The Spy with the Red Balloon (Balloonmakers) - Hardcover

Locke, Katherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807529346 ISBN 13: 9780807529348

Verlag: ALBERT WHITMAN & CO, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Siblings Ilse and Wolf hide a deep secret in their blood: with it, they can work magic. And the government just found out.

Blackmailed into service during World War II, Ilse lends her magic to Americas newest weapon, the atom bomb, while Wolf goes behind enemy lines to sabotage Germanys nuclear program. Its a dangerous mission, but if Hitler were to create the bomb first, the results would be catastrophic.

When Wolfs plane is shot down, his entire mission is thrown into jeopardy. Wolf needs Ilses help to develop the magic that will keep him alive, but with a spy afoot in Ilses laboratory, the letters she sends to Wolf begin to look treasonous. Can Ilse prove her loyaltyand find a way to help her brotherbefore their time runs out?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katherine Locke lives in a very small town outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with her feline overlords. In addition to fiction, she writes about books and reading and has contributed to The Forward, The GayYA, Teen Librarian Toolbox, and other sites. The Girl with the Red Balloon was her YA debut.

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The Spy with the Red Balloon

By Katherine Locke

Albert Whitman & Company

Copyright © 2018 Katherine Locke
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8075-2934-8

CHAPTER 1

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK AUGUST 15, 1943

ILSE

Sometimes, I thought I might drown in all the marvels of this world. Usually this happened when I saw planes flying and thought about all the engineering work and experimentation that had turned metal cylinders into modes of transportations and weapons of war. Sometimes this happened when I turned on the faucet and water flowed out, having been plumbed through a network of pipes designed by teams who'd thought about the past, present, and future needs of the city's residents.

Or, when I experienced the changing seasons, caused by the tilt of the earth. The idea that something off-kilter could cause anything as beautiful as the seasons regularly astonished me. Imagine how dull our lives would be if the earth had an upright axis, like a chandelier hung from the ceiling.

Today, the drowning happened because the sky was a wild sort of blue. The type of blue you could fall into, and when you tipped your head back, you'd only see blue in every direction. It was dizzying.

"Ilse," said Wolf, ever patient.

"Do you know why the sky's blue?" I asked him, squinting upward, even though Mama would have yelled at me about how my face would wrinkle and I'd never find a husband.

"You're going to tell me anyway."

He wasn't wrong. I suppose that's the thing about siblings. They know you like no one else does.

"Light," I said. "The blue light scatters farther from the sun's rays than red light."

"I'm going to pretend to understand that for the purposes of this experiment," Wolf said. "Do you think that light affects it?"

The last word pulled me out of my reverie and I looked down at him, blinking rapidly as spots splashed across my vision and the cone cells in the back of my eyes adjusted to the rapid change in light. Wolf came into focus in front of me, a frown crossing his face. He never used to frown this much, but he'd lost his sense of humor the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. So far, neither Hitler nor the Emperor nor Wolf's frown seemed likely to surrender.

"Magic doesn't appear to be affected by light." I thought about our prior experiments, the ones done in our rooms late at night after Papa went to bed. "But to verify that, we'd have to test under multiple weather conditions throughout multiple times of day, or expose something with activated magic to —"

"Shhh, Ilse. Keep it down." Wolf huffed, looking around with a scowl as if we weren't at least a hundred yards from the nearest person. "I still don't think we should be here. But since you insist, please stop saying that word so loudly."

I continued. "Different wavelengths. It's not a bad idea. We can add it to the list."

"We don't have a list," Wolf said, but slowly, as if he wasn't sure he was telling the truth or was trying to reassure himself we didn't have one.

But we did. Or rather, I did. I pulled the red notebook from my schoolbag triumphantly and tossed it to him. He caught it and flipped it open to the first page, where it said at the top, List of Things I'd Like to Test with Regards to Blood and Physics.

"Are you mad?" my brother hissed. "You're going to get caught."

"It doesn't say 'magic,'" I protested.

"It says everything but!" He shoved the notebook back into my bag. "You're going to be the death of me. Look, I promised you I'd help, and I'm not going to renege on that. But you promised to be done before dinner. Let's get this started."

Between the two of us, I was the scientist. Wolf was in the park with me because he didn't trust me not to get into trouble. I didn't mind because I wanted to use samples of both of our blood. I didn't know if there was a difference between how they acted on the magic, or maybe the magic in the blood acted on the equations. Either way, there were so many variables between us that it seemed silly to conduct an experiment by myself when he could help.

Wolf didn't like to talk about what our blood could do.

I could barely keep myself from telling everyone.

Magic. Even the word itself felt otherworldly, rolling around on my tongue. Some of the earliest uses of the word weren't about the creation, but about the act of creating. Magic. Creating something out of what appeared to be nothing. But matter could not be created or destroyed. Magic only acted on what already existed and what could exist given the right circumstances.

It'd been an accident, discovering the magic. But once I'd discovered it existed, it was hard to stop asking questions. Where did it come from? What could it do? Why did we have it? Who else had it? Were we the only ones?

"Ilse," Wolf repeated again, sighing, fingers snapping in front of my face.

"I know, I know," I said, even though I didn't know, and that was the part that had me distracted. My mind felt like a tornado. It spun up with all the questions I had.

Wolf sat down on a rock, rolling up his sleeves and setting objects next to us: a kite, two apples, a handkerchief.

I sat down next to him, unpacking our little kit. It'd taken awhile to assemble. We'd spent most of the last three years figuring out what we needed. I mean I spent most of the last three years figuring out what we needed; Wolf was happy to ignore everything. But he didn't bleed once a month, so this was less of an issue for him. He just needed to avoid blood loss.

And by blood loss, I mean he needed to avoid the war.

The only reason Wolf was at university was to get a deferment. Papa didn't speak to him for a week after he enrolled. He couldn't imagine why Wolf was avoiding the war — or running away from the family business. Wolf had come up with some sort of excuse that hadn't really mattered, but he'd suffered. It'd been the first time he was the child who stepped outside the carefully drawn paths of our lives. Our parents had given up on me when I did calculus in third grade.

"I know I've figured this out," I said.

"You said that last time," Wolf replied dryly. "Let's try not to let everyone see that we're drawing blood in the middle of the park, shall we?"

I glared at him, even as I drew the syringe and needle from the case that held them down. Our unclotted blood made things float, so little leather straps designed for pens kept the syringes in place. I'd taken a thoroughly unappetizing first aid class for girls interested in serving as nurses in the Pacific and in Italy, and while I'd managed not to puke directly on the instructor's shoes when he'd shown us a photograph of necrotic flesh, I'd managed to acquire the one skill I needed: how to do a blood draw.

One of my earliest experiments had shown that clotted blood was practically useless. I'd love to know how it got that way — was magic a particle interrupted by coagulation? — but I hadn't figured out how to study that in the laboratory at school yet. They were not fans of students experimenting on themselves for some reason, and it wasn't like I could explain why I had to use my blood and not the blood of a rat.

Unless rats had magic. I hadn't thought of that possibility.

Wolf opened his mouth, and I could feel my name forming on the air, even though that wasn't possible, according to science, and I said hurriedly, "Your blood or mine first?"

He wasn't going to tolerate many more distractions.

"Mine," Wolf said after a beat. "I don't want you to be lightheaded during...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ALBERT WHITMAN & CO
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807529346
• ISBN 13: 9780807529348
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar