Page 29 of Written in Red

Mercury’s thoughts raced so fast that he couldn’t separate one from the other. He wasn’t an orphan. He had been kidnapped. The orphanage legally had claim on his ghosts, but not if he could prove that he should never have been there in the first place.

He’d have to prove it.

“Can you remember if my parents are still alive?” He could hardly believe he was asking the question. He had never assumed otherwise.

“That is not part of the memory.”

Mercury paced in a tight circle. If his parents had been alive when he turned eighteen, then Moor Cross had no claim on him. But he had to know who his parents were if he had any hope of proving that, assuming it was even true.

“Do you remember their names?” Mercury asked. “Or mine?” It had been changed by the orphanage; he knew that from a Phantomic Memory the Cream Canary had gained.

“I do not.”

So he couldn’t find them that way. There had been more ghosts at the house than just his, Holly Hock had remembered.

“Do you know how many ghosts there were in my home before I was taken?”

“Forty.”

Forty. “Were there other children in the house, other people?”

“I remember only you, and your mother and father.”

That meant, between them both, his parents had twenty attachments. Mercury’s large number of ghosts had made him legendary. His parents had enough attachments to have garnered notice as well.

Perhaps they’d kept it a secret. Rightly so. In the end, someone had discovered it and kidnapped their son. But that secretiveness meant he now didn’t know who they were.

Mercury’s pacing brought him back around, facing his desk. The quill was twitching once more. This time, the small, inexpert movement felt more frantic, more anxious. Mercury watched it, feeling himself growing a little impatient.

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to move the quill well enough to write with it,” he said.

But it didn’t stop. Indeed, the Reluctant Recluse simply tried harder.

“Do you need me to dip it in ink for you?” he asked.

The quill only twitched more earnestly.

Mercury looked over at the Violet Giant. “You’re certain you can’t tell me what it is he wants to communicate to me?”

“He says no. It must be something secret, or something he’s prevented from verbalizing.”

A secret.

A possibility landed with a hopeful, almost painful thud on his heart. He looked back over at the quill. “Do you know who my parents are? Do you remember?”

Another couple of jerking twitches resulted in absolutely no information. The quill was tossed to the ground in obvious exasperation. Mercury felt frustrated himself. His unreachable Invisible had something important to say, and Mercury had a lot of important questions he needed answered.

“The quill isn’t working,” he said, his voice more tense and forceful than he’d intended. “Please try something else.”

Nothing else in the room moved. Nothing. Was the Reluctant Recluse giving up already?

Mercury started pacing again, rubbing at his temples, trying to breathe through his growing tension.

“The memories you have obtained,” he said to the Violet Giant, “do they include anything about where I lived? The Moor Cross Home for Orphans was on the outskirts of London. Was my home in London, too?”

The Violet Giant’s face twisted in thought. “It doesn’t feel like London.” He held his hands up in a show of helplessness that felt so foreign in such a towering figure. “But it does feel familiar.”

“Familiar to you or familiar to me?” He didn’t know if Phantomic Memories were his memories transferred to the ghosts, or memories merely connected to him.