Chapter 25
You didn’t mention that we’d have to share a room. I can’t seem to write that quickly enough or angrily enough onto my notepad.
“Did I not?” asks the Nomad. “Surely I mentioned it at some point. Oh well.” He shrugs. “Surely you don’t mind.”
I’m not sharing a room with you.
I’ve never had a dream where the Nomad kills me on a train, but who’s to say that one small move in the wrong direction won’t cause that to occur?
“Well, Phoenix and Venus won’t room with anyone but each other,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Something about not trusting the rest of us. And I’m certainly not sharing a room with either Lars or Acel. Not when I’m fairly sure either of them would be happy to throttle me.”
Lars wouldn’t throttle you. He would poison you.
The Nomad looks as if he’s not sure whether he’s supposed to laugh at that or not, or if laughing will get him into further trouble.
“If it makes you feel better,” he says with a wink, “it’s a bunk bed situation.”
The fact that we’re at least not having to share the same mattress does make me feel minimally better. The train bobs back and forth under my feet as the six of us make our way to our rooms.
“You two will be sharing a room?” says Venus slyly as she pushes past me through the hallway and into her and Phoenix’s room.
The number 32 glares before my eyes, its fake gold lettering smudged and rubbed off so parts of it look burnished.
Cabin 32 of a train. This is where I’m going to die.
The Nomad slides the door open and ushers me in with a casual gesture of his hand and a poisonous smile.
I remain in place.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says, “and they don’t allow you to sleep in the hall. I already checked the rules.”
“You were going to sleep in the hall?” says Lars on his way to his and Acel’s room.
“No,” says Acel. “He was going to make her sleep in the hall.”
By the time I turn back to the Nomad, he’s already disappeared into the room and is making himself at home, unpacking a suitcase that, in my opinion, is much too large for something that is a heist and not a vacation.
Still, the Nomad likes to live in luxury, and train or ship, location doesn’t change that.
He pulls all sorts of unnecessary things from his suitcase before turning to me.
“Top or bottom?” he asks.
I stare at him blankly.
“The bunks,” he explains. “Which one do you want?”
You’re letting me pick?
“It is the gentlemanly thing to do,” he says, looking rather pleased with himself.
I consider my options. My gut reaction is to take the top bunk. There’s something that feels safer about not being trapped underneath the Nomad.
Then again, I once heard someone say that top bunks were bad luck. I don’t even remember who it was.
I toss my one leather satchel onto the bottom bunk.
“Boring choice, but I’ll accept it,” says the Nomad.
Apparently, Lars also took the bottom bunk, which I can tell from the snores rumbling through the partition. While I wouldn’t have been thrilled about sharing a room with anyone on this train, I find myself pitying Acel and grateful there’s at least a wall between our rooms.
Not that I had any intentions of falling asleep tonight anyway.
“What do you bet Acel is going to be in an excellent mood tomorrow?” says a voice out of the darkness.
I half-jump, feeling the train bumble over the track beneath me.
“Are you awake?” He whispers it like a child whispering to their sibling, hoping not to wake their parents and receive a scolding.
Irritation swarms within me. He knows I can’t answer him.
“Knock twice if you’re awake and once if you’re asleep.”
This man is an idiot. I’m not sure how this child in a grown man’s body became one of the most feared men in the world. But the world is full of contradictions.
When I don’t knock either once or twice, I hear the Nomad shift to his side. There’s a flick of something and then a warm light blooms across the ceiling.
Did he really just light a candle on top of a bunk bed on a train?
I was right: I am going to die tonight, but not because the Nomad is intending on murdering me. It will be manslaughter at best. Which somehow seems more offensive.
I hear something scraping against a surface, then a ripping sound. Moments later, a hand holding a note appears in front of my face, blocking my view of the window.
Are you awake? it says.
I roll over in bed and face the wall. Probably not the safest choice considering this man will one day try to kill me. But what can I say? He incites me to stupid behaviors.
Several minutes pass, and because I don’t enjoy sleeping on my right side, I flip back over.
Another note hangs from the Nomad’s hand. You’re supposed to write on the note, then pass it back up.
I snatch it from his hand, grab the quill on the bedside desk, and write, Stop bothering me.
When I place it back in his hand, his hand darts away. I hear nothing of his reaction except for the sound of him scribbling. The note appears in front of my face once more.
But I’m bored.
That’s because you’re a child, I write.
Why aren’t you sleeping?
Probably because you’re bothering me.
No, you weren’t sleeping before that.
Perhaps it’s difficult to fall asleep with a notorious murderer in the same room.
Yes, but I’ve never murdered you, he writes, underlining the word you.
Oh, if he only knew.
When I don’t respond, he retracts the note and writes something else.
Well, if you’re not going to sleep, might as well talk to me and make the night go by quicker. Or do you enjoy staring at the slats in the walls and listening to Lars snore?
It is a more pleasant sound than your voice, I write.
Then good thing you don’t have to hear my voice right now. I’ll stay quiet, promise. But only if you talk to me.
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?
I pause, looking at the paper for a long while. His hand appears beside the bed, like he wants to write more. So I hand it to him.
My father banished her. Raised me. I didn’t see her for years.
Then one day, we were reunited, and, let’s just say, by that point, I’d allowed my father to sink his claws into me.
He’d given me a taste for blood, for power as he’d conquered other peoples.
Made me his right hand. She thought once we were reunited that we’d be together.
But I tricked her. I told my father who she was.
I thought when I found her that she was my weakness.
I knew she would disapprove of the bloodshed.
Of the conquering. And I feared that if I allowed her in my life, she would convince me out of the life I had grown to covet.
The luxury I had never had as a child. The freedom. So I betrayed her in the end.
I hold on to the note, my breath quickened. Minutes pass, and I wonder if he’ll think me asleep by the time I finally write, Did you kill her?
I pass the note up and wait for what feels like hours, but in reality, it’s likely only minutes. There’s the scratching of a pen. Then he passes it to me, folded this time. I hold it in my hands, feeling the softness of the parchment, unsure of what I want to find inside.
There’s the part of me—the wicked part, I suppose—that wants to know that he did kill his own mother, that wants to be justified in fearing him for more reasons than simply nightmares. But then there’s the other part. The part I can’t bear to acknowledge.
I unfold the paper.
Inside is one last note:
Quite the opposite, Wanderer. She killed me.