Ghost’s road back to himself was not quick, nor clean. It was a crawl, a scraping against the walls of his own fractured mind. The nightmares clung to him, memories of the Architects, of cages that weren’t physical but carved into the brain. Some nights he woke drenched in sweat, his chest heaving, fists raised as though fighting shadows no one else could see.

But Leah was there. Jason was there. And the others; the team that had walked through fire together never let him slip back into the void.

Day by day, piece by piece, Ghost returned.

Not as the phantom he had once been. Not as a blunt...