Page 41 of Stealing Tink

It’s not the vials that give me pause, though.

It’s the walls.

They’re covered in glass shadow boxes, each of which displays a different set of wings.

The blood drains from my face, as I pull my trench coat tighter around my torso.

Most are insect wings—butterflies, dragonflies, moths, that sort of thing. But on the far wall in the center of the display are wings much too large to belong to any insect.

I shoot a glare at the Nomad, but if he senses it in his periphery, he pretends not to. Instead, he stuffs his hands into his pockets and quietly examines the man on the far side of the room.

The man is young, but you wouldn’t know from his hair, which is red but already graying. He’s clean-shaven and slightly freckled, but in a way that tells me those freckles haven’t been helped along by the sun in many years.

He’s hunched over something, taking a pair of tweezers to it as he examines it through a monocle that makes one of his blue eyes look, well, rather buggish.

We stand there watching him for what feels like forever. Finally, I nudge the Nomad with my elbow, and he rolls his eyes.

“Lars.” He says the man’s name rather forcefully for a first attempt, in my opinion, but when the man doesn’t look up from whatever he’s working on, I silently rescind my opinion.

“Lars,” he says again, this time louder.

Lars blinks and scrunches his face, looking as if the Nomad had woken him from a deep slumber, not called his name while he was alert enough to be making precise cuts. When he finally looks up, his right eye expands to the rim of his monocle at the sight of the Nomad.

I’m not sure what I’m expecting from Lars, but it’s not for him to say, “Your companion isn’t as pretty as the last one.”

I rear back.

“Which offends you more?” asks the Nomad. “His insulting your looks, or the assumption that you would ever deign to be with me?”

I hold up two fingers, to which the Nomad grunts something that sounds like, “I thought so.”

Although, if I were given a truth serum, the answer would be a close tie between the two.

“Tink is a colleague. Just as ‘the last one’ was,” says the Nomad before leaning over and whispering quite loudly, “For the record, I disagree with his evaluation.”

I don’t have the opportunity to respond to that, because the Nomad addresses his friend, who has already gone back to whatever he’s working on.

“I have a proposal for you.”

“I’m not taking any more projects. Too busy. Yes, much too busy,” he says without looking up.

“It’s a profitable venture.”

“Money is just coin. It’s only valuable because someone in power told us it is and the general population believes them. All that matters is what coin can buy, and I have everything I need right here.”

“Yes, judging from your appearance, it doesn’t seem you’ve left this workshop in quite some time.”

“I have everything I need right here,” Lars repeats, in the exact tone as previously.

“Is that so? So I suppose you just keep that display case empty because you enjoy the aesthetic?” The Nomad points to an empty display case on the far wall, just over Lars’s workbench.

At this, Lars pauses his work, his tweezers hovering over the insect he’s been picking apart.

The display case on the wall is large enough to make me swallow a lump in my throat. Worse, it’s empty.

I nudge the Nomad in the side, a silent, What are we doing here? He pretends not to notice.

“You know I’m saving that case for something special,” says Lars, sounding genuinely offended.