Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  “Ellie,” Kai said. I glanced at Sabina, at the sheen in her eyes. From tears or from whatever world her mind had taken her to, I wasn’t sure. She had to stay present though, if we were to get her out of here. Kai could get her out, I realized, and I could stay and deal with Aurora.

  I swallowed. “It wasn’t cowardice. You were a little girl. Like Sabina. Let her go.”

  Aurora’s smile shook me to my core. It was sad and hopeful at the same time. “I was your age. Wouldn’t I be a coward now if I didn’t try? If I knew I could do it.”

  “You’re killing people to save people,” I countered. “How does that make sense? How do you justify this?”

  “Let Sabina go,” said Kai, his voice rising again. He was two long steps away from the table. Almost there. “Aurora, she’s just a girl.”

  “I’m not letting her go, Kai, because I need her for the science. Because once I have the science down, I’ll be able to save more lives than I lost along the way.” Aurora sat back down. “Just sit there and wait, and when I’m ready to go, we’ll trade. My escape for your sister’s life.”

  But Sabina’s legs were beginning to tremble. She couldn’t hold that position much longer, and if she collapsed, she’d hang herself. She wouldn’t even need Aurora to yank away the table. Kai began whispering to her in a steady stream of Romani, the language lilting over his tongue. But she only sagged farther, the rope indenting her neck.

  “Sabina,” I said, choking on her name. “Stand up.”

  “Yes, dear, stand up,” said Aurora absently.

  Kai’s hands were fists at his side. I had to do something before he tried to get to his sister. Aurora could still hang her faster than we could cut her down. I didn’t even know how we’d cut the rope off her. My voice sounded desperate now instead of steady, and I didn’t even mind. “Aurora, let her go, and you can spend all night telling me how you’re fighting science. Science can only take us forward in time, not back.”

  “I’m getting closer,” she retorted. “The last body the other night was from 1991. I am closer.”

  “Closer is not enough,” Kai said. “Aurora, I’d like to kill Hitler too. And everyone who hurt my people. And if you had the science down to an art, if it were possible, I’d volunteer to do the deed myself. But you can’t. You won’t. You’ll only kill people for a pipe dream. Guilt or no guilt.”

  “Your family died at Łódź, and Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbruck, right alongside her family,” snapped Aurora, her eyes flashing. “We’ll never know how many Roma died in the o baro mudaripen le Rromenge. You don’t even have a word for it, boy. Your people believe in collective amnesia. She…” She gestured to me. “At least her people understand. Collective memory is more powerful than collective amnesia. Without Hitler, Germany would have never been divided. Without Hitler, we’d have no East Germany. Without Hitler, we’d have no Stasi. Do you see? Because of Hitler, we have so many more deaths than just the war. Kill Hitler, save the people I should have been able to save, change the world. It’s so simple.”

  It was never that simple. I knew that now. And I knew we were going in circles. I had everything to lose—Sabina, Kai, and my way home—but secrets weren’t among them. “And if you wait eighteen months, Aurora, the wall comes down.”

  Even Sabina seemed to focus at that. I continued on, never lifting my eyes off Aurora. I had to get her out of here. I had to get rid of her ability to continue this experiment. I had to keep her from killing Sabina. All at once. We were never going to agree. She was never going to give up unless all her research was gone. Unless she couldn’t continue.

  “The wall comes down in 1989. Germany is reunited as one Germany a year later. By the time that I come to Berlin,” I said, stepping a little closer to the candle on my left. It was one of the tall pedestal ones. Next to it sat a box of matches. “Germany is one of the most powerful, peaceful, and respected countries on earth. Without ever resorting to militarization.”

  No one breathed for a beat, and then Aurora shook her head. “It does not negate the deaths that came before this.”

  “Nothing will negate them,” I said. Or the ones you caused, Aurora. What’s the difference? We’ll never know all their names anyway. “I don’t want them negated. I want to remember my grandfather’s family who died in the Łódź ghetto. I want to know that the Holocaust made me who I am—and not just because my grandfather’s a survivor. I don’t want more people to die. I want to believe that World War II is the reason we haven’t had another world war. I want to believe that we’re all here for a reason, and what we have now, and all that history behind us, is important and meaningful even when it’s terrible. Even when it’s sad.”

  “You’d rather me let his family die.”

  “They’re already dead.” I swallowed back tears. “They’ve been dead. You can’t change that because of your conscience. We can’t change the past, Aurora. We can only try to do better in the present and the future.”

  I saw her pushing the table at the same time that I moved. I knocked the candle to the ground and it shattered, glass everywhere, the flame nearly going out before it caught hold of all the papers on the ground. Aurora screamed as the table shifted and Sabina’s feet came off the edge of it, the weight of her dropping against the edge of the noose. Kai lunged forward, shoving the table back underneath his sister’s kicking feet. She stumbled, and he climbed up to her.

  “Ellie, leave her!” he shouted at me over his shoulder as I leaped forward to follow Aurora. “Eleanor!”

  Grabbing the matchbox off the floor from where it had fallen next to the candle, I struck another match and threw it on the ground. I tracked Aurora around the tables and toward the chalkboard. The fire began slowly, but everything inside the workshop was paper and wood. The fire crackled and burned, the smell of smoke overwhelming the scented candles. I stepped in the shards of the coffee mugs, my heart pounding in my chest. Aurora moved ahead of me, grabbing for important documents and throwing books at me over her head.

  I dodged one and ran after her, past the burning workshop tables and the active balloons, waiting for blood and magic, past the chalkboard with my name on it and ideas on how to get me home. Past the active cases of Passengers waiting for freedom. Aurora worked her way up the metal stairs, her heels clanging with every step, as she headed for the offices and library. There had to be another exit.

  Stop, drop, and roll, my instincts told me as the fire licked at my feet on the stairs.

  Burn it to the ground, my heart said.

  “You’re destroying the only chance to change history for the better!” Aurora cried. “You foolish, stupid, simple-minded child!”

  My heart ached when I dropped another match. If she was right…What if she was right? What if she could prevent all those deaths—my grandfather’s family, my family, Kai’s family, not just the Holocaust but the war and all the men and women who died in it, the Cold War, the division of Europe and the Iron Curtain…No. There was nothing that said she could do it. I struck another match and left it by the library of books in the loft that overlooked the workshop tables. I couldn’t read the titles anymore, not through the smoke that rose, clogging my lungs.

  I tried to strike another match, but it snapped between my shaking fingers. My throat burned. Too many people died here, forever missing from their lives in their own times. Me, stuck here. I clung to my thoughts, a mantra running through my mind. You cannot erase a wrong. You can only make it right in the present and the future. Killing people to save people isn’t fair. I’d snapped the last match. I crumpled the empty box in my hand and stood up again, covering my mouth and nose with my hand to guard against the smoke. It wasn’t much help.

  The room blazed hot and fierce. Below me, Kai had Sabina down and halfway to the tunnel door. He yelled my name, and I ignored him. She was just going to keep doing this, just keep killing people in pursuit of something unattainable, unless everything she had compiled was destroyed. I had to make sure it al
l burned.

  In her office, Aurora filled a box with books and papers. She didn’t look at me as she spat out, “You’ve destroyed forty years of research. It’ll take me years to fix this. You are the only Jew in the world who would say that a few dozen lives were not worth saving the lives of six million.”

  “Ten million, and more, if you count soldiers on all sides who died,” I corrected her. “I hope it all burns. I hope you never get it back. If you had exact science, then maybe I’d have a different answer. But you don’t. You just have death in hopes of saving lives.”

  “That’s how progress works, you insipid child,” Aurora said. She shook her head and pulled at a bookcase on the far left wall. It swung open, revealing an escape. The fire crept across her carpet. I couldn’t breathe in the smoke, and I coughed. She said over the blaze, “Some people must die so others might live.”

  “I can’t…I won’t accept that.” I doubled over, trying to bring air into my lungs. The room spun, burning at the edges of me.

  “You are a foolish child. Benno would hate you for what you’ve done. You could have saved his family, and you made the decision not to,” she said, and then she stepped through the tunnel and pulled the bookcase closed behind her. I grabbed at the shelf and pulled with all my weight, but it moved just an inch and caught. Locked.

  Below me, the workshop was entirely ablaze, the room filling with thick, dark smoke as the fire consumed everything in sight, all the good and all the bad. The smoke curled up through the holes in the metal grated pathway I stood on outside Aurora’s office. A fire in front of me, between me and that passageway. The entire workshop on fire beneath me, between me and the tunnel passage. Kai and Sabina were gone, safely into the tunnels.

  Me and a fire.

  Decades ago, my grandfather was a seventeen-year-old boy who survived Łódź on luck and health and hard work, and then he was sent to Chełmno, from which almost no one survived. He survived Chełmno because a teenage girl named Aurora gave him a magical balloon so he did not die in a gas chamber and his body was not incinerated. No one breathed in his ashes.

  It seemed so fitting that I’d die here in a fire, that smoke would be the last thing I breathed in, underground in a tunnel beneath my grandfather’s former city, divided by a Wall, death on one side and art on the other. It seemed so fitting. My eyes stung, blurring with tears from the smoke scissoring through them, and I closed them, coughing. I sank to the floor, burying my face in my skirt, trying to breathe.

  You’ll pass out first, I told myself. You won’t burn alive. The smoke will make you asphyxiate. You’ll just pass out. You won’t feel a thing. It’ll be okay.

  A hand touched my shoulder and shook me. A damp cloth pressed against my mouth, and someone hauled me to my feet by an elbow. I stumbled along, inhaling a hand and damp cotton. I tripped and fell against the wall, screaming as the heat, conducted along the metal walls, burned through my sweater.

  The stairs. Someone was shoving me into the fire. I shook my head and tried to push the person away, but fingers dug persistently into my arm as I was shoved one step at a time down into the inferno. I sobbed as the heat grew intolerable, so hot I couldn’t breathe, so hot I smelled nothing but my hair, burning. Books, burning.

  If you give a girl a magic balloon, she will burn down the world.

  The sound of metal wrenching against metal. The walkway. It was melting and coming down on us. And then cold. Cold. Cold. A shock against my hot body as I stumbled toward the clear, cool air, gasping and stumbling. I fell to the ground, and then I heard the metal again. A door. I lay, shaking, on the damp ground, and then a hand touched my face.

  “Ellie,” whispered Kai, his voice hoarse and shaking. “Eleanor. Breathe. Just breathe.”

  I’d burned everything. I burned it all. No one else would die, just like I told him, and now, no one in the past had the opportunity to live. And I had burned my own way home. Somewhere in there, Aurora must have had the balloons and the way of sending me home. She was too methodical not to think of the reverse equation. It had either burned or she’d taken it with her, and now I was trapped. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t do anything but shake in the cold tunnels.

  Kai left Sabina and me in the tunnels, returning to find Ashasher, Mitzi, and Felix frantically searching for all of us. The fire in the workshop was noticeable. The smoke came up through manholes, and sirens wailed through the city. The police would be in the tunnels soon. Ashasher carried me out, and his feathers, swirling like a hurricane, were the first things I saw when I opened my smoke-dried and burned eyes in the day. I couldn’t cry, but I wanted to sob.

  Ashasher didn’t tell me I had done the wrong thing. When we got back to the house, he carried me upstairs and let Mitzi take care of me. He just said, “Brave girl. Brave girl.”

  I closed my eyes again and listened to Mitzi as she cried and talked to me in German I was too tired to translate, a cool cloth against my forehead. My body wouldn’t stop shaking, even when I ordered it to stop. To stay still. I just wanted to be still.

  I wasn’t brave.

  I had been so afraid.

  Chapter Thirty–Three

  AFTERMATH

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, May 1988

  Kai

  Unraveling the events of the day took hours, and considering that Aurora had nearly succeeded in hanging my sister, and Ellie had set the entire workshop on fire, it was the least of my concerns. But once Ellie was home safe and Sabina was upstairs, detoxing under Mitzi’s watchful eye from whatever concoction of drugs Aurora had given her, Ashasher and Felix sat me down in the kitchen and demanded to know what had happened. So while Ashasher treated the burns on both of my hands, I told them.

  They wanted to know which came first, the candle or Aurora trying to kill Sabina. I couldn’t remember. In my head, they were all the same thing. The burst of flames across the floor, the burst of movement into my limbs to get the table back under my sister’s feet so I could cut her loose. I hadn’t been paying much attention. For some reason, I thought Ellie would be on my heels when I pulled the noose back over Sabina’s head and pulled her past the growing fire to the tunnel.

  When I turned around, the fire was moving—well, like a fire—like a goddamn freight train really, across the room, and Ellie was lighting more and more matches, like a girl possessed. Like a girl who had snapped off the branch of reality. I screamed for her, and she didn’t even turn around. She followed Aurora right up those stairs and around the curvature of the pathway to Aurora’s office.

  When I went back in for her, the smoke was the killer. I made it to the steps. The soles of my shoes would still be on them. They melted right through, burning a grid onto the bottoms of my soles. I tore off my shoes when I finally got Ellie into the tunnel. She was breathing, barely, and alive. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t carry her and Sabina out myself so I had to leave them behind to find help.

  Felix, apparently unaffected by Ashasher’s hypnotizing feathers, turned to him. “Aurora escaped the office but went into the train tunnels. We’re still working to recover…”

  “She’s dead?” I interrupted.

  “She didn’t know the tunnels and the train schedule like you Runners do,” Felix said with a shrug. “Or maybe she did. Maybe she knew we’d convict and cut her from her magic.”

  “But there are others we need to worry about now. Eleanor Baum,” said Ashasher, “needs to rest. Setting fire to the equations and balloons might not have been the best decision…”

  “Just because it wasn’t the decision you or I would have made…” I said, standing up. I didn’t know how to talk to him. In my head, he was still connected to everything that happened. He knew we’d thought it was him when we went to the workshop. We hadn’t talked about it. I didn’t intend to. “Doesn’t make it a bad decision.”

  “Kai,” Ashasher said, his voice stern. His dark eyes held mine. “Ellie’s not in trouble, and I cannot judge her. I wasn’t
there. I was about to say that knowledge once learned cannot be unlearned. Ellie is fine. However, the Council submits Sabina Holwell as a potential accomplice to Aurora’s crimes to the Zerberus.”

  My stomach dropped out and hit the floor. I whispered, “She’s a child. She doesn’t know—”

  “Sabina is not damaged. You brought her here to prevent her from being institutionalized or used for bad magic against her will because you did not believe she was damaged. She is more than capable of knowing right from wrong. We failed to keep her safe, and for that, we will submit ourselves as an entire community to the Zerberus as failing to protect a student and for endangerment of a student, but Sabina must also be investigated. She knows now how to make the rogue balloons, Kai. She has been trained to use blacklisted magic. We cannot ignore that.”

  I slumped. “And if she’s arrested?”

  “Unlikely,” Felix said quietly. “I doubt we’ll even strip her. I think we’ll probably put her on probation. And she might not dislike that. I am afraid to find out the extent of abuse she suffered at Aurora’s hands.”

  Everything inside me twisted clockwise, a lock sliding into place. I had failed everyone. Garrick. Passengers. Ashasher. Felix. Mitzi. Ellie. Sabina. I couldn’t even keep Sabina safe. Safe was such a useless word. No one was ever safe, even when they thought they were.

  “Kai,” Felix said. “Take a few days. Just take care of Sabina. We’ll come around eventually, but we have a lot of cleanup to do.”

  I remembered what Mitzi had said before Ellie and I left. “Will there be more balloons?”

  “Not right now,” Felix said, looking at Ashasher. “We’d like to have this Council back on its feet and sending Passengers to safety no later than the end of the month.” He stood, shaking Ashasher’s hand first, then mine. “Take care of yourself. And don’t worry about the Stasi or Volkspolizei.”