He stares at the vacant surface where Victory once stood, like he wishes a swipe of a hand was all it would take to destroy it for good. “You should find a better hiding place. This is one of the busiest rooms in the Colony.”

“What makes you think I’m hiding?”

He moves like a shadow, following the edge of the table until he’s only a few feet away from me. No wonder I didn’t hear him come in. “It’s not like you’re up here to train. Speaking of, I hear it’s going about as well as expected.”

“None of this is easy for me,” I counter, scowling. “But at least I’m trying.”

“If it were easy, we wouldn’t have lost the war.”

“I was under the impression the Colony didn’t think the war was over yet.”

Gil’s mouth curves into a barely there smirk. “Looks like you’re learning something after all.”

My shoulders tense, and I immediately curse myself for having so many tells. The Colony already knows more about me than I ever wanted them to. The feelings I have here, in the afterlife? They should be mine, and mine alone.

But the way Gil is looking at me makes me think it doesn’t matter how many walls I try to put up. He’d see straight through all of them.

I stare at the lines in the wooden table. “For the record, I didn’t come in here to hide. I came here to try to understand.” He doesn’t ask why, but I tell him anyway. “If I want to stop feeling like a stranger in this world, I need to get to know it better.”

Gil waves a hand in front of him and the hologram reappears, the snowy landscape glistening beneath the lights. His eyes trace the image of the glass tower.

“I’m still figuring out how to use the hologram, but sometimes I can feel words in my head, explaining things to me.” I flatten my mouth. “It said this was called the Winter Keep.”

“It’s a prison,” Gil says stiffly. “One of many.”

“Has anyone ever seen inside it?”

“No one that’s ever made it back.”

“You made it back,” I point out.

His hazel eyes find mine and flicker like a new blade. “I wasn’t caught in Victory, so I was never brought to the Winter Keep. Though I imagine it’s quite luxurious in comparison to War, as most things in Victory are.”

I think of Gil’s face when Annika first spoke of his escape, and the way he looked at me when he called it a battlefield. He may have survived, but he didn’t come back from War alone. There are ghosts in his eyes, feeding off his pain. His hatred.

“How did it happen?” I ask quietly.