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Mercury was growing incredibly tired of discovering more impossible things about himself. “Phantomic memories have revealed that I was actually stolen from my home and taken to the orphanage. That likely means the Governor was never my legitimate guardian. That would have made his permission unnecessary.”

But the Scholar shook his head. “The trade would still have required approval from whoever was.”

“Then how do you explain it?” Mercury held his hands up in a show of frustrated helplessness. “More things about me that are impossible?”

“Perhaps.” The Scholar adjusted his ghostly spectacles. “Or that was not actually your first trade.”

Mercury grew very still, in mind and body. The thud of his heartbeat echoed through him.

“I suspect a swap was undertaken before you were stolen from your family,” the Scholar said. “Such a thing is incredibly rare and would certainly have been done for a very specific reason. I cannot help but suspect that this is yet another piece of the puzzle of who you are and why you have been pulled to this place.”

“My parents had twenty ghosts between them.” That was another of the bits of his past revealed by Phantomic memories. “Ever since learning that, I’ve suspected they might have been ghost brokers.”

“Entirely possible,” the Scholar said. “Likely, even.”

“One of them could have facilitated the trade. And I would have had to be old enough to understand enough to agree to the trade.” He took a breath. Then another. “If I had to guess, I would say it was likely one of their ghosts they swapped for one of mine.”

“That is what I would assume as well.”

Mercury rubbed at the tension growing in the back of his neck. “Which means one of the ghosts I had with me all those years at the orphanage came from my parents.” The shock of discovery was giving way to a deep-seated grief. “I had a connection to them and didn’t even know it.” Frustration stirred itself into the mixture of surprise and sorrow. “None of my ghosts ever told me that.”

“Your remaining Originaries have said they don’t remember things they should. Perhaps this is another of those—”

“Impossible things,” Mercury finished for him. “I sometimes think that this Place of Rending has been breaking me my entire life.”

“Your path has always been leading you here.”

“And what if I cannot heal this place? What if I am merely the next in the chain of broken people pulled here pointlessly?”

The Scholar’s expression turned a touch avuncular. “It is not like you to sound so defeated.”

Mercury tossed his hands up once more. “My house is both under siege and attempting to destroy me. I’ve lost Baby Blue. I’ve had to trade Zizzy, and that swap is currently draining the vitality out of the woman I love. And I have just realized that I probably traded away a ghost that was once attached to one of my parents, a ghost that might have regained their lost memories of my childhood if they were still with me as the Phantomic memories began spreading.” He had to work at keeping his fists and jaw unclenched. “I have earned the right to sound a bit defeated.”

Calm and unshaken as always, the Scholar asked, “Are you defeated, though?”

Mercury looked back at him. “Never.”

7

Mercury had always prided himself on his ability to navigate difficult situations with a calm levelheadedness. He’d never been one to be easily distracted. But he was struggling.

Too many crises were battling for attention. Too many thoughts were swirling in his mind.

How did he get the intruders out of his house? Even if he managed that, there would be others. He was, after all, a fugitive from the law, just as Mrs. Brand had pointed out. They would keep chasing him. But if he could just gain himself a bit of time, he might be able to prove what the ghosts around him had begun remembering: that he had been stolen from his family and wasn’t actually an orphan, or at least hadn’t been when he’d been brought to the orphanage.

How was Tacey? Had she improved at all while he’d been giving the ghosts their assignments, being further upended by the Scholar, and now making his way to the dungeons on yet another crucial bit of mischief? Was she improving at all?

Was Zizzy ever going to forgive him for breaking his word to her? Was he ever going to find Baby?

Which of his ghosts had once belonged to his parents? Sorting that out, and finding that ghost if it was one he had traded away, might be the key to unlocking the secrets of his past. But that could take years.

He slipped into the dungeon by means of a passage he wasn’t certain even Wallaby knew of. It, like so much about Aventine, was well disguised and well hidden. It proved a good thing that he had chosen the route he had. No sooner had he reached the depths of the dungeon than he heard voices not belonging to any of his ghosts. He kept himself to the shadows and listened.

“Those blasted ghosts came out of nowhere,” a man’s voice said.

Mercury knew he’d heard it before, but he wasn’t overly familiar with it. He inched his way toward the turn in the wall, so he could peek around the corner and eye the situation for himself.

“We found one of the others like this earlier,” Mrs. Vann said, eyeing one of the bounty hunters who had doubled back to the house after being released from the dungeon tunnels.