Andy didn’t leave the med bay all at once.

  He sat on the edge of the bunk for a long moment, letting the floor stop swaying, letting the last of Hale’s stabilizers and stims burn through his system. His legs felt hollow, like they belonged to someone else. When he finally stood, he did it slowly—one hand braced against the wall, breath measured, every movement deliberate.

  The curtain slid aside with a soft rasp.

  The Wayfarer’s interior felt different now. Quieter. Focused. The chaos from earlier had condensed into something colder and sharper. Voices carried low and controlled from the central compartment.

  Andy followed them.

  He emerged into the planning bay to find Ghost Route gathered around the tactical table. The projection hovered above it—layered, three-dimensional, slowly rotating.

  Bastion.

  Or what remained of it.

  The city was scarred beyond recognition. Whole districts had collapsed inward, leaving jagged cavities like missing teeth. Fire still burned in isolated pockets. Vanguard unit markers pulsed along the perimeter, forming a tightening ring around the ruins.

  Andy stopped without realizing it.

  For everyone else, it was a battlefield.

  For him, it was home.

  The projection shifted as Lance spoke, his voice steady, carrying the weight of command without raising its volume.

  “Primary objective remains unchanged,” Lance said. “Ghost Route enters through the southern substructure—here.” A segment of the city peeled away, revealing buried tunnels and ancient infrastructure beneath the surface. “We locate the anomaly. We assess. We extract data or neutralize, depending on what we find.”

  Andy barely heard him at first.

  The city blurred.

  He saw it as it had been—cleaner, smaller, alive. Sunlight on stone. Narrow streets filled with laughter and color. He remembered his parents’ hands, warm and steady, guiding him through the crowds during harvest festivals. Paper lanterns floating overhead. Music drifting through the air.

  He remembered Terra—Stargirl back then—running ahead of him, hair catching the light as she laughed, daring him to keep up. He remembered hiding behind stalls, stealing sweet bread, pretending the world was endless and safe.

  The projection flickered.

  Fire.

  Sirens.

  The sky tearing itself open.

  Andy’s chest tightened.

  The attack came back in fragments—screams, collapsing stone, the way the ground shook beneath his feet. Being dragged through smoke-choked alleys. His parents’ voices shouting over each other, over the noise, over the impossible sound of the city dying.

  Then darkness.

  Cold.

  The sewer.

  He and Terra huddled together in the dark, water up to their ankles, holding their breath as things moved above them. He remembered pressing his face into her shoulder to keep from making a sound. Remembered the moment the world ended—and the long, empty quiet that followed.

  “Andy.”

  Lance’s voice cut through the memory like a blade.

  Andy blinked hard, the projection snapping back into sharp focus. He hadn’t realized how close he’d drifted to the table.

  Lance didn’t comment. He simply continued.

  “A large Vanguard force is securing the outer exclusion zone,” Lance said, highlighting multiple units around the city’s edge. “Several Knight detachments. Scrub companies on rite of passage.”

  Markers pulsed brighter.

  “They’ll keep the bio-mutants engaged. Loud. Mobile. Aggressive. The intent is to hold attention and draw pressure outward.”

  Andy’s heart began to pound.

  New names scrolled across the projection as Lance spoke.

  Rodrick — Vanguard Cohort Lead.

  Andy’s breath caught.

  Then—

  Lana — Vanguard Auxiliary Unit.

  Terra — Knight Detachment.

  The room felt suddenly too small.

  Andy stared at the markers, watching them shift and reposition as if they were nothing more than data points. His pulse thundered in his ears, drowning out everything else.

  They don’t know, a voice whispered inside him.

  They don’t know what they really are.

  “They’ll harass bio-mutant concentrations along these corridors,” Lance continued, unaware—or choosing to be unaware—of the storm inside Andy’s chest. “The goal is sustained engagement. Controlled attrition.”

  A distraction.

  The word echoed, heavy and ugly.

  Lana. Terra. Rodrick. So many others.

  All of them fighting, bleeding, risking their lives so Ghost Route could slip beneath the city unseen. So he could reach the anomaly.

  Andy’s hands clenched into fists at his sides.

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  “They’re buying us a window,” Lance finished. “They don’t need to know what we’re doing. They just need to hold.”

  Andy swallowed hard, forcing himself to breathe.

  He understood the logic. He always had.

  But logic didn’t make it hurt less.

  The projection rotated again, zooming toward the underground access point—the path Ghost Route would take.

  Andy stared at Bastion’s broken image, at the layers of history stacked beneath the city that had raised him and destroyed him in equal measure.

  This wasn’t just another mission.

  It was a descent—into the bones of his past, into a truth buried long before the storm took everything from him.

  And above him, on the surface, the people he loved were fighting a war they didn’t even know they were losing for him.

  Andy straightened.

  When Lance’s eyes flicked toward him again, Andy was ready.

  Whatever waited beneath Bastion—

  He was going to face it.

  Not just for the mission.

  But for the city he remembered.

  Lance let the projection fade.

  The ghostly image of Bastion dissolved into nothing, leaving only the low hum of the Wayfarer’s systems and the weight of what had been said hanging in the air.

  “That’s it,” Lance said. “You know your roles. You know your lanes. We move quiet, we move fast, and we don’t improvise unless the ground forces us to.” His gaze swept the room. “If this goes loud, we abort. No heroics.”

  No one argued.

  Chairs scraped back. Harnesses unclipped. Ghost Route dispersed with practiced efficiency, tension translating instantly into motion.

  The Wayfarer was already parked deep inside a secluded sector of Bastion’s outer exclusion zone—masked by collapsed structures and sensor jamming fields that made the area look like just another dead pocket of ruin. Outside, distant artillery thundered. The surface war had begun in earnest.

  Andy followed the others into the armory bay.

  It wasn’t large, but it was dense—every inch of space packed with purpose-built equipment. Racks of weapons locked into magnetic cradles. Armor plates hung like flayed exoskeletons waiting to be claimed. The smell of oil, ozone, and charged metal filled the air.

  Rook was already strapping into his heavy kit, reinforced plating sliding into place with solid, final clicks. Wraith checked her blades without looking at them, muscle memory flawless. Iris synced her helmet and visor, data already scrolling across her display. Hale sealed his med rig and snapped it into his back harness, expression unreadable.

  Thread was waiting for Andy.

  “Hold still,” she said, already tugging his armor into alignment.

  Andy complied, lifting his arms as she adjusted the plates along his torso and shoulders. The armor was lighter than it looked—flexible composite layered over reinforced joints, subtle power conduits running through it like veins.

  “This is new,” Thread muttered, fingers dancing across a control pad as the armor’s systems came online. “Prototype booster integration. Short-burst jets along the calves and spine. You’ll move faster, jump higher—don’t overdo it or you’ll snap something important.”

  “Comforting,” Andy said.

  She smirked faintly. “I live to reassure.”

  She stepped back as the armor finalized its fit.

  Andy felt it then—the moment the modified Vanguard Army Link synced fully with his body. A subtle pressure settled across his spine and limbs as the system calibrated to his weight, his gait, his balance. The armor didn’t fight him. It learned him.

  For a split second, he felt almost weightless.

  Andy reached for a rifle from the rack—solid, familiar. He checked the action, mag seated cleanly. Grenades followed, clipped to his belt with practiced motions. Last came the overclocked pistol.

  He hesitated before holstering it.

  The memory of its recoil still burned in his arm.

  Then he locked it into place anyway.

  Outside the Wayfarer, the wind howled through broken streets. Ash drifted through the air like black snow. Bastion groaned beneath distant impacts, the city still fighting, still dying, still distracting everything above.

  Lance keyed the hatch.

  “Ghost Route,” he said, voice calm and ironed flat. “Time to work.”

  The ramp dropped.

  Cold air rushed in, carrying dust, smoke, and the faint metallic tang of storm residue. Andy stepped forward with the others, boots hitting fractured stone as the armor’s servos adjusted instantly, compensating for uneven ground.

  The city loomed around them—ruined, familiar, hostile.

  Andy felt the armor settle fully against his body, the Armor Link completing its final calibration. The jets hummed softly, waiting. His weapons felt like extensions of his hands.

  This wasn’t the same city he’d grown up in.

  But it was still his.

  Ghost Route moved out, vanishing into the shadows of Bastion’s broken streets, while above them the Vanguard fought loudly, violently, drawing the world’s attention away.

  Andy took one last breath—

  And stepped into the dark.

  Ghost Route moved as one organism.

  They flowed off the Wayfarer and into the ruins, spacing out without a word, weapons angled low but ready. Boots touched stone softly, servos whispering as the armor compensated for broken ground. The city swallowed them almost immediately, jagged silhouettes closing in until the Wayfarer was nothing more than another scar among many.

  Wraith slipped ahead.

  One moment she was there—then she wasn’t. Her outline blurred, adaptive camo bending light until she dissolved into the ruin-strewn street. A soft click sounded in Andy’s ear as her feed synced to the squad net.

  WRAITH: Path’s clear. No movement. No heat.

  Andy felt it too.

  Bastion was empty.

  It was simply hollow. Streets stretched ahead in long, broken lines, flanked by collapsed facades and shattered windows that stared back like blind eyes.

  They moved through it carefully.

  Far off, the war made itself known.

  A dull concussion rolled through the ground, vibrating up Andy’s legs and into his chest. Another followed—closer this time—then the distant stutter of heavy weapons fire. The sound echoed strangely through the ruins, refracted by broken stone until it felt like the city itself was breathing under assault.

  Andy swallowed.

  Each step pulled something loose inside him.

  The city around him overlapped with another—one that no longer existed.

  A corner they passed flickered in his mind, and for an instant the rubble was gone. He saw a vendor’s stall instead, bright cloth snapping in the breeze, the smell of roasted grain thick in the air. He remembered tugging at his mother’s sleeve, asking for something sweet.

  The image vanished as quickly as it came, replaced by cracked stone and ash.

  Andy shook his head, refocusing.

  They crossed an open square where a statue had once stood. Only its legs remained, fractured at the knees. Andy’s chest tightened as another memory surged—children running in circles around the statue’s base, Terra laughing as she chased him, daring him to climb higher.

  “Last one up buys bread,” she’d said.

  Andy slowed without realizing it.

  Thread glanced back at him, concern flickering across her face. Andy forced himself forward, armor humming softly as he caught up.

  Another vibration rippled through the ground—this one sharp enough to rattle loose debris from a nearby wall.

  IRIS: Surface units are fully engaged. Knights are drawing heavy concentrations east and north.

  Andy didn’t need the update.

  He could feel where the fighting was. The storm residue in the air trembled with every explosion. Somewhere above them, Lana and Terra were moving through fire and ruin, unaware that every step they took was pulling danger away from Ghost Route.

  Andy’s jaw clenched.

  They passed a narrow alley half-choked with fallen masonry.

  Andy’s breath caught.

  This one he recognized.

  For a heartbeat, the rubble peeled away, and he was smaller—terrified—pressed into darkness as Terra dragged him down into the sewer access, hands shaking but determined.

  “Quiet,” she’d whispered. “Don’t look. Don’t listen.”

  Andy’s chest tightened until it hurt.

  The alley snapped back to ruin.

  WRAITH: Contact negative. Still nothing. Too clean.

  “Bio-mutants avoid this zone,” Lance said quietly over the net. “Which means whatever’s beneath it doesn’t want interference.”

  Andy felt a faint tug deep in his chest—subtle, directional.

  “There,” he said before he could stop himself.

  Lance’s head turned slightly. “You sure?”

  Andy nodded, eyes fixed on a collapsed transit entrance half-buried beneath stone and twisted rail. His awareness brushed against something far below it—steady, patient, waiting.

  “Access point’s under that structure,” Andy said. “It’s not active.”

  Silence followed.

  Then Lance said, “Wraith. Confirm.”

  A long pause.

  WRAITH: …He’s right.

  Andy exhaled slowly.

  They regrouped at the edge of the collapse. The sounds of battle surged again in the distance—closer now—artillery walking across the city, thunder rolling through Bastion’s bones.

  Andy stared down at the buried entrance, memories still ghosting at the edges of his vision. Bastion wasn’t just ruins to him.

  It was a childhood layered over a grave.

  And somewhere beneath it all, something ancient was waiting for him to come home.

  Lance raised a fist.

  “Stack up,” he said. “We go underground.”

  Andy tightened his grip on his rifle, felt the jets in his armor hum in readiness, and stepped forward into the shadow of the past—toward whatever truth Bastion had buried beneath its streets.