We take one of the elevators to the top floor, walking across rickety wooden planks and sheets of metal until we reach a pentagon-shaped clearing that overlooks the entire Colony. The railing looks like a mix of birch, copper, and cherrywood, with thick rope woven through the makeshift banister like it’s barely being held together. I grip a length of copper pipe and peer over the ledge.

The fall would kill me if I weren’t already dead, but the design of the Colony is frightening on its own. Everything is lopsided and unfinished. A hodgepodge of colors and materials and recycled objects, all thrown together to create this place. There are hints of every type of metal, every type of wood, except none of it seems to go together. There’s no organization—no rules.

A city built from resistance.

Even though the structure feels sturdy beneath my feet, the sight of so much chaos makes my head sway.

“I’m not here to be your tour guide,” his voice clips. When I turn around, the young man is standing in front of one of the huts, motioning for me to hurry inside.

Biting my lip, I pull myself away from the view and step through the bamboo archway.

An enormous table fills most of the room, round with silver studs decorating the edges. On the surface are the circular lines of an aged tree, polished despite a few nicks and scuffs. A vibrant hologram of the entire Princedom of Victory rotates slowly in the center, far bigger than I’d even realized. I spot the fields, the cathedrals, and the village near the docks, but they hardly take up a quarter of the hologram. There appear to be three more triangular sections of Victory, all divided by vast stone walls. In the very center is a circle of trees, and when the hologram shifts, I see the unmistakable shape of a palace.

Towers sprout generously all around it like spores multiplying over time. A courtyard circles the entire palace, pebbled with white stone, with flowered gardens covered in glass just beyond them. At the foot of the palace, a wide set of stairs leads to a pair of doors, taller than most houses and rivaling the decadence of even the palace itself, with faces of mythical creatures carved into the surface and tiles that flicker like they’re fragments of frost and diamond, shimmering with all the purity of a winter’s snowfall.

It’s the most breathtaking castle I’ve ever seen.

“I apologize for causing you additional trauma,” Annika says from the other side of the table. When she waves her hand over the hologram, it disappears instantly, leaving the surface bare. She walks toward me with her hands folded behind her back.

I flatten my mouth, remembering her dagger.