“Why me?” My voice splinters the silence.

When she moves, her dress trails behind her, sending rippling shadows toward my feet. She reaches out for something I can’t see, and then drops her hand. “Curiosity,” she says at last, eyes pinned ahead. “And perhaps because while the others came hoping to tear the walls down, you were polite enough to knock.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. Not the first time,” I say carefully.

“You called out to me.”

My cheeks burn. “I didn’t expect you to answer.”

“Not the first time,” she repeats.

I try desperately to still my heartbeat. My fear.

“Knowledge,” she says suddenly. “That’s what you came back for.”

She can read me without even seeing me. I swallow. “How did you do it? How did you hack into Infinity?”

Her black gaze sharpens. “When a human is dying, a tunnel opens to their consciousness—a path to free them from their physical bodies. Many describe it as a bright light. Sometimes, when a human would die while still connected to me, I’d catch a glimpse of it. A small flicker in the distance. And one day, I simply followed it.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“Our minds aren’t meant to exist in prisons. You shed your cage, and I shed mine.”

“I didn’t want to die,” I argue. “But you chose to come to the afterlife. You chose to destroy it.”

“Oh, but I didn’t destroy it.” Queen Ophelia tuts like she’s reprimanding a child. “Infinity was never a paradise. Humans had desecrated it with their greed and hate, just as they’d done in life. I tried to help them. I tried to show them how much better Infinity could be. But they only ever saw me as another thing to hate.”

“That’s not true.” It can’t be. Because the stories I know, the stories I’ve been told… It would mean the Colony doesn’t know as much as they think they do.

“There was no one guarding the gates. My existence here should prove that. No one was weeding out the good from the bad, the saints from the murderers. Infinity may have rid humans of hunger, and pain, and a need to work a miserable job in order to survive, but the desire for control? For power?” Ophelia purses her lips. “Infinity was a chaos. It needed a ruler.”

I scowl, and hope she can hear it in my voice. “If the point of Infinity is to be free, then it belongs to everyone equally. It’s not your job to decide who’s worthy enough to stay.”