Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  “Thanks for the help.” I sat down hard in a chair. The thump of my ass hitting the wood echoed inside me, and I crushed my fist against my sternum. My heart hammered. Some days I woke up knowing I wouldn’t win. Some days, I took my pulse to remind myself that was the most important thing. If my heart still beat, I could still go on.

  My heart beat, and the man who had made me laugh, read me passages of books, and shared his knowledge, his fears, and his dreams with me over the last week was dead. Garrick lay on a slab in a back room of the Council’s offices deep underground. They had no morgue in their compound. Schöpfers did not age like most people, and we so rarely lost Passengers and recovered their bodies.

  Instead, Garrick was packed with ice, gray-skinned and in his bloodied clothes, among the piles of papers on balloon theory. A fierce academic, he would have killed to see that office when he was alive. And now he had died for no good reason. He had died because of a “chronological anomaly,” the same reason a girl from the twenty-first century was here, audibly sobbing in the room above me.

  The world was an absurd place, and it kept on spinning, getting more absurd with every rotation. Why did we even try?

  “Kai,” Mitzi said, sinking into a chair across from me. She nudged a mug across the table with her knuckles. “You should take a few days off.”

  “Allergic to boredom,” I said, tapping my throat. “Closes up my throat. Can’t breathe.”

  “You’re allergic to your own thoughts,” she said, correcting me in her no-bullshit way. “Kai, we just lost a Passenger you liked a lot. Under crap circumstances. Take three days off. We’re not getting assigned a new Passenger until next week anyway. Even you can’t fight probation.”

  “Should I take up knitting?” I scowled at her. “I don’t slow down. It’d be much easier to just get a new Passenger tonight.”

  “Go knit with your sister,” Mitzi said, her mouth and eyes knotting into a deep frown. At the edges, I could feel the admonishment. She’d left under the guise of not putting her family at risk because of her work as a Runner, but her family knew Mitzi was gay. She couldn’t have gone home if she wanted to. She hadn’t seen her sister in three, maybe even four years now. Since before Sabina and I came to Germany. If my sister would let her, Mitzi would adopt her. I almost told her not to tell me what to do, and then Mitzi added, “Remind yourself why you’re here.”

  I didn’t want to give in, but god, when Mitzi was right, she was really right. I opened and shut my mouth, then sighed. “Think that’ll work?”

  “It’s got to be better than whatever long, dark tunnel your mind was entering,” she said. She took the mug of tea back. “We all cope in different ways, Kai. If you need to be busy, go see your sister.”

  I pushed my chair back. It scraped noisily along the floor, and I pressed my palms into my knees. “And you, Mitzi?”

  “What about me?” She knew exactly what I meant. Some girls could pull off coy. Mitzi couldn’t, and she knew it. Her eyes stayed lowered to the tea and the steam.

  “Garrick was your Passenger too.” The reminder was unnecessary, but easier than asking her how she planned on coping. I was her family. Me, and the other Runners, and Aurora and Ashasher. We were all Mitzi had now.

  “I have tea. And I want to be alone. And someone’s got to make sure she”—Mitzi gestured with her hand toward the ceiling—“doesn’t kill herself.”

  “Mitz.”

  “I’ll be here when you get back, Kai. I want to be alone for a little bit.” Her voice sobered up. Enough for me to trust her.

  “Done. Enjoy your tea, Mitzi.”

  “I always do.”

  I didn’t linger any longer than I had to in the hallway. Mitzi wanted to be alone. I wanted to move. The girl upstairs wanted to go home. Two of the three of us could get what we wanted.

  I stomped through puddles on my way back to the Council workshops. The Council took fewer than five students a year here in East Germany. Almost all their students studied in Paris and London before being sent on assignment around the world. But the danger of East Germany was exactly why the Council had agreed to take Sabina here. It’d be much harder for the others who knew about magic—the Zerberus, who wouldn’t say why they wanted my sister but only that she was useful—to find her here.

  The Schöpfer workshop was underground through the subway tunnels. There were two entrances, but one was only for the Schöpfers who could use magic to hide themselves and bypass the guards. The only time we Runners used that entrance was to replace the helium tanks for the balloons, a magic written on our arms in our own blood to hide our comings and goings. The rest of the time, we went into the tunnels by one of the ghost stations beneath the death zone by the wall. The ghost stations used to work, I guess, before the wall and after the War, but now they were closed. The trains came by from West Berlin but didn’t stop. Couldn’t risk anyone wanting to leave.

  As an outsider, it was sometimes bizarre to look at the East German government’s thought process. The government and its party members truly believed they were building a better society. Okay, maybe once they thought that, but over the last couple of years, it had become clear that mostly they were clinging to power with the ends of their gross, old-person, yellow-fungus-covered fingernails. And in order to keep power, they locked everyone in. There was this apartment complex I walked by all the time. The wall cut right through the neighborhood, down the middle of a street. Mitzi said when the wall first went up, people would try to jump from their apartment windows over the wall and onto the Western part of the street. The government barred the windows and evicted all the residents to prevent anyone from getting to the West.

  They didn’t even pretend they were keeping the West out for the East’s own good. No. They were just flat-out, pull-no-punches keeping the East from getting out. I guessed that was the least of the lies that government told its people though.

  There were days here where I could almost forget I lived in a place with such rigid rules and expectations. There were concerts in the park and the theater, with tickets cheap enough that I’d brought Sabina with me. If I had business on the other side of the city, I took the tram past a university and the sidewalks there were packed with people. But there was always an undercurrent of suspicion and hesitation. There were private conversations for the home, and public conversations. There were the television shows everyone discussed—the ones on state-owned channels—and the Western television shows that Mitzi and I only talked about inside the safe house.

  I couldn’t be too mad. I’d given up everything two years ago to keep my kid sister safe, and if I had to do it again, I would. Most people didn’t get it, but the way I saw it was that if I couldn’t rely on my family, I could make a family to rely on. Now Sabina and I were here, behind the Iron Curtain, in the makeshift family of Ashasher, Aurora, and Mitzi.

  If people who wanted to institutionalize her came for her again, I’d move her. If the people who wanted to take her talents for their own use came again, I’d take her somewhere else. I’d do what it took. Go anywhere. Somewhere deeper inside the USSR. Into the woods of Poland or the mountains of Yugoslavia. Sabina would never need to defend herself. That was why she had me. I was Sabina’s Berlin Wall. I kept the outside out for her. I kept her safe.

  In the Schöpfer workshop below the Council meeting rooms, chaos reigned, per usual. The room was large—a former mechanical workroom off the subway line for trains before the wall went up—and entirely made of gray stone with thickly painted yellow railings so the rust didn’t creep through. The Schöpfers were not exactly big fans of imperfections. Take it from someone who had been asked a dozen different ways that morning if he was sure, absolutely positive, that no one had interrupted or tampered with Garrick’s balloon.

  The room smelled like paper and ink and blood caught in the stale underground air. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. On the second level, along the metal-staired walkway leading to the loft where the Schöpfers stored the
ir books in a haphazard library, a couple of younger Schöpfers sat, legs dangling over the sides of the walkway and kicking in the air as they debated—loudly, might I add—the rate of heat transference in blah-blah-blah.

  I tuned out. Math and science weren’t my thing. I liked to be moving. An itch had already started crawling up my neck from being underground here. From the ceiling floated red balloons, some decorative and some floating lower, heavy with magic, waiting for their Runners. Between them, chains of paper doves—the first things the Schöpfers practiced magic on before they were allowed to write equations in blood—rose and fell, as steady as breathing.

  “Heard you had an accident,” someone said next to me and I jumped, surprised to be caught off guard.

  Trina Peters, another Runner, leaned on the wall, turning over a cigarette in her fingers. I’d never seen her smoke them, just carry them. We all carried a few to bribe any guards or local citizens who got too curious. Like Mitzi, Trina rebelled in her own quiet ways. Most of her head was shaved except a long lock of hair that hung over one of her eyes. Her more straight-laced partner, Norm, was watching a Schöpfer at the next table build a balloon. I didn’t usually watch my Schöpfer—Aurora—build my balloons, but some Runners did. And I bet after news of my balloon mishap spread, there’d be more and more Runners in here. It seemed fruitless. It wasn’t like we’d know if an equation was wrong.

  Trina flicked a floating dove out of her face, and it nearly collided with me. I scowled at it, and it rose back up to the ceiling while I considered Trina’s suggestion that I had an accident. It wasn’t quite an accident, but it wasn’t not an accident either. There wasn’t much I could say—the Council had forbidden Mitzi and me from speaking of what had happened.

  Trina gave nothing away beneath her lock of hair and heavy brow. She studied the floor, avoiding my eyes. So finally I said, “Shit happens.”

  “Why are you here?” she asked, keeping her voice low. I bet no one was supposed to know about Garrick and Ellie’s balloon. “If I got questioned by these clowns this morning—”

  We both stilled as one of the Schöpfers swiveled toward us, fixed us with a stern eye, and then returned to her work. I said quietly, “My sister. Came to see her.”

  Sabina wasn’t a secret here. We had stirred enough controversy and interest when we arrived with our English accents and dark skin that the Schöpfers never saw the point of hiding her here. Trina nodded a bit, lifting her head to scan the room.

  “How’s she doing?” Trina asked in a tone that told me she knew exactly how my sister was doing. We both watched her Schöpfer dip a pen in the ink mixed with the Passenger’s blood sample and begin to write the equation onto the red balloon held in front of her by two curved metal clamps. The blood ink disappeared every few marks, absorbed into the integrity of the balloon. This Schöpfer wrote with a steady hand, and I was grateful. I’d been here before when a Schöpfer with a less steady hand had accidentally popped a balloon with the metal nib. Blood and balloon had splattered everywhere.

  “She’s fine,” I said, because fine covered just about everything I didn’t want to talk about.

  I knew where Sabina was in the room. I had known from the moment I walked in. Try being not white in a room full of white people. You find the nonwhite people in the room real fast. Try being Romani in a room full of gadje. You find the other Romani, even if they aren’t your people. My sister was the only other one, standing at a chalkboard under the walkway’s overhang. She rocked back and forth on her feet, heel to toe and back to heel, like she always did when she was thinking really hard. And even with her back to me, I knew that she was chewing on a long, dark curl.

  My sister was a genius, which I knew, but seeing her at the chalkboard was proof. She had one of those minds that took to mathematics like a fish to water. Plus, she was born a Schöpfer, born with magic in her blood. Some people are, some people aren’t. Even if I understood the equations, anything I wrote in blood ink onto balloons would be useless. My sister, on the other hand, pushed the boundaries of what Ashasher said they thought balloons could do. She was working on an equation to increase flying distance of the balloons now. Last month, she and Aurora had worked together on an equation that expanded upon the DNA in Passengers’ blood samples so that one family member’s blood sample could be used to write equations for anyone in their family.

  Genius. Someone in the family had to get all the brains. Sabina would turn thirteen in a few weeks, but she still seemed young to me. Her concept of evil was the Schöpfers’ consistently tight hold over her independence.

  I remember Garrick asking me about my accent, and I told him that I emigrated from England. He had laughed at me, until he heard I came here for my sister. He said that he was an only child, but he often thought that if he had any siblings, he’d do just about anything in the world for them.

  I wished now that Sabina had met Garrick. Pea, meet pod.

  Garrick was always writing in his little notebooks, jotting away, mouthing the words as he wrote in a shorthand nearly unintelligible to anyone. It was like his own private little code. The first time I met him, he was wearing a blue button-down shirt buttoned right up to the throat and tucked into poorly fitted jeans. He kept brushing his dirty hair out of his face while he wrote.

  I had asked him, like I ask every Passenger, why he had to leave East Berlin. He had glanced up, squinting at me over his nub of a pencil, and deadpanned, “Too punk for them, I guess.”

  I would have adopted him into our little family for that alone, if we hadn’t been sending him over the wall.

  “Kai,” Sabina said, standing in front of me, her dark eyes wide and her long, wavy hair tied back in a braid so she looked like a miniature of our mother. She held out a paper dove, its wings beating slowly. I cleared my mind and smiled at her. As soon as my fingers touched the paper bird, its wings stilled. Not enough magic, Sabina once told me. In me, she meant. It felt a bit like the little paper bird had died when I touched it, and I hated that, but she loved to make the chains and she loved to give them to me. So I took the dove, as always, and tucked it into my pocket.

  She pressed her mouth into a line. It was a move she’d learned from Aurora, without a doubt. She slipped her hand into mine. “They said we could go out. For a walk.”

  I glanced over her head at Aurora, her teacher and my Schöpfer. Aurora’s dark hair stood out in the sea of blond-haired Schöpfers around us. Ashasher said she wasn’t born Aurora, and she wasn’t born here. I had figured that out on my own. No one knew how old she was, but I’d been here two years and she hadn’t seemed to age a day. To me, Ashasher looked older by the minute, but one of the older Schöpfers here told me that Ashasher hadn’t seemed to age since he’d recruited him in 1961, when the wall went up. Maybe that Schöpfer was looking for gray hair, while I was listening to Ashasher’s voice.

  Aurora, like Ashasher, was one of the founders of the original Council, with the idea that magic and science had an intertwined connection that could save lives in places of unimaginable oppression. Now there were Councils in every city where people were oppressed or lived without certain freedoms, all overseen by a shadowy organization that simply made sure that the rules for magic were obeyed in each of those Councils and cities. Sometimes, on a good day, when our Passengers made it over the wall and I felt like I’d truly saved a life, I was proud to work for the founders of balloon magic. I tried not to think that too often, but some days, even most days, I was proud of the work I did.

  Aurora met my eyes and inclined her head slightly. Lessons over for the day. Maybe she realized I needed this much more than Sabina did.

  “A walk,” I agreed. I’d have to take care not to walk her by the wall. My sister didn’t filter very well. The last thing I needed was to be questioned by those guards after being questioned by Schöpfers this morning.

  “You think so hard,” Sabina said, swinging our hands between us, “that your eyes go cross.”

  “They do not.” I
scowled at her.

  “I hear the Zeitreisende is very pretty,” she added, smiling at me. I guessed Ellie didn’t need a name here among the Schöpfers. Easier to call her by what she was than who she was. Time traveler. Sabina’s language moved languidly from English to Angloromani to German. A new language forming from her mouth, even as her hands wrote out an equally strange one and made magic of it.

  I shook my head at her, trying not to smile. “Sabina.”

  Next to me, Trina failed to cover her laugh. Sabina kept smiling, all innocent. “She’s not pretty?”

  “She’s very pretty,” I said without thinking. Ellie was really pretty. But there was just no way anything was happening there. “And she’s from the twenty-first century. And she’s going home.”

  “Maybe,” Sabina said. “Maybe not. Let’s walk.”

  Mitzi was right. Getting teased about a girl by my little sister was exactly what I needed.

  Chapter Seven

  TWO FLAMES

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, April 1988

  Ellie

  Days came and went, marked only by the punctuation of doors opening and shutting below me, the low hum of Kai and Mitzi switching shifts. There was always someone in the house. I was never alone, except that I was always alone. Mitzi knocked and left trays of food outside my door, but never came in, never forced the issue. Part of me wanted her to. I wanted someone to stomp up and down and tell me they cared if I lived or died. But there it was: they didn’t care.

  Why should they? I was a girl who shouldn’t be there. I was an accident. A mishap. An anomaly. I’d never been part of the popular crowd at home, but here, this was an entirely different feeling of being an outsider. I wasn’t just an outsider, I was an outlier. I didn’t belong here. I couldn’t keep up in conversations, even the ones I eavesdropped on while trying to practice German in my head.