Page 59 of Stealing Tink

I pause, considering. It’s going to be a long night regardless. At least if we’re carrying on a conversation, I’ll know what he’s up to. Otherwise, I’ll likely spend all night imagining that every creak of the train tracks is him shifting in bed, readying to pounce down and murder me. The rational part of my brain acknowledges that it would make no sense for him to kill me yet, not when he needs me to pull of this heist. But since when has the rational part of the brain ever been the one in control in the dark hours of the night?

Fine, I write back, my penmanship hasty.

That’s not exactly a very conversationally stimulating response, he writes.

I agreed to talk, but you’re the one who wants to have a conversation. So the burden’s on you to make it interesting.

Oh, that shouldn’t be a problem, he writes. Tell me about your childhood.

You first.

There’s a pause, then a quick scribble. When the Nomad passes his note back down, it says, Trust me when I say that would be even more boring than sitting in silence all night.

I toss over onto my back and cross my arms after passing the note back up without response.

I wait. And when I don’t hear the scribbling sound from above, I find myself a tad disappointed, though I shove the feeling down. It’s probably only because I am also not looking forward to a night spent awake in silence.

It’s easier to not let my imagination run away with me—not to fear the nightmares I’ll certainly slip into tonight—if I have something to pass the time. Even if that something is conversing with the Nomad.

So it doesn’t entirely surprise me when relief fills my chest as the Nomad passes a note back down. All right, so perhaps it’s not boring, he writes. But it is depressing. Consider yourself warned.

I take the pad and write, Any harm done to my mind by knowledge of your childhood, I hereby acquit you and take full responsibility for. I pass it back up. The Nomad’s low chuckle causes my heart to flutter, which I tamp down immediately.

I grew up in a… I can tell he paused here because of the thick dot at the bottom of the letter where his quill pressed into the parchment. …closed-off community. We didn’t have contact with many outsiders. And even within the community… Well, let’s just say I didn’t exactly have other children to play with. My father was cruel. He thought me too soft, too gentle of a child, if you can believe it. He made it his aim to beat that quality out of me.

And did he? Beat that quality out of you, I mean.

When I pass it back up, there’s a pause from above. Then, I’m surprised you asked, it says when he passes it back down. I would’ve thought you, of all people, would find me cruel, exempt of all gentleness.

I think back to the day Lars experimented on my wings, to the way the Nomad stood his ground while I dug my fingernails into his hands. Gentle is probably not the word I would use. But steady, unwavering—certainly not cruel. It would have been one thing had the Nomad needed me to be calm to get through that experiment, but he could have just as easily left. He knows me well enough to know I would have endured the pain of that experiment to get what I want, as unpleasant as it would have been.

But I don’t know how to write all that. I don’t know how to be kind to this man. Not so openly, at least. So instead, I write, You seem too stubborn to have let your father win completely.

And I pass it back up.

Again, I wait, feeling tension gathering in my shoulders, somehow worried that perhaps I’ve been too callous. Which is why I’m so relieved when I hear the deep grumble of the Nomad’s laugh. He passes the note back down.

You would turn even my best qualities into something as petty as defiance. But you’re not incorrect, I suppose.

Your mother, was she kind?

This time there’s a long pause before I receive the note back.

When it returns, there’s only one word. Once.

Now it’s my turn to bleed ink onto the paper as I pause, biting my lip before I write, Did your father beat that out of her too?

I pass it back up.

When I get the note back, it says, No. That crime is pinned on me, I’m afraid.

What happened? I write, afraid that I don’t want to know, but even more afraid, for some reason, of ending the conversation this way.

When I was a child, my mother tried to run away with me. She wanted to get me away from my father, was afraid of what he would make me. We’d been living in the wilderness for a while when I was gravely injured. She was a healer, you see, and all of her materials were left in the village or with my father’s people. She was captured trying to salvage them for me. My father made her lead him back to me, but by the time she’d arrived… Well, I was already healed.

You had healed? I write. How?

That’s irrelevant to the current story, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you rather hear my tragic family dramatics?