahim in Iran. Meriem in Algeria.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  Kai glanced up from the equations he was reading. “Where Schöpfers and Runners are helping people in places of crisis. We don’t put down the addresses in case we’re compromised.�
�

  I blinked. “So it’s not just here.”

  Kai shook his head and walked up to the map, tapping it with a finger. “Not just here. Wherever we’re needed. We don’t play sides. We don’t work for governments. We help people get out of places if they’re at risk.”

  I smiled a little bit. “You said we. You usually talk like it’s the Council and the balloon makers, and they’re a separate mission and entity from you.”

  His gaze slid over to me, and his almost-smile twitched in the corners of his mouth. “You’re too sharp for your own good, you know that? Here. I want to show you something.”

  He stepped back so I could move over to the chalkboard where, at the edge, someone had taped an old-fashioned color photograph with a name and dates written underneath. I stepped close to it and stared at the dark-haired guy with a careful smile and deep-set almond eyes. I touched Garrick’s name beneath it. 4 August, 1954–21 March, 1988.

  Swallowing, I turned away and wandered through the workshop, looking at all the papers. My name was on a large sheet of paper marked up by a dozen different hands. Over my shoulder, Kai translated it: “Ways to Return Ellie Baum to Her Time Period.” He showed me a note from a head organization allowing the Council to investigate uses for illicit magic to return me home.

  I felt like I was in a museum, or a fairy tale, or a movie set.

  “This is incredible,” I said. “Ashasher and Aurora wouldn’t mind me being here?”

  “Oh, they’d mind very much,” Kai said, and he sent me a sly smile, like we were coconspirators in a crime. I thought about the broken balloon, the missing Runner, the flags all over the world, and all of the dangerous puzzle pieces, but Kai stepped closer, distracting me. My mouth went dry. His kaleidoscope eyes tipped toward golden. “Calculated risk, sponge.”

  “What did you call me?” I stepped away from him, away from the blackboard with its uncertain and indecipherable equations. “What does that mean?”

  “Sponge,” Kai said and frowned. “It’s not a German word. You soak up everything around you, don’t you? You’re quiet because you’re always absorbing everything. Everything’s personal to you. Everything is.” He paused and turned away from me. “It’s very real.”

  He shrugged and added after a beat, “But I don’t know you yet.”

  I imagined storing all the too-much things about me in my heart, with little valves letting them out slowly or not at all. I thought about my full-to-bursting heart sponge so much that I almost missed the word yet. The word wrung out my heart with its promise to fill it up again.

  On our way out of the workshop, I stumbled over one of the rails and let out an embarrassing squeak. He caught me by my arm, and I spun toward him before I realized it, my free hand on his chest. I could feel his heartbeat all the way through my palm, up my wrist, sliding through my veins to my heart. Our breath shared a ragged pulse.

  His hand came up to touch my cheek, warm, dry, and smooth. His fingers curled against my temple, his thumb running across my cheek. I imagined his eyes turning to molten gold in the dark of the subway tunnel. His hand on my arm tightened only slightly before our lips met. The last time I’d kissed him, after the second time traveler, he’d stood still as a statue, just letting my mouth brush against his. The shocking ambivalence of that reaction was only a shadow now, his mouth capturing mine with extraordinary determination.

  We kissed as if this were the solution to everything that lay ahead of us, as if a girl from the twenty-first century and a boy from the twentieth century kissing in an abandoned subway station beneath a divided city could untangle the terrible ways in which time looped and history replayed itself.

  Chapter Seventeen

  TIES THAT BIND

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, April 1988

  Kai

  Ellie was playing solitaire in the front room, a paper dove opening and closing its wings next to her mug, when I came to get her. I must not have done a good job of hiding my emotions because her smile dropped off her face pretty damn fast.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, scrambling to her feet. She slipped the dove into her pocket. The rest of the cards tumbled off her lap and scattered on the floor. I shook my head, still trying to catch my breath, and grabbed her coat off the hooks. She took it from me and slid her arms through the sleeves. “Kai, you’re freaking me out.”

  I was freaking myself out, to be honest. I really didn’t want Ellie around the Schöpfers. They had a tendency to see us normal people like we were little experiments, things to be studied and examined and discarded at the snap of their fingers. And it’d only be worse because she time-traveled. But they wanted to see her because they thought they’d figured out why and how the balloon worked for her. And if they figured that out, maybe they’d be able to get her a way home.

  “Ashasher and Aurora,” I said at last, opening the door for her and then switching into German. “They want to see you. At the workshop.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at me while I locked the door. “You look scared.”

  I tried to smile. I had practice faking emotions for Sabina, but for some reason, I couldn’t with Ellie. I said hoarsely, “I’ll be with you the whole time.”

  She blinked and then nodded while she brushed her mane of brown waves back over her shoulder. She didn’t look as afraid as I felt, or as I expected her to look. “Okay.”

  I didn’t get why I felt her trust was so misplaced. I wanted to earn it, but I didn’t know how. I just knew that I’d never seen Ashasher and Aurora so worked up and animated like they were this morning. I slipped my hand into hers, and we set off for the workshop.

  Dropping into the train tunnels brought back a slew of memories from the other day that didn’t help to slow my heart or make it easier to breathe. Every time we bumped into each other in the tunnels, I thought about stopping and kissing her again. All my life, I’d never understood how people could get distracted so easily. I went eighteen years before understanding: distractions were five foot six with a mane of perpetually tangled brown curls and blue eyes that could bring a man to his knees. Everyone has their own definition of distraction, I guess.

  As I closed the door to the workshop behind us, Ellie’s eyes nearly popped out of her skull. She hadn’t seen it so busy. Schöpfers were examining a red balloon lit up by stage lights and held delicately in the metal clamps in the middle of a table. I could barely see the equations on the thin skin of the balloon, but I wasn’t here for a balloon. Not today. Ashasher sat in the corner with Aurora, the feathers moving at slow speed while Aurora’s eye makeup seemed to drip down her face a little more than usual today. My sister was noticeably absent.

  Eyes followed Ellie, and I expected her to be shy, but she walked behind me, her bottom lip trembling but her feet steady. The girl was way more incredible than she’d ever give herself credit for being. We crossed the workshop to the place under the overhang where Ashasher and Aurora had ceased talking just to watch us walk.

  I realized too late that Ellie and I were still holding hands. Ashasher raised his eyebrows, a hidden motion behind the crown of feathers, but I knew him well enough that he gave himself away. Aurora blatantly stared at our hands. It was too late to drop Ellie’s hand now. Not if I ever wanted to kiss this girl again (and yes, I did).

  She must have figured out that everyone was staring at us, at her holding my hand, not at her. Her fingers tried to untwist, but I just held her hand tighter. We weren’t giving in to that nonsense. I’d already become mahrime, outcast from my people. Here, in this world, they could not judge me for this.

  “Ellie,” Ashasher said in greeting, the feathers picking up speed. “Kai. Thank you for coming.”

  “Aurora,” I said, and gestured a bit with our hands. “This is Ellie. You met the other night.”

  For the first time in good light, Ellie and Aurora appraised each other. Then, in careful, absurdly careful German, Ellie said, “I forgot to say thank you. For working to find me a bal
loon that will take me home.”

  Aurora shook her hand slowly, tilting her head to the side. “It took me a few days to sort it out, but I think I know why the balloon picked you, Ellie Baum,” she said. “You look like him. It’s even clearer now in the light.”

  Aurora turned, dropping Ellie’s hand and crossing to the chalkboard. She tugged Garrick’s photo off the slate and brought it back, handing it to Ellie. Ellie had seen it before, but of course Aurora didn’t know that. Ellie studied the photo, a frown curling up the softness of her face. I studied Garrick’s dark curls, his slim face, his long, delicate fingers always with a pen between them. At first, I didn’t see it, but then…Their eyes were the same shape. They had the same crooked smile. The same ears. Ellie turned the photo over and read the name off the back of it.

  “Garrick Aaron Hirsch,” Ellie said aloud slowly, and then her eyes widened. She jerked and looked up at me. “Hirsch. He has the same last name as my grandfather. And his middle name…That was my grandfather’s father who died at Łódź.”

  “We pulled Garrick’s file,” Ashasher said, looking around. “Where’d it go? Christian, find Garrick Hirsch’s file.”

  “I heard you both met our Zerberus friend,” Aurora said in the lull as some young Schöpfer behind us scrambled to do Ashasher’s bidding.

  “He’s a real piece of work,” I said, trying to take a deep breath. Ellie said nothing, just stared at the photo. “Did you talk to him?”

  Ashasher’s smile thinned his mouth. “The Zerberus will not speak to us. By coming to you, they have made it clear whom they are investigating in the case of Ellie and Garrick’s balloon. And now there’s a second balloon. Even we cannot ignore the facts. It is unlikely, Ellie, that your balloon was accidental.”