Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  Kai shuddered. “We’ve been working with a murderer. My sister. My sister’s been training with someone who’s killed people. Oh god. I have to go. Sabina…Bean…I sent her right back to them.”

  “Stop,” Mitzi cut into his thoughts and mine. She tucked teal hair behind her ear and reached out, closing her hands over his. “Kai. Look at me.” It took him a moment, but then I watched him lift his eyes to hers. His face emptied of emotion again. I’d seen this before. He couldn’t stay present. I didn’t know how not to stay present. If I didn’t cling to the facts, then I’d drift away. But none of this felt real.

  “We don’t know all the information,” Mitzi said. “With the Volkspolizei presence by the wall because of the bodies the other night, I think it’s safe to say Ashasher won’t send any balloons over the wall tonight. They don’t know that we know, so Sabina’s safe. We can’t go in there alone. We need backup. We’ll find Felix in the morning.”

  Kai gripped her wrists and whispered in a hoarse tone that cut through me like a rusty knife, “You’re positive.”

  “We can’t go in there. They don’t know we know,” Mitzi repeated. “Ashasher isn’t going to hurt Sabina. He doesn’t know that we took the papers. He’s threatened, but he isn’t going to follow through without proof.”

  When he nodded, I exhaled slowly and gestured to the papers on the table. “But then, what about this? What do we do with this in the meantime?”

  The safest place turned out to be between my mattress and box spring. We agreed that Ashasher wasn’t likely to think that I’d be involved in stealing anything from him. He still called me a child. He still thought I was innocent. And it’d be hard for him to report the papers stolen without divulging their contents.

  Kai sat down on the edge of my bed and covered his face with his hands. I sat next to him, leaning into him just enough that he had to feel me there. I didn’t know what else to do. Mitzi watched him, biting her lower lip. Then finally Kai let out a long breath. “At least we know now.”

  Mitzi’s smile was sad. “There’s that.”

  She went downstairs to make dinner, and when I stood to follow her, Kai caught my hand. He whispered, “Wait. Stay. Just for a little bit.”

  I sank back onto the bed next to him and leaned my head against his shoulder. He turned my hand over in his, running his fingers across the lines of my palms. I shivered, and I could feel his smile through his cheek against the top of my head.

  “Ashasher was the one to offer Sabina sanctuary. They’d keep her a secret from the Zerberus, train her to keep her magic safe, and protect her from the others back home. I didn’t want to believe he was part of this. I still don’t know how to believe this,” Kai said, his voice rumbling and loud, like the beginnings of a thunderstorm creeping into this room and just this room.

  I closed my eyes, relishing the calluses on his fingers running over the soft skin of my wrists. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Kai. “He speaks German and English, both with accents. Aurora told me once that he was Romani, like me, but he doesn’t understand a lick of Romani when I speak it, so I can’t help but doubt that. He’s been here since they began to build the wall. He just arrived and formed the Council. Aurora was one of his first recruits. She was one of the first ever to use a balloon to help someone escape. She and the first Schöpfers were smuggled around Europe to concentration camps to help people escape. She’s Polish, but her German’s so good now that you barely notice. I didn’t at first.”

  The silence that sank over us made me queasy. Kai and I could be a lot of things together, but the honesty left me feeling raw and exposed. He looked too thoughtful, too curious, and I didn’t want him to redirect that on me. There were questions hanging in the air between us, and I wasn’t ready for them.

  “Want to hear a terrible joke?” I asked him instead.

  “Always,” Kai said, his voice lightening, though it seemed more for my sake than it did genuine.

  I pretended to start a joke and then paused, shaking my head and covering my face with my free hand. “No, no. Never mind.”

  He pulled my hand free of my face. “You already said it was terrible. You can’t back out now.”

  “No,” I protested. “Jokes about German sausages are just the wurst.”

  It took him a beat, but then Kai fell back onto the bed, laughing so hard that Mitzi yelled up the stairs to find out if we were okay. I shouted back that everything was fine, grinning as I looked over my shoulder at Kai. My feet kicked merrily in delight at his happiness. Kai reached up and tugged me by my elbow. I lay back on the bed next to him as his laughter faded, and then rolled up, and faded again. He took my hand and laced our fingers together. In the sunlight filling the room, I studied his dark skin against mine, the way his hip fit in the curve of my body. Two different worlds, two different times, and yet nothing felt so right as here, the quiet warmth of the room, the lingering happiness from his laughter hanging in the air, his thumb gliding against my skin.

  He rolled over, his first kiss gentle and light, a warm summer breeze against my lips. He whispered against my mouth, “I promised you that we’d get you home, Ellie. I haven’t forgotten that. We know that time can go forward. Before Ashasher’s arrested, we’ll make him write you a balloon home.”

  I started crying then, which was exactly the wrong thing for that moment. There’s nothing worse than kissing someone you really like and then promptly bursting into tears. But Kai didn’t seem to mind. My tears didn’t freak him out, and he didn’t leave or get awkward. He tugged me closer to him, wrapping his arms around me, and stayed there until his shirt was damp with my tears and I had calmed enough to hear his heart beating against my ear again.

  “Come on. Whatever Mitzi’s cooking smells good. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow,” Kai whispered, rubbing his hand up and down my back slowly.

  Tomorrow, I might have to say good-bye.

  Chapter Thirty

  VISIT FROM THE POLICE

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, May 1988

  Kai

  I didn’t think I could sleep, but my body couldn’t stay awake. Not two nights in a row. I fell asleep on the couch, whispering back and forth with Mitzi again about why Ashasher had done what he did, and what Felix might do to him. Sabina, Sabina, Sabina. Thank god she was too in her own head to be a part of this. Mitzi fell asleep too, my head on her lap, because when Ellie woke us in the morning, wide-eyed with her finger to her mouth, both of us jerked awake at the same time. Fists pounded on the door.

  “Polizei!”

  Ellie’s blue eyes, wide with terror, grew impossibly wider. She shook as I grabbed her hands. “Papers, Ellie. Get your ID card. And get rid of those damn doves.”

  God, I fucking hoped Ashasher had done his homework with her papers. What if he’d planned for this too? What if Ashasher screwed up her papers in case he had to play this card? My mind raced through different scenarios, and none of them ended well.

  Ellie ran up the stairs as Mitzi brushed back her hair and tucked it under a hat. If they were going to give her shit for having blue hair, I’d get shit for being brown-skinned. We were both at risk when I answered the door.

  “Good morning,” I said to the two policemen on the steps. My heart snapped in half with the stress. All I could think was, This is how Ashasher’s getting us back for taking the papers. He called it in to the Volkspolizei. He’s going to get one or all of us arrested. “Can I help you?”

  “We need to search the premises for an illegal person,” the Volkspolizei said. “Let us in.”

  I didn’t argue. He’d played the card. Ashasher thought I’d do anything to keep Mitzi, Ellie, and Sabina out of jail. And he wasn’t wrong. But right now, he was making me pick between them. I remembered Felix telling me that he knew I’d be loyal. To a fault. Have I always been this easy to play? I gestured for the officers to come into the house and followed them, babbling about how it was just my half sister, Mari
e, and her friend from school. We all had work permits and college enrollments. There were stacks of books in Ellie’s room and the room Mitzi and I shared when we were there. That should be enough for them. It had to be enough. Ellie had papers. As long as Ellie’s German papers held, that was enough. My hands shook, and I tried to hide that as they walked through the house, opening the closet where Ellie once hid from Ashasher, checking the bedrooms.

  To Mitzi and Ellie, one of the police said, “You’ve had no one else here?”

  Mitzi shook her head. “No, sir.”

  “Where does he sleep?” the police asked, pointing at me.

  I blinked. The house had two bedrooms. It was clear that Mitzi’s clothes were on one bed and Ellie’s on another. Ellie was paler than I had ever seen her. She was shaking hard. My hands itched to go to her and smooth away the wrinkles on her forehead, the way her eyes bounced around the room.

  Mitzi didn’t miss a beat. “With Eleanor, if he’s lucky. Some nights she makes him sleep on the couch.”

  One of the police snorted and said, “Women.”

  I shrugged and gave him the only smile I could muster which was a small, wan one, like I couldn’t agree more. He shook his head at my ID card and spat out a word that chilled me to my bones, a racist slur I hadn’t had hurtled at me in ages.

  “No. I am Romani,” I said without thinking. He didn’t care about language and what he should, or shouldn’t, be calling me. But what was I supposed to do? Let him say that word just because he could?

  The room stilled. Ellie’s mouth pressed together in a thin line. Mitzi shook her head slightly at me in warning. If they wanted to call me racist words, then they could. I’d have to let them right now. Everyone’s safety depended on it. The two police exchanged looks, and for a long time, I could only stare at the puke green of their uniforms and see myself hanging from a ceiling, bloodied to a pulp. Going into a Stasi prison meant one was unlikely to return. Especially me. Some things were constant in Europe. The treatment of Jews and Romani was reliably awful.

  By the stairs, the policeman interviewing Ellie broke the silence by saying, “Baum. Jewish.”

  Ellie’s chin lifted slightly as he turned over her papers. “I am just a student.”

  He nodded and handed her papers back to her. He quizzed all of us about what we were studying and where we were working. Ellie was just a student, for now, and she came across as young enough. Thank god it was a Sunday. She remembered where she was supposed to be going to school, according to her papers, and I could have kissed her for that. They doubted that Mitzi and I were related until Mitzi smoothly insinuated that our mother was a troubled woman.

  She shrugged. “Our mother isn’t here. We didn’t ask. We didn’t need her. She’s damaging.”

  It was the right answer. As the police left, I heard one of them say, “A Jew and a Gypsy. Sounds like the beginning of the end. Sure we can’t arrest them for that?”

  I stiffened, waiting for them to come back and arrest me for being Romani and Ellie for being Jewish—and then, then we’d have a problem. But I shut the door behind them, and they got into their car, pulling away a moment later.

  Mitzi shoved me hard, and I grabbed her wrists. “I wasn’t thinking! I know! I know.”

  “Think better,” she snapped. “They’re going to come back now. You mouthed off to them. Congratulations, idiot. You’re under surveillance.”

  “You’ve never been called that word in your life, Mitzi. Don’t you dare tell me how I should or shouldn’t react to it,” I hissed, releasing her and pushing her back.

  “I don’t care. You’re missing the point. I don’t care. I care about keeping everyone safe. And if that means you have to hear that word again, I don’t care.” Mitzi poked me in the chest, her eyes flashing dangerously. “Our job requires us to be under the radar, Kai. You are now on the radar. Tell me how you’re doing your job right.”

  “Our job? It’s dead,” I yelled back at her. “We found out last night that one of the two people we run balloons for has been using them to kill people. Our job is dead. There will be no more balloons after this, Mitzi. Nothing matters.”

  “Everything matters, Kai. You’re wrong. There will be balloons. One bad seed can’t ruin it all,” Mitzi spat back, digging her finger farther into my sternum. I grabbed her wrist and dug my fingers into her pressure points. She gritted her teeth and then spat at my face.

  “Fuck!” I swore and wiped at my face with my free arm.

  “Stop it, both of you,” Ellie said, pulling on a coat. She pulled her hair free of her collar. Her face had regained none of its color. Her fingers shook as she did up the buttons. “Kai, come on. We need to find Felix. Now. You both are missing an important point. If Ashasher sent the police here as retaliation, then he knows it was us. He has Sabina.”

  Time stopped. My blood froze in my veins, slicing me open from the inside out, and I stared at Ellie. He has Sabina. Bean, Bean, Bean, for whom I’d do anything. So busy fighting with Mitzi over a fucking word, and my sister’s in the hands of a madman.

  “I’ll get the papers,” I said, needing to move. My heart began to wake back up as I ran up the stairs. I hid the papers inside my coat and zipped it up, making sure they were secured in the interior pocket. When I came back down the stairs, Ellie was scolding Mitzi.

  “I’m serious, Mitzi,” she was saying. “It’s distracting from what we need to do, and that’s get Ashasher arrested. Have your existential arguments about racist terms and what’s tolerable tomorrow. Today we’re busy.”

  Mitzi shook her head. “Of course you’ll take his side.”

  Ellie made a face at her as I slipped quietly down the stairs. “It’s not sides. There are no sides here. Are you coming with us?”

  Mitzi frowned at my shoes. “No. You two know Felix. I don’t want to be the wrench in the plans. He has to trust you. And besides, someone has to be here. They’ll be suspicious if they come back and we’re all gone.”

  “Ready?” I asked, surprising both of them. Mitzi’s eyes skipped past me, and she set her mouth in a thin line. She was still pissed at me. Ellie glanced at her and then at me. She nodded, and we both stepped out into the sunshine.

  In the street, I took her hand and Ellie sighed, leaning a little against me as we walked. People’s eyes followed us. I’d never noticed that before today, but maybe I was being paranoid. I murmured, trying to keep my voice as soft as possible, “Are you okay?”

  She shook her head slightly. There was nothing to say to that. I didn’t know how to make her feel better. I didn’t know much about Ellie, really, when I thought about it, and I’d never felt that ache of helplessness so much as then, walking toward the café to find Felix. I thought Ellie understood me a great deal more than I understood her, and I didn’t know how that could be. That she could have known yesterday how badly I needed to laugh, even over a bad joke, and how sometimes I just needed to feel another person next to me. She read me better than I read myself, and I realized I only knew her middle chapters. I didn’t understand what made her tick, and I didn’t know where she was going.

  And if she left today, I’d never know her. It was the worst, realizing that she could leave and I’d never know her again. Our paths could never cross in the future. I’d be—look, I did the math on how old I’d be when Ellie came to Berlin in her time, and it wasn’t pretty—and we’d just be two lines that intersected once. I didn’t want that, but I couldn’t ask her to stay. She couldn’t stay. It fucked with everything for her to stay. She didn’t belong here, and maybe, in her time, she was a happier person. Maybe she had a boyfriend there, and maybe she was free. Here, she was stuck in a prison state. How could she want to stay?

  If I had the opportunity, if Sabina wasn’t in the picture, would I travel to the future?

  In a heartbeat. In a fucking heartbeat.

  I’d get out of here, skip all the messy stuff in the middle of life, and get straight to knowing who I was and what I wanted out of th
e world. I’d leave in a heartbeat.

  Not without Sabina though. Not without her. And maybe not without Mitzi, though I was still pissed at her.

  “Da ist er,” Ellie said, bringing me back into the present.

  This present, anyway. The idea of multiple presents hurt my head.

  Felix sat at the café, sipping coffee and tilting back in his chair. He nodded to us as we sat down across from him. I took the papers out of my coat and put them on the table in front of him. “It’s Ashasher.”

  “Interesting. That explains why Ashasher’s been absent lately, doesn’t it?” Felix mused, taking the papers calmly, as if he had expected them. I steadied myself against the sudden panic that Felix was in Ashasher’s pocket. If he was an informant, he knew everything. We had given him everything.

  But he shook his head, turning over the papers. “This is…He did his research. I assume Sabina’s transcribing for him? I can almost understand enough of how this might work. But why?”

  “That we’re not sure about. But the balloons can’t go back. Instead, the balloons are being sent forward because that’s how time works. You can only time travel forward, not back. The magic in the balloon activates when someone on the other side is grabbing the balloon, and then the balloon is returning to its original dimension,” explained Ellie, her explanation in German almost free of stumbling blocks.

  Felix looked up at her, his eyes light and crystalline. “What else?”

  Ellie’s eyes shifted to me so I said heavily, “He has Sabina.”

  “Ah,” Felix said softly.

  “So we’re going to arrest him, right?” Ellie asked, leaning forward. “Before anyone else gets hurt.”

  To our surprise, and then shock, Felix shook his head. “I have to review the evidence first and verify that you didn’t tamper with it. I’m sorry, it’s procedure. When I can verify with my boss that everything here is from Ashasher, then I’ll go ahead with the arrest.”