Cloud and Wallfish by Anne Nesbet

better acquainted with East Berlin, however. His father took him on a lot of expeditions, looking for interesting buildings or parks or doughnut stands. Mostly people tried to ignore them, but every now and then someone would stare. After almost two months in East Berlin, they must still have stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs — even when Noah wasn’t talking.
    On one of those expeditions, a strange thing happened. Noah’s father had paused to tie his shoe. Then two minutes later, a policeman came hurrying up behind them, even though they hadn’t been anywhere near the embassy at all!
    “You dropped this,” said the policeman, and he handed Noah’s father a little piece of paper that did indeed look like the sort of thing that sometimes spilled out of Noah’s father’s pockets.
    Noah’s father looked at it. (So did Noah.) It was blank.
    “Oh,” said Noah’s father. “Thanks!”
    And he put the blank little piece of paper into his wallet, at which point the policeman did what all those policemen seemed always to do, and asked for their identification papers so he could recite their statistics to his hidden microphone.
    Noah’s father offered no explanation, either. The whole thing was, thought Noah, rather strange.
    The next day, Noah was hiding in the non-park, studying his map of Berlin, when a medium-small hand reached out from beside him and tapped the paper. The hand had long, fragile fingers that came from a different world.
    “Cloud!” said Noah. His voice fractured that one syllable into many happy ones.
    She was smiling.
    “Show me that map you’re holding, Nojonah,” she said to him, pulling gently at the map.
    He let her take it. He was too busy trying to remember all the urgent questions he had been going to ask her if he ever saw her again.
    “So why aren’t you in school?” he said. “Isn’t this the last week or something? Before summer?”
    He knew that from his mother.
    “School?” said Cloud.
    She made a face and gagged a little and shrugged.
    “I was sick for a long time. Lung sick. Then I got better, but not better enough to go on vacation. So they left me with my grandmother. My parents left me. I’m better now.”
    Cloud-Claudia certainly didn’t look sick. Somewhat pale, yes, but healthy.
    Noah asked the question that had been waiting in him for days and days:
    “And why did you say you’re a
Wechselbalg
?”
    She looked at him and put her finger to her lips and whispered from behind that finger.
    “I told you: I don’t belong here,” she said. “I’ve never belonged.”
    And then she went back to studying the map.
    “Where have you been all these weeks?” said Noah. “I looked and looked for you.”
    “The
Oma
doesn’t want me to talk to you,” the girl said. An
Oma
was a grandmother.
    “Why not?” asked Noah.
    She shrugged.
    “Maybe because changelings are dangerous,” she said. “So
two
changelings together? Extra scary.” And she said something else that Noah had to work to translate into English in his head. In English it made almost a rhyme:
    Changelings change things.
    Noah wasn’t sure about that. There was so much in the world that was built of concrete and barbed wire and rules. How could anyone ever hope to change any of it?
    “So, when are your parents coming back?” he asked, to shift the subject in a different direction. Claudia stared at him. He tried again.
    “Where did they go, your parents?
Mutter, Vater?
”
    “Ungarn,”
said Cloud with another shrug.
    “
Ungarn,
”
Noah repeated. That didn’t sound like any place Noah had ever heard of.
    But when he said that word —
Ungarn —
he had accidentally shrugged, just like her. He felt himself doing it. He hadn’t meant to mimic her, but that’s how it came out. Cloud’s face crinkled into a grin.
    “Ha!”
she said.
“Nojonah!”
    That was, however, the exact moment when someone stormed around the corner of the fence and grabbed Cloud’s arm, pouring angry German words all