Archive of Our Own ^beta

Most societies, regardless of how alien they were to each other, how far-flung across the cosmos they were from any possible judgemental neighbours, fell into a common pattern at a certain level of technological advancement— work was done during daylight hours, and nightfall, whatever that looked like at any edge of a given galaxy, was a time of silence and sleep. It was what made sense for most sentient creatures, those whose whole existences were controlled by the orbit of their home and the whims of their nearest star and their own fickle needs. Those poor organics, who could not help their own inferiority.

Caminus, however, did not quieten at night. To a visitor or distant observer, it would seem that the colony had nothing but night— there was no atmosphere on the planet to suffocate its people, so the stars above were never hidden from view. But Cavea’s light was not limitless, and the gas giant that stood between Caminus and its dwarf star would inevitably cast a shadow that would then force the colony to switch— for lack of any better words— from day to night.

And then Caminus truly came alive. Its people would surge from their suites in droves, to bathe in high-grade flowing from the crowded bars and the neon light that drenched the colony's every corner. Of course, most of Caminus was populated with actors, dancers, singers; all of whom made their living in the hours where everyone else wasn’t working. The scientists and factory workers and bureaucrats paid the artists to keep them happy, and in turn the artists paid them for food and medicine to keep them healthy. In this way, they all supported each other. They were all content.

It was an equilibrium that the Mistress of Flame had strived to perfect, ever since Caminus split away from Cybertron and found its own safe corner of the galaxy, where Primus and His favoured child could protect and provide for them. But, as she stood watching the casual nightlife of her people from her chambers, far above the streets carved into Caminus’ skin, she did not feel pride or relief at how good existence had become for them all. Instead, as she had done for the last few hours, all she could feel was unease.

Light footsteps echoed behind the Mistress, but she did not turn towards them. There were very few bots who would be admitted to her chambers without invitation, and they were easy to tell apart from the weight of their peds. She knew that it was Ember, her personal attendant, waiting patiently to be acknowledged behind her.

“Have the Hermitian team returned contact?” The Mistress only now turned to her assistant as she asked, already knowing the answer the moment she saw Ember’s face.

“Not yet, Mistress. And there is still no word from Cybertron itself.” Ember shook her head, with her hands held together and digits entwined. As was the case with most sociums of the Forgefire Parliament, her armour was a mirror-sheen of orange and gold. “I’ve come to announce that the Torchbearers have returned.”

The Mistress closed her optics, allowing a small sigh of relief through her vents. “That’s something worthwhile, at least… send them in.”

Ember bowed her head as she retreated, and a klick passed before the six Torchbearers made their entrance. Pyra Magna led the procession, with Dust Up and Jumpstream flanking her. Skyburst and Stormclash followed while Rust Dust, the youngest of them all in spirit though not in spark, demurely kept her distance at the very back.  

These six femmes were the only people on Caminus who were anywhere close to the age of the Mistress herself, and she still had seniority of six billion years. They were all born at the same time, from the same burst of Caminus’ hotspot— the first citizens of the colony, and the only children of Nexus Prime to ever emerge. They were her vanguard, and in their lifelong service they had not yet let her down.

Pyra’s expression was indecipherable as always as she took a knee before the Mistress, but the others seemed perturbed. Rust Dust in particular couldn’t hide her agitation as well as her sisters, almost losing her balance as she knelt. Just as she knew with Ember, the Mistress knew that the Torchbearers did not have good news to share.

“Mistress of Flame.” Pyra Magna had not lost any of her dignity in the stellar cycles spent away from home, did not even sound weary from her travels even though she had come straight from her shuttle to kneel before her leader. “It is with great regret that we declare our mission a failure. Just as before, we were unable to find any suitable planets in our search.”

So that was that. There was not a single planet within range of Caminus that could meet her needs… the Mistress had been prepared for this result, but it was still disappointing to hear. She had hoped that some might have evolved in the last few hundred million years that could serve well, that she wouldn’t need to go forward with her original intentions. Despite her distaste for what the so-called Cybertronians had become, she still hesitated at the thought of what she must soon do…

Then again, if the Hermitian was in danger, then it was already too late to reconsider. There was nothing else to do but move onto the next step.

“Your mission was to investigate, Pyra Magna, and you have done just that. There is no failure here,” the Mistress reasoned, and she saw Rust Dust let out a loud exhale of relief. “But your safe return is very fortuitous. Much has happened since your departure.”

She turned away from the Torchbearers, and with her staff she summoned a hologram that was projected into the centre of her chamber. Pyra Magna stood up to make way for it, and the other Torchbearers spread out around her as they watched the holographic planet in front of them, some of them letting out gasps of recognition. It was Cybertron, as it had looked millions of years ago before Caminus’ departure. 

“A vorn ago,” the Mistress explained, “I sent an envoy towards Cybertron. They consisted of three Cityspeakers, their bodyguards, two pilots and a medic. Up until a day ago, we were able to contact them without issue. But now, they will not answer any summons we send. Not only that…''

The hologram of Cybertron was now accompanied by frames from Windblade’s last message, showing a vile feathered creature standing behind her.

“It appears that our ancestral home has been overtaken by organic monstrosities,” the Mistress twisted the hiss into a sigh of regret, “with no sign as to what has happened to the original inhabitants.”

There were three sounds of disgust from amongst the Torchbearers; Dust Up’s was the loudest, an unrestrained scoff, while Stormclash and Skyburst mirrored each other’s vocalisers with a muffled shudder between them. Rust Dust’s jaw had dropped open, and she only closed it when Jumpstream tapped her on the shoulder.

“What would you have us do, Mistress?” Pyra Magna asked, keeping her composure even as she averted her gaze from the left half of the hologram before her.

“For now? Nothing.” The Mistress dismissed the hologram display with a wave of her staff, satisfied that the Torchbearers understood the delicacy of the situation (and not wanting to scar them any further with the sight of technorganics). “You must first recover from your mission, and we will continue to attempt contact with Cybertron. If the envoy does not return our summons within a decacycle, we will assume that they have been captured or killed. In which case, we will have a reason to retaliate.”

The Torchbearers each nodded, all except for two. Stormclash and Skyburst, the only identical sisters, shared a look before stepping forward. Stormclash was the first to speak.

“Forgive my doubts, Mistress, but—"

“Will that be necessary?” Skyburst finished her twin’s question.

The Mistress levelled her gaze on the two sisters, grateful that they had grasped the severity of what may come if Cybertron continued to ignore them.

“I hope not,” she answered. “Which is the only reason why I am hesitating.”

If she had proof that her delegation was harmed, she would have wasted no time in sending forth soldiers to extract them. But it would not fit her role as Primus’ voice to start a war on their ancestral ground over what might only be a communication mishap. And what reason would Cybertron have to harm a peaceful envoy? The logical answers were all that kept her from making decisions she would surely regret. 

“Take your leave, Torchbearers. You’ve earned your rest. I will summon you if there is further news from Cybertron.”

Pyra Magna bowed just as Ember had done, and her sisters followed her example. “As you wish, Mistress.”

She straightened and turned on her heel to leave, with the others following close behind. Only Rust Dust lagged slightly, still bent in a bow as Stormclash passed her. She let out one last hurried “Mistress” as she went on to catch up with the others.

Once they were gone, the Mistress couldn’t stop her frame from sagging, as if her mantle weighed as much as the whole of Caminus itself. It took the last of her strength to carry herself to the nearest chair, set away from the window that allowed her to look across the colony. She needed space away from the lights and noise, away from everything she stood to lose if she made just one mistake, just one wrong or rash decision.

 In times of hardship like this, she told herself that Primus was only testing her and her children, that He would show them where to go when they needed Him most. But after seeing what had become of Cybertron, Primus’ own body desecrated by those things that infested Him, she didn’t have that hope to cling to anymore. Wherever Primus was, He was not there and He was not here.

But He was surely watching her from somewhere, waiting for her to cleanse His corpse, to ensure that His last pure descendants would survive and thrive. It only made her more sure of what had to be done.  

“Mistress?” This time she hadn’t heard Ember approaching, and she sat up with a start when she heard the attendant’s meagre voice. “Are you… in need of anything?”

Ember lingered in the chamber door, clearly understanding that something was wrong. The Mistress forced herself to relax. This wasn’t the first time her acolyte had seen her under such stress— even so, she prided herself on hiding that which others should not have to see of her.

“No, Ember. I…” She danced the line between dismissing her and calling her forward. Ember was young, not having been forged until long after Caminus’ exodus, but she was still someone to be trusted. Someone to confide in. The Mistress kept such people to a minimum, so they were a precious resource in times like this. 

“For the first time in many millennia,” the Mistress sighed, “I find that I’m doubting myself. Was it a mistake to let Windblade and her friends go? Have I doomed them all just for the sake of satisfying my own curiosity?”

Ember blinked, unable to mask her uncertainty, but she braved entering the chamber to better comfort the matriarch.

“You had no way of knowing that contacting Cybertron would be a risk, Mistress. There was no sign of them being uncooperative in diplomacy. They accepted the invitation for the envoy, after all.”

The Mistress closed her optics, gliding thin digits across the top of her aching skull. “I should have known it would not be as simple as that, though.”

With a harsh vent of air through her olfactories, she forced herself to regain her posture and bearing. The first step to being a good leader was appearing as one. “Did the Cybertronians also accept the gifts we sent them?”

There was a moment as Ember accessed previous comms from the Hermitian team through her data link. “It appears so. I imagine they’d be within their vaults by now.”

The Mistress nodded, the smallest of smiles threatening at the corners of her mouth.

“Good. We will wait for further contact from Cybertron.” She lifted herself from the depths with help from her staff, standing upright with her cape hanging languid behind her.

“And if we still hear nothing from the envoy?” Ember asked, her eyes following the Mistress as she stood once more before the skyline of Caminus.

How beautiful it was at night. How loud and crowded, drunk with life and joy, filled to the brim with bursting bodies on every surface level… Cybertron would surely be the same, with even more creatures packed on top of each other. The Mistress circled the very top of her staff with an idle thumb, readying herself for when it was time to press the button concealed within it. 

“Then we’ll give Cybertron a reminder of who they’re dealing with.”

Numb, blind, and cold. Plagued by these three fates upon her awakening, Windblade found herself wondering if simply letting herself die would have been preferable. It would have been quick. It would have ended the nightmare… 

And it would have marked her a failure in the eyes of Caminus, of Metroplex. No. She was alive, by the mercy of Solus, and she would do everything and anything to stay that way until her job was done. 

Though her optics were still offline, her HUD the only light in the pitch-black of her vision, her other sensors worked just fine. She could feel ice around her. She could taste a bleed in her mouth, her glossa pierced by the clenching of her own jaw. She could hear... a voice. A hiss, something that lashed out like a knife in the blank wasteland she found herself in.

“Animals. Fragging… animals …”

His voice. The Sparkcracker’s. The one who had almost killed her and, at the same time, also saved her. It sounded like he was coughing up something, spluttering on the ground, purging past scarred lips. Windblade saw this image clear in her mind even before her optics repaired themselves, slowly letting in the light of a silhouette bent over before her.

The mech, the living statue and torture machine, was curling viciously into himself as the white powder beneath him turned bright pink. By the light of his curdled energon, Windblade could see his face, and even before it turned towards her she knew that it was a horrible sight. Not because of the vomit dripping down his chin over the thick solder marks, nor because of his burned optics, not because of any sign of hardship on his shaking body. It was the expression on his ruined face, the hatred in his optics, the fact that he was shaking not from the cold but from fury seething in his veins. 

And then it was gone. Not replaced or smothered by anything else, but simply drained away. His optics flickered, the light within failing to cut through the heavy blizzard falling around them both.

“You,” he choked. “You’re... not one of them.”

Windblade shook her head, slowly sitting up in the mass of white that had apparently broken their fall. It was pliable but ice-cold, and she heard it crunching around her as she shifted her weight.

“I’m… I’m Windblade,” she mumbled through numb lips. “I come from Caminus.” She didn’t know why she even bothered with the distinction, but then the mech’s optics flashed bright for a moment.

“The Titan colony?” he asked. And she nodded, even as she wondered if admitting such things so readily would just get her killed again. She was a convicted terrorist around here, after all, which was still better than being dead.

“Windblade…” The mech coughed, wiping at his mouth as he straightened into a weary kneel, his arms hanging like pendulums at his sides. “You were the one on trial.”

Windblade felt herself gulp, though the sound was lost to her in the roaring breeze. So he really had been the statue, knowing she was there the whole time…

“I-I didn’t try to sabotage Metroplex,” she insisted. “They were lying, we’re not terrorists—”

“I know that,” he snapped, like she was telling him something insultingly obvious. “Not that it matters, either way.” Then he grimaced, but not from anger. Something was giving him pain; as he clenched his jaw the skin around his chin seemed to split open even more, but this strangely seemed to give him relief.

“They had you in the courtroom,” Windblade said, slowly as she tried to figure it out for herself, buying precious little time for her processor to recover from what had just happened in the last few hours. “Y-you… you were a statue.”

“I was,” he confirmed, listing to his left while he gave her his attention. “They left me like that when I wasn’t—”

He stopped himself from going any further, and then squeezed his optics shut as if he was in agony. From what Windblade had seen of him, that must have been true. The razorsilk had been painful enough over her limbs, but to have it over your optics, literally blinding you with pain…

Then she tensed, remembering the dress that Tarantulas had tricked her with that now lay tattered around her. The few remaining scraps didn’t hurt, but she’d been left with nothing but her base protoform to shield her from the mysterious elements. The thick white powder around her was curious as well as cold, and it seemed to be falling from a thin gauze over the sky— what little she could see of it at least, with the buildings and towers crowding in all around.

Primus, were they still in Technotropolis? Was Rattrap sending guards after them already? What about her friends? And how was she supposed to cover her protoform?! 

“How did you free me?”

Her saviour mech distracted her from all the questions with one she hadn’t even considered. She looked at him, observing his bruises and bloodstains in the darkness, flinching at how his wings twitched without rhythm. 

How did she break him free? Even if she had some idea, she didn’t want to remember… she didn’t want to think about what had been done to her, as bad as death would have been. Her spark still ached, violated and scared, and she just wanted to bolt her chest permanently shut. 

“I...I-I don’t… I don’t know what happened,” she said truthfully. She didn’t want to know, either. What Rattrap and Tarantulas and Airachnid had been trying to do; not just killing her, humiliating her, scarring her with a kind of torture she didn’t even fully comprehend...

And they were going to do it to the others, too. This mech wouldn’t have been the only weapon at their disposal. Primus knew how many other Sparkcrackers were at hand, or if there were even worse ways to die in store for her crew.

“I need to go back up there.” She was on her peds before she even realised she was standing up, sinking into the soft white with her weight. “My friends—”

“You won’t be able to help them by getting captured again,” the mech growled, taking obvious effort to push himself upright. “Right now, your only priority should be staying out of sight.” He wheezed as he lifted one knee and his shoulder locked up, but when Windblade tried to offer help he instantly pushed her away.

“If we’re lucky,” he told her, trembling on two legs, “they’ll assume we perished in the fall. That means they won’t be looking for you, at least.”

“But they’re in danger!” Windblade only kept her voice hushed in case anyone really was looking for her, lurking somewhere in the dark. “They’re going to be tortured like me, a-and... their sparks—!” 

“They won’t.” The mech caught himself as he stumbled, staring down at the ground as he wheezed. “If… if they were meant to come to me, then they won’t be executed. Rattrap is patient. He’ll find another way to deal with them. They’ll live until then.” 

He turned away from her as he forced his chassis upright, rotating himself around like each ped weighed as much as a Titan. “Don’t stay in the snow too long. You’ll rust.” 

Then, with a heavy groan, he started walking away.

“Where are you going?” Windblade tried to go after him, though her peds struggled to break through the white crust that he’d called snow. 

“Away from here,” he called at her, without turning around or stopping, each step a violent lurch forward. “Anywhere. You’d be smart to do the same.”

“You… you’re just walking away from this?!” Windblade knew she was appalled, even though she also knew that it was the most practical thing to do when a planet’s government was trying to catch you and slaughter you. The unleashed Sparkcracker didn’t even look in a state to be running anywhere, yet he still tried. Even if he fell down dead somewhere, he just wanted his grave site to be anywhere but here. She knew that was the case even before he finally stopped in his tracks, turning around with just enough effort for one bleary optic to find her in the blizzard.

“What else am I supposed to do, Windblade of Caminus?” It was impossible to ignore the mockery in his tone, the way energon seemed to curdle once more at the back of his throat as he spat more curled pink liquid onto the snow. “Tell me, since you obviously know a better answer.”

“I don’t fragging know anything!” Windblade couldn’t stop the frustration coming out as a warped scream, even as she clenched her vocaliser, even as she knew she had every right to scream and cry and grab him by the shoulders and just shake him for refusing to help, refusing to even be kind. “I come here because Metroplex needs me, and all I get is lies, a-and I’m framed for attempted murder, and I almost get killed in such an awful way—!”

The mech croaked, or snorted, or barked. Some kind of sound like metal grating in the depths of his tanks. It might have been a laugh, if it didn’t sound like something in dire need of repairs.

“If that’s enough to break you,” he told her, “then you’re not strong enough for a place like this. Go, then. Go find your friends. Find a way back home. Leave me to do the same.” He wasted the effort of lifting his servo just enough to give her a jolting wave of dismissal, his lack of faith in her so great that he didn’t mind showing it at the expense of his comfort. He’d went to such lengths to save her, halting his own escape to bring her with him, and yet he was ready to abandon her at the first opportunity. 

He reminded WIndblade of Chromia. Of Lightbright, and Hot Shot, and everyone else who thought she wasn’t strong enough just because it wasn’t how she was made to be. Why else would Cityspeakers need bodyguards, if they weren’t able to protect their own minds and sparks?

She loved her crew. She loved her friends, her guard, Nautica and Afterburner and Maxima and Velocity, and she would have gladly sacrificed herself to send them all back home safely. But she couldn’t do that right now. If she even had the energy to fly back up into the building, she’d just get herself killed. Or worse, all over again. 

She couldn’t save them, not yet. But she could, eventually. If she just stayed alive until then. 

Their lives weren't the only ones at stake, after all. Metroplex had more to tell her about Cybertron and Rattrap— even if she was far too late to save one from the other— and she was the only one who could hear it from him.

“You just said that I’ll only get caught again,” Windblade reminded the mech, taking wide steps through the snow to catch up to him. “That they think I’m dead.”

“I said that you better hope that they do,” he corrected her, not stalling once even though he clearly didn’t know where to go. “Otherwise, they’ll hunt you down. And they’ll find an even worse way than me to kill you.”

“Well… you’re not going anywhere without me.” Windblade caught up to him with a boost from her thrusters through the snow, and she skidded to a stop in front of him. He paused before he collided with her, but didn’t even look surprised by her sudden teleportation. Maybe he’d once done the same thing, when he’d had working wings. When he’d been free. If he ever had been. From the state of his frame, the way he could hardly walk despite all his effort, the way his default expression was hatred, he might not have even remembered such days, and that made Windblade want to stay with him. They had to help each other, because they were likely the only ones who would bother to try.

“Just because I haven’t killed you,” the scarred mech scoffed, “doesn’t mean I can keep you alive.”

“I don’t care about that,” she said, though she knew it was a lie. So long as she was alive long enough to save her friends, that was all she did care about. “I need to know… I need to know what’s going on, and I think you’re the only one who can tell me. Ever since I came here all I’ve gotten is questions and questions, and no one is answering any of them, and I don’t know what else to do because... if I don’t know what the Pit is going on, then how am I supposed to fix any of it?”

She almost laughed at herself— as if she could even fix a faulty fuel line or broken bulb, let alone an entire planet rotten to the core— but the mech did not laugh first. He was utterly serious as he faced her, raising his chin as if to see her better through the snow.

“...What kind of questions?” 

Every kind of question, Windblade wanted to say, any and every kind that could ever exist— the obvious ones, the stupid ones, the philosophical ones that never truly be answered. But she decided to start with something small, yet immediately relevant.

“Well, for starters,” she said. “Do you... have a name?”

His jaw hung open in telling silence, and he didn’t look at her. His optics were dim things, red coals, and they were almost lost in the twirl of white flakes falling from the sky. If he didn’t have a name, if he couldn’t remember it, then what was she supposed to call him? 

“...Starscream,” he told her after some long moments, and it was the first sound out of him that wasn’t a growl or cough or wheeze. “My name… is Starscream.”

Windblade hadn’t been quite prepared for the answer, mostly because she didn’t even know if she would be given one. But there it was. Starscream. The mech who had saved her, in exchange for almost killing her. It was a standard Cybertronian designation, she’d probably heard ones exactly like it on Caminus, but even then… this one was different. She could tell from how he said it, the pride hiding in the quiver of his broken vocaliser. He was not just a mech, or a machine. He was something to celebrate, to be worshipped, and he still held onto that small belief despite what he’d been turned into. Windblade was starting to regret blocking his path, especially as a light started to fall down through the crack of wherever they’d been walking towards.

“Can you tell me what happened here, Starscream?” she asked, trying to give his name the proper respect even as she whispered. “What… why this is all happening? Why Cybertron is like this?”

Starscream looked beyond her, into the haze of snow and ice that shielded them and everything else from view, and his optics flashed a brilliant crimson that was like searchlights through the fog. With only his silhouette showing through before her, he almost looked normal and whole. 

“We should find somewhere to hide,” he croaked, exhausted at last. “Then... I’ll tell you everything I can.”

 

 

“You idiots! IMBECILES! Fragging slag-headed MORONS!”

Dinobot had been a loyal servant of the Tripredacus High Council for almost four centuries now— not including a few short decades of training under the watchful optics of Inferno and Rattrap himself— yet he’d never heard the Chancellor sound so incensed before. Even standing outside his office with the thick walls between himself and Rattrap, Dinobot could feel those walls shake from the strength of his fury. The volume alone would have convinced anyone that it was in fact three voices screaming in unison, but of course Dinobot knew better. Of the three minds that Rattrap controlled, only one was ever coherent. 

But the one thing Dinobot didn’t know was what had made the Chancellor so furious in the first place. He knew all about the rogue Camiens (Velocity and Hot Shot, still missing since the trial), because he was one of the mechs in charge of retrieving them. Regrettably he’d had no sightings of either of them, and he’d been prepared for the Chancellor to be in a sour mood when he came to give him an update on the search. 

This was more than just a sour mood. The environment leaking through the office door was practically toxic. 

“Do you have ANY FRAGGING IDEA what you’ve allowed to happen?!” Rattrap raged on, dull thuds undercutting each snapped word as he seemed to stamp across the floor. “Because of your incompetence, your—!”

“Chancellor, sir, please calm down,” a new voice cut in with rather suicidal intentions, the familiar simpering drawl of Inferno making Dinobot grimace. “We understand that—” 

“Do not interrupt me, Inferno!” There was a sharp crack as something solid was thrown. “You… you… slag-sucking sycophant!” Rattrap let loose a snarl that almost made Dinobot flinch even from a distance. Then there was a heavy pause, others in the room not wanting to speak in case they interrupted the Chancellor again, but his rant had seemed to reach its heated conclusion. 

“We understand that you’re upset, Chancellor.” Quickstrike’s firm tone betrayed only a slight spot of rusted uncertainty in his vocaliser. “We take full responsibility. But even if Windblade has been lost, everyone believes she’s—”

“I don’t CARE about her!” Rattrap shrieked, “I care about my MACHINE!”

“The lean, mean, rarely-seen machine!” a giggling chitter joined in. “Get it? HAHAHAHA!”

While the Chancellor’s two heads spat through their denta, Dinobot took a moment to understand what he’d just heard. Windblade had escaped as well? Why hadn’t he been informed of it? The only reason she was still on Cybertron was because two of her conspirators were still on the run. As soon as they were apprehended, they were to be ejected along with her and the rest of the sorry lot. But now the process would be even more delayed with their ringleader missing, and there was no knowing what tricks Windblade might try to pull while on the run.

And the machine, of course, Rattrap was still enraged over her attempt to sabotage Metroplex... or was it only an attempt? Did the Camien terrorist somehow succeed, and now the Titan was like a time bomb lying in wait to level the planet? Or had she set something in motion that she could easily complete before being caught once more? Rattrap’s plans for the Titan were already fraught with enough problems and complications, and it was vital that he became habitable before the planet’s winter got even worse. With shelter on the surface becoming so scarce, and the underground crowded with rebellious Cybertronians who would slaughter any technorganics they came across...

Dinobot didn’t want to think about it any longer. Though it served him right for eavesdropping in the first place, learning things he clearly wasn’t supposed to know yet for his own good. Even if no-one caught him lingering outside the door, it felt wrong because it was wrong. The Chancellor was under enough stress without having to deal with soldiers getting themselves killed over idle curiosity. And, above all, the Chancellor knew best. The last five centuries were more than testament to that.

So, if the Chancellor decided to retaliate against another interruption by upending the rest of his office through the door, Dinobot could really do nothing about it.

“Who is it?!” Thankfully Rattrap sounded more surprised than offended at the sound of a tight-knuckled knock against his door.

“Dinobot, sir.” The mech kept his spinal strut taut as he announced himself, faintly remembering old youngling rumours that at least one of Rattrap’s six optics was able to see through walls to a certain distance.

“Well, don’t just stand out there,” Rattrap growled, “come in already!”

“And close the damn door behind ya!” his left head added. “Freezin’ my aft off already!”

Dinobot seized upon the invitation, while his shoulders relaxed and claws curled out from the nest of his palms. The first thing he saw was the Chancellor himself, seated at his desk like he was melting into the chair, the grand window behind him showing the snowy night sky. Then there was a slight dent in the left wall, the mark of whatever had been flung in anger, but Dinobot’s gaze did not linger to find out what. Instead, his attention was on the audience that crowded the office, making it feel like a penthouse broom closet.

As expected, the four mechs of Rattrap’s personal guard were present, as well as Ratbat and, for some reason, Airachnid. Dinobot didn’t have much personal experience with Tarantulas’ daughter, mostly because she was Tarantulas’ daughter and that was enough to keep most sane bots away from her if they could help it. Even Ratbat, eternally unflappable despite how his wings always seemed to be moving, kept a good distance from her as she stood by Rattrap’s desk; back straight even with her many legs retracted by her spine, servos folded there to hide her talons, respectful to a fault. She didn’t even glance Dinobot’s way as he closed the door behind him. 

“You three,” Rattrap pointed a digit to his elite squad and waved it between Inferno, Rampage and Quickstrike in turn, “will be personally responsible for tracking down our lost property. I want every inch of Technotropolis scoured, and every city at all corners of the planet searched too. Understand?”

Such a feat couldn’t possibly be accomplished by only three mechs, but they each nodded with varying degrees of fealty. Rampage only chucked his chin in acknowledgement, while Inferno almost doubled over in a submissive bow.

“We won’t let you down, Chancellor,” the overgrown ant promised, and of course he was the first to scurry out of the office to get to work.

That left Ironhide, always the odd one out, as the only Elite still in the office awaiting orders or dismissal (or maybe another mystery object thrown in his direction). Dinobot had never understood why Rattrap would allow a Cybertronian to have such a privileged position, and had only once been brave enough to ask about it. The Chancellor had smiled, his oversized denta showing full over his curved lip, and then told Dinobot the story of Ratbat’s role before the end of the Golden Age, when Cybertronians had tried to sweep technorganics out of existence by simply pretending they didn’t exist. When they realised that the new species would not simply go away, those in charge reacted with utmost cruelty and anger. If the organics would not disappear on their own, then the Cybertronians would make them disappear. 

That was what Ratbat’s appointment to Senator so long ago had been all about. Some had been foolish enough to think it was a sign that things would improve, that the Cybertronians were beginning to understand, but it was nothing more than a stunt for the Senate’s own amusement. They wanted to put a freak on display, to show the rest of the planet that technorganics deserved their treatment. If Ratbat tried to institute reform for his people, he was ridiculed. If he did nothing and simply agreed with everyone else, he was shown as an example of what technorganics should be. Quiet. Obedient. Non-existent. 

Rattrap had described all of this to Dinobot, and only then did he understand why Ironhide had been given his role. It wasn’t cruel in this case, though. It was a seat of honour, to be in Rattrap’s confidence even as an outsider. Nobody laughed at Ironhide. Nobody judged him for the crimes of his ancestors, not even Dinobot. Ironhide had been born just as the Organic Age began, after all. Not part of the Well’s final batch which consisted solely of Transmutate (Rampage’s choice of sparkmate, who was another story all in herself), but young enough that he hadn’t yet been entrenched in the sins of his ancestors.

That was another piece of knowledge Rattrap had gifted to Dinobot, but not one that was to be repeated to anyone else. The Well had a certain reputation that had to be maintained.

“As for you, Ironhide...” Rattrap paused as if he wasn’t quite sure what to have him do, or what he could trust him with. “You can keep an optic on the prisoners we still have left. And if any more of them get away, I’ll hold you personally responsible!”

“Understood.” Ironhide was always a mech of few words, and this was the only one he said as he took his leave.

“And you two,” Rattrap visibly gnashed his denta as he faced Ratbat and Airachnid. “Just… get out of my sight. And get your sire in here, Airachnid! I don’t care how busy he says he is!”

“Yes, sir.” Airachnid’s legs scraped together on her back, and her optics stayed glued to the floor as she departed with the Senator behind her. The edge of Ratbat’s wing grazed Dinobot’s shoulder, but otherwise the two of them just ignored him. Dinobot didn’t mind; he preferred being invisible. It made his job easier, even at the expense of most everything else.

When the office door clicked shut for the third time, leaving only two mechs alone behind it, Rattrap seemed to deflate with his head cradled in his hands, the other two hanging limp on his shoulders. 

“More bad news, Dinobot? You too?” Exhausted of all anger, righteous and indignant, he could only speak in a defeated monotone that made Dinobot wish he had something good to say. But then he would have been lying, which would have been even worse.

“I’m afraid so, Chancellor. We still haven’t found the other two Camiens who managed to slip away.” 

“These ones can’t even fly!” Rattrap’s helm snapped up like he was trying to make himself dizzy, and the two at his shoulders were like bobbleheads as their body moved their servos around with renewed fury. “How fragging difficult can it be to find two aliens between a few miles of city! How has NO-ONE seen them?!” He sprang up onto his peds to start pacing back and forth behind his chair, the snowflakes beyond the window disappearing amidst his silhouette. Looking at him in profile, the finer details of his deformity obscured in shadow, almost made him seem normal. But if he was truly ‘normal’, then he wouldn’t have been chosen as leader. 

“We think that the trial broadcast may have encouraged certain Cybertronian cells to shelter them for the time being,” Dinobot informed him, referring to ‘we’ as his whole task force when really he meant himself. “But we’re searching beneath the surface as well as through the cities, and we’ve offered a reward for any useful information.” Monopoly had been oh so generous as to offer a few drones for the subsurface patrols; even he knew how reckless it was to send actual people down there without knowing what was in store (and he also knew he couldn’t just take all the credit for himself if Camiens were found down there, hence why he only offered ‘a few’ of his drones). 

“What kind of reward?” Rattrap’s pacing had paused, and he looked at Dinobot with all three heads (well, barring the one that was never awake).

“Credits. Accommodation upgrades. State-of-the-art tech.” Anything the council could easily spare and that everyone else would clamour for. “They can choose whichever one suits them best, only once the Camiens are found.”

“Yes, yes… whatever works.” Rattrap’s brief burst of energy seemed to subside, and he returned to his seat with a heavy sigh that just about masked the sound of his frame falling into place. There he sat, rubbing a hand over his optics with snowflakes glittering in his shadow, while Dinobot stood with nothing else to offer, nothing to convince the Chancellor that all was not yet lost. Then, briefly, Dinobot wondered if he should ask about Windblade, or Metroplex; if he was even allowed to ask about such things. He hadn’t been told about either of them, after all. With the situation so delicate, it made sense that bots would only be told what they needed to know. And, right now, Rattrap had decided that Dinobot did not need to know.

Even so, he felt like he had a right to at least inquire. As far as he knew, he had been the one to warn Rattrap about Windblade in the first place. He could help find her, if he knew to look out for her. He could be useful, if he was only allowed to be.

“Chancellor,” he eventually said, “may I ask about what is being done with the other prisoners?”

Rattrap’s hand covered one half of his face, and the other half curled inwards in consideration. “What’s being done...?”

“You had said they’d be deported back to Caminus,” Dinobot clarified, “yet we still have them detained within the building. If they are as dangerous as we fear, shouldn’t we remove them from the planet’s surface as soon as possible?” 

That made most sense to him, what with all the resources and time wasted in just keeping them locked up when they were somehow able to escape anyway. They still had the Camien ship on lockdown on the Hydrax Plateau, another waste of resources spent on guarding the ugly thing. Why not just load them all up and send them on their way? When the other three were eventually re-captured then they could take shuttles back home, or have another delegation come rescue them. Keeping these terrorists all separated was the key, Dinobot was sure, and most of all he just wanted them gone. Just the thought that they were somewhere far below his feet, plotting murder and mayhem and Primus-knows what else… it was enough to give a grown mech nightmares, and it did.

“Yes, yes, I’m... in the middle of negotiations with their leader,” Rattrap said after a short pause, folding his servos together to hide his claws even as his fangs framed a sharp frown. “The so-called ‘Mistress of Flame’.” 

“More like Mistress of Lame,” his left head snickered, “hahahaha!”

“Despite her disgust for our kind,” Rattrap continued after slapping the loudmouth across his snout, “she seems willing to pay for the safe return of her own. After all, she did gift us with some very interesting tech just for letting the terrorists in. We shall see what she offers for them first.”

“I see.” That also made sense to Dinobot, though it did nothing to calm his spark. What if this Mistress was stalling while planning to send an army after Cybertron, to finish the job her first delegation had failed at? Surely she wouldn’t just admit defeat and take her people back with an apology for trying to kill Cybertron’s entire leadership, and the Chancellor was too smart to not know that for himself. No wonder he was so exhausted, trying to keep himself and his soldiers and all of his people alive through this latest crisis. This was how he was repaid for his generosity, for trying to think better of their other ancestors.  

“I just hope her offer makes all the trouble worth it,” Rattrap added with a weary sigh, as if talking to himself. “Especially when this is all my fault. Foolish to let them come here. Foolish to think they would have accepted us...”

Dinobot blinked as Rattrap shuttered his optics— even his disrespectful left face looked solemn for once. He didn’t know what to say, if he was supposed to say anything. The Chancellor had never been one who needed reassurance or platitudes. Then again, he’d also never had to deal with threats like this before. The Gestalt Rebellion hadn’t come from beyond the stars. 

“It is no-one’s fault that they betrayed us, Chancellor,” Dinobot eventually said, after searching a few long moments for the right words. “You showed them every kindness and courtesy. We couldn’t have known that they would treat us like… the Cybertronians did.”

He had known from the very beginning that they couldn’t be trusted, of course, but even he had more tact than to gloat about such a thing in front of his superior. It didn’t make him feel better to have known, anyway. For the first time in his life, he had wanted to be wrong. 

“But we should have known,” Rattrap insisted. “I should have known. I should have… never mind.” He shook his head, the other two listing left to right in turn, and sat as upright as his spinal strut would allow. The mask of the leader was secure once more. “Was that all, Dinobot?”

There was still much more in his mind, much more to say, much more to ask- but Dinobot knew that now was not the time. “Yes, sir. I shall continue my search for the other two escapees.”

“Good, good, make yourself useful… more useful than some idiots around here, at least.”

Dinobot did not look back as he left the office, though he wished he’d had when he saw who was standing outside as if he was waiting for an audience of his own.

“Dear, oh dear.” Tarantulas scraped dirt from one of his talons with a tsk from his fangs. “The Chancellor’s heads must all be spinning from the recent excitement.”

Dinobot saw no point in hiding his scowl from the scientist. “You call the escape of dangerous alien terrorists excitement, Tarantulas?”

“More exciting than the usual Cybertronian riff-raff, at least.” When he shrugged his back legs clacked together, thicker and far more threatening than his daughter’s (not to say that Airachnid’s own were not a sight to be feared by anyone with sense). “Though, of course, I’m one of the few who can afford to have a sense of humour about the whole thing.”

“And why is that?”

Tarantulas laughed, and the fangs around his jaws seemed to squirm like they were alive. “Because I know all is not as bad as it seems. And I bring news that will surely turn all three of the dear Chancellor’s frowns upside-down.”

“Is that so.” Dinobot didn’t treat it like a question, and neither did Tarantulas himself. 

“You’ll see for yourself soon enough, I’m sure.” The spider moved as if he was going to place a hand on Dinobot’s shoulder, but just as the mech flinched away his hand went instead to the office door. Dinobot was more than happy to move out of Tarantulas’ way, still reeling from the possibility of being touched by him. 

Cybertronians were not, and never would be, his friends. But some technorganics were just as bad. Not that he could ever admit such a thing, especially when the Chancellor’s trust was now at a premium. Dinobot had already put himself in an unfortunate position with his knowledge about Windblade, even if Rattrap wasn’t yet aware of it. He wanted to know what Tarantulas had to say, what ‘good news’ he apparently had in store. But Dinobot couldn’t know, for his own good. As the spider had said, he’d see it for himself eventually. When it was time. For now, the smart option was to simply leave and do his job. 

That would be enough. For now.

It was a long walk away from the long drop, through the snow and spotlights of a city at night and at full alert.

Starscream never spoke once, not as he crawled through ditches under bridges nor inched alongside giant pits filled with half-frozen water. Windblade wanted to ask about it all— how different Cybertron’s landscape was away from its capital, how different it was from any part of Caminus— but she knew that Starscream was in a delicate state as it was. His body was falling apart, his mind probably not in much better shape. He wasn’t talking for a reason, and she knew better than to rob him of the silence he likely craved. She only mumbled to herself, to distract from the stabbing pain in her wings and back that flared up with every step forward.

Even if flying had been a safe option, she knew she was in no shape for it. Besides, she had no way to carry Starscream through the skies with her. Just one look at his own wings made it clear that they were currently nothing more than giant dead weights stapled to his back. He might have been better off just ripping them entirely from his spinal strut, just so he could move a little faster. 

Though, if Windblade was in his position, would she take such action and ensure she could never fly again? Of all the awful things that had happened to her that night, it was the mere thought of that happening which made her shudder the most.

There was a close call at the far end of one of the bridges they lurked under— a checkpoint had been set up to screen anyone trying to cross. Starscream didn’t even curse at the sight of flashing lights and heavily-armoured technorganics stationed to capture them, instead he simply turned around and started climbing out of the ditch at its middle point. His claws made rough footholds out of the sloped metal walls, and they were steep enough that the darkness covered them both as they clambered up into the unknown that waited at the top. From her new vantage point Windblade couldn’t help looking over at the checkpoint, the vague figures likely under orders to apprehend her— if not outright kill her— on sight. She moved on before they could notice they were being watched. 

On the other side of the ditch there was some kind of sprawling suburb, though every other building seemed to have collapsed into rubble-filled shells. It was one of these buildings that Starscream hobbled into, dragging himself along the wall of the cramped alleyway and falling through the nearest hole before Windblade could offer him any help.

Inside, the place was almost gutted with no lingering sign of what it once was. A shattered staircase led up to a mezzanine drenched in shadow, and Starscream insisted on pulling himself up those stairs just so he could seat himself at the very edge of the balcony, where the bannisters had long since crumbled away. Windblade stayed at the bottom of the steps, her optics scanning the decayed walls for any point where someone else could enter and ambush them.

“Is it safe here?” she asked, only loud enough for Starscream to hear from his place dangling above her. “Are we far from Technotropolis?” It felt like they’d walked half the length of the planet, and even if they had it still wouldn’t have eased her anxieties about Rattrap or one of his soldiers lurking around every corner.

Starscream still didn’t speak. Not at first. He started with a growl, a rough gargle of his vocaliser’s circuitry as if it had forgotten how to form words. Then, eventually, a single scarred word emerged from his scarred mouth.

“Iacon.”

Windblade stared up at him, hating that this was yet another thing she didn’t or couldn’t understand.

“It is not Technotropolis,” he explained, saying the city’s false name with such scorn that Windblade almost flinched. “It is Iacon. It always has been, and it always will be.”

Windblade gulped, slowly understanding yet another one of Rattrap’s lies. He’d changed the name of the city to one that suited him, and his kind, better. But Starscream still remembered its true name, and he wouldn’t give it up without a fight.

“Okay… are we far from Iacon?” she corrected. Starscream’s optics, bright red pinpricks that ebbed like lava, narrowed as they stared down at her.

“Far enough,” he told her, finally pointing his gaze elsewhere. “I’d get off the ground floor if I was you. If this place collapses, you won’t want to be underneath it all.”

Windblade felt her cables tighten, when they were already so taut that they were likely to snap at the slightest pull, but she understood that it was his way of inviting her to join him upstairs. So she made her way up, taking each step two at a time with the fear that the whole structure might collapse under her weight. Though Starscream had climbed them just fine, and with all his grotesque modifications he easily weighed twice as much as she did, Windblade didn’t trust anything at that moment, especially not ancient infrastructure on a planet that clearly hated her on principle.

She reached Starscream’s spot as the floor beneath her creaked, and carefully sat down on the other side with a sufficient gap between them both, wide enough that their EM fields wouldn’t overlap. He watched her sit, his optics flicking between her and the gap she’d left, and her legs folded securely under her frame rather than dangling loose over the edge of the mezzanine. Without the familiar security of her armour, it was hard not to curl into herself just to give some feeling of coverage. Pit, she could deal with being stripped to her protoform so long as she had Chromia to keep her safe, or Maxima or Afterburner or…

She’d left them behind. She’d had to. But Primus, she felt guilty for it. She’d elected to save her own aft first, and according to Starscream she was supposed to feel grateful for it, that at least one person had had managed to escape.

When the mech looked back to her a second time, she was ready to challenge his gaze with her own. Blue against red. She remembered that his spark had been red, as it had flared to life in response to her own. Which made sense, as the light from your optics was the same light from your spark. That was the only glimpse Camiens were ever allowed into another’s chamber, usually. That was how it was supposed to be. 

Windblade didn’t want to face those optics anymore, but Starscream looked away before she could. She couldn’t tell what else had caught his attention, if anything at all. Likely he just wanted to not look at anything. 

“What do you want to know, Windblade of Caminus?” he asked. The way he said her name, like it was a title, seemed like it was meant to be mocking without sounding like it. Maybe he was just too exhausted to put the extra effort through his vocaliser. 

“You don’t have to call me that,” she muttered. “Just Windblade is fine.”

“Just Windblade. Well, then.” He might have been smiling as he said it, but he didn’t turn his head and Windblade didn't think he had much to be smiling about. She'd never know what face he was making, but everything else he could tell her, all the questions he could finally answer for her...

Where to even start? She wanted to know everything, even the things she’d be better off not knowing at all. Especially those ones. She knew why they’d tried to kill her. She knew why the technorganics hated her, and her friends, just because of their shared ancestors. But there was plenty left that she was still left to wonder.

“Why… why were you a ‘Sparkcracker’? What did they do to you?” She felt her glossa freeze on that terrible name, and Starscream clearly flinched upon hearing it.

“You don’t waste time with small talk, I see,” he muttered.

“If it’s too difficult to talk about, you don’t have to—”

“No,” he interrupted swiftly, a warning against even finishing that sentence. “I’ll tell you. You’re the only person I can tell, right now. And if I wait too long to get it out… I might lose it forever.” He inhaled, his vents making harsh grating sounds as they tried to open through all the rust, preparing for the sad story he had to tell.

“They fitted my chest with hydraulic pumps.” His hand went to his chest, the worn-down tips of his claws settling over the centre of his sealed chamber. 

“The edges of the plates were sharpened to a razor point.” Fingers to the seams between the armour plates, so filthy with long-dried energon that if he cut himself on his own metal the stain would have been indiscernible. 

“My mouth was soldered over.” He touched his lips, two fingers trapping a hiss as he grazed the scars still present.

“My optics blinded.” He did not cover them, instead placing his hand on his forehead as they clicked shut on their own. And whatever those optics saw made him grimace, like he was waking from a dream or nightmare, as if he feared that if he kept them closed any longer he would wake up truly blind all over again. In fact, when they flew open, they immediately looked left to see if Windblade was still there. At the sight of her, he seemed to relax ever so slightly.

“That answers what they did to me,” he finished, leaving Windblade a chance to change her mind on whether she wanted to know the other answer. And she did. 

“But… why?” Seeing what was done, almost being a victim of it, was horrifying enough, but it meant nothing without knowing the reason behind it all. Starscream seemed to appreciate that, or was just impressed by the extent of her morbid curiosity. Either way, he decided to grace her with his full attention this time. 

“You already know that Cybertron wasn’t always like this,” he began. “It wasn’t a perfect place. No such thing exists. But… it was peaceful. I’d thought it was, at least, until I stepped outside for the first time and had my first encounter with a technorganic.” And try as he might, he wasn’t quite able to mask his disgust on that last word. Though, Windblade could hardly blame him with what the likes of Rattrap had done to him.

“So they weren’t lying. About... being treated badly.” She spoke cautiously, treading carefully, trying to dig for the unbiased truth beneath his steel-thick anger. Starscream huffed, a low-effort sigh. 

“That much was true. People had their reasons to scorn them. Mostly superstitious slag that only made them feel a little better about themselves… but that’s a long enough story on its own. The first thing to understand is that I was not one of the cruel ones. I never minded the organics. Not as much as others, at least.” He curled his lip, as if wanting to bite down despite the pain he’d give himself, and it seemed he was having trouble finding what else to tell her.

“If you weren’t bad to them,” Windblade tried to prompt, “then… why did this happen to you?” But despite her caution, she knew she had said the wrong thing just a nanoklick too late. Starscream hid his glare under nothing, and all the scars in the universe couldn’t have masked his scowl. 

“Are you saying my imprisonment was a valid punishment?” he confronted. “That I deserved this fate?” He was so incensed that his wings, which seemed useless in every way from damage, could be seen lifting up at a sharp angle like they were ready weapons. Windblade had felt her own do that sometimes, but she’d never been furious enough to lift them up so far...

“No, no, no,” she insisted with the urge to pull away from him, for her own safety. “I… no, I didn’t mean…” Her head spun left and right like it was on a faulty joint, protesting her mistake no matter how dizzy it made her, and her own wings almost overlapped from how low they were hanging from her spinal strut. The movement brought her pain, of course, but it was nothing compared to what she could suffer from offending Starscream. He could just get up and walk away, without another word about anything. Or just perish in front of her out of stubbornness. He seemed like the kind of mech who would do that.

But he did neither of those things. When Windblade’s head finally stopped shaking its plea for forgiveness, she found that his own was hanging low. He stared down at the ground floor over the edge of the landing, as if contemplating jumping, but his legs were frozen. 

“Of course you didn’t,” he said, quiet and exhausted, utterly drained from that single moment of emotion. “Well. The revolution was nothing but chaos. It didn’t matter if you had organic friends, if you housed them and fuelled them. Everyone and anyone mechanical was a target. Especially those born from bonds.”

Windblade felt herself gearing up to ask about the ‘revolution’, if he meant the gestalt rebellion Rattrap had talked about or something else entirely, but the questions were instantly pushed aside in favour of another. She’d heard the phrase ‘bond-born’ before, from Rattrap’s own mouth. 

“Bonds…?” She prompted Starscream for explanation, preparing for some look of condescension or ridicule in turn when it must have been something so obvious to everyone else, but he hardly even glanced up at her.

“Why else would Rattrap devise such an elaborate way of execution?” he went on, as if that would answer her. “It’s a spectacle. It’s a joke to him, a...” He cut himself off with a self-imposed snarl, and when his jaw stretched he almost tore open the already-ragged skin of his mouth once more.

“It’s a mockery… they kill us by our very means of creation and connection.”

Windblade watched him grip the components still bolted into his chest; the framework for the hydraulics, the pumps themselves, the cage that turned his spark into something deadly, something to be laughed at. It sounded so serious, so important to him. And yet...

“I don’t understand…”

“Spark bonds, Windblade.” He actually sounded disappointed, like he was trying to educate someone fresh from a hotspot, as his hands went limp. “Surely you know the impact of such things. Why they happen. What they lead to.”

She took a moment to think, to genuinely try and figure it out for herself. The bond… meant two sparks coming together. The concept alone was enough to almost scramble her circuits, but she tried to go with it. So if something could be ‘born’ from such a bond… what would it be? 

It had been a long night. She could practically smell her boards starting to fry.

“I don’t… I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She wished she did, not only to avoid the roll of optics and heavy sigh of her companion. But neither of those happened. Starscream didn’t look disappointed anymore.

“I see… Caminus must be a very lonely place, then,” he said. 

“Why do you say that?” With how many people were in the colony, it was impossible to ever be alone. Cityspeakers had their bodyguards, dancers had their partners, singers had their audiences, even the Mistress had the Forgefire Parliament and the Torchbearers and other dedicated disciples. Solitude was a myth, unless it was forced upon you or you made great effort to create it for yourself.

Windblade had never known if she loved or hated the place for its complete lack of privacy, compensating so much for its own isolation on the cosmic scale. Starscream had admitted he’d heard of the colony, so he must have known what the culture was. Though, if he’d been imprisoned when Rattrap assumed power… where the universe was concerned, five centuries was not long at all— Windblade herself had been born only three centuries ago. But it was long enough for places to change. Caminus may have been a different world, when she’d not been around to see it. Cybertron had certainly been different.

“No children,” Starscream clarified, as if that was supposed to mean anything. “No lovers. You don’t use your sparks at all?”

“What are you supposed to ‘use’ them for?” Windblade meant the question with all the sincerity she could spare, wanting a serious answer to give her some idea of what Cybertronians had been doing with themselves (and each other) since Caminus had left them behind. It was like being told that she’d been using her wings completely wrong all this time, and then being expected to figure out the right way all by herself. 

Starscream narrowed his optics, and their glow was a little brighter as if his own spark was making fun of her. “What is a spark to you, Windblade?” 

Though, if she wasn’t mistaken, his own question sounded as sincere as hers. Probably just to set her up for more embarrassment. Even so, she answered the only way she knew how to.

“They’re gifts from Primus, to be protected and shielded at all costs. Touching one… even showing one to someone else is unthinkable.” She said this to try and empathise with him, to prove that the process of execution via the spark was just as disgusting to her as it was to him, even if the deeper meanings for Cybertronians were still lost on her.

“And who told you all of that?” he asked.

“The Mistress of Flame. She’s our Cityspeaker. A messenger of Caminus’ will, and of Primus.” Then she realised that he already knew who she was. He’d been listening at the trial, after all. He’d heard what she’d said about the state of Cybertron as it now was. And, with what she knew now about her ‘hosts’, Windblade realised that the Mistress had been right all along. If they’d listened to her, they’d all be on their way back home by now. 

She would know something was wrong by now. Windblade hadn’t reported to her since the previous cycle, and there was no way for Rattrap to fake a message that would ease her suspicion. She’d send another team, soldiers and bodyguards, maybe even the Torchbearers themselves, to see what had happened to her delegation. She wouldn’t let Rattrap get away with it. She’d come to rescue Windblade, and everyone else. They just had to survive until then. Whenever ‘then’ was...

But her wistful, desperate hopes were interrupted. It sounded like Starscream was choking again, his vents grinding as they opened and closed, his frame shaking even as his legs stayed still and heavy. Then he inhaled sharply, and Windblade realised he was laughing.

“From what I saw of your trial, I’d assumed you had some sense in your processor. But you’re really just a foolish, foolish femme...” Starscream laughed with his mouth clamped shut, as if to try and stifle the shrieking of gears and pistons around his frame, and Windblade felt her own twist as her spark— already the victim of enough punishment for one evening— flared in her chest.

“Don’t call me foolish for not knowing things no-one will even tell me about,” she snapped, her patience wearing as thin as a wafer of semiconductor. They were supposed to be helping each other, the sole survivors of whatever evil experiment Rattrap had been running for the last five hundred years, yet he could do nothing but belittle and mock her. Which was bitterly ironic, considering his main complaint about his ‘operation’. And she didn’t think being locked up was much of an excuse for being so rude.

Starscream stared at her, no longer laughing.

“A fair point,” he admitted. “So you’re not foolish after all. Then why, pray tell, would you put all your faith into someone who claims to talk to Primus of all people?”

Windblade opened her mouth without having anything to say. The Mistress was Primus’ chosen, and had been such ever since Caminus had lived on Cybertron’s surface. She’d predicted the ancient Quintesson invasion, after all, because Primus had warned her about it. That was why Caminus, and the Torchbearers, and everyone else who heeded her warning, had left. She didn’t claim to talk to Primus. She simply did. 

But then… why hadn’t Primus warned her about what else would happen on Cybertron? Not just that her delegation would be captured and framed for crimes they never committed, but that His body would be taken over by mutations of His descendants. The technorganics had claimed that Primus had been on their side all along, which was why the Well of All Sparks lay dead at the planet’s core. Did they believe that Primus wanted His people exterminated because they were ‘obsolete’, that they were just doing as He wished? 

Maybe it was worse than that. Maybe Primus had died long ago, and the Well had died with Him, and the technorganics were simply in denial. But the Mistress would have been distraught over such a thing. She would have known immediately if her connection to Primus, a connection stronger than any Cybertronian "spark bond", had been suddenly severed or left unattended. She would have told the colony, assembled a force to storm Cybertron and find out for herself what had happened to their God. She wouldn’t have waited this long. She wouldn’t have tried to hide it, if she even could.

Unless…

…

She couldn’t hear Primus at all.

Windblade almost slapped herself, actually raising her hand to do it before grabbing her wrist. She’d just thought of something very dangerous, something that simply couldn’t be true. After all the lies and deception she’d already endured, that was one possibility she simply couldn’t even consider. Never. Never. She wanted to scold Starscream for even suggesting it. But that would only bolster his argument, make himself look even more smug.

“I thought I was the one asking questions,” she pointed out, knowing it was a weak diversion even as she clung to it. But it seemed to suit him well enough as his mouth cracked open, the scars forming the faintest smile.

“That you were. Go on, then.”

Windblade inhaled, pulling the stale air in deep to her frame even as it chilled her. Their shelter did nothing to keep the weather out, but she didn’t mind it much. It kept her awake, and alert. They were still fugitives, and this peace was only temporary. If it could even be called peace for either of them.

“So…” She combed her processor for other questions, but there weren’t many that she didn’t think would make him laugh at her again. One stood out, though. One about him.

“The ‘Sparkcracking’ is symbolic,” she stated, mostly for herself. “Rattrap uses it to kill Cybertronians who get in his way. And you’re the only one who can… do it.”

Starscream grunted to save himself the effort of nodding, and Windblade hated that she felt relieved. That there was really only one machine on Cybertron like him, and that her friends would at least be spared what she’d almost gone through.

“So why you? Why did they turn you into… something so horrible?” If he had been the only one to receive treatment like this, there had to be some reason for it. There had to be a reason that it was him and not someone else. If there was, only he would know it. But would he even tell her? 

Starscream’s jaw was set tight, the solder seams on his chin like the thick cords of his neck. It wasn’t immediately obvious if he would speak, or if he would just fall forward and let the ground meet him. His mouth eventually did open, but it was a while before anything came out.

“I was important once,” he told her, and each word was calculated and proofed and double-proofed before it was allowed out. “They got to me last. I can only assume… they wanted to use the last survivor of the old powers as a message. I’m a… I was a secret. But Cybertronians notice when people disappear. The technorganic descendants sleep soundly, not able to even imagine that something like me can exist, and the few surviving mechanicals spread rumors of what will happen if they fight back.”

So that was the truth of Cybertron. Their chancellor was a dictator in disguise. He’d allowed the Camiens within his circle, and then used them as tools to further his agenda. Metroplex had seen it happen from the very beginning. His warning had arrived too late. But it hadn’t been about him. It hadn’t been about mending the rift between colony and home.

The Camiens, Windblade and her friends, were nothing but fuel for Rattrap’s genocide. 

And she wanted to scream. She wanted to tear this already-destroyed building down, to blaze her way through every guard covered in fur and scales and leather and teeth, to rip every one of Rattrap’s heads from his shoulders. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to go home. She wanted to scream.

And she hadn’t even been his main victim. If she was feeling incandescent with her fury, murderous and vicious, needing to put Rattrap through all the suffering he himself had ordered over the five centuries… what about Starscream? How was he sitting there, so calm in his composure? It couldn’t have just been exhaustion leaving him empty. He couldn’t have been worn down, if he’d managed to pull himself this far away from his prison. He couldn’t have accepted what Rattrap had done to him, if he’d been so incensed at the suggestion that it was his own fault. It was right there in his optics, in his weaponised spark. 

He wasn’t done yet. Not for a long while. The fire was still there in him, just laying dormant as he recovered. 

It then occurred to Windblade that she hadn’t even thanked him for rescuing her. He probably wouldn’t have accepted it, and it felt too late to say it now. But she still wanted to say something, some small token of appreciation for what he’d done, of understanding for what he’d had to do.

“I’m sorry this happened to you, Starscream.” 

He let out some sort of whistle, like his vents were clogged and rasping. “I suppose you are.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Windblade had expected some weary hostility in response, but she really didn’t know what to make of his state of mind from those few wheezed words.

“It means,” he growled with closed optics, “that I don’t need your sympathy. Or pity.”

“I wasn’t…” Windblade felt her glossa fail her, because she knew denying it would just turn it into a lie. Then she tucked her glossa into the bottom of her mouth, like a stone weighing down her jaw. “Well, I don’t need yours either.”

“Glad to see we’re on the same page.”

Windblade had almost been ready to just leave him there to get over himself, to give him some silence so they could both calm down and consider what the Pit they were going to do next, but she could hear the smug smile on his mouth when he had absolutely nothing to be smiling about, and she felt a familiar fire being fed in her spark, the same one that had fuelled her righteous outburst at the trial. Despite the abuse and the trauma and the energon it had lost, her frame was conducting enough heat that the cold surrounding it was turning to steam that came off of her in wispy clouds.

“If you’re just going to sit there and treat me like slag,” she snapped, staring at her ‘saviour’ through those clouds, “then why even bother saving me in the first place?”

Starscream eased open one optic at her, and then rolled his shoulders in a heavy and painful shrug. “Because you freed me first. And I owed you for that.” He looked away then, to whatever point in the building’s shadows kept catching his attention. 

“So that’s it? You just don’t like being in people’s debt?” Even as Windblade said it, she knew that couldn’t possibly be all there was to it despite how Starscream nodded.

“There you go.” Then he closed his optics once more, and it was like he was a statue all over again. With how frustrating and antagonistic he insisted on being... maybe he was just tired. Well, after all that had happened, of course he was. Windblade wanted to just lie back and fall into recharge herself, though her anxiety was far higher than her exhaustion could ever catch up to. If she fell asleep here, she’d wake up to soldiers dragging her back out into the snow and throwing her into another cell to await some other cruel and unusual execution.

And if they found Starscream too, would they take him back and chain him down in the middle of that room again? Would they dismantle him, or do something worse? Was there anything worse than being turned into a spark destroyer?

If Windblade wasn’t careful, if they didn’t find somewhere safe soon, she was sure she would find out for herself.

“This whole planet will be looking for us, won’t they?” she asked, barely a whisper. “If they don’t think we’re dead.” When there was no answer, she assumed that Starscream was asleep after all. But he inhaled deeply, and, shockingly, actually told her something that gave her hope.

“Not the whole planet. Some old Cybertronians still live. Some are brave. Most are stupid. I only meet those who are both.”

“People who aren’t technorganic?” Windblade thought back to Ironhide, one of Rattrap’s four guards, the only one she’d seen that didn’t look like the others. Of course, there had to be others like him, like herself, hiding far out of sight where they couldn’t be hurt. “You think they’d help us?”

“If they’re brave, and stupid, and somehow still alive despite that.”

“We need to find them, then,” Windblade declared, fighting back a twitch on her lips that so desperately wanted to be a smile. “Them and my friends Velocity and Hot Shot, and the others still locked up—”

“I told you,” Starscream cut in with a growl. “It’s useless. You only escaped because of me. And because of that, they’ll increase security tenfold. Your other friends will be dead soon eno—”

“Don’t say that! You don’t know them!” Windblade found herself standing up, though she didn’t remember moving her legs, and her head started swimming from the sudden change in posture. But before she could sit back down or collapse, Starscream rearranged himself so that he was standing too. And even with his spinal strut bent, his wings nothing more than dead weight pressing down on his shoulders, he still towered over her.

“But I know you,” he told her, as if that was answer enough on its own. “You’re the first Camien I’ve encountered, and you’ll likely be the last.”

“Stop it!” Windblade gritted her denta as she held her head in her hands, keeping them occupied so she didn’t try to grab him and break something off by shaking him. “Things are bad enough as it is, there’s no need for you to make it worse for the both of us!”

And he laughed at her, though it was no feeble chuckle or choking on his own air this time. It was a sound that steamrolled through anyone’s audials, that announced to anyone in the same district that there was someone here of unrivalled strength and humour. This was a snapshot of Starscream in his prime— before the sparkcracking, before Rattrap ruined him— and though Windblade was the target of his jeering she could do nothing but watch in awe as his insides rattled, his entire infrastructure shaking like it would fall apart at the slightest breeze, yet still he continued to laugh like being heard was more important to him in that moment than being alive.

“That’s what you call it? ‘Making it worse’?” he asked her through stray gasps, the strength of which almost flew him face-forward onto the ground as his spine jerked back and forth. “I call it the truth, Windblade of Caminus. I call it what it is...” His heavy intakes were now nothing like laughter, as he gripped his chest plates like they were all that were keeping him standing upright.

“What I’ve seen ...” Then, with his claws wedged deep into the razor-edged cracks and seams, he started tearing the plates apart— the hydraulics, the fluid lines, the bolts and screws and circuitry that made him into Rattrap’s pet monster, all clattering to his peds even as his digits were torn apart.

“Starscream, stop it—!” Windblade stepped forward to try and restrain him, knowing he was gutting and bleeding himself dry in his fury, but he stumbled back and listed to his side like he was about to fall off the landing, or at least was threatening to if she tried to touch him. 

“Being forced to spend the last five hundred years executing my own kind,” he hissed through the pain and energon, through Windblade’s own shock, “perpetrating our own extinction—!”

And then he tore out a vital fuel line, or the trauma of the night or the years had finally caught up to him, as he keeled over onto his knees from the force of the energon flood coming out of his mouth. With how dark the desolate building was, his fuel was bright like splattered lava and it burned Windblade’s optics to look at it too long. Yet she couldn’t look away.

“Starscream…?” She was by his side, not caring if his purged energon stained her protoform or jammed her digits together. She tried to hold his wings back, mindful to not touch them in the delicate areas, though even when her digits grazed the central joint he didn’t even twitch. He was limp like a toy, helpless as his fuel tanks emptied themselves all over the floor, and only Windblade’s grip on his wings stopped him from collapsing. 

‘He’s actually dying,’ she thought, even though it couldn’t be true. ‘Oh no. Oh no…’

She couldn’t fix this. She wouldn’t even know where to start— Primus, why couldn’t Velocity be with her, or Chromia to smack some sense into her, or even Lightbright to keep her going out of spite...?

And then, as if it couldn’t get any worse, a voice called out from downstairs.

“Whoever’s in here, would it pain you to keep it down?!” an unfamiliar mech bellowed. “My patients are suffering enough as it is!”

Starscream pulled himself away from Windblade’s grip with the last of his strength, his mouth and ravaged chest covered in energon, and she saw him shake his helm as he pulled away from the edge of the mezzanine. But she couldn’t tell what he was trying to tell her— stay quiet? Or just make the newcomer go away? If it was a technorganic, they’d surely summon guards. But if it was a Cybertronian, there was a chance they’d offer help.

Either way… Starscream wasn’t going to live for much longer. And Windblade wouldn’t last long without him. 

“Sorry… sir.” Windblade struggled to raise her voice as she tried to stand up, shakily making her way to the top of the stairs before the mech thought to start climbing them. “We were… I was just about to—”

She cut herself off when she saw who was waiting on the ground floor. A Cybertronian. At least, she didn’t see any signs of mutation. No fur or claws. No wings, either. The only other things she could really see were that he was red, he had wheels on his back, and he had his hands on his hips like he was expecting a grovelling apology. From the bright red light of his optics— very different to Starscream’s own despite the same colour— she saw him tilt his helm to one side. 

“Ma’am, are you aware you’re lacking armour plates?” He pointed a long talon at her as if she really didn’t know she was down to her protoform. 

“Yes,” she sighed, ever so slightly frustrated despite the dying mech lying in the shadows behind her. “Very aware.”

“Well... you look familiar,” the mech said. “Have we met before?”

Windblade felt a lump in her vocaliser, seriously suspecting that it was her spark trying to flee her body once and for all. The trial had been broadcast over the whole planet, hadn’t it? Everyone, technorganic or not, thought she was a terrorist, and her own Cityspeaker marks made it impossible for her to hide. Her face was in shadow, and the distance between the two floors helped blur her details, but she was sure that she would eventually be recognised, and even more sure that anyone who took her into custody would be generously rewarded...

“No, no, definitely not,” she assured, walking backwards into the safe darkness of the second floor before turning to flee. “Sorry again, I’ll be on my way just now—”

“Hold on a nanoklick, your back—” Before Windblade could even turn back towards the stairs, the mech had reached the top in a matter of nanoklicks and was gripping her shoulders like they were handlebars. She froze with a yelp, though her wings were fluttering from her cable spasms as the mech ran his hands over the plates. Even though he was careful to avoid the sensitive areas (or just lucky), there was still something horribly invading about a stranger’s hands on her frame, especially after her spark had been bared naked just a few hours ago. 

“My goodness,” the mech tutted even as Windblade tried to get away from him, “it’s a miracle you can even stand with your strut in that state. And your wings are almost completely bent! And you’ve lost all that energon?! How long have you had this for!?” 

Then Windblade realised that he was the answer to her silent prayers. He had patients, he knew something was wrong, and he assumed the massive puddle of pink energon on the floor had come from her— he was a medic.

When he finally released her, she whirled around to face him with careful hope, and even more careful glances around the floor for Starscream. But he was nowhere in sight, not even with his tell-tale energon leaks. 

“Um…” Windblade stalled in her answer to try and look around the second floor for him. “It’s only been for an hour, but—”

He grabbed her again before she could finish, pulling her down the stairs with such speed that her peds would have left skid marks on the ground.

“You’ll need them fixed ASAP if you don’t want the damage to be permanent,” he told her like it was a lecture. “Luckily my skills are more than up to the task, but I do charge extra for priority work, so you better have good credit or I’ll bend those wings back out of shape myself.”

Windblade looked over her shoulder for any other sign of Starscream, seeing only a long trail of energon leading from over the edge of the mezzanine to the ground floor, but then her attention was back on the medic when he brought up the one thing she hadn’t considered, the one thing to bring all her hope crashing back down to rock bottom.

“I… don’t have any credits,” she told him. And then he instantly released her, looking over her like he was expecting her to be infectious of something.

“Oh. Well then. Should have known, if you can’t even afford armour... I better get back to work. Good luck to you!” He waved a lazy farewell with his back turned, but before Windblade could chase him down and plead for his help, any help, even just a placebo or a roof that wasn’t about to fall down…

There was that laugh again. Not nearly as rich as the one that came before, a mere shadow of itself, but it was still a sound that was unmistakably Starscream. And it was coming from under the mezzanine, where the energon trail kept dripping away from above.

“Over five centuries, Knockout,” Starscream called out with a cough, “and you haven’t changed one bit.”

He must have somehow lowered himself to the ground and then rolled away into the darkness. Windblade went to approach his hiding spot, but then the medic pushed right past her like he had a score to settle.

“And just who are you to be acting snide over how I run my practice? Are you the same slagger leaving me bad reviews on the—?” There was a bright shine as the medic switched his headlights on, and as he adjusted to the sudden glare he leapt backwards in fright.

There he was, lying on the floor amidst a mild wreckage of crumpled steel and his own gore. The energon was blinding underneath his hand, where he’d tried to stop it from bleeding out. No wonder a doctor would be so appalled at the sight. But when Windblade reached the medic’s side, he inched closer like he wasn’t quite sure if he was even looking at a person. And then he whispered, as if he was trying to talk to a ghost.

“Starscream…?”

“Good to see you too.” Starscream spluttered, and his mouth was clearly outlined by the spread of energon drops. 

“I… where…? I thought you were…”

“I only look dead, Knockout. Though I probably will be in the next hour if I don’t…” His vocaliser suddenly failed, stretching out the words into indecipherable sounds. And that was enough to spur Knockout into action. He kept his headlights on, clearing space around Starscream’s body so he could see the full extent of the damage. Windblade helped in silence, not knowing what to do or even think. It was either pure coincidence that this medic was someone Starscream had once known, or Primus was working overtime to try and make her faithful again. 

Either way, Windblade allowed herself to feel… calm. Not quite safe, not yet. But she could take just one moment to rest as Knockout carried out his examination. He hissed, and tutted, and cursed in whispers, but he didn’t shake his helm. That meant it wasn’t hopeless. That meant he could still help.

“She with you as well?” he muttered, and Starscream could only let out a vague groan that caught in his dead vocaliser like a fibre jam in a weaving machine. 

“Right.” Knockout stood up, pulling Starscream’s nearest arm over his shoulder. “Take his other servo,” he told Windblade. “We’ll get him through the side entrance.” 

And Windblade did as ordered, even though Starscream felt like he weighed as much as one of Metroplex’s districts, even though he was still bleeding all over her. Because, even if Starscream thought that his debt was paid, Windblade still felt like she owed him. And she still had questions that couldn’t be answered by a dead mech.

“Can we go out yet?”

Velocity hissed air out through her intakes, as close to a sigh as she dared. “No, Hot Shot.” 

It was the fourth time he’d asked that same question, in that same hushed whine like he was being told he couldn’t stay out on the streets all night. But really, he was being told to shut up before he got them both killed.

“But my tanks are starving…” As if on cue, his fuel lines seemed to gurgle in protest of running empty like they always did if he went a few klicks without stuffing his face. Though, maybe the dark was just making everything sound louder. Either way, it didn’t inspire much sympathy from Velocity. 

“We’ve only been in here a few breems,” she reminded him in a harsh whisper, even though just one klick spent with him complaining felt like an hour all on its own. “You’ll last another few cycles if you need to.”

“A few CYCLES?!” 

“Quiet!” Velocity lunged forward to clamp her hands over Hot Shot’s jaw, just as he realised his outburst and tried to correct it with his own hands covering his mouth. Even with the total darkness of the cabinet, it was easy to pinpoint his location when he insisted on being so damn loud . If anyone else was listening outside, if anyone could hear them hiding inside… 

They’d both seen what happened to Maxima. Velocity had taken her back to the Hermitian with Hot Shot, under the pretense of finding something useful from the ship’s medbay, and they hadn’t been onboard for more than five klicks before there was a voice ordering them to come out. Velocity could see the guards assembled outside from the ship’s viewport, the weapons they had ready, yet Maxima told her and Hot Shot to stay put. She’d gone out by herself to see what the problem was, and they ambushed her like she was some kind of violent criminal. It took every single bot gathered there to subdue her, and while she was pinned down with cuffs digging into her wrists she’d met Velocity’s optics through the ship’s front window. She didn’t say anything, nothing that the medic could hear at least, but the warning was obvious enough without words. They’d be boarding the ship next. They’d be coming for her, and Hot Shot, and likely everyone else.

She had to hide, to keep them both safe. But there was nowhere they wouldn’t be found, nowhere the guards wouldn’t check...

Nowhere, except Nautica’s prototype subspace cabinet, the one she’d been so proud of, that Velocity had had nightmares about getting lost in. But what waited for her outside would be far worse than any nightmare. She didn’t know why Maxima had been detained, if the others were being arrested as well, if they’d all been tricked or if it was just an innocent misunderstanding. 

None of that mattered anyway. They had to hide, and that was what they did. Velocity flipped the hidden switch to open the compartment, and as the void appeared she pushed Hot Shot in before either of them could hesitate. As she threw herself inside, grabbing the edge of the door as she fell into the empty to pull it flush behind her, she almost didn’t notice the transition. The sensation of simply disappearing from existence; temporarily, only physically, but still utterly gone from her own reality. Nautica had tried to explain how the cabinet worked, with equations and diagrams and her own scale models she’d made out of scrap metal and warped plastics borrowed from various refinery dumpsters, but though her effort was admirable she had never quite understood the art of making things simple for people who weren’t as smart as her… which was pretty much everyone on Caminus. Velocity was a competent chemist (almost mandatory in her line of work, after all) but any kind of physics just gave her chills. She didn’t like thinking about how big the universe really was outside of Caminus, how many different forces of that universe were constantly working against her no matter how much she tried to prepare for the worst, to have a solution for every and any possible problem…

So why did she fling herself into a physics experiment that hadn’t even been evaluated by the scientific guild, let alone approved? Why did she even agree to leave Caminus in the first place?

...Well, at the time she knew why. Because she wanted to be useful. Because she wanted to do something other than patch up drunk idiots and clumsy dancers every other night. Because a medic didn’t see much else in a place like Caminus. How stupid that she’d wished for some danger, some chance to challenge herself, and she’d gotten exactly what she wanted.

It wasn’t her fault, wasn’t anyone ’s fault that she could think of… but it sure felt like Primus just wanted to torment her. 

“We can’t stay in here forever, Velocity.” Hot Shot mumbled like he was still holding a hand over his mouth, and Velocity wished she couldn’t hear him because she knew how right he was.

“We won’t have to,” she said, trying to convince herself as she did. “We just need to wait for Maxima.”

Maxima, who had been overwhelmed and outnumbered, who had made them both stay behind because she knew something bad was waiting outside, who was their only hope for knowing when it was safe to come out...

“You really think she’ll be coming back for us?” Hot Shot scoffed, and Velocity almost wanted to throttle him for being so realistic. “There were, like, five guards outside when you shoved us in here! And she was fragging hungover or sick or whatever was wrong with her!”

“No, she wasn’t,” she informed him. “She made that up so we could stay behind.” At first Velocity had been against lying to the Cybertronians and trying to trick them, but now she was grateful for Maxima’s paranoia. Ironic though, that she had known something was wrong yet hadn’t been able to save herself from it.

“What?! So I missed out on everything for nothing ?!” Despite all the slag they’d found themselves in, Hot Shot was still hung up on not getting to go along with Lightbright and the others, even when they were all likely rotting in the same place Maxima was dragged away to! And then, before Velocity could let him know how much of an utter dumbaft he really was-

“GAH! I felt something! Something grabbed me, there’s something else in here- !”

He went and proved it for himself with an outburst that would have been heard all the way back on Caminus. 

“Would you fragging shut up, Hot Shot?!” Velocity wanted to scream at him, since he’d already gone ahead and ruined their stealth, but she forced her anger into a tight hiss regardless. It sounded like a scream in the dark anyway- both cramped and infinite, neither of them able to get away from the other- and he actually did shut up. Either Hot Shot had realised he’d surely been heard by whoever was still waiting outside, or Velocity’s frustration had shocked him into silence. 

A few anonymous klicks passed, each one leaving Velocity in anticipation of being dragged out into sudden blinding light, yet no-one came for them. She heard nothing, not even Hot Shot’s vents, and she almost wondered if something had snatched him away into the nothing. But then she heard him; a shaky intake, a mumble. 

“I’m scared, Lottie…”

Not just scared. Terrified. Velocity had heard the same voice from few patients, those who weren’t used to getting hurt, and now she was feeling the same. Yelling at Hot Shot wasn’t going to fix anything, of course. He shouldn’t be punished for not being able to hide how he was feeling. He knew Maxima, the one who had pledged to always protect him, wasn’t coming back, and he knew their friends were in danger, and there was nothing either of them could do about it. What else was he supposed to but panic?

“I’m scared too,” Velocity confessed, pulling her legs up to her chest though she couldn’t even see her frame. “Nautica could probably figure something out if she was here, but...” Pit, Nautica could have gotten them all back home with nothing but a screwdriver and some scrap metal. Why couldn’t she have stayed behind with Maxima? She wasn’t a trained medic, but with how quickly she learned things she could have done all of Velocity’s studies in just a few days if she felt like it. She could have reconfigured the subspace cabinet so it opened out into her lab back on Caminus, or built a weapon to scare off the guards, or done something other than sit around waiting to be rescued...

“Frag it.” Velocity knew where the cabinet’s exit was despite the darkness (another thing Nautica had tried to explain, something about a compass always pointing the same way and a bot’s EM field being the same), and she watched the light from outside bleed in through the tiny opening of the door. It was like a hairline crack in the dark, illuminating none of it.

“Where are you going?!” Hot Shot sounded far away now that the cabinet’s space was breached. 

“You’re right,” Velocity told him, buying herself time to convince herself to move. “We can’t stay in here forever. And Maxima obviously isn’t coming back anytime soon. So I’m seeing what’s out there for myself. You stay here.” She probably didn’t need to tell him to do that, but her burst of courage might have been infectious. If she got caught, they needed at least one Camien free and on the run. The Mistress of Flame would realise something was wrong sooner or later, if she didn’t already know, so all Hot Shot would have to do is wait for her to arrive...

Only if Velocity got caught, though. She just had to be careful. They’d been hidden away for hours, so surely the guards were gone by now…? She couldn’t see any in the ship’s loading bay at least, even as she took a full klick to emerge from the cabinet. Hot Shot might have made some other protest, but he was cut off by the door sealing him back into the void. Now she truly was alone on the ship… it felt like trespassing. Between the Cybertronians finding her and Nautica finding something broken on her pride and joy, Velocity didn’t know which she should be more scared of. Even if she knew how to work any of the controls, there wasn’t much she could even do. The comm panel looked dead, and Velocity didn’t know how to turn it on, let alone use it to send any kind of message to the Mistress. Solus, why couldn’t Nautica have just jury-rigged one of the regular pagers medics used…?

So that left calling for help impossible. But Velocity could check outside at least, since the command pod’s viewport should still be open. And if there was no-one around, she could sneak out with Hot Shot and go… where? 

Somewhere. Anywhere. Maybe they could just walk back to Technotropolis and ambush the Chancellor. Assuming he wasn’t the one who had ordered them all captured. Though he probably was, cause who else on the planet would have that kind of authority? 

Dammit, if she just had some idea of what the Pit was going on, she could figure out what to do next. She went to the medbay just for a sense of security and belonging, finding everything in its usual place to ease her anxiety ever so slightly. Just as well she’d decided to overstock, though her subspace was still crammed full of all the extra supplies she’d taken along when they landed. The control pod was just ahead, though Velocity had to push herself towards it because if anyone else was onboard waiting for her, that was where they’d be waiting...

But the door hissed open, and the pod was completely deserted. No lights blinking, no hum of the engines. It was so dark that she almost thought she’d found another door back into the subspace cabinet, the open viewport showing a hangar draped in shadows. But it had been light outside when the guards had appeared… how long had she and Hot Shot really been hidden away for? 

She didn’t have much time to wonder before she noticed someone standing under the viewport, and she fell to the ground like her joints suddenly failed her. 

“Hoo! Ha! Come and try it, I’ll knock your circuits in!”

She heard a mech’s voice in between other sounds of exertion, though she didn’t see who the speaker was until she managed to raise her optics to the very bottom of the viewport. It was one of the odd Cybertronians; covered in thick armor plates, his head sporting a pair of curved horns, and his mouth was covered by frilled metal that made the strange sounds he was making echo slightly, whoops and growls as he kicked and punched at the empty air around him. 

“You want a piece of me, eh? How about two? Woo, just missed me!” 

At first Velocity thought she’d been spotted, with all her energon freezing at once, but the mech just stayed in place as he assaulted his invisible enemy. Then she realised, it was a familiar sight. Vertex often talked and acted out to practice her characters, blocking out everyone else around her as she said her lines and followed her directions until they were programmed into her mind. Was this mech an actor too? If so, why was he all alone in a spaceship hangar?

“Powerhug!”

No, not alone at all. Another mech’s voice called out, much deeper than the first, and Velocity saw Powerhug flinch as he scrambled to salute whoever was approaching.

“Gah! Er, yes, Tigatron!”

“You were slacking off again.” Tigatron towered over Powerhug, and Velocity recognised him as one of the mech’s who had greeted them with Rhinox and Airazor. White fur surrounded patches of his green protoform, and he seemed to have some kind of false face on his chest. With the height difference between them, this was the only face Powerhug could actually meet the eyes of. 

“Ye… no, sir, no, I was staying on guard in case any Camiens show up!” 

“Right. Why don’t you go to the aftend and have Sonar help you with that?”

“Is that a suggestion, or…?”

“It’s an order.”

“Right. Sure. Okay. Just making sure.” And then something happened that Velocity had yet to see- Powerhug transformed , but not into a vehicle. His armor plates slid into place over him like a spiked shell, turning him into a ball, and he rolled away with a clicking sound that faded quickly. Tigatron watched him go with a shake of his head.

“Primus save us all…”

Velocity only caught small glimpses of the interaction, and she kept her head down away from the viewport when Tigatron was alone. He would surely spot her instantly… but he didn’t seem to expect anyone to be inside the ship. That was good. That was something useful . For whatever reason, he and probably a few others were under orders to guard the ship and stop her friends from boarding. No sign of what they’d do to anyone they caught though, and Velocity wasn’t about to find out for herself. 

She’d seen enough for now. If she could get back to the cabinet, she could at least assure Hot Shot that no-one would be searching the ship for them. And she’d still have to put up with him whining about fuel. 

Though… it was very dark outside, but it hadn’t felt like much time had passed inside the cabinet. Maybe it hadn’t only been a few breems. She checked her chronometer, the only thing she could really trust anymore, and-

...Primus. They’d been in there for a whole solar cycle. The chronometer itself had been slowed down while inside, but now that she was out it quickly corrected itself to the proper time. It had been that long and the Cybertronians were still looking for them, for whatever reason. Had others managed to escape too? Or maybe they were safe, the misunderstanding completely resolved, and only Velocity and Hot Shot were unaccounted for.

But then, why hadn’t Maxima come back for them? No, she had to assume they were fugitives. And she had to keep them both safe. The subspace cabinet could do that. 

But if she was going to go back in there, she needed energon. She had some medical-grade in the medbay, but it wouldn’t last long without refrigeration and she didn’t think it was a good idea to drink what was supposed to go directly into the fuel lines… but what other option was there?

The engine. It would have some still resting in its tanks; raw-grade, spliced with other chemicals that tasted like cleaning solvent, but better than nothing. If they rationed it, they could stay under the radar for a long time. And it wouldn’t even feel that long.

Still crouching, Velocity crawled out of the control pod and towards the engine, mindful of every step she took and door she had to open. Now that she knew people were outside, she couldn’t assume that she was safe in the ship. Anything could give her away. But as long as she got the energon, she just had to run back to the cabinet. 

The tanks were close to the engine, but in a different room so the heat wouldn’t boil the liquid. This was the one part of the ship that Velocity could at least pretend to understand- the tanks had an emergency drainage valve in case of flammable incidents, so all she had to do was turn it and drip the fuel into a container. Simple. There was even a bucket nearby, like Primus was finally cutting her some slack. 

She found the valve with help from her headlights, but her digits froze over it. She had no idea if it would make a sound, if it was rusty or connected to the engines themselves, if the sound of dripping energon would sabotage her. So she had to be ready to run. She was good at that, at least. It was in her name, after all.

Velocity almost bit through her lip as she turned the valve, and there was a subtle hum from the tank as it released its reservoir. The energon was dull and lifeless in its glow, nothing like the medical-grade she kept in the ship’s freezers nor the delectable high-grade from home, but it would keep even a dead bot going for a little longer. And with how Hot Shot guzzled his fuel, she doubted he’d even notice the taste before it was gone. 

It was going well. It was actually going well , she was doing something! But then the valve stopped, with the bucket not even half-full. 

‘I thought you were a bucket half-empty person?’ she heard Nautica quip in her audio, and she almost whirled around to knock her across the shoulder when she remembered that she was alone. It had only a day, and she was already going crazy. Great. If only she’d studied processor health instead of frames, she could have diagnosed herself. Or maybe psychoanalyse her way to victory. 

No, scratch that. She should have been an engineer. A bot’s frame wasn’t all that different from a machine anyway. Same parts, different names. And a machine was easier to keep going than a bot. It didn’t care if the fuel tasted good, where it came from or how much there was. It just worked if you let it. 

She should have just been a machine. If she didn’t have energon, she would just stop working. She wouldn’t die so slowly, each system shutting down to conserve power, first her onboard sensors and then her servos, her optics and vocaliser, everything except her processor and spark gone and by then her fuel pump would be circulating nothing and it would be late to save either of them... she’d seen it happen, heard about putting bots into stasis when they had no fuel left to spare, heard stories about them never waking up even when their tanks were fuel, even when nothing was wrong anymore-

Then she slapped herself.

‘ Stop it, Lottie. Stop it.’ She was falling into the trap that Hot Shot had barely been avoiding. If she accepted that all was lost, then all would be lost. She wouldn’t die. Pit, it was her job to make sure it didn’t happen! If there was one thing she was qualified for, it was surely that.

So what did she need to do? There was definitely more energon in the tank, there had to be if Nautica had been planning to fly back to Caminus. It just wasn’t coming out. Was there a blockage? She tried jabbing a digit through the valve’s pipe, and through a grimace she felt something push back. Another problem with raw-energon; if it sat stagnant for too long, the byproducts could curdle together into mush. Usually the turbines in the tank stopped that from happening but, of course, they weren’t running. 

The blockage wasn’t one that she could just poke through, since her digit wasn’t thin enough to fit through the whole pipe, so she had to pull it out somehow…

Velocity remembered something then, like how Vertex and Nautica had both popped into her mind. A patient had come in with fuel poisoning, after he went through with a dare to ingest a whole batch of spoiled energon. She’d had to hook up a vacuum to his fuel lines to pull all of the rancid energon out before it clogged his pump. Did she have a vacuum on hand? No, of course not… but she did see a thin tube, a small part of something meant to siphon the tank’s contents far away from the ship itself. 

There was nothing else for it. She needed the energon, and she needed to clear the way. So she hooked one end of the tube onto the valve and brought the other to her mouth, allowing herself a shudder before taking in a deep breath through it. 

Nothing happened. So she tried again with an even deeper intake, forcing her fans into overdrive. And again, and again, until-

Pop!

The lump of curdled energon flew down the tube, along with a renewed stream of raw fuel. Velocity felt her face burn in pride when she saw it… but she didn’t get the tube away from her mouth in time. She felt the congealed mass hit her face, even as she clamped her lips down, and as the valve released the rest of the fuel into the bucket she couldn’t stop herself spluttering and gagging as she tried to scrape her glossa clean with her denta. She hadn’t felt it go in her mouth, but Primus she could still taste it, like refinery runoff or factory slag forced right under her olfactories.

“Hot Shot,” she hissed, “if you say one bad thing about this energon I swear to fragging Solus-”

“I heard something!”

No, no no no no, they’d heard her coughing up her spark. One bot had heard, at least, someone she couldn’t recognise from his voice.

“Where?” But that was definitely Tigatron answering; she almost felt the walls around her shake from the depth of his vocaliser.  

“From the ship! I swear, I heard something moving around in there! Open it up, lemme see who’s hiding-!” Velocity was trying to squeeze the last of the vital energon out as she froze, hearing a bang against the ship’s hull. Only one, though. 

“Calm down, Stampy,” she heard Tigatron scold as she hefted the mostly-full bucket into her arms. “You know our orders. Terrorsaur still needs to examine the ship’s mechanisms before anyone can board.”

Velocity had to perform a balancing act between speed and strength, all the while expecting to hear the ship being raided and the walls torn down around her. 

“We don’t need to wait for him to stick his beak into the controls,” Stampy protested with a stubborn groan, “just lemme kick down the door-!”

“No.” Tigatron growled this time to make his order clear, and Velocity would have ran out and kissed him if she could have. She was so close to the cabinet, only needing to find the control to open it. Nautica had made it inconspicuous, hidden somewhere under the console instead of on it, specifically so no-one could just stumble upon her new toy, but it was hard to get to it with your servos occupied…

Just as Velocity’s digit grazed the button and part of the ship’s wall eased itself aside, she heard Tigatron speak again. 

“But if you do suspect that someone is inside… Sonar.”

“Understood,” a femme said. “Cover your audios.”

Velocity didn’t know what she was about to do, and absolutely did not want to know. She didn’t wait to hear from Hot Shot inside before she shoved the energon in, and then herself. The darkness fell upon her once more, the energon’s feeble glow barely visible, and she hadn’t been within it for a nanoklick before the most awful sound she’d ever heard suddenly ripped through everything. 

‘ Primus, she wasn’t kidding about that warning…!’ Velocity kept the energon bucket clamped by her legs as she tried to shield her audios from the screech, and even after it faded into grateful silence she didn’t want to take her hands away. The aftereffect, ringing and wrecked audio levels all over her processor, made it so that she almost didn’t hear Hot Shot even when he was right next to her.

“What the Pit was that ?!” He had to repeat himself, and the second time he still sounded muffled like he was talking through a layer of rock. 

“Some kind of… locating system,” Velocity guessed. “Or alarm, maybe. Here.” She handed off the energon to him, ready to clamp her audios down again for when he started complaining about it. But he didn’t say anything as he took the bucket. In fact, though he was definitely low on fuel, he didn’t even take any of it. 

“Are you okay?” he asked, and Velocity had to wonder if she was. The obvious answer was definitely not, because Hot Shot was definitely not fine either. But she didn’t want to state the obvious. The truth was bad enough without her going the extra mile to point it out. 

“Yeah. Good.” She was still free, at least. That was good. 

“Are they coming for us?” 

“No. No, I don’t think so.” Velocity took a breath, parsing what she’d heard during her frantic run back to safety. “They said... they’re not allowed to board yet. They have to wait for authorization. Probably one of Rattrap’s mechanics who’s supposed to disable the systems.” She decided against telling him about how long they’d actually been stuck in the cabinet, at least for now. It was one thing he was probably better off not knowing, for his own good.

“And when they get onboard… what then?” Hot Shot gulped as he asked, though he still hadn’t taken any energon down his throat.

“They’ll search it,” she figured. “And they’ll find us. Or not.” In the end, it was as simple as that. If they were found, they’d be reunited with the others and they’d finally find out why they were suddenly wanted criminals. If they went unnoticed, they’d just have to stay put until they were found.

Or died.

No, no. Stop that.

“Velocity?” 

For the very first time, she was actually grateful to hear Hot Shot.

“Yeah?”

“Are your headlights working?”

Of course they were, she’d been using them just a few klicks ago. And, of course, she hadn’t realised she could have been using them in here the whole time. Her frame would need more fuel than usual to keep the lights going, but that wouldn’t be a problem. Not for now, so long as she could get used to the taste of pure liquid alkaline. 

“Yeah… yeah, I can keep them on for a little while.” She flipped the internal switch, and immediately her lights shone onto Hot Shot. Once her optics adjusted to her own glare, she saw him sitting on a floor that didn’t exist, his Cityspeaker markings almost completely worn away like he’d been rubbing his optics in the dark.

“Thanks,” he said, smiling with a thin residue over his top lip. And, funnily enough, the siphoned energon didn’t taste as bad now that it was shared.

Windblade said nothing as she helped carry Starscream out of the building’s carcass, down a snow-strewn alley into another place that didn’t look like it was in much better condition. It had all four walls, at least, and some kind of roof. She wasn’t given time to take in much else before Knockout disappeared behind plastic sheets that covered a dark doorway. 

“Emergency patient,” he told someone in a rushed mumble. “Close up the front, I won’t be fixing anyone else today. Yes, it’s bad… you don’t want to know.” And then he stormed back through with a loud thud of the door itself slamming behind him. 

“Get him up on the slab,” he told Windblade with a nod, indicating the wide table in the middle of the room. She realised that it was a rudimentary surgical slab, and that this must be his operating theatre. From just a glance at the grime on the standing walls and rust on the floor, she felt like she was more likely to catch an infection than have one cured in this place…

But they had no other place to go. So she steadied Starscream against the table, helping him lift one of his legs up onto it while pushing on the rest of him so he was laid flat on the slab. Now he couldn’t even keep his optics open, his mouth dribbling curdled energon, and when a spotlight snapped on overhead she saw the full extent of the damage to his chest. He’d torn open a hole with his claws, and it gaped through layers of protoform, circuitry and mesh right down to his endoskeleton. Rattrap had bolted his modifications right down to his bones, and Starscream had tried to skin himself just to rip them out. 

It was worse than anything Windblade had seen before, worse than Velocity’s most gruesome horror stories from dancers with snapped legs, singers with rust in their vocalisers from trying to pour oil down their throats, artists with so much heavy metal coating from their paints that they could hardly move their digits. She felt like she wanted to purge, but there was almost nothing in her tanks to throw up.

“Are you squeamish?” Knockout was like a red spectre around the hum and glow of the light shining from above, and for a moment Windblade thought he was making fun of her. But he had one hand braced on the table, the other taking the form of a buzzsaw, ready to cut into Starscream at any moment.

“Um…” Windblade gulped, fighting the urge to step back. “I don’t think so-” Knockout didn’t wait for further confirmation before he activated the saw, and its high-pitched whirr was almost pleasant compared to the sound of it crunching through Starscream’s chest plating. There was some resistance against the hydraulics, the thick steel protesting being shorn apart, but Knockout just used his own weight down on the slab to force the saw through. He worked quickly, methodically, not stopping once to clean the energon from himself or to even check if Starscream was still alive. Windblade thought he was… hoped he was. She had never seen a dead mech before. Pit, she’d never even see a dying one. She didn’t know what one was supposed to look like.

He made small sounds, at least. Groans when Knockout yanked the plates apart to get to the underlying protoform, checking for any excess damage; hisses from his vents when a blowtorch was taken to his wound to cauterize it- though, they might have just been reflex sound effects from an empty shell. Regardless, Knockout made a grand show of looking like he knew what he was doing. 

“Hand me that syringe,” he barked while pointing a servo to a table at his left. “Quickly, quickly!” Windblade found the giant needle he must have been referring to and immediately had it snatched from her grip, as Knockout positioned the sharp end within one of the gaps left by the sawn-off hydraulics. Then he yanked on the plunger, pulling it back like a ripcord as the syringe filled with a translucent fluid- definitely not energon, whatever it was. He disposed of the fluid in a sink behind him, and did the whole process over another three times. Windblade kept her attention on Starscream, watching for any grimace or twitch, any sign that he was still online. He had to be… no medic would keep working on a corpse. Well, Velocity might, if she thought she could still save them if she tried hard enough. 

Primus, Windblade wished she was here...

“The hydraulic fluid was mixing in with his energon,” Knockout said over the hiss of a hose cleaning off his hands in the sink. “Poisoning his systems. It should be all gone now.”

Though he didn’t face her, Windblade had the feeling that he was saying it for her benefit. And it was a benefit, knowing that at least one thing had been fixed. She wanted to ask the medic what would come next (because surely the repairs wouldn’t be this simple); but before she could decide if she even wanted to know, Knockout went right back to work without a falter in his step. He opened the lid of a freezer unit, pulling out small packs of medical-grade energon and hooking them up all around Starscream’s prone frame.

“I don’t know what the Pit you’ve been doing with yourself all this time, Starscream,” Knockout muttered as he jabbed external lines through his patient’s protoform, “but you should not be alive right now. I say that because I’m both impressed and horrified that you still are.”

Starscream’s vents fell open, and his vocaliser was overtaken with an overload of coughs like he was trying to stop the fresh energon flowing into him from coming up out of his throat. Before Windblade could feel relief that he really was still alive (despite Knockout’s professional opinion), he scowled around a groan as he tried to sit up. 

“If you don’t shut up ,” he snarled, “I’ll just go ahead and kill myself so I don’t have to look at the repair bill.” Then he tried to get off the table, as if he thought he could just walk off with six fuel lines all hanging out of him. But even if the lines didn’t tether him in place, Knockout was on hand to shove him back down flat where he was supposed to stay. 

“The energon infusion alone would bankrupt you,” the medic informed him, not seeing or maybe just not caring about Starscream’s hazy-yet-incredulous glare. “Even if you still had the vault of Vos to dip into.” 

And then Starscream went silent, turning his head as much as he could so he was facing an empty wall. Windblade remained where she was at his other side, taking in all the apparatus in the makeshift clinic, the glowing blue energon lines feeding life back into Starscream; and there, left forgotten on the floor, the thick bars of metal that Knockout had sliced through to free his patient’s chest from its prison. Windblade knelt down to them, picked one up with two hands. Just the one piece of jagged metal felt like it weighed a tonne, and with how much of it had been welded to Starscream’s frame it was a miracle that he could walk at all. Of course, it had to be strong to withstand the force of crushing a spark. Over, and over, and over again. This was what had almost killed her, just a few hours ago. This was what had almost driven her ancestors to extinction…

Her hands jolted away from the broken mechanisms, like they were electrified. She didn’t want to touch them anymore. She didn’t want to look at them. 

“Did you get all the pieces off of him?” she asked aloud to Knockout, turning her head far away from the pile of disassembled torture tools. “All the… modifications?”

“All the ones that were in my way. But I’ll have to wait until his energon is replenished before I can see what else is inside.” He sounded so nonchalant, like he was just talking about his ride to work or the sky outside. Windblade watched him hose down his surgical implements, mop up the spilled energon that pooled under Starscream before it dried to a crust, throw the broken steel parts down a disposal chute (though she looked away when he picked them up from the floor). Starscream still wasn’t saying anything, and she knew better than to try and talk to him while his frame was in the middle of repairs. She knew nanites could work wonders when left alone, but the extent of the damage looked like something that only Solus or even Primus Himself could fix.

“So just how did a nice girl like you end up with the likes of him?” Knockout leaned back against one of his workbenches, looking at her with servos crossed over his chest. It didn’t sound like an accusation, but Windblade still heard it like one. She’d learned her lesson from the likes of Tarantulas- some people will pretend to be your friend just to hurt you all the more. And, after all, she was still on the run. Just because he was willing to help Starscream didn’t mean she would be given the same courtesy if he knew what she’d been accused of.

“We… helped each other out,” she said. That was the most basic version of the truth, and Starscream made no sound in protest. Knockout tilted his head as if in thought, because of course there was more to it than that, and he studied Windblade like he was wondering if she was really there in front of him. 

“I swear I’ve seen your face somewhere before… with all those squiggles on it, you think it’d be hard to forget.” He waved a hand in front of his face to indicate her own Cityspeaker markings. “Some kind of new fashion statement?”

Windblade resisted the urge to rub her digits hard across her cheeks, to try and scrape off the last remnants of pigment that were still giving her away. “Something like that...”

And that seemed to be good enough for Knockout. If he’d been watching the trial, maybe he just didn’t pay very close attention. Or maybe he knew exactly who she was and just didn’t care very much. He had his priorities in order, at least, as he switched his attention from Windblade to the cracked LCD monitor beside Starscream.

“I hope you understand I’m only doing this for free because I expect you to tell me everything , Starscream.” Knockout pressed something that let out a high-pitched sound, almost making Windblade jump. “Where the Pit you’ve been all this time, for starters.”

“Can it wait until I’m not in danger of going offline?” Starscream spoke through clenched teeth, still refusing to look at anyone.
“You’re not going to go offline while I’m around, you idiot, so speak. ” Knockout held a scanner, moving it slowly over Starscream’s prone frame. “Tell me just how you turned yourself into a barely-walking thresher.” He might have had genuinely atrocious bedside manner, or he might have just been working a ploy to get Starscream worked up enough that he couldn’t stop himself from talking just to correct him. Either way, Starscream’s helm snapped forward with a growl. 

“It wasn’t me, ” he snapped. “It was Rattrap. Tarantulas… they did this...” His vocaliser trailed into static, and he clenched his jaw shut again. 

“I see.” Knockout looked over to Starscream as the scanner seemed to transmit its findings to the monitor. “They… kept you prisoner?”

Starscream said nothing, keeping his optics closed. 

“Well. Then it really is a miracle you’re still alive.” Knockout whistled air through his denta, and then set himself to work analysing the scanner results. His stare was intent, like he was eager to lose himself in the screen so he didn’t have to think any more about what being Rattrap’s prisoner meant. 

Windblade, meanwhile, was feeling more useless by the nanoklick, wanting to stay out of the way but also wanting to do something other than stand around with her hands folded. She had no medic training, and Velocity wasn’t like Nautica in always trying to train her friends to do part of her job for her, but surely she wasn’t supposed to just hang around in a corner waiting for Starscream to cheat death. She couldn’t ask him anything with Knockout around, since Starscream clearly didn’t want to say too much around him…

But there were some things she could ask Knockout himself, now that his patient was recovering. And he seemed much more co-operative than Starscream, anyway. 

“How do you know Starscream, Knockout?”

He glanced over at her like he’d almost forgotten she was there. “I was one of his sire’s great physicians, during the good old days. Of course Seekers usually scorn any help from grounders, but when you’re the best in your field they tend to overlook your lack of wings. Even then they’ll tell you to frag off as soon as they’re all patched up. No offence intended, er...”

She wasn’t sure which part she was supposed to be offended by, mostly because she didn’t understand even half of what he’d just said. But she could at least recognise that he was asking for her name. “Windblade.”

Then she braced herself for a look of recognition and scorn, but Knockout only scoffed. “Seekers do love putting ‘Wind’ in their names, don’t they? I blame Windscythe himself for the trend, the pompous old-” He stopped in his tracks when his optics landed on Starscream. There was no glare, no growl, not even a warning hiss that whatever Knockout was saying was dangerous. Yet the medic still looked guilty, like he’d just committed a crime with his vocaliser.

“Sorry. Sometimes I still forget...” His talons were hanging suspended in the air in front of his monitor, like he’d also forgotten whatever task he was in the middle of. Windblade looked at Starscream, his optics pointed aimlessly up at the ceiling, his face set in blank stone, and wondered if she should ask who Windscythe was. But then Starscream’s jaw shifted, strings of half-dry energon between his lips.

“What happened to Vos?” he asked. 

After a moment’s pause, Knockout’s digits tapped rapidly across his keyboard as if to make up for the past few klicks of work he’d lost to his memory banks. “It’s better that you don’t know-”
“Knockout.” Starscream didn’t snarl, or screech, or snap with his demand. It was a simple statement, but said with such force that both Windblade and Knockout had no choice but to pay attention. “What. Happened. To Vos?”

Knockout was frozen in place, meeting Starscream’s expectant optics with his own full of regret. It was the same expression he had when he first saw Starscream, bleeding out in the dark and laughing with his last few breaths.

“They burned it down,” the medic told him. “Hollowed out the foundations. Filled it in with water. It’s now the planet’s largest sea.” Then he looked down at his typing talons, before he could see Starscream’s reaction. Windblade saw it unfold for herself, his optics whirring wide and his jaw trembling. He blinked several times over, though his eyes were completely dry. He had nothing left to give, not even in sorrow. Even though Windblade did not know what Vos was, did not know what it meant to Starscream, it was easy to guess what it once had been. It was another city, one like Technotro... like Iacon. But instead of having its name changed and history paved over, it was simply eradicated from existence. 

“They said everyone had died at Vos,” Knockout went on, unable to keep his voice hollow. “I saw some of the bodies myself. But they left you alive?”

“Yes.” Starscream gulped. “They did.”

“And then they did… this, to you?”

Starscream closed his optics instead of nodding. “What did they do with the bodies, Knockout?” It was a rasp, like a voice on low battery, like merely asking it drained all of the energy he had left.

“...I don’t know,” Knockout told him. “I’m sorry.” 

And he really was sorry, for so much that Windblade couldn’t even begin to comprehend as an outsider. Starscream and Knockout were both victims of Rattrap, of the technorganic society he had created, and they knew each other's pain despite spending centuries apart. She felt like she was trespassing on the moment, like she shouldn’t have been a witness to it, and she couldn’t even bring herself to look at Starscream. She didn’t want to see him broken, mute, like he’d been in the council chamber. She didn’t want to see anyone like that.  

But then Knockout shook his helm, and with one last swipe of his hand across his screen he turned to his workbench to start preparing for the next stage of surgery. The brief sorrow would be all that he would allow himself. Maybe he was just desensitised to it.

“There’s major points of weakness around your endoskeleton,” he said over his shoulder, “and your armor will need to be entirely regrown to support them. The protoform breach will need a full solder patch as well to stop it bursting open again.”

Starscream groaned. “Is that all?”

“Those are just the things that will kill you eventually,” Knockout told him, wielding what looked like a pair of minuscule tweezers in one hand and a scalpel in the other. “There’s plenty more that might .”

Despite the medic’s bleak prognosis, he set to work swiftly. Windblade once again watched from overhead, waiting for a moment to be useful as Starscream was cut open. But Knockout never asked for a piece of equipment or even for the spotlight to be moved aside. In fact, he never spoke at all, not until he’d removed every armor piece from Starscream’s chest and pulled the underlying protoform apart.

“You’ll need to keep your chamber open for this part,” he said. “It’s a delicate procedure.”

Starscream, who had also been silent as he averted his gaze from his own innards, grunted as he released the internal lock on his spark chamber-

Oh, Primus. Not again. It didn’t matter that Windblade had already seen his spark, even under circumstances that she didn’t want to remember. She had to look away, a hand across her optics just to be safe, keeping her distance so she wouldn’t even see the glow, and she heard Knockout let out a loose laugh. 

“Very polite, isn’t she?”
“Leave her alone,” Starscream snapped, “and just get on with it.”

Apart from feeling somewhat grateful for Starscream coming to her defense (if only so he could get off the operating table as soon as possible), Windblade could barely control how mortified she was to be in that room at that moment. How could Knockout be so casual, so comfortable with staring right at a mech’s naked spark with his life in his hands? Velocity had never had to deal with sparks like that, in fact no medic on Caminus would ever think of asking a patient to open their chamber. If there was ever a problem that severe, like spark parasites, that was for the Mistress to deal with. It made sense, after all. Sparks were the gift from Primus, so the voice of Primus was the only one who had the right to see them. Whenever Caminus’ hotspot brought forth a new generation, it was she who would greet the sparks into their frames. She had seen almost the entire population at birth, and knew more than anyone else how sacred their chambers were. 

That was Caminus. On Cybertron, apparently they were open for anyone who asked nicely. And Knockout hadn't even asked that nicely. Was that part of what Starscream had meant by ‘using’ sparks? She had a whole new set of questions to ask him as soon as Knockout was gone. 

“Well, you’re not going to die,” the medic sighed after almost thirty klicks of surgery that Windblade had looked away from. “Not immediately, anyway. So long as the patch holds up, your nanites should finish the rest of the repairs by themselves. But...”

Windblade cautiously uncovered her optics, making sure all sparks were out of the way as they should be, and found Starscream looking somewhat less like a scrap pile. His chest plating had been entirely stripped back, the razor-embedded plates sheared down to short ledges, and his mouth had pale lines where the thick solder-scars had marked him before. His wings were still a useless jumble on his back, the cables hanging loose and some metal sheets barely clinging on, but Knockout didn’t look like he was going to operate on them. 

“But what ?” Starscream sat up as best he could, drilling his optics impatiently into the medic. This time Knockout didn’t try to push him back down flat. 

“Starscream,” he said firmly, “I need to know what they did to your spark.”

Starscream blinked once, narrowing his optics as an after-effect. “Isn’t it obvious ? They turned my chest into a guillotine .”

“I’m not talking about the casing,” Knockout corrected. “I’m talking about the spark itself.” His expecting gaze did not shift once from Starscream, despite how the other mech averted his glare. 

“I don’t know… what they did.”

“Because the damage is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” Knockout marched over to the largest screen set up near the surgical slab, rotating it around so that Starscream could see the readings on it. “There are burns on your casing, like… like the spark was trying to eject itself from your frame. When I said you should be dead, I was quite serious.”

“I told you,” Starscream insisted, “I don’t know about any of that-”

“Even when you’re just lying down like this, it’s like it doesn’t know which way is up or down, and it’s not just because my equipment is faulty. And there’s debug logs in your processor that make no sense, constant dead-ends and missing messages that I’ve only seen on old Empurata victims. It’s like you’ve been missing parts that-”

“I am not in the mood for an interrogation, Knockout!” Starscream quite literally exploded, ripping himself off the table and swatting Knockout’s hands aside so that the printouts he was wielding went flying. “You’re the genius doctor, you should be able to figure out whatever the frag is wrong for yourself !” Then he shoved past the medic, not even looking at Windblade as he went for the door.

“And just where do you think you’re going?” Knockout stood with his empty hands on his hips, watching Starscream wrench the door open. 

“ Away. I don’t want to exist right now. Just... get away from me!” He disappeared into the furious blizzard outside, and Windblade tried to catch the door before it slammed shut.

“Starscream, don’t go-!” She felt the icy chill blow in from outside, saw the tips of his broken wings vanish into the snow before her hand could reach him, but Knockout stopped her from going any further with a servo around her waist. 

“I wouldn’t,” he warned, letting the door close on the weight of its hinge as he slowly released her, only when she stopped trying to push against him. “Touch him while he’s in that state and he’ll likely just tear your servo off. And I won’t be putting it back on.”

“But…” Windblade stood staring at the door, as if she could see Starscream’s freezing frame in the distance through it. “Cybertron’s looking for him. If he gets seen, or-or caught, or-”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.” Knockout almost sounded bored as he began the second stage of cleanup, wiping down the operating table that was dripping with freshly spilled energon. “The organics mostly stay away from these parts. He’ll find another hole to crawl into for the time being and, when he’s ready, he’ll find his way back here.”

He sounded so sure, like he was psychic and could see Starscream trudging back already. Windblade wasn’t even sure if she wanted him to come back, since he was apparently so against being helped. Her priority was saving her friends and getting back home, and Starscream’s was…

Well, she actually had no idea what his agenda was, other than act like a complete aft. 

Then again… he’d been mutilated. He’d been turned into a torture device. He’d seen his kind slaughtered. Was she really expecting him to be anything but angry?

“I’ve fixed his physical wounds, but he’ll need to sort out his mental ones by himself,” Knockout went on, like he really was psychic and reading her thoughts as they came. “And to start doing that, first he needs to be alone.”

Windblade found herself sitting on the floor, her back to the door with her knees at her chest. “His wings, though,” she pointed out. “You didn’t fix them.”

“They can’t be fixed. And I think he knows that. Which is another reason why he should be left alone.” Knockout punctuated the sentence with a metallic clang of the disposal chute’s lid closing, and the sound pierced Windblade’s audios as she considered the true weight of his verdict. He’d said he specialised in fixing flyers, those like her with wings and propulsion systems and everything else to worry about, and if even he couldn’t make Starscream fly again… 

Primus.

“So what’s your side of the story, Windblade?” Knockout hosed down his tools under a low spray, so the hum of the cleanser didn’t overtake his voice. “What did they do to him?”

At first Windblade debated over how much to tell him. He probably had a good idea himself of what Starscream had been turned into, but she was the only eyewitness around that could confirm anything. She didn’t want to think back to any of it.

“They made him kill people,” she told him, her voice as hollow as the rest of her felt. “Other Cybertronians.”

Out of the corner of her optic, she saw him freeze for just a moment. 

“...I thought as much. When I saw what was left of those chest pieces. And they kept him blind?”

“With… razorsilk, yes.” Tarantulas’ vile weaving that she could still feel tearing into her protoform, like it was something alive and bristling. Knockout didn’t ask her to explain what it was, which made her think that it was something Tarantulas regularly employed against any and all Cybertronians he got his claws on. 

“That’s why they didn’t just cut his optics out,” he muttered to himself. “The blindfold would constantly cut into them… I imagine you were probably the first face he’d seen since he was imprisoned, then.”

Windblade hadn’t realised that. She hadn’t even considered it. Was that another reason why he’d gone through the trouble of saving her? Not just the matter of repaying a debt, but because he’d gone so long without seeing anyone, any thing that once he had his vision back he wanted to preserve the first thing he saw...

Which happened to be her. 

She didn’t know how to feel about that.

“They made him... kill with his spark?” Knockout switched the hose off, though he kept his back to her. She nodded, watching him incline his helm ever so slightly over his shoulder.

“I see. I think I understand now.”

“Understand what?”

Knockout roughly dried off his hands, moving briskly with renewed effort. “If I’m right, then I can’t tell you. Patient confidentiality. And… it isn’t something for me to share, anyway.”

It must have had something to do with Starscream’s spark, and whatever happened to it during his imprisonment. It must have been personal. In which case, Windblade didn’t want to know it anyway. Bad enough having someone turn your spark into a spectacle, she wouldn’t want strangers knowing anything about it that she didn’t even know herself.

“They called him a... Sparkcracker.” She flinched as she said it, but even so she watched Knockout’s reaction for any recognition. If he had heard of such a thing, maybe he would tell her some more of what she did want to know. 

“A what?” He snapped his head around, still holding the stained rag aloft in his hand. “A spark cracker? ”

Windblade nodded again, wondering if she’d said something wrong. Knockout looked away, crushing the rag in his sudden vice grip.

“Primus… very insidious of them.” He sighed like it wasn’t something that surprised him… whatever ‘it’ was.

“What do you mean?” Windblade was getting tired of having to question everything, but Knockout (apparently) didn’t know she wasn’t from Cybertron. He would just assume she knew what he was talking about if she didn’t speak up.

“You know… the old sparkling stories.” Knockout leaned back against his workbench once he finished wiping it down. “Supposed to get us to behave when we’re that age. If we make too much noise at night then the Sparkeater will come gobble us up, the Sparkstealer will take us away to Unicron and the Sparkcracker… well, he was only ever brought up around very bad little ones. I had more than a few nightmares about him...” He trailed off while looking aside, then started throwing aside his clean tools into various compartments.

“They’ve turned our children’s stories into reality,” he muttered, “and our intimacy into murder.” 

Windblade heard him, but even if she understood she didn’t know what to say, didn’t know if she should say anything at all. The floor was making her feel numb, but there was nowhere else for her to sit but the surgical slab. Her wings were still wrecked, though thankfully not as badly as Starscream’s, but Knockout was unlikely to give her free repairs as well. 

She felt like she had to leave. Even if organics didn’t often enter these parts, they’d be searching everywhere for her and Starscream. If she stayed put then she was constantly in danger. 

But there was nowhere to go. She couldn’t just try to hop between wrecked buildings dodging the guards and soldiers and drones and whatever else Rattrap would have out looking for her. For all she knew, Knockout would sell her out in a nanoklick if the reward was good enough...

The medic seemed to be watching her over his shoulder as he organised his implements, as if waiting for her to dart for the exit. But then, when his hands were empty, he crossed his arms over his chest and faced her with a curious glint in his optics. 

“You’re not from around here, are you, Windblade?”

So she’d been found out. Yet she almost laughed at how long it had taken. 

“What gave it away?”

“If you were raised on Cybertron and came face-to-spark with a creature called the Sparkcracker, you would be looking a lot more hopeless,” he informed her. “Probably catatonic, even.”

“Not too late for the shock to still kick in...” It was strange to hear that she apparently didn’t look defeated. She felt pretty hopeless, at least. But even with her armor gone, something on her outside was still shielding her from what was within. 

“Where are you from, then?” Knockout tilted his head to one side, which seemed to be his tell for when he was waiting for answers. And Windblade wasn’t sure if she should’ve been giving him any more.

“I don’t know if I can trust you.” She stated it plainly so she wouldn’t need to skirt around it. After all the scrap she’d gone through, she figured she was allowed to be a little paranoid. And Knockout didn’t look surprised anyway, despite all the trouble he’d gone to with repairing Starscream.

“I see. Well, you’re injured yourself. So how about you tell me while I fix you?” He patted the operating slab, the same one she’d watched Starscream straddle life and death upon.

“You know I don’t have credits.” 

Knockout shrugged, even though he hadn’t even wanted to touch her when he first found out she was broke. “I can take the information as payment.”

It sounded too good to be true. Like a trap. It was just too easy, surely. Her back was to the door, she just had to bar it open and vanish like Starscream into the snow… 

Into certain death. 

“Alright.” Windblade pushed to her peds, pulling herself onto the table. “But... stay away from my spark.” 

Knockout raised an eyeridge, like he was confused she would even ask such a thing, before assembling a new set of tools.

“At this rate, I might as well turn myself into a worker drone…” That was his only complaint as he opened up her spinal strut, leaving her unsedated so he could make sure he wasn’t making any mistakes in realigning her nodes. Through gritted denta and hisses of sharp pain Windblade told him of Caminus, her friends, the Mistress, the quest she’d given them all. She missed out her connection to Metroplex, only so she didn’t have to explain once more what a Cityspeaker was. She told him of being tricked by Tarantulas, dragged off to see Starscream and, in a blind flash, somehow releasing him from his bondage. He asked no questions, made no interruptions other than asking her to move her servos and wings. Since he had nothing to ask when she finished, Windblade thought she would offer some questions of her own to him.

“So... What’s a Seeker?” She remembered him mentioning the word, referring to Starscream as one. 

“It’s the name for flight-enabled frametypes,” he answered, dragging something cold and damp around her neck. “You and Starscream. The rest of us can’t take on aerial altmodes. Frames too heavy, sparks not efficient enough at metabolising all the energy you’d need for it, things like that.” 

“I see.” So she wasn’t just a Cityspeaker. She was a Seeker, and by Knockout’s definition so was Maxima. She’d never considered that being able to fly was something that would set bots apart from each other. Caminus didn’t have much room in its skies for flight to make much of a difference to travel, and the presence of wings was only ever considered for things like finding the centre of balance for difficult stage choreography. Even when leaving the planet’s gravitational pull it wasn’t like you could fly out very far before fuel started running out. 

But she’d seen Cybertron from above. It was a very different place, both from the outside and within. She’d seen it with Airazor (was she a Seeker as well? More importantly, was she still free despite how she’d helped Windblade?), and though it had looked beautiful at a glance she now knew that the beauty only grazed the very skin of the planet. Cybertronians, organic and otherwise, seemed obsessed with categorising everyone, putting them into neat boxes that they could endorse or ignore. ‘Seekers’ were just another box, like ‘technorganics’. On Caminus, bots were defined by what they did. Bodyguards, scientists, dancers and singers and performers, their roles were far more important than what they looked like. 

And Cityspeakers, of course. Even if their jobs felt empty sometimes, listening for voices millions of light years away that hardly ever spoke, at least it was something they were meant to do. A Cityspeaker could understand Metrotitans, therefore they listened to them. A bodyguard was strong, therefore they protected. 

And a Seeker could fly, therefore they did.

She was beginning to understand the Cybertronian mindset, she thought. Though there was one label that still eluded her. 

“And… what’s a sire?” 

Knockout was facing her as she asked, examining the front of her wings, and he looked at her like she’d asked him who Solus Prime was. 

“What’s a si-? Primus, you have been living on an asteroid, haven’t you?”

Windblade felt her jaw clench. “A Metrotitan, actually. And I’m sick of people acting shocked that I don’t know things when they won’t fragging tell me anything about them.” 

She was fully aware that she was just doing exactly what she’d frowned on Starscream for, being unco-operative in spite of herself. But, Solus, she was sick of feeling like an idiot and even more sick of being treated like one.

Knockout looked at her, but not with the expected roll of his optics. He seemed to be studying her, analysing her even, and not just for his medical assessment. 

“Caminus has a hotspot, doesn’t it?” he asked. 

“Well, yeah. Of course it does.” She wondered if the answers to her own questions were as obvious to Knockout as that one was to her. 

“And that’s where you came from. Where everyone on the colony came from.”

“Yes…” She was glad that he knew that much for himself, at least, but she had a sinking feeling nonetheless. Like the floor was about to disappear from under her at any moment. 

“So you don’t know that there are other ways for bots to be born.”

And there was the moment, as if on cue. She thought she’d misheard him at first, which gave her some time to prepare herself.

“Other… what?”

Knockout looked at her again, and this time it was with a strange kind of sympathy. Starscream had had the same look, when he told her that Caminus must be a lonely place.

“You probably weren’t told for a reason,” he said, working on her left wing to divert his optics somewhere. “Maybe to keep the population down and ease resource strain… but I’ll tell you anyway.” He stood in front of her, commanding her full attention as he folded his digits together.

“Windblade,” he inhaled deeply, his vents almost fluttering, “you can carry sparks within you. Within your chamber.” He unfolded a single talon to point to the very centre of her chest, though he knew not to touch the plating itself. “Almost all femmes can. A new spark, away from any hotspot or even the Well itself.”

Windblade stared at Knockout’s claw, at the bare protoform on her chest, where she could almost see her chamber thrumming beneath the layers of mesh. 

Her own chamber was a hotspot. She was a walking Well of All Sparks. She could make a new life, a new spark from her own. If Knockout wasn’t lying to her. But why would he? 

She could carry sparks. Lightbright could as well. Maxima and Chromia and Vertex and Nautica and Velocity, they could all incubate a new generation… 

And they’d never even known. 

“I…? How…?” It felt impossible. It felt like heresy. Sparks were Primus’ property, His gift to the universe. And yet Windblade could take that role as well? The Mistress of Flame could?

Did she know this? She had to, surely, she knew everything about Primus.

“Spark bonding, mainly.” Knockout’s answer sounded distant, like he was in a different room even though he was right in front of her. “That’s another thing you haven’t heard of before, isn’t it?”

“I… no, not until I met Star…” Starscream had mentioned sparkbonding, at least, though he’d been too preoccupied with thinking she was an idiot to explain it. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever given this talk to another adult.” Knockout laughed as he admitted it, like it was something embarrassing. “It’s a little strange... well. When a mech’s spark-” 

He held his left fist aloft. 

“And a femme’s spark-” 

Then his right fist. 

“Are drawn together...”

He brought both hands parallel in front of him, holding them so the talons faced each other and then entwined.

“They merge to create a new life. A sparkling. The mech is the sire, and the femme is the carrier. They create a child and raise it together until it reaches adulthood- which is what you and your other Camiens are simply born into. Much less efficient than just birthing batches of sparks from a hotspot, but the benefit is the bond between the parents and their children. It's almost unbreakable. So when someone speaks of their sire or carrier, you know they speak of them with respect.”

He spoke slowly, which must have been for Windblade’s benefit as she struggled to integrate this new knowledge into everything she already knew- everything she thought she’d known. 

“The funny thing is,” Knockout went on, “we always thought Seekers had to be born from bonds. No-one remembered them ever coming from the Well of All Sparks, you see. But it sounds to me like Caminus just took the part of the Well that created Seekers away with him.” 

Windblade found herself nodding, though not in response to anything. She just couldn’t keep her head still, rocking back and forth while the processor within felt like it had been doused in static and gasoline.

“I think I need to lie down.”

“I imagine you would. And I need to see if your spinal circuitry is aligned anyway.” Knockout even left a (fairly) clean rag on the table for her to cushion her aching head with as she lay flat on her front, staring ahead into nothing. She didn’t even feel Knockout soldering wires within her together or pulling her various wing plates to and fro. Her repairs seemed inconsequential, the ability to fly meaningless compared to what her spark chamber could apparently do. 

With a mech, like Starscream. Their sparks were supposed to create new ones? That was why she’d been magnetised to him. His spark was pulling on hers, as hers was pulling on his. It was no trickery, no vile mechanism put in by Tarantulas, it was simply what their bodies were meant to do.

Yet it felt wrong. Not just because it had been supposed to kill her… because she hadn’t known what it was at the time. She had no idea that baring your chamber to another was supposed to be an act of trust, and bonding, and loyalty. Yet Rattrap had twisted that into something unholy.

So Windblade finally understood why Starscream had been so disgusted, why he’d tried to peel himself apart. It was like if a hotspot had been turned into a smelting pool. It was desecration of Primus Himself .

That was why the Mistress hadn’t told Camiens of what they were capable of, then. The risk of things going wrong, if not on such a grand scale as Rattrap had done, was simply too great. Who were they, Primus’ children and followers, to think they could take His place and create new life?

They were not like Cybertronians. They would not repeat their mistakes. Windblade swore this to herself, even as she heard her spark’s high-pitched hum and felt even more keenly the empty space within it. She’d thought that it was just the hole left by Primus, the same one all Camiens had that they would only fill when they finally returned to his side. She knew better now, and she wished she didn’t.

Even so, she at least now understood so much more about Cybertron and the technorganics. Everyone had parents. Families. A permanent bond that would never leave them, stronger than even the sorority and fraternity groups on Caminus.

It sounded comforting.

“So… Starscream had a sire and carrier?” Windblade asked, as Knockout worked a blowtorch on low-heat over the fresh metal patch on her strut. “And you worked for them?”

“Only his sire. I never saw very much of his carrier. Cloudchaser, her name was. She had her own physicians, the kind who could deal with sparklings as well as checkups. Always busy arranging ceremonies, throwing parties, anything for an excuse to serve up high-grade and show off in the sky.”

“They sound like they were important.” She let Knockout ease her upright once more, and she watched the moving shadows of her restored wings with some small measure of relief. But, standing beside her, Knockout seemed to be thinking once more.

“Windblade,” he said somewhat carefully, “you don’t know who Starscream really is, do you?”

She knew plenty enough about him, she thought. He was self-sabotaging and needlessly hostile. He was a walking contradiction, saving her with the last of his strength and then acting like he’d wished he’d just left her behind. But, if he’d really known Starscream well, Knockout already knew all that for himself. So she stayed silent, waiting for his own answer.

“Vos was the city of the Seekers,” he told her. “When it existed. And Windscythe was the last Winglord, leader of his people. He had three sons, and one daughter.” He held up a cyan-streaked hand to count them off. “Slipstream, Skywarp, Thundercracker...”

“And Starscream,” Windblade finished for him, her voice muffled under the slow weight of realisation.

“He likely would have taken over Vos from his father, if… if things had been different. He would have been one of the most powerful mechs on the planet.” Knockout’s vocaliser dwindled, as if a thousand regrets had suddenly caught up with him all at once. He wasn’t trying to fight them off. Windblade was silent because she was thinking, reframing her understanding of Starscream and how he acted, why he did the things he did. 

He was supposed to be a leader. He was supposed to be a figure of admiration, maybe even worship, and he’d been morphed into something from his people’s nightmares. 

And then, through the thick veil of renewed horror, she remembered the other thing Metroplex had tried to warn her about.

“He was a prince…?” She knew the word only from ancient records of the Cybertronian Empire’s old power structures, of emperors and kings. A prince was someone just below that of the ruler, though they’d be the one to take over if needed. Knockout seemed to consider it for a moment, as if he had to remember himself what the word meant.

“You could say that, yes.”

Metroplex had known about Starscream. He’d seen him before he was taken, before he became the Sparkcracker. Yet… like the rest of Cybertron, he’d thought he was dead. 

If Starscream was supposed to be important, maybe he’d known Metroplex before everything went wrong. Maybe he could help her reach him again. 

If she saw him again… if he ever came back. But surely he had to. There was nowhere else for either of them to go. And until then, well, Windblade could only wait with her helm throbbing and spark ebbing, one too full and the other far too hollow.

“Knockout, you don’t mind if I… rest just a while… just until…?” She didn’t think she could really rest at all, not even if she was forced into stasis lock, but she had nothing else to do with herself. Knockout, at least, seemed to recognise that, and when he switched the burning spotlight off she didn’t know the darkness would be such a relief.

“Trust me, Windblade,” he sighed as she turned her heavy helm away. “You’ll need all the rest you can get.”

Nautica stopped tracking time at some point. She didn’t know exactly when she’d stopped, because she refused to look at her chronometer to check. It was the only point in her life where she was content with ambiguity. It was also, she thought, the only point where she was grateful not to be alone.

“What does your cell look like?” Afterburner asked her through the wall against her back, through a vocaliser that was plagued with a whine like a warning alarm. As if he was low on fuel, and his own voice had to keep reminding him that something was wrong as if he didn’t notice it himself.

Something was very, very wrong indeed. Nautica didn’t need a HUD blip or alert to tell her that much.

“The same as yours, I’d assume.” She didn’t need to raise her voice to be heard, didn’t need to raise her head, and she didn’t know if she even could. “There’s a recharge slab. Walls and floor padded with some kind of synthetic weave. Only exception is the plasma grid in front of me.” It was the same kind that had buzzed in front of her a few breems before, when she was herded into what must have been a holding cell with everyone else. This was one that looked fitted for a long-term stay. For days, or vorns, or...

“Yeah.” Afterburner’s sigh managed to save her processor from going down that spiral of doom. “Sounds the same as mine’s. Don’t know why they even give us a slab when we won’t be doing any recharging.”

“Likely the same reason why they gave us a trial when they were just going to find us guilty anyway,” Nautica reasoned alongside her own sigh. “Trying to convince us they’re the good guys. Trying to convince themselves, maybe .” She far preferred analysing the orbital mechanics of Camien satellites to making guesses on the social minutiae of their afthole ancestors; but when one lacked a telescope or indeed a window to look out of, one couldn’t afford to be picky over what could keep one’s mind occupied. In Afterburner’s case, he seemed to be the kind who kept on talking so he didn’t have to think. 

“Why did they just lock us up again?” he asked. “They said we were being sent back to Caminus. They just have to put us back on the ship and we’ll happily leave all this behind.”

“Maybe they’re doing something to it,” Nautica suggested, grimacing as she thought of the  Hermitian being infested by fur and scales and whiskers, all the hard work she put into keeping every surface and gear pristine just gone to waste. “Might be putting a tracker on it. Or a bomb.” For some reason, she found that worst-case scenario amusing. As if the Cybertronians thought getting rid of them all would be that easy, as if the Hermitian could really be so easily compromised. They could do anything short of dismantling it for scrap and it wouldn’t matter much. Whatever trick they tried to pull on her ship, Nautica would see it immediately. Because it was, after all, her ship.

“What about the others?” Afterburner pressed, in a tone that made it clear he didn’t want to think too hard about them for his own processor’s wellbeing. “You think they’re being held as well?”

“I’d assume we’re all being held the same way.” Then Nautica paused, remembering the reason they were being held in the first place. “Except maybe…”

“Windblade,” Afterburner finished the thought for her, saving her the guilt of turning it into an accusation. “She was the scapegoat, after all.”

That was a good way to look at it, Nautica thought. Windblade was just as much a victim as the rest of them, if not moreso because she was the main culprit of the so-called terrorist plot. Nautica knew it was all nonsense, an excuse to get them all off of Cybertron before they found out anything they weren’t supposed to know. Windblade had known Rattrap’s true intentions instantly, because she must have gotten close to something dangerous before she was captured. Whatever she saw in Metroplex, it was worth almost starting a war to hide. But if Cybertron really had such a monumental secret somehow related to the Titan, why invite a delegation in the first place? Why go to such trouble to welcome them just to frame them for a crime that hadn’t even happened?

Unless…

“Do you think she did do something to Metroplex?” Nautica raised her helm, and though Afterburner was out of sight she could also see him shaking his own furiously in denial. 

“Absolutely not. Why would she?”

It was the expected response. He had volunteered to defend Windblade all by himself, in front of a planet full of rabid beasts who likely wanted the Camiens dead on principle. He couldn’t entertain any thoughts that she wasn’t as innocent as the rest of them. 

Yet Nautica wondered, only briefly, if he was actually expecting an answer from her. Because she could think of several reasons why Windblade would do something after trying everything she could to get to the Titan, and she was sure none of the reasons were ones that Afterburner would want to hear. But then Nautica decided that there was at least one he had to hear.

“Might have been ordered by the Mistress,” she told him.” We all heard what she thought of the Cybertronians. And she speaks with Primus’ words.” 

‘ Apparently.’ That was the only part she didn’t voice, because thinking the Mistress would lie to her delegation and leave them to deal with the consequences of her own betrayal was treasonous enough. And she could hear Afterburner spluttering from having to even consider such a thing. She’d thought he’d have been used to her casual slander by now- he was one of the few people who ever heard it other than Windblade, because she knew that, despite all his warnings to stay quiet and his duties to the Mistress as a bodyguard of her chosen Speakers, he wouldn’t actually do anything about it. Maybe he thought if he just didn’t acknowledge something then it didn’t really happen- like quantum particles that change when observed. If he didn’t look, then things would not change, then he could carry on pretending that everything was as it should be. 

Until someone like Nautica came along and wrenched his head on its spinal strut, forcing him to see what was right in front of him all along. She could hear his vents gulping down air, preparing for a harsh and familiar reprimand. 

“Nautica, I know you’re not exactly known for being respectful, but that’s a very dangerous thing to be saying. You’re suggesting that… that Mistress sent us on some kind of suicide mission?!” He turned it into a question with a crack in his vocaliser. “That we were just a distraction while Windblade was sent to sabotage Metroplex?”

Nautica had never heard Afterburner actually try to interpret her doubts and theories before, not when he usually just tried to change the subject before they were overheard. But there was no one to hear them and care when they were so many light years from home. Ironically, he probably felt safer to speak as a prisoner of a foreign power than walking around free on the streets of Caminus. 

For the first time in her life someone was hearing her, someone not on an ethics board or scientific panel, and they were actually understanding the terrible things she was suggesting. It was good. She just wished it hadn’t taken being imprisoned on charges of terrorism to break him out of Afterburner’s mental comfort zone.

“Worse things have happened in the history of our kind,” Nautica said, shrugging even though no one could see her. “You should hear some of the old stories Vertex likes to read.” The old Cybertronian archives, records rescued from the days of the Empire before Caminus and his people left, were all readily available to anyone who looked for them. They helped form narratives for theatre and paintings and sculptures, because though it was their own history it was so alien and unfamiliar that it was impossible to see anything of Caminus’ culture within it. Vertex read the records for inspiration, and Nautica read them to try and piece together what went wrong. 

“ Stories ,” Afterburner scoffed. “Meaning they didn’t actually happen.”

Nautica almost laughed at the irony of Afterburner now being the one to doubt in her place. Cybertron’s imperial history was so ancient and irrelevant to modern Caminus that there was no reason for anyone to lie about it. He didn’t realise that all that was known of Caminus’ own history was what the Mistress herself allowed them all to know.

“You can’t decide that for sure without even reading them, Burn.” She had to wonder, somewhat callously, if bodyguards like Afterburner were even taught how to read in the first place.  

“You know who writes those stories, Nautica? Winners. There’s only one side that we ever know about. There’s no… no peer-review, like what your kind do. There’s no rigorous testing over and over to make sure what you write down is undeniable fact. So no, I’m not gonna read something that I don’t even know is true or not. I’m interested in what I know, which is what I see for myself in the here and now.”

He’d started off with a surprisingly good point, Nautica thought, but then she had to suppress a scowl when she heard the dismissive tone wrapped around ‘ her kind ’, subconsciously comparing it to how the Mistress had referred to the techno-organics. It didn’t matter that Afterburner couldn’t see her expression, she knew that it would show through her vocaliser if she let it simmer on her mouth. She’d had good practice at putting up with all the jokes and snide condescension that came with her career- a fast processor didn’t get you much in a place like Caminus, not when the frame that carried the processor was all people cared to see. Her whole life was dedicated to proving empirical truth and firmly separating real from fake, black from white. It was what Primus had made her for, and she accepted it, even when it meant having to debate people like Afterburner on the painfully obvious. 

“So just what do you know, Afterburner?” 

“One,” the bodyguard paused, and Nautica could tell he was actually raising his digits to count off his facts as they slowly came, “the Mistress speaks for Caminus. Two, she dedicates her life to Primus and to keeping us all safe . And three… we need to stop arguing and get the frag out of here.”

Nautica wanted to lie flat on her side, hearing how exhausted Afterburner was through the wall. They were only arguing because there was nothing else to do, nothing else except panic and worry, and like the other two options it did nothing to help them. He was right, if only about that one thing.

“Well. One out of three isn’t so bad.” She scoffed at how pointless the back-and-forth really was, once again scolding herself for not knowing how to talk to her own people without turning the conversation into a confrontation. Even those who were her friends sometimes felt like strangers if she said the wrong thing. Nautica thought of how Lightbright had exploded at Windblade, blaming her for ruining their mission, and she wondered if Lightbright was angry because her friend had done wrong or only because she had to suffer the consequences of that wrongdoing. If Windblade hadn’t been caught and only confessed to seeing Metroplex, whether or not she did anything to him, on their way home, would Lightbright still have reacted the same way? How important was the morality of the decision compared to the consequences?

Nautica hadn’t considered such things in stellar cycles, not since she came up with her first pilot study. She’d wanted to examine patterns of quantum mechanics in macro scale, analysing the usual midnight crowds of Caminus on one of the busiest streets and then subtly manipulating them to see if they’d act in ways that could disrupt and predict the movement of quantum particles. It had been rejected, of course, because she’d need the consent and approval of every single Camien on the street for it to be ethical, and she’d been furious because it wasn’t like she was trying to hack into their processors and tell them to walk right instead of left. 

But now, she finally realised, the extent of the manipulation wasn’t the point. It was the fact that unwilling participants were being involved at all. If the Mistress had given Windblade instructions to sabotage Metroplex, then the rest of the Camiens brought along were just unwilling participants. They were the civilians in the street, with no idea of what they were really involved in, with no say in what would happen.

‘...I don’t think I’ll ever complain about the ethics board rejecting one of my proposals ever again’. Nautica buried her head in her hands, pressing her palms against her optics, like trying to block out her HUD. She was overthinking and overcomplicating every thought she had, just to avoid the only terrifying truth that mattered; they were in prison, with no easy way out. The reason why didn’t really matter at all, and the fact that it didn’t matter scared Nautica because it was the only thing she could focus on-

Until Afterburner spoke. 

“Someone’s coming.”

Nautica didn’t know what he could hear that she couldn’t, but a nanoklick later there was a woosh as a door opened out of sight and heavy footsteps thumped the ground. Nautica saw him first as he marched in front of the two cells; it was the red mech from Rattrap’s personal guard, the Cybertronian who looked like a Camien. She couldn’t remember his name. 

“Rise and shine, prisoners. On your feet.” He held an intimidating cannon in one hand, hefting its thick barrel onto his other hand so he could hold it steady. It was a clear warning- if either of them made an unwelcome move, he could aim it at them in less than a nanoklick. Nautica slowly stood up, keeping her hands balled by her sides, and she assumed Afterburner did the same because the guard soon grunted another order at them. 

“Show your hands. Palms first, digits stretched.” Nautica uncurled her fingers, showing she was unarmed. Even if she had some kind of weapon stashed away, she wouldn’t know what to do with it. 

“Why are we being held here?” Afterburner asked. “You were supposed to be sending us back to Caminus. That was what the trial decided.” He spat out that one word, knowing full well that it hadn’t been a trial so much as an inquisition. Nautica had seen it the same way the rest of Cybertron had, through a vidlink beamed to a tiny screen in the holding cells. 

“You’re being held for interrogation,” the guard informed them both. “You’ll be free to leave when we’ve made sure you ain’t got nothing else to hide.” Then he turned to leave the same way he entered, but his loud steps didn’t drown out Afterburner’s voice pelting at his back.

“Interrogation?! You already got what you wanted, the whole planet hates us! What else could we possibly give you people?!”

Nautica moved closer to the edge of her cell as the guard took his leave, trying to keep him in her sight as she angled her head behind the buzzing plasma grid. He clearly wasn’t listening to Afterburner, but he was currently the only link either of them had to the outside world. If he left, there was no knowing when he’d be back, not without Nautica looking at her chronometer and knowing how long they’d really been left to rot was more than she could bear. She didn’t want to know anything, for the first time in her life she wanted to be stupid and blissfully ignorant and know nothing at all so she could just stay innocent and go home...

But she knew the guard’s name. She remembered it. Chromia had been arguing with him, and she’d called him...

“Ironhide?” 

There was a woosh of the door opening once more, but his footsteps stopped.

“Your name’s Ironhide, right?” she asked again. 

“Yeah,” Afterburner sneered, “he’s one of Rattrap’s pets.”

Nautica ignored him, but she pressed herself closer to the edge of her cell so Ironhide couldn’t do the same to her. “Where are our friends, Ironhide? What are you doing to them?”

There was silence for a few nanoklicks, and Nautica feared that the guard had left the cell block after all. But then he walked back, his steps slower but still loud as he stopped in front of her. Seeing him up close, he didn’t look scary or threatening even with the giant cannon in his grip. He just looked tired.

“As I said, the ones still left are being interrogated,” he informed her with a weary glossa. “You two’ll be next.”

“The ones left...?!” Nautica realised the implications in the second it took for her to try and charge through the grid of molten energy in front of her, the only thing stopping her from grabbing Ironhide by his shoulders. “What happened to them?! What did you DO !?” She hissed as the heat from the plasma grid started to sizzle her armor, but she wouldn’t step back. She wouldn’t let Ironhide stand there and ruin all the hope she still had. She wouldn’t accept that her friends… that any one of them had been-

“Now calm yourself down, lil’ lady.” Ironhide narrowed his optics, staring down at her like he wanted to nudge her away just so she’d stop burning herself. “Ain’t no one been killed. Some have just… managed to slip away.” He muttered like it was an embarrassment he didn’t want to admit it, but Nautica stepped back as her legs started to shake. Did he mean Velocity and Hot Shot? Or had others managed to join them?

“Who got away?” She had to ask, though she doubted Ironhide would tell her. He started to leave again, his head turned away, but something anchored his peds in place. 

Was he allowed to tell them such things? 

Did he want to tell them anyway?

“I only know ‘bout one.” Ironhide was almost whispering, still not looking at Nautica. “Windblade, her name was. She escaped while being transferred for interrogation. And we won’t let it happen again, so don’t be getting any stupid ideas.” He gave his warning while walking away, and when he was out of sight Nautica let herself collapse on the floor, lying flat with cold steel tiles at her back.

“Windblade got out…?” Afterburner was quiet, like he didn’t want to jinx things by speaking loud enough for Unicron to hear, but from the direction of his voice it sounded like he was on the floor as well. “Solus, I hope she’s safe.”

“She will be.” Nautica sighed, releasing all her worst fears for now. “She’s smart. Smarter than me in some ways.”

“Why, Nautica, are you being humble ? Didn’t think you had it in you.”

Nautica usually didn’t respond well to sarcasm, sometimes because she didn’t even recognise it and other times because she took it as mockery. But even if she’d thought Afterburner’s tone was malicious, she was too numb from relief to bite back. 

“Accepting that you can’t know everything is the first step towards knowing as much as you can,” she said, a recitation she’d copied and underlined hundreds of times in every single datapad she used for notes. “Windblade’s smart in the Caminus way. She knows how to talk to people. Even if the trial was just a public humiliation, she spoke so well that I bet at least one person watching was convinced that she’s innocent.” In that way, Nautica was glad that it was Windblade instead of herself that had managed to escape. Even if she was public enemy number one for most of Cybertron… there had to be at least one person out there who’d be willing to help her. It was statistically impossible for there not to be!

“I suppose when you can talk to Titans, regular people aren’t much of a challenge,” Afterburner theorised. “Unless you’re Hot Shot.”

“Everything’s a challenge when you’re Hot Shot.” Nautica almost laughed, but then felt immediately guilty. If he was with Velocity, he might be okay. If not... 

“I hope he’s alright,” she mumbled, knowing that just hoping wouldn’t be good enough.

“Lightbright too…” Afterburner sighed, and there was a loud clang of his fist hitting something solid. “I should’ve protected her. She was my charge. I had one job, and I failed it-”

“Stop it, Afterburner.” Nautica turned her head towards the wall, still lying flat on the ground.  “Stop it. Thinking like that isn’t going to help us.”

“But it’s true.”

“And you can kick yourself for it all you want once we’re back home. Pit, I’ll even let you report me to the Mistress for blasphemy. Because we will get back home.”

“But what if one of us says something these creeps don’t like? What if they change their minds about sending us back? What if…?”

Just as Nautica had feared, he was panicking now that he didn’t have a pointless argument to distract him. She’d seen Chromia deal with such situations with a hard slap across the cheek, but that probably wasn’t the right course of action (and Nautica couldn’t even see Afterburner, let alone assault him for his own good).

“They can’t hurt us, Burn,” she insisted, reminding herself as well as him.. “Remember what Vertex said. They lay one servo on us and the Mistress would storm this place with Victorion and every bodyguard who can hold a weapon.” For all her heretical thoughts and doubts about her dear leader, Nautica was sure of that at least. The Mistress would see it as the highest insult, her own people harmed while on a pilgrimage to Primus’ shell, and she wouldn’t forgive it. 

“Right… yeah. Of course.” Afterburner gulped as he kept convincing himself. “Rattrap wouldn’t do anything to risk that.”

“Just think…” Nautica’s mind started to wander when she was sure Afterburner was calmed enough. “Maybe she’ll even wake Caminus himself- Primus, can you imagine?!” Instead of sending out legions of ships loaded with soldiers, the Mistress could just fly the entire colony to Cybertron and catch in its orbit like a second moon, and the sight of Caminus looming overhead would be enough to send Rattrap scurrying to the core to hide. 

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Afterburner said, his cautious tone bringing a quick end to Nautica’s fanciful imagination. 

“Yeah… yeah. Of course,” she agreed.

But what was the point of living on a Metrotitan if you couldn’t enlist him to settle some serious scores? He’d been sleeping for millennia- Pit, there were no records of him assuming his walking mode even before he evacuated Cybertron. Only the Mistress had any idea of what Caminus the person was really like…

Only she knew what was going on in his mind. Nautica didn’t like that, and she really didn’t like that she’d only realised such a thing at that moment. 

This wasn’t her field of expertise. People scared her. They were unpredictable and loud and selfish, and when she tried to be scientific about them she just made her head hurt. But it was the only way she knew how to deal with them. It was the only way she knew how to make sense of…

Of everything.

‘I should have been born on an asteroid. Somewhere far away. Somewhere I could mess with the laws of physics all I want and not even Primus Himself can stop me. Maybe I’ll just find somewhere and go away when we get home. Just me and the Hermitian. My favorite journals. Some tools in my subspac-’  

Subspace.

Her pocket.

The cabinet on the ship.

In just a few desperate short hops around her processor, she’d just discovered their ticket to freedom.

Subspace was still something not entirely understood, not even by quantum geniuses like Nautica. Every bot had their own little pockets to themselves, anomalies within their frames that allowed them to temporarily store things, be it possessions or parts of their own body that allowed them to take on compact alt modes that otherwise would have been impossible to have. It was hard enough to study them when, under normal circumstances, no-one could access another person’s subspace, only observe what was within it. 

Of course, Nautica rarely ever acted under ‘normal’ circumstances. It had taken her cycles and cycles of experimentation and funding favors from friends who had other friends who actually enjoyed scientific breakthroughs in between dance recitals… but she’d found a way to replicate her own subspace pocket into a separate vacuum. And then there was the even more difficult process, expanding that pocket into something that an entire person could fit inside. But she’d done it, Solus dammit! That was what her prototype subspace cabinet onboard the Hermitian came to be, though it was only by sheer coincidence that expanding the pocket also negated the fact that only she could access it (apparently the person-locked shield didn’t scale up with the vacuum itself, so there was only a tiny part of the whole cabinet that technically couldn’t be used by anyone other than herself).

But there was another unintended quirk of the cabinet, one that she’d only discovered a few cycles before she departed Caminus. She could pull things from it by dipping into her own subspace, because the two entities were copies of the same quantum space and therefore directly linked. Almost anything she put in the cabinet she could then pull out from her personal subspace, and vice versa. The only limit was size- she could only remove items from the cabinet that weren’t larger than her own subspace, of course. 

She didn’t need anything large. Just a wrench, or a screwdriver, something she’d surely have lying around in the cabinet...

She didn’t say anything to Afterburner, not wanting to get his hopes up before she even knew if she could do it, as she opened her subspace. It was empty on the surface, she was expecting that, but the space underneath was almost bottomless. She felt her digits go further, tensing as she grazed across objects and trinkets and something that seemed to flinch away as she touched it… she knew what she was looking for. She knew its shape, the texture of the handle, the buttons along its surface-

There it was, tight in her hand, rescued from the endless dark. Her laser screwdriver. An old thing pitted with rust, in dire need of upgrading, yet she almost wept when she saw it in her digits.

The easy part was done. The hard part was finding some weakness she could jam the tool into, some panel in her cell or crease or crevice around the plasma grid, or a bundle of wires that would lead her somewhere. She was silent as she searched her cell top to bottom, only speaking to keep up with Afterburner’s inane chatter that kept him sane. 

It was under the slab they’d given her to sleep on- a single fraying thread on the padded wall. She pushed the screwdriver into the broken seam, slowly ripping through layers of weave then plastic then soft metal until she reached the gilded back of a circuit board. She carefully pulled it out, keeping the wires intact in case an alarm was set off, and looked over it several times with ever-increasing glee. For all of Cybertron’s differences, their tech was the same as Caminus’, and she was ninety nine percent sure that what she was holding was a control chip. Maybe for the doors, maybe for the plasma grids. Whatever it was, she was going to tear it to pieces.

“Afterburner, I need you to do something,” she called out, her vocaliser cracking with barely-contained longing.

“What?”
“Get ready to run.” She was already digging her screwdriver through the circuit wafers, breaking the thing apart with her bare hands and using her frame’s weight to yank out every wire. The lights above her flickered, and there was a harsh buzz that she almost thought was an alarm before it died completely, along with the plasma grid keeping her imprisoned. 

She was left frozen, just for a nanoklick, just long enough to process the fact that she could leave. She darted upright and out of her cell before any backup procedures could kick in, and she saw that Afterburner’s cell was still powered and humming. He stared at her in shock, and his optics were still bulging when Nautica found the button to deactivate his cell’s grid.

“H-holy slag…” He looked up and down, as if he was hallucinating his freedom, before Nautica marched forward and grabbed him by the elbow.

“What’d I tell you?!” she hissed. “RUN!” She was pulling him behind her, towards the door Ironhide must have used.

“But… but Lightbright!” he cried, now blocking the way out by moving in front of her. “The others! We have to find them!”

And then, a few seconds too late, the alarm went off, a shrieking klaxon that Nautica had to scream over. She grabbed Afterburner’s thick head to make sure he heard what she was telling him. 

“We don’t know where they are, Afterburner! Listen to me, if we go around this place trying to find them we’re just gonna get trapped and caught again. We can come back for them. Right now, we need to focus on getting the frag out of here. Just like you said. Okay?”

She wasn’t good at talking to people. She certainly wasn’t good at cheering them up, or getting them to agree with her, or even talking sense into them. But she’d used Afterburner’s own words to break through, and it actually worked. 

“Just like I said… right.” 

“So you lead the way,” Nautica told him over the blaring noise. “I’ll cover you.”

Afterburner looked at the screwdriver she held up so proudly, and for the first time in what felt like years he actually smiled. “You’ll strike fear into the sparks of every screw we come across.”

From nightmares of her spark being split apart, cracked like a rotten egg with the contents boiling away into rancid mist as they hit the ground, Windblade awoke to the sound of screaming and sobbing and vents going into overdrive. She thought the sounds were her own at first, but her throat didn’t ache and her vocaliser was silent. It was a different femme spiralling out of control, but her voice wasn’t one that Windblade recognised. 

“What the Pit were you thinking, Knockout?!”

“I wasn’t thinking, clearly,” she heard the medic reply through gritted denta. “But it’s been done, and we’re still alive—”

“For now! But we won’t be for much fragging longer thanks to you!”

Windblade tentatively opened a single optic, only seeing an empty wall in front of her. She had fallen asleep on the operating slab, and the voices were coming from behind her. She didn’t want to be part of whatever argument was raging on (especially because the argument was likely about her), but she wasn’t going to be able to drift off again any time soon.

So she slowly rolled over onto her back, trying not to crush her wings as well as not draw attention to herself. Her head was still heavy, her neck stiff from curling her head into the crook of her elbow, and she knew if she tried to push herself upright she’d just get a face full of glaring HUD warnings. At least from this angle she could turn her head enough to see Knockout, as well as whoever was tearing him down in his own hospital.

“Look, we’ve lasted for five centuries without any guards even coming to the door. You were just like this when I kept the clinic going in the first place, you were adamant that we’d get shut down and dragged away, and here we still are because— ah.”

The medic took a reprieve from his own scolding by noticing Windblade, and he seemed grateful to use her as a distraction. “Sleeping beauty re-joins us at last.”

“Don’t you start!” The femme grabbed his shoulder to remind him that he wasn’t going to get out of their confrontation that easily. She was a fairly sleek frame, despite the heavy wheels and racing fins on her back; Windblade could tell she was designed perfectly for the roads. Though her yellow paint was chipped and faded, the maroon details were almost pristine as if she painted them on new whenever they were slightly scuffed. That was all that Windblade could take in of her with a single glance, before she buried her head in her hands.

“You… you fragging idiot! All that hiding and moving and nights spent on guard gone to waste because you decided to take in a wanted fragging criminal! ” She threw the last curse over her shoulder as she stalked out of Windblade’s sight, and Knockout followed after her with a shake of his helm. 

“Dragstrip, you know Rattrap is trying to kill us all anyway!”

“So you think it’s fine to go ahead and give him an excuse to get at us first?!” 

Windblade started to slowly inch herself upright, trying to block out the bickering between Knockout and Dragstrip. Instead, she looked around for something missing, something that seemed out-of-place even with her processor barely functioning at half-efficiency…

Starscream. She couldn’t see him anywhere. He had to have come back, surely. Knockout said he would, eventually. 

She couldn’t have been resting for very long. Maybe he was on his way back already. Maybe he was just in a different room. But Windblade wouldn’t know unless she got herself back on her feet. 

When she finally pulled her legs down from the slab, carefully putting her weight on them as they met the steel floor with wobbling resistance, she couldn’t hear Dragstrip and Knockout arguing anymore. She could only hear a muffled, reluctant kind of cry, and when she looked over she saw Knockout holding onto Dragstrip’s shoulders to stop them from shaking.

“I can’t… I can’t do it again, I can’t… he killed Motormaster, he killed everyone...” Dragstrip kept her face hidden in her hands, and despite her efforts it was clear that she was crying.

“Dragstrip, please.”

“You didn’t see what he did to him, Knockout… he’ll do it again. He’ll take me away from you and he’ll kill us all...”

“Listen to me, Dragstrip. Calm down and listen.” Knockout moved his hands from her shoulders to her face, gently pulling it away from her palms. “Rattrap doesn’t know we’re here. We’re safe. For now, we are safe.”

“Safe…” Dragstrip blinked, as coolant rolled down her cheeks and onto Knockout’s claws, as she looked past him as if the safety she needed was somewhere beyond. 

“I’ll deal with this. I promise.” Knockout had softened his vocaliser, almost to a whisper. “Why don’t you go take a drive around the underground for now?”

Dragstrip nodded, a small action that once she started she didn’t seem to know how to stop. “Maybe… maybe I will…”

She let Knockout herd her out of the operating room, through some dark doorway that Windblade couldn’t see through, and when she was gone Knockout’s shoulders sagged like someone had dumped a crate of raw energon on top of them— a great weight held up for little reward. 

“Sorry about that,” he sighed. “I didn’t get the chance to tell her we had a guest before she…” He made a vague gesture in the direction of Dragstrip’s departure, before even that little amount of strength failed him.

Windblade wanted to ask who Dragstrip was, but she feared that it was some other kind of relationship that was alien to Camiens. These weren’t two bots who found each other in a club for an evening, and then went their separate ways in the morning. They were clearly close, but this was more than just friendship between sorority members or the protection a bodyguard owed to their Cityspeaker. The closest parallel she could think of was the rare moments when Hot Shot and Lightbright got along (usually with both of them inebriated), or the silent understanding that Afterburner and Maxima shared in their mutual duties…

Was it something to do with what Knockout had told her about sparks, mechs and femmes being ‘magnetised’ together? If it was, Windblade still didn’t know what to make of it But it wasn’t her business, anyway. She had more important things to be asking about.

“Did Starscream come back…? Where is he?” She looked around the operating room, or any sign of him lurking in the shadows or dozing off like she had done (Solus knows he desperately needed some rest), but Knockout shook his head. 

“Still somewhere out here moping. Assuming he hasn’t tripped over and impaled himself on something, just to spite me for trying to keep him alive.” He rolled his optics, as Starscream’s death really meant that little to him— though, if it did, why go to all the trouble of keeping him alive in the first place?

Windblade couldn’t hide her concern nearly so well. She had to make sure he was still alive… most of all, if Dragstrip’s fears were well-founded, she had to get away from the clinic entirely. She wouldn’t repay Knockout’s generosity by getting him captured just like she had been.

“I need to… I… I’m sorry,” Windblade apologised both for having to go and for staying in the first place. “I’ll go. I’m sorry. I need to find him.” She went for the door, the same one Starscream had wrenched open and fled out into the snow through, but as she grasped the handle there was a hissing tsk from over her shoulder.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Knockout asked, and though Windblade didn’t turn around she could practically see the expression he was giving her— weariness, wariness, maybe some doubt. She was, after all, leaving the only place she’d found that was remotely safe with the only people who, so far, hadn’t tried to kill her.

“Probably not,” she conceded, even as her hand tightened. “But… I can’t just leave him out there by himself. I can’t.” Even if she wanted to be selfish like Starscream and only think of herself, she knew that if he died then the answers to so many questions would die with him. What a waste it would be. She owed it to the both of them to at least try to find him. 

“The injuries to his spark make him unpredictable,” Knockout informed her. “He might attack you.” 

She nodded. “He might.”

“He might kill you.”

She nodded again. “He might.”

“You still don’t have any armour on.”

After a moment of delayed spluttering, Windblade managed to let out a scoff. “That’s the least of my concern right now.”

If someone out there really wanted to kill her (like Rattrap), then no amount of layers upon layers of Cityspeaker raiment would be able to save her. Not even her sword had managed to do anything. Her sword, forged in the fires of Caminus’ own spark, made for her and no-one else… only to be torn from her grip before she could even use it, likely now rotting away as a shielded prize in Iacon’s lauded relic vault. 

If all Cityspeakers were as inept as her, then it was no wonder they all needed bodyguards. Chromia wouldn’t be scared of what lay outside... she wouldn’t have let Tarantulas trick her in the first place. 

Then again, she probably would have killed Starscream in her grand escape. So, in the end, maybe it was just as well that Windblade was the first— and last— bot set to be executed by him. It wasn’t good. But, in terms of freeing Starscream at all, it was the best outcome that could have happened.

“Well.” Knockout sighed, a grating hiss through his vents, as Windblade snapped back to the present. “Good luck. But when you go and prove me right, I’m not fixing you up again for free.” 

“Wouldn’t expect you to.” This time she turned to face Knockout, confirming that he was definitely looking at her with weariness, and wariness, and doubt. But she hadn’t guessed that he’d look genuinely sad as well. He’d probably seen more of his patients end up dead than alive. When they left, he’d likely never seen some of them ever again. He was expecting that she’d become another number as soon as she closed the door behind her.

Windblade was sure of all of this, yet she still pressed the handle down. 

“Wait.”

It wasn’t Knockout who stopped her this time. She turned again to find Dragstrip standing behind her at a healthy distance, holding something under one shoulder.

“Your name’s Windblade, right?” Dragstrip looked away as she said the name, like she was wincing. Did she think just saying it out loud would summon Rattrap’s guards in nanoklicks? Well, something like that actually happening wouldn’t have even surprised Windblade anymore.

“I watched the trial,” Dragstrip went on, almost stumbling on the single step forward she took. “It was streamed all over the planet. Everyone saw it, I think— well, obviously some people missed it." She briefly threw aside a half-sparked glare at Knockout. "Did you... really try to kill Rattrap? Him and everyone else?” 

Windblade shook her head, idle drifts that quickly became firm denial. “No. I wasn’t… that wasn’t what I was trying to do.” She was about to plead her innocence before she noticed Dragstrip’s face fall through several storeys of disappointment. 

“Shame. I was hoping someone had finally noticed everything. I hoped someone… had come to help us.” Her voice became thin, threatening to crack again, but she held it together with a harsh grunt that sounded like an engine rev. 

Rattrap had been killing people for five centuries. Dragstrip had spent that long living in fear, not knowing if she’d soon be another one who disappeared. She’d already lost people she knew. Possibly everyone, save for Knockout. But, if anyone found out he’d helped Windblade, he wouldn’t be left alone any longer.

Which was why Windblade had to let Caminus know what was happening.

“The Mistress of Flame will help,” she swore. “She’ll know we’re missing. She’ll come here with an army, and Rattrap won’t be able to hold her back. She’ll help make things right.”

Dragstrip would have heard of the Mistress from the trial. She would have seen her rejection of Cybertron, and the people who had taken it from her true ancestors. She would know that this life of fear wouldn’t have to last any longer. Yet she didn’t smile. 

“You sound so sure. Well, anyway. Here.” Dragstrip unburdened herself of the bundle under her shoulder, holding it out to Windblade where she realised what it was; a dust-worn set of red armour plates.

“Red was always Knockout’s colour,” Dragstrip told her. “Not much mines. It’ll keep you warm out there, at least.”

Windblade held the armour to her frame, seeing that it would fit it well enough (even though Dragstrip was a little shorter than her). “Thank you, Dragstrip. And… I’m sorry for all the trouble.”

Dragstrip stood across from Knockout, who was busying himself by covering up his various tools with a tattered tarp. “We used to get into a lot of trouble,” she said, with a glance at the mech. “Before… well. I’m glad you ended up here instead of walking into a trap, at least. Look after yourself. I don’t think your Mistress will be happy with any of us if you turn up dead.”

Windblade nodded as she dressed herself, hiding her face towards the floor so her frown wouldn’t be seen. She knew that if the Mistress did find any of her delegation deceased, only Primus Himself could stop her from razing Cybertron down to its core. 

Despite what she’d been put through, she didn’t want that to happen. 

She didn’t want anyone else to have to die. 

 

✧✦✧

 

The snow and night had ended, though a cold blue haze still lingered in Cybertron’s atmosphere amidst gaps in the thick curtain of clouds. If there were any fliers— Seekers— out looking for Starscream and Windblade, at least the weather would give them some trouble. 

Even so, Windblade didn’t dare leave herself out in the open. The place that Knockout made his home seemed to be a decrepit slum, like the areas on Caminus, far away from the Titan himself, that were left in deliberate disrepair because every other night some drunken friends would smash things for fun— so there was no point in fixing any of it. This place also seemed deliberate in its dilapitude, except people were actually expected to live here and just deal with it. 

From her hiding spots among the unsalvageable ruins, she saw Cybertronians; real ones, sitting on pitted winding pavements or trying to patch up the gaping holes in their homes, or lying flat on the roofs doing nothing at all. Despite Rattrap’s attempts at culling the natives there were more than a few on the streets, but they all looked so miserable that there likely would have been little point in killing them. Which, over the last five centuries, was exactly what Rattrap had intended.

Knockout had told Windblade the Sparkcracker was a myth, something meant to scare their children. But now it was real, and they thought it would come for them at any moment. She hadn’t fully realised just how horrifying such a thing was supposed to be, not until she saw what was plastered all over one of the only still-standing walls. 

Torn printed pictures. Frantic pleas stamped out in bold. More than she could count.

 

HAVE YOU SEEN HER?

MISSING PERSON

PLEASE HELP FIND ME

HELP US FIND HIM

 

There was no knowing how old each monochrome appeal was. Some were photographs, some were painstakingly detailed drawings of faces. Some were even smiling. But they were all doomed, as told by the graffiti scrawled in white over the top of the wall. 

 

THE SPARKCRACKER WON’T GIVE THEM BACK

 

They were all dead. They had to be, if they’d been brought to the Sparkcracker like Windblade had. She’d known their fear and agony. She’d known exactly what their last moments had been like...

And she almost collapsed. Almost, before she remembered the pain of the unwilling Sparkcracker himself.

Starscream.

He had a name like everyone else, dammit. And he had to remain her priority, if she was going to get anywhere with her spark still intact. 

But… she didn’t even know where to start looking for him. Had he been this way, seen this very same wall covered with his… victims? Would he have found somewhere far away to hide? Somewhere underground...? 

No. He was a Seeker. He was the prince of Seekers. There was only one place he would be, even if he was being hunted down, because there was only one place she could see that was tall enough. 

It was an empty building, a place that was only still standing up through either a miracle or sheer stubborn defiance of gravity, and its height paled in comparison to the starscrapers in the far distance— the clear markers between the slums and the cities. But it was where she found Starscream, motionless and silent with his back and its mangled wings towards her. His EM field was barely an ambient fizz in the air, but otherwise he made no effort to hide himself; almost skylined against the murky ice-crust of the horizon, almost a statue, almost letting the cold wind blow him off the very edge of the roof... 

He wasn’t going to just let himself fall, was he? 

Just as Windblade took a step forward, his vocaliser burst forth with a sigh that could have toppled the building itself with the force it left his body with.

“What a hideous sight it all is,” he growled, addressing the horizon. “I can’t even remember what it all looked like before. Though, perhaps that’s a blessing. I can’t pine for something that I can’t remember existing.” He dragged a hand over his face, like he could hardly bear to disgrace his optics with the ruin before him for much longer, yet did not want to turn away from it. “How did you know I was here?”

Windblade remained balanced on her single forward leg, still debating on whether it was safe to bring herself towards him. “I didn’t know. Just a lucky guess. I like high places too.” 

Starscream inclined his helm towards her, though he still did not turn. “The capital of Vos held the highest point on the planet,” he told her, somewhat matter-of-factly. “We called it the Skyspire. You could see it from the balconies of Iacon, from the quarries of Kaon, even from standing on Luna 1.” He reached a hand up towards the sky, where Cybertron’s single moon could barely be seen through the darkest clouds overhead, and there it remained suspended for a long, long moment. 

“This is as close as I’ll ever get to ever feeling the sky again…” He whispered it to himself, as his arm finally fell limp by his side. “But the distance from the ground doesn’t matter. I could be standing on the peak of a Praxian starscraper, and it would not be the same. It never will be.” 

So Knockout was right. Starscream knew that he would never fly again. He sat down on what might have once been a satellite control box, or a unit for supplying heat into the building, or anything else that was proof that people were supposed to be able to live there at one point, and though his wings were useless they still made him bend forward with their weight.

“You’re pitying me, aren’t you?” he asked, now finally turning towards Windblade. On his face, the scars from his surgery were still angry raised lines that defied healing, morphing his exhausted grimace into an almost-comical scowl. “I’d rather you didn’t. It’s a waste of emotion, even for someone with so much excess to spare.” 

Windblade had the feeling he was trying to bait her into getting angry, just to prove him right. This time, she wouldn’t fall for it. Because she did pity him, and that didn’t have to be scorned.

“Do you mind if I sit with you?” she asked, and he blinked twice with a scoff that surely must have hurt from how his scars pulled against each other. 

“Is that what I owe you,” he asked, “in return for saving my life?”

“You don’t owe me anything. I just took you to Knockout, he’s the one who did the saving.”

“Then why are you here, if I don’t owe you?” 

Windblade couldn’t see anything else that would serve as a seat, so she lowered herself to the flat surface of the roof. 

“Because,” she answered as she crossed her legs, “I wanted to make sure you were still alive.”

He was looking down at her from his slight vantage point, both literally and metaphorically. She could make out that much from his disbelief, his sheer bewilderment at the fact that she just wouldn’t leave him alone. But why would she?

“Well. Now you know. Primus clearly likes keeping me around. Perhaps I amuse Him. He’s never liked Seekers very much, ever since we decided the Thirteen weren’t good enough gods for us. Now I’m the only one left. The last survivor of Vos...”

He trailed off with his eyes to the destroyed borders stretching out far beyond his view. As if he could see Vos, the shadow of it, somewhere amongst the paved-over wreckage. Windblade was sure that it would have been beautiful, and she wondered if that was the long-lost Seeker within her pining for a home she never even knew. She didn’t understand why such effort had been spent on tearing it down— the other cities, Iacon especially, had all been left intact by Rattrap. What had Starscream and his people done to be such specific targets of his wrath?

Well, only one person was alive to tell her. 

“Why did Rattrap destroy Vos?” She was half-expecting Starscream to ignore her, or just stand up and walk away in disgust. Even as she said it out loud, she knew it sounded like one of those many things that was obvious to everyone except her, the ‘stupid Camien who didn’t even know what a sire was’. 

But Starscream didn’t ignore her, or walk away. He kept looking to the broken horizon as his vents pulled down a heavy gasp from the icy wind. 

“Because the Seekers would rather perish than submit to him,” he told her. “He simply granted our wish in the worst way he could devise. Even though Tarantulas and Ratbat had sent their worst to deal with Vos, they’d wanted the city kept intact. Rattrap must have gained the beasts’ favour by letting them burn it all.”

Then his gaze dropped, too heavy now to hold up, as Windblade realised that Tarantulas and Ratbat were not just mere advisors to the mad Chancellor after all. If they had helped arrange the uprising, why did they let Rattrap take command once the dust had settled? Was the ‘Sparkcracker’, and Rattrap’s command over him, really so powerful that they couldn’t afford to stand against him? Or was it something else… something worse?

“He changed on that day,” Starscream said, oblivious to Windblade’s own horrifying revelations. “That was the day he became the three-headed monster you now know.”

Windblade embraced the distraction as she thought back to Rattrap’s introduction, how his appearance was apparently a point of contention even among his soldiers, how it was still the most bizarre and inexplicable thing she’d seen on Cybertron. And she wondered if Starscream was admitting that he knew Rattrap personally, before he became Chancellor and turned the planet into his own organic playground. 

“He wasn’t always like that,” she stated, not quite making it a question. Starscream grunted, and she took it as confirmation.

“He’d said it was because of a malfunction with the… Enigma of Combination?” Of course, she knew better now than to trust anything Rattrap himself had said, and Starscream raised an eyeridge in response.

“I hadn’t heard of that story,” he said, sinking further into himself as his spinal strut bowed. “I remember… I remember he was a pathetic little thing. He disappeared during the city’s siege. I’d hoped he’d been torn apart by the same monsters he’d lead through the gates. But when he returned… he’d been mutated. He held a device. I’d almost thought it was the fabled Matrix, but just a breem before then I’d discovered that not even Sentinel Prime had that fragging thing on him. He wasn’t even Sentinel at all... but that’s a whole other depressing story.”

A Prime that wasn’t a Prime...? Like the Seekers’ apparent contention towards the Thirteen, it was a story that Windblade still wanted to hear. But she knew better than to have Starscream tell it to her at that moment, not when he was finally telling her things that didn’t make her feel stupid. 

“So Rattrap was holding the Enigma?” she said, faintly and distastefully recalling the Chancellor’s heroic tale of squashing the Gestalt rebellion with the relic. That might have explained better why Tarantulas and Ratbat had to settle for serving Rattrap, if he’d threatened to use the Enigma against them otherwise. 

“All these years, I’d had no idea what it was,” Starscream admitted, shaking his helm. “But it must have been. We didn’t have such relics in our vaults, so I’ve no idea where he would have found it.”

“He used it to kill the combiners.”

“I imagine he did. They would have been the only ones who could have stopped him. Other than your Metroplex, but he’s not been much use the last few centuries, has he?”

Windblade bristled— somehow hearing an insult against her Titan was worse than hearing one against herself. “That’s not his fault. Rattrap shut him down. But he still managed to get a message out, and that’s the whole reason I’m here. If it wasn’t for him, you’d still be—”

“Alright,” Starscream snapped, loud enough that some heads down below surely would have heard. “You’ve made your point...”

And though she hadn’t done anything wrong, Windblade still scolded herself. Of course, he didn’t want to be reminded of what he’d escaped… but that didn’t give him the right to call people useless just for doing their best in an awful situation.

Metroplex must have seen some of the destruction for himself, before he’d been switched off. He’d known that Rattrap was the one behind it all. He’d known about Starscream.

“He mentioned you,” Windblade told him. “When I talked to him. I didn’t know you were the one he meant until now.”

Starscream closed his eyes, just as sunlight started to break through the clouds. “And what did the city say?”

“He said you were a dead prince.”

Then Starscream cracked one optic open, a wide and curious orb of red. “Prince…? An interesting choice of word.”

Windblade had thought so too, which was why it had taken her so long to decipher what it meant. 

“It’s from the old Empire days, isn’t it?” She made it a question because she had no idea if it had any other meaning on Cybertron, as Knockout’s hesitance around the word made her suspect.

“Very old,” Starscream replied, now with both optics narrowed at her. “And very astute of you to know that. Does the term ‘Winglord’ mean anything to you?”

“Knockout mentioned it. I think he said it was a title.” Though he didn’t say that exactly, that was what Windblade had assumed it was supposed to be.

“Correct.” Starscream might have been impressed, if Windblade had any idea of what such a thing looked like from him. “It is given to those who lead the Seekers. People like you and me, with Primus’ gift of flight. And it’s hereditary, by tradition. A nice contrast to the ‘elected’ Senate.”

“Hereditary?” Again, Windblade could only guess from context what the word meant. 

“Right. No children on Caminus.” Starscream straightened his spine, rolling his shoulders with a wince. “It means that when the current Winglord steps down, their progeny will be their replacement. And then the new Winglord will one day pass it down to theirs, and so on and so on.” He made circles with his wrist, the endless cycle given form.

“And you were the progeny.” Windblade supposed it was an obvious thing to state, but still felt like it was worth stating since it was where Starscream likely gained so much of his pride from. 

But now, he didn’t look proud at all. He looked sad. Guilty. His jaw was a scarred and stiff monolith as he muttered. 

“I was one of them.”

He stared at a fixed point on the broken roof, at nothing at all, for a long moment. Like how he’d been staring at the distant horizon when Windblade first found him. And again, just as she was thinking of how to snap him out of it, he retrieved himself with nothing but a blink of his eyes.

“Well. I am no longer a prince. And I’m no longer dead. So what use is Metroplex if he doesn’t even know what’s true anymore?”

It was a firm change of subject as well as another trap to make Windblade angry, a clumsy one that she didn’t even acknowledge. 

“He could help us,” she went on, deliberately including Starscream even though he was unlikely to even come with her. “If we can reach him, I could talk to him again. We could hide in his core until the Mistress—”

Starscream’s vents made short skips of air that now evolved into degrading laughter. “Do you really think it would be that easy? Rattrap wanted you to get to Metroplex’s core last time. Now that he’s made you look like a terrorist, he won’t let you get near him again. He’s scared of you.”

Windblade balled her fists to try and stifle her embarrassment, fully aware that she was pouting, but Starscream’s last assertion caught her off guard and completely drained her of anything except confusion. 

Rattrap was scared of her?

He was the one with an entire army, an entire planet under his thrall, countless loyal followers who would happily serve him her head on a platter. He was the one who had her trapped here. He had nothing to be scared of— but Starscream wouldn’t say such a thing just to give her a confidence boost. He wouldn’t say it lightly, either.

He’d spent the last five centuries in Rattrap’s company. He knew every dirty secret, every crime and sin the Chancellor had committed to secure his place in Iacon. Which meant he at least believed that Rattrap should be scared of her.

Windblade figured it was supposed to be a compliment of sorts, but that was the only thing she could figure at all.

“What am I supposed to do, then?” she asked. Starscream must have had some idea, after all, if he was so adamant in what she shouldn’t do.

“You have faith in your Mistress, apparently,” he said, almost daring to shrug. “Wait for her to show up and save you.”

“She won’t get here in time.” Even if the Mistress started travelling from the moment Windblade had been arrested, it would still take a vorn for her to arrive from Caminus. Her people wouldn’t survive that long, not without more luck than all of the Thirteen could give. 

Starscream gave her a look that, ironically, might have been pity if it had come from anyone other than him. “Then it might be a good time to start reconsidering all that faith.”

Windblade opened her mouth, but before she could think of what should come out she saw Starscream violently throw himself to the ground, like he’d just been slapped by Metroplex himself. Windblade heard him gasp and keen as he huddled there, and just a nanoklick later she felt what had hit him. It was a ping against her armour, something wet that seemed to be falling from the sky.

“W-what is it?” she stuttered, joining Starscream on the ground as she knelt to try and avoid the hits. “Is it dangerous?!” It must have been if Starscream was reacting so adversely to it— but now he stopped gasping, looking up at the sky which was now bloated with grey.

“...It’s rain,” he croaked. “Just rain… just water.” He uncurled himself, squeezing his optics shut with a hiss. “We’d do best to get under shelter.”

They retreated into the building’s shell, where the drizzle of rain soon became a thick wall of falling water through the holes in the walls. 

“The water helps the organics,” Starscream growled, trying to shake the droplets from his arms. “But it’s as good as poison to the likes of us. Stay away from it, unless you want to get your new armour covered in rust before the day is out.”

Windblade made a sound of acknowledgement, though she still sat close to one of the broken walls where the rain streamed down heaviest. The liquid haze almost made the wasteland beyond look like something pretty, but she knew it was nothing worth going towards.

“It’s like the whole planet is fighting against us,” she muttered, bringing her knees to her chest.

“Because it is,” Starscream told her. “That’s how Rattrap has designed it.”

Of course he did. It always came back to him. She held her knees tightly.

“What are we supposed to do?” She was repeating herself, but this time she wanted to know what Starscream was planning to do with himself. He had to have a plan, if he was so insistent on being alone. 

“For now,” he spoke with no small amount of effort, “I would wait for the rain to pass.”

“And then?”

“And then you go find a nice little hole to bury yourself in. Or see if Knockout will let you sleep on his operating slab.”

Windblade closed her optics instead of rolling them. “I can’t go back to Knockout. We’ve already put him in enough danger.” She could imagine guards breaking down his door, tearing his clinic apart for any sign that she’d been there. And even if they found nothing, they’d likely kill Knockout anyway just for not being one of them...

“Any Cybertronian is in danger in this place,” Starscream said, as if he could read her thoughts from her EM field. “Whether they realise it or not.”

He knew it better than anyone else. He was part of the reason they’d all been in danger. But Windblade hoped he couldn’t read that thought as easily as her other ones. 

“Windblade.”

She almost bit her glossa as she jolted, expecting a snarl in his voice that, it turned out, wasn’t there at all. “No ‘of Caminus’ this time?”

Starscream didn’t smile at the meagre jab. “Did Knockout say anything about my… condition. About my processor, in particular?”

Windblade didn’t remember anything like that, though the whole operation had been a blur of spilled energon and burned metal.

“No,” she answered. “He only mentioned your spark.”

He froze. It wouldn’t have been noticeable if Windblade hadn’t been watching him, the subtle shift of his optics skidding to a sudden stop. 

“What about it?” he asked, barely moving his mouth. 

“That it’d been injured,” she told him. “That it might make you go crazy and try to kill me.”

His optics flicked over to her, the only movement they made. 

“I might,” he told her.

“You might.”

“Glad we’re in agreement, then.”

That seemed to be the only thing they agreed on, but one thing was better than none. They would have been left in silence, if not for the constant drip of the caustic rain all around them.

“I don’t ask for much, do I?” It was a rhetorical question, of course, the calm before the coming storm, yet Rattrap almost wanted one of the four incompetant cretins before him to try and offer an answer. None of them, not even the insufferable pedlicking Inferno or his own left head, took the bait. So at least they all understood how serious it was. 

“I give you security,” he told them, reminded them as if they would ever dare forget. “I give you shelter, and fuel. I give you everything a reasonable mech could possibly desire… and I only ask for one thing, one miniscule thing in return. AND YOU COULDN’T EVEN FRAGGING DO THAT ?!” He was about to hurl a datapad at the nearest mech’s- Quickstrike, he always stood too fragging close for comfort- helm, before he remembered that the datapad in his hand held information that he wouldn’t want glancing optics to see. So he set it down on its face and, drawing from patience that wasn’t his own, forced himself to sit while his whole body was clattering in its armor plates.

He’d dealt with worse than this. He’d survived more than one assassination attempt, for Primus’ sakes (including one where a blue blur of a mech tried to dump a bomb right in his lap, only for Devastator to pick the offender and his weapon up and then crush both in a single hand). So why was this making him reach breaking point? Why did this make him think of certain doom?

Because five centuries of meticulous work were finally coming to an end. Because if anything were to ever go wrong, it might as well be now.

“I warned you, Ironhide.” Rattrap did not have to point at the mech standing furthest away, he only had to look at Ironhide to know that he felt the weight of his mistake. “I specifically said that YOU were responsible for the Camiens, that if ANY of them got away it would be YOUR price to pay-!”

“It was not Ironhide’s fault, Chancellor.”

“Eh?” Rattrap’s rant was bitten off at the crust by Rampage’s sudden and firm assertion. He had kept his head bowed since he entered the office, and even now he would not look at the Chancellor. A lesser mech might have taken it as an insult, as if the interruption itself wasn’t insulting enough.

“Ironhide was performing his duties as tasked,” Rampage went on, while the blamed Cybertronian behind him seemed to be breaking his optics from their sockets. “I take full responsibility for the escape. I was not present to monitor the cameras or contain the situation.”

Rattrap felt his lip almost break under his jutting teeth as he clenched his jaw. “And why were you not there to contain it?”

“Because, sir, Airachnid required assistance during her interrogation on the other side of the facility. She was overpowered by the prisoner Chromia, and I was the only one available to step in.”

“Myself and Inferno were occupied with leading search parties at the time,” Quickstrike added, likely more to save his own spark than to actually help Rampage.

“Yes, yes, Chancellor,” Inferno chittered, “we hard at work, yes…”

Rattrap looked to each guard; stone-faced Rampage, coolant-soaked Ironhide, fidgeting Quickstrike and insipidly grinning Inferno, and in that moment he couldn’t decide which one of them he hated more. They all looked guilty, yet that alone was not enough to decide which one was most at fault. Rampage would not have come to Ironhide’s defense without reason, not unless he truly was innocent. Or unless Ironhide was an accomplice…

But, an accomplice to what ? Ironhide had never shown suspicious allegiance to his own people, hadn’t even been around any of them long enough to develop thoughts like that. And Rampage was too smart to get involved in any plans of sabotage or subterfuge. He knew what was at stake if he even tried.
“...Did the prisoners somehow co-ordinate this distraction?” Rattrap asked, even as his lip curled around the question- of course they didn’t, of course one of his own men let them go, but he had nothing to prove it with.

“That’s… unlikely.” Ironhide seemed to regret speaking as soon as he opened his mouth, but he seemed to think staying silent would make him look guilty all over again (as if that was the only thing working against him). 

“There was no way for them to communicate with each other,” Rampage said, once again coming to the younger mech’s rescue. “Even if there was help from a traitor in our ranks, each cell block was overseen by different guards.” 

So they admitted that one of them could have allowed the escape in the first place. That alone should have made Rattrap order an execution. But he was already running low on good soldiers. And what made a good soldier was not intelligence or humility or even blind loyalty- it was strength, and size, and doing what you were told to do and nothing more. And the four mechs had been good enough at some of that, at least. Once Rattrap had assembled them, the assassination attempts had abruptly stopped. So he couldn’t just cast aside any of them without raising questions from an already-panicked populace.

He had to keep them around for a little while longer. Just until Metroplex was finished.

“Well. I can’t very well lock up half of my Elite Guard, now can I?” Rattrap was sick of his own rhetorics as he sank back into his chair, almost wishing he could tip back and just fall out of the window behind him.

(But then he remembered he didn’t have wings anymore. Even after five centuries in this body, he still sometimes forgot about its limitations).

“Ironhide, Quickstrike,” Rattrap shook himself as he addressed the two, “you will both remain permanently stationed with our remaining prisoners. So if these ones escape, I’ll know for certain that you are the ones allowing them to. And there will be no more second chances .” Ironhide had already made a grave mistake, so he would be very careful not to repeat it. And even if Rampage and Ironhide were not working together in some way, Rattrap still wanted to keep them separated.

“Understood, sir.” Ironhide dared to let out a rumble from his vocaliser. 

“We will not fail again.” Quickstrike bowed rather dramatically as Rattrap rolled his optics. 

“The rest of you are dismissed. Get out of my sight.” He wished he could just swat them all into the corridor outside with just a wave of his hand, but alas he had to wait for them to file out one-by-one behind the grateful click of the door finally closing. And then his ever-insightful left head decided to pipe up. 

“Well, that went well!” 

“Oh, shut up.” Rattrap swatted at the impertinent thing more out of habit than hope of teaching it some tact. He’d learned long ago that there was no use in trying to permanently silence the Rattrap-remnant hanging off his shoulder. In a way, it had helped placate the others who had been used to the company of an entirely different mech (who now only existed as corrupted personality fragments that sometimes bubbled up from his locked-down processor). 

But, Primus, if only it would know when to shut up .

“Was it wise to let Rampage go unpunished?”

Rattrap almost bit his tongue at the sound of Ratbat, who must have let himself in when he saw the Elite Guard fleeing any further reprimand. He’d ordered the Senator to stand outside the office, so he must have been right next to the door to have heard what had been going on inside. 

Or maybe the walls were just thinner than Rattrap had thought they were. He’d need to fix that.

“There would be no point,” he told Ratbat, taking care to lower his voice now. “He doesn't care if harm comes to him. The only thing he cares for is Transmutate… and he knows we can’t do much to her in her current state.” Rattrap wasn’t a complete monster, after all. A pregnant femme was a precious thing, even if she was a Cybertronian. What mattered was that the spark growing within her was not Cybertronian, at least not entirely.

“But he also knows that we could do very much,” Ratbat reminded, “if he forced our hand.”

“Precisely.” Rattrap couldn’t hold back a proud grin as his teeth jutted forward. “So I don’t think we have to worry about him. Has Dinobot given his report?” So far, Dinobot was the only person who hadn’t managed to completely fail him, and he certainly deserved a promotion once everything was in place. Perhaps he’d replace one of his incompetant ‘Elite’ guards. 

“He returned this morning from searching across Tyrest,” Ratbat relayed with a glance at his datapad. “To my knowledge, he hasn’t yet been informed of the recent escape.”

“Good. Let him rest for now. His focus should remain on the two we didn’t manage to capture. And the Constructicons have been deployed?”

“Yes. And they’re once again asking for permission to assume gestalt mode for their searches.”

Rattrap felt and heard his teeth grind together- it was now the third time they had asked. “Absolutely not. It’s bad enough that everyone is scared over one terrorist on the loose, if Devastator goes around flattening houses then everyone will know right away what trouble we’re really in. I might as well just hop onboard Sky Lynx and go looking for them myself if it came to that...” 

Because Sky Lynx, like Devastator, was a last resort. People who’d been alive to see it still remembered the sight of Sentinel Prime’s energon oozing from his passenger compartment. It was something that Rattrap would certainly never forget… since that day, the shuttle had been living his life in disguise, with his mind split into three separate bodies (how very familiar) that no one could recognise as belonging to the False (and Final) Prime’s executioner. He would only ever take that form again if absolutely necessary- the very sight of his return would likely start yet another civil war.

It was with that concern that the Chancellor had delayed the announcement of Windblade’s escape for as long as possible, but they were now beyond the point of capturing her without anyone even realising she was on the loose. At least if people were aware of her escape, they’d be actively on the lookout for a femme with paint all over her face. And Rattrap was now more ready to trust the sightings of random fanatical civilians than his own soldiers. 

“I’ll let them know the bad news,” Ratbat said, ticking off that item from his datapad with a swipe of his claw. “Also, Tarantulas has once again requested an audience-”

“Because, dear leader, once again I have news that you’ll want to hear.” It was like you could summon the spider just by uttering his name, even if he was the last one person you wanted to see ( especially if he was the last person you wanted to see). Tarantulas followed Ratbat’s example of just letting himself in, though at least he made sure the door was sealed tightly behind him by pressing against it with his back legs. 

“You fragging well better have something good,” Rattrap warned him, “if you don’t want your own spark added to your collection...”

Out the corner of his optic, Rattrap saw Ratbat scribble something down on his datapad with a frown. Tarantulas whisked his own datapad from his subspace with a flourish, scanning it with his lower optics while his top ones rolled around. 

“Please,” the spider scoffed. “Mine’s will end up in an art gallery, where it deserves to be. Though, however will you get it out of me when your pet is nowhere to be found?”

Rattrap almost sliced through his lip as scowled. “That pet was YOUR responsibility, you… spindle-webbed imbecile! You ASSURED me that he’d barely even be ALIVE after so long in your restraints!” The Chancellor had felt the razorsilk for himself those five centuries ago, still had a scar on his hand from where he’d tested its bite on his own skin. He’d seen the first spark fed to the Sparkcracker, the morbid lightshow that had followed. He’d fed the creature only dregs of energon, barely enough to keep the deadly forge of his chamber alight. The restraints, the tubes and wires and pumps hooked deep into his protoform, those were the only things that kept the Sparkcracker alive.

(And, of course, the whispered rumors and doomsday prophecies scrawled out in graffiti kept him alive in his people’s terrified minds). 

So how the Pit did he even survive the escape? How had they not found his corpse by now?

How was he still alive ?

Why was every single Starscream so difficult to kill?!

“And perhaps if you’d had the foresight to put a killswitch on your experiment, Tarantulas,” Ratbat spoke over the thudding fury shared between Rattrap’s three heads, “we wouldn’t be scrambling to find it in the first place.”

And then the fury dissolved in an instant, replaced with the urge to giggle that Rattrap had to fight against. Because there was a killswitch in the Sparkcracker after all, though it wasn’t the kind that could be triggered with just the flip of a digit. If he really was still alive, he’d remember it was there. And he’d be fighting against it the whole while, with no knowing of if and when it would go off.

Though, Rattrap was surprised that Ratbat didn’t remember that little bit of knowledge. It had been his idea, after all. But a lot had happened in the last five centuries, so the Senator couldn’t be expected to remember every little detail. Especially when so much of what he’d planned for had gone so wrong.

“Well, I’m sorry , Chancellor,” Tarantulas sighed, “that you didn’t give me enough time to account for differences between Cybertronian and Camien sparks. How was I supposed to know the energy delta was so consequential?”

“It is your job to know these things, is it not?” Ratbat asked with a long-suffering glance away from his datapad to the scientist. 

“And isn’t your job to just do as you’re told?” Tarantulas shot back. “This whole time, I’d thought the Sparkcracker was the pet-”

“DON’T SAY THAT NAME!” Rattrap could have woken his perpetually-comatose right head with how he shrieked, as his front teeth rattled from the shockwave let loose from his vocaliser. Ratbat left a dent in his precious datapad from how hard he gripped it, and Tarantulas only stopped his own from falling into the floor by catching it with one of his many back legs. If anyone had heard the name that had just slipped out of his vocaliser, Rattrap would personally bludgeon the spider to death with that slab of touchscreen-metal. 

“Don’t… say that… in here. ” The Chancellor slowly sat back down, emphasizing the weight of his command with the weight of his frame. 

It was the one rule he asked of his two confidants, the two who had unwittingly put him on his throne, the only two who knew every secret of Cybertron-

(well, not every one).

The rule was simple and immutable. The Sparkcracker was a myth. It was a horror story. It was a creature of pure and horrible fantasy. Unless they were standing right in front of it, it simply did not exist. 

The Cybertronians still knew about it, of course. Every slum had its stories, its warnings, its missing people snatched right off the street just a few days after they’d announced to a few friends that maybe the rebels weren’t so bad after all. But so long as it was never acknowledged, so long as the ones in charge could deny its existence at any opportunity, there was nothing anyone else could do about it. The only way they’d be able to find it was by being taken to it.

After all. You can’t try to destroy something that doesn’t exist. 

“Ah,” Tarantulas drawled, “so we’re still calling it ‘the machine’ yet you expect everyone else out there trawling the streets to know exactly what ‘the machine’ is and what it looks like. Primus, I wonder if and why you want him found at all.”

Rattrap forced his frustration out as nothing more than a hiss of air. “You don’t get it, do you, Tarantulas? The machine doesn’t matter. The… operation of it is wildly inefficient anyway.” 

But he’d known that from the start. It was never about efficiency, or mass disposal. It was about the spectacle, and the symbolism of turning the last remnant of old Cybertron’s obsession with inherited greatness into the means of its demise. 

It was, quite frankly, genius, and that genius was one of the only reasons he’d kept Tarantulas around for so long.

So now Rattrap lowered his voice further, barely grazing above a whisper.

“But he still knows who he is. And there are people out there who still remember him. Dangerous people. If he finds them, or they find him… do you have any idea the damage they could cause? They could undo centuries of our work in just a few vorns.”

Ratbat’s busy hands on his datapad went still. Tarantulas raised an eyeridge above three optics, and he leaned in to match Rattrap’s whisper. 

“I think you give those runaways too much credit, sir.”

“You won’t be saying that when they’re breaking down the door with all the Cybertronians we’ve left alive, you idiot!” Rattrap hissed.

“And who was the one who decided to leave them alive in the first place?” the spider asked, just before he pulled out of range of the Chancellor’s snapping-sharp denta. “But we’re getting off-track, so before you throw me out...” He tapped his datapad quickly, and with a swipe of his talon he transferred a diagram to the projector built into Rattrap’s desk. It was a three-dimensional and indecipherable mess of numbers, graphs, glyphs and patches of bright light, and Tarantulas looked incredibly proud of it for some reason.

“...What am I looking at?” Rattrap asked, while Ratbat skeptically walked up to the hologram and poked at one of the specks of pulsing light. 

“The good news I wanted to show you,” the spider revealed through a nest of fangs. “It’s the latest scan from Transmutate’s spark chamber.”

That was enough to secure Rattrap’s interest, but it didn’t explain much at all. “And? What am I supposed to make of this?”

Tarantulas looked somewhat disappointed. It must have been difficult, being such an evil genius that he couldn’t just expect people to immediately understand his painstakingly-obtained nonsense. Airachnid probably understood some of it, what with being his assistant and his daughter, but Rattrap didn’t exactly envy her. 

“Chancellor,” the spider said with summoned patience as he walked through his own hologram, “when this child is born, she will have an amount of energy in her frame that is usually only seen in supernovae. Just as I’d theorised, she is a Point Zero One Percenter.”

He was breathless as he explained, barely containing his excitement as his claws cradled one of the bolts of light that made up the intricate circuitry of this amazing infant.

Because Point Zero One Percenters, despite the name Tarantulas had come up with, did not exist. Not until a few decacyles from now, when Transmutate would birth the very first one in the history of the universe. 

Tarantulas had insisted it would happen. He’d been so sure that the child of Transmutate and Rampage would be a miracle that Rattrap had refused to get his own hopes so high. Even though the stars had aligned, and everything fell so perfectly into place, he simply couldn’t believe it would be so simple.

Point One Percenters, as they were known, were exactly as they were named. Less than 0.1% of all sparks produced from the Well of All Sparks would fit the description. The energy and potential contained within such sparks was almost immeasurable, and the explosive birth of just one from a hotspot was able to wipe out the rest of its generation if it wasn’t handled correctly. 

But if you managed to extract it from its womb, coax it from Primus’ embrace into its frame… you had something very special for your trouble. Historically it was thought that Percenters were those destined to one day bear the Matrix and lead their people as Prime. Some could lift planets on their shoulders, some could command legions with their vocalisers, some could assume the effortless guise of multiple alt modes (like Sky Lynx, though his status as a beast weighed more heavy on his fate under the Senate’s rule than the state of his spark). 

And some were like Rampage and Transmutate. The key difference between them, of course, was that Rampage had not been born with his special spark. That had been Tarantulas doing, his very first experiment that had gone so horribly right. He had made an artificial Percenter, as intended, but Rampage’s temperament had been so volatile that he swore to never try again. In that state, Rampage had only ever been good for clearing out Vos-

Ah, memories. Sweet burning memories. Rattrap could still remember feeling the energon of so many Seekers under his peds. Rampage had done very well that day… well, right up until he’d gone to the core where the Well of All Sparks was preparing for its last gasp. He was supposed to have destroyed whatever else was down there, whatever final burst of sparks the Well was preparing to deliver to fight the war that was already lost. 

He’d emerged with Transmutate, the final child of Primus. The final Point One Percenter.

Tarantulas theorised that the Well had used the very last of its energy to birth her.

He’d also theorised that a child of two Percenters would be the most powerful creature in the universe. The mythical Point Zero One Percenter. 

Which was likely why most Percenters were, for all their power and prestige, cursed with infertile sparks. Usually only the mechs bore the burden, with their negative charges giving them an overabundance of electrons. The energies within their sparks were simply too volatile to perform or even survive mitosis. It was Primus’ way of limiting even His chosen ones.

But Rampage hadn’t been created from Primus. Despite all of Tarantulas’ manipulations and adjustments and vivisection sessions, his Point One Percenter spark was still able to bond. Transmutate, with her positively charged spark, had also been spared from the curse of her kind.

And so, five centuries later here they were; awaiting the birth of the most dangerous person to ever live since Unicron himself had been spawned from the Pit of the multiverse. Someone who was the lynchpin in all of Rattrap’s plans. And there was one final, very important detail, that would be the true decider of whether or not his hard work would bear anything at all, for all his patience and planning and parading around in his disgusting rat body.

“She...?” The Chancellor looked to Tarantulas with, though he would never admit it, pleading eyes. It had to be female. It had to be...

“Ah, yes. I almost forgot.” Tarantulas made a grand show of double checking one-section of his cryptic projection. “The polarity readings indicate it will indeed be a femme.”

It had been a fifty-fifty chance. Or maybe even less than that, if Transmutate hadn’t been able to survive carrying such an immense power in her chamber for so long. But it had all worked out. Its polarity was positive. It would fit so perfectly into what he had in store. 

She would bring Cybertron to its knees, and then the galaxy would follow suit. 

“So everything is falling into place,” Ratbat said from somewhere far away, almost as if he couldn’t believe it. “Exactly as we need it to...”

Rattrap had worked so hard to make it this way. He’d been tireless in his efforts, immaculate in his ministrations. Yet he still didn’t quite believe it either.

Which was good. He couldn’t let his guard down just yet. He couldn’t lessen his work just because he was so close to the end of it. He couldn’t afford to lose everything just because he thought he had everything. 

“I still think it’s such a waste…”

Tarantulas’ whine jolted Rattrap out of his frenzied thoughts, and he shoved them into one of his other heads for the time being. He’d need a clear mind to deal with the spider’s petulance. 

“We’ve been over this already, Tarantulas,” the Chancellor growled. 

“And I still completely disagree!” The scientist was swatting at his projections as he started gesturing wildly. “We could solve everything by using this spark to restart the Well on our own terms-!

“The Well cannot be trusted!” Rattrap was on his feet again, almost accidentally slapping Ratbat in the face with the back of his hand. “It created the people who tried to wipe us out! Its last act was to create the carrier of that creature that could destroy us all if it wasn’t in the right hands!” He pointed right at the heart of Tarantulas’ projection, where the scattered dots of light were congregating.

“It is the spark of Primus ,” Rattrap seethed, “and do you really want to go and wake Him up with all that we’ve done?!”

That was enough to leave the spider silent, and Ratbat hardly dared to tap a claw on his datapad.

“No,” Rattrap decreed as he sat back down. “I won’t let you waste this child on one of your foolish experiments . Not when Metroplex’s reformat is almost complete.”

That was supposed to be Tarantulas’ main focus, after all. With the Sparkcracker gone, that was what was making him useful. Though, will all the mechanisms in place, Ratbat probably could have co-ordinated the final pieces of work all by himself.

“Very well, sir…” Tarantulas sighed as he shut down the projection, and the stark return to regular light made him look pale despite the glow from all his optics.

“But if you are so impatient for some fresh blood in your lab,” Rattrap conceded with a blooming idea, “perhaps one of the leftover Camiens will suffice. After their interrogations have ended.”

He was certain that if one of them was locked up in the spider’s lab, then there’d be no need to worry about escape. And if the others heard about one of their friends being turned into an experiment, they were sure to come running to their rescue...

Tarantulas must have known what Rattrap was thinking, from how sharp his fangs were in his returning grin. Or perhaps he was just thinking of all the new and grisly hypotheses he could explore. 

“I’d be very grateful for the new research material. I’m sure I could quickly figure out how their sparks work with a live subject on hand.” And his legs started twitching in anticipation of diving into someone’s guts. At least he wasn’t thinking of ruining everything anymore. 

“Good,” Rattrap said. “So you’ll know what to change when we retrieve the machine. Get to it.” He watched the spider leave with a knowing frown. He’d ask Airachnid which one of the Camiens would be best to keep her sire occupied for a while. She’d know all about them by now, what with all the interrogations she’d been busy with. 

“You know he’s the one who will be delivering Transmutate’s child.” As usual, Ratbat didn’t look up from his datapad as he spoke. And, as usual, he was just telling Rattrap things he already knew. 

“I’m well aware.”

“You know he’s likely going to try and steal it.”

Of course he was. He wouldn’t be a genius if he didn’t at least try to. But...

“There’s no one else who can safely extract that spark from her chamber.” Rattrap admitted the fact begrudgingly. It wasn’t a matter of whoever was delivering the spark possibly making a mistake and getting wiped off the face of the galaxy for it. It was purely about keeping the spark itself alive… and there was only one person who could ensure that. 

“Shockwave might have been able to do it.” Ratbat rarely ever mentioned his former fellow Senator, and never in a positive light. But if they really had a Point Zero One Percenter growing in their basement, then there really was a first time for everything and anything.  

“He might have,” Rattrap said with only a hint of wistfulness. “Which is probably why Tarantulas killed him.”

Though he usually tried so hard to keep his face utterly blank, Ratbat couldn’t stop himself from smiling. “Probably.”

It was another one of those not-secrets that kept everyone awake at night. 

The Sparkcracker didn’t exist, yet everyone knew it did. 

Tarantulas hadn’t killed Senator Shockwave after performing the brutal Empurata procedure on him, yet everyone knew he had.

“Solus’ sake, what is up with all this wet stuff?!” Afterburner shuddered as he ferociously tried to dislodge the water from his armor plates. The heavens had opened as soon as he and Nautica had found themselves outside the detention center, which had been both a blessing and a burden. The guards would have a hard time tracking anyone through such a deluge… but Camiens also had a hard time running through it. By the time they found shelter, they were soaked right through to their circuitry.

“You never heard of rain before, Burn?” Nautica had heard about weather patterns on organic planets, the main downside of having an atmosphere. On Caminus the only concerns were gusts of solar wind blowing around festival decorations, and solar flares making everything bright and shiny (as well as making Nautica’s instruments unable to function for a few breems… but everyone enjoyed a lightshow, so who cared if her experiment results were utterly ruined?).

“No,” Afterburner replied with a waterlogged groan, “and if this is what rain is then I never want to be near it ever again…”

It was a struggle not to shout over the hammering of water-on-overhead-metal, but being hidden was more important than being heard. Nautica huddled in the shadows. 

“Well, we can’t stay here for much longer,” she muttered. “They’ll be patrolling close by. They’re sure to find us if we stop moving.”

“And we can’t even use our alt-modes to speed things up… I can’t just jump inside your subspace and end up on the ship, can I?” Afterburner’s smile was weak- he’d been impressed when Nautica explained how she’d found a tool to unlock her own cell, but even he knew there was nothing else she could pull out of her cabinet to help them now. 

“I can tweak the laws of physics, Burn,” she sighed, “but that would outright break them. Besides. The Hermitian will be on total lockdown. The only way we’ll be able to get to it is with a suicide mission.”

The ship was their only means to contact the Mistress, and despite all of Nautica’s misgivings about Caminus’ spiritual matriarch she wasn’t so righteous as to reject help from the only one who could help. So there was no way that it would be left unguarded, not with Windblade already on the loose. 

Windblade… Solus, was she even still alive? She had to be. Out of everyone on Caminus, she was the first one who Nautica had ever been able to call a friend. As a Cityspeaker Windblade had been kept apart from regular sororities, but Nautica had still found solace in her company when her own so-called sisters were only ever interested in treating her like the butt of a never-ending joke. 

Even if Nautica did die here, light years from home, she doubted any of her sorority would pretend to care for more than a decaycle at most. She’d come to terms with that, at least. But she wouldn’t accept Windblade, or any of the others, falling to a fate like that. Not even Afterburner, the naive morality soldier that he was.

“The locals are superstitious about the Well, right?” he was saying. “Maybe... if we can find a way down into Cybertron’s lower layers, we can find somewhere safe to hide out.”

“Good idea,” Nautica told him. Even if it was the only idea they could come up with, it was better than nothing at least. But if they did manage to get to Cybertron’s underworld, what then?

Well. They’d just have to figure that out along the way. Nautica had always been flexible with her experiments. If a method didn’t work out, she just tried another one until she ran out of options and had to admit defeat to her hypothesis. 

Then again, being wrong about a hypothesis never carried the risk of being killed for it...

“So where do you propose we go first?” she asked, expecting Afterburner to have a grand map of potential stops all ready to go. But the mech opened his mouth, kept it open for some long nanoklicks, before something came out that wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear.

“I don’t know…” He lowered his helm to his knees. “Vertex would probably know about some kind of ancient tunnel system... or an underground city we could hide in.”

“But Vertex isn’t here,” Nautica reminded him, as gently as she could manage. Even so, Afterburner seemed to flinch.

“We should have gone back for her,” he moaned. “And Lightbright, and Maxima and Chromia-”

“But we couldn’t,” Nautica once again reminded him, this time not bothering to be gentle. “We have no idea where they’re being held. It’s better that at least some of us got out while we could.”

“I know you’re right. I know, but… I failed my Cityspeaker. I left her behind. I had one job, one fragging job…” His vocaliser glitched slightly, a hiccup of static that almost perfectly matched the patter of rain overhead. Like the droplets were breaking apart on the steel, he too was about to break. And Nautica couldn’t let that happen, not when they still had miles to go before they could afford to let down their guard.

“My job was to keep the ship safe and get us home,” she told him as she shuffled closer. “That was my one fragging job, and right now I’m failing that. But, as long as the ship is still around, as long as we’re still alive… I can still do that job in the end. You understand me, Afterburner?”

He said nothing at first, with his head at his knees and his arms wrapped around them. But then his hands tightened together, and he slowly lifted his neck. His optics seemed to be leaking like the heavens.

“As long as Lightbright is alive… I can still protect her.” He blinked the coolant away from his eyes as they found hers. “And in order to protect her… we need to get out of Technotropolis.”

Nautica smiled at him. “Exactly. And we’ll take it from there.”

She offered him a hand to help him stand, and he took it without hesitation.

There was no indication that the rain was going to let up, which Nautica tried to take as a sign that they’d at least reach the city’s edge without being seen. The cool water helped mask their heat signatures; even if the technorganics were using infrareds to seek them out, they hopefully wouldn’t stick out on the horizon like a mismatched armour plate. Afterburner took the lead, shuddering through the downpour as he bolted in a straight line through the barren metal fields. Technotropolis seemed to be bordered by deep ditches that monorails and highways passed over in a crisscross of various bridges. Afterburner hesitated at the edge of one of the chasms.

“Should we… try and find a way around? Or-”

Nautica made the decision for him as she shifted into her alt-mode (Solus, it felt good to work her T Cog after so long) and peeled down the steep hill. She pressed hard on her breaks so she didn’t crash right into the other side, but with some smoking skid marks behind her she managed to bring herself to a stop with zero casualties. 

“Y’know a little warning next time would be appreciated, Nautica!” Afterburner called out to her from the top of the chasm, as loud as he dared while they were still being hunted down. Nautica shifted out of her alt-mode just as he shifted into his aerial form, and she watched him hover down the slope with much more care than she had taken.

“Hold it.”

A voice caught them both at the bottom of the ditch.

“Just… stay still. I don’t want to hurt you if I don’t have to.” 

It was a firm command, but there was the slightest tremor in the vocaliser that delivered it. Nautica found the source standing close by, underneath a bridge and protected from the rain. It was a pink femme, holding onto a heavy blaster that burned an orange hole through the screen of rain-static above her blue optics, though it was hard to tell anything else about her from the distance. But it was clear enough that she wasn’t a guard, otherwise she would have just shot them without warning.

“You won’t have to,” Afterburner assured, though he stayed frozen alongside Nautica as they both waited for the other bot to approach. As she slowly emerged from her shelter, it became clear that she wasn’t a technorganic like most of Cybertron’s population. She looked just like Ironhide; or, indeed, she looked just like a Camien. And Nautica wasn’t the only one who was suddenly struck by similarities, as the distance closed between her and the Cybertronian.

“You… you look familiar.” The pink femme lowered her weapon as she looked at Afterburner. “You were one of the Camiens. The terrorists who tried to get inside Metroplex. Right?” 

Afterburner gulped. It was like he was allergic to getting in trouble.

“It was Windblade who accessed Metroplex,” he insisted. “I… we were just accompanying her. And we are not terrorists.”

“That didn’t stop the rat from locking you up, though,” the femme pointed out, though it wasn’t a condemnation. Her gun was now aimed at the pitted ground.

“We were supposed to be sent home,” Nautica told her. “But when we heard that Windblade escaped… we realised that they’re not planning on sending us home at all.”

The other femme nodded with a faint grimace. “They just announced that this morning. About Windblade. They said she’s dangerous.”

“Not... really?” Afterburner said with more than a hint of the confusion that Nautica was also feeling. “She doesn’t even have her sword on her.”

“And if Cityspeakers were dangerous,” Nautica added, “they wouldn’t need bodyguards.”

She would have looked aside to see Afterburner’s reaction to that, but another new voice caught her attention.

“‘Cee? You okay?” It was a mech this time, and he too came from the shadow of the faraway bridge. His own weapon was a robust cannon, and he held it warily in both hands.

“It’s alright, Blaster,” Cee said over her shoulder. “They’re Camiens.”

“The ones who got locked up?”

“Looks like these two just managed to escape this morning. You go on ahead. I’ll get them to safety.”

“You sure?”

“You know how to set up the broadcast a lot better than I do. But if you need someone watching your back, I can ask Jazz to-”

“Oh, Pit no. The last thing I need is him hijackin’ my playlists...” Blaster’s vague silhouette disappeared into the downpour behind the bridge, and Cee faced the two Camiens with a jolt of her neck.

“We should get out of the rain. This stuff has ruined more hinge-joints than the damned Rust Plague.” She directed them in the opposite direction of the bridge, keeping close to the insurmountable wall of the ditch while she focused her gun’s aim to the top of the opposing side. 

“Are you a Cybertronian?” Afterburner whispered. “A real one?”

“Yes. I’m Arcee.” She didn’t shift her focus from aiming as she spoke. “Sorry about holding you at gunpoint. We always need to be careful.”

“I’m Afterburner. And this is Nautica.”

Arcee made a rough sound of acknowledgement. 

“What were you and Blaster doing out here?” Nautica asked.

“We were on our way to hijack a radio tower. Good way to broadcast things that make TO’s think twice about what they see on TV. We were even gonna show the unedited version of Windblade’s trial.”

“Unedited?” Afterburner was the one to ask this time. He had been there to defend Windblade, but Nautica and the others had seen the broadcast version of the trial from their cells. She had seen first-hand how they either cut Windblade’s segments short, or muted her entirely. 

“Yeah, they censored a lot of it when it was live,” Arcee said. “You can imagine why. But we had someone there to watch the trial in person. She managed to record it. Follow me down here.” 

Arcee had reached a part of the ditch that had a heavy grate set into the ground. It was almost invisible amidst the various debris and struts that made the bottom of the chasm into a tangled metal undergrowth, but Arcee must have known it was there as she easily found the handle to yank it up with a grunt. It was almost pitch-black inside, but she shone a flashlight from her weapon through to show that there was solid ground waiting. This time Nautica let Afterburner take the first plunge, and he landed in the dark with a dull thud . Arcee was the last to fall in, and she pulled the grate down behind her with an echoing slam. 

“You haven’t seen Windblade, have you?” Afterburner asked, finding Arcee only by the light of her optics and gun.

“I’m sorry, no. We’ve been on the lookout for her since this morning, but there’s been no sign of her. That might be a good thing, though. The best thing she can do right now is stay hidden. There’s not many of us running around right now, so it’s just good luck that I found you two.” She led the way further into the tunnel; from what her light could show, it seemed to be some sort of abandoned maintenance shaft. Nautica had seen similar ones on Caminus, the few that weren’t off-limits to anyone who wasn’t a Cityspeaker.

“How many of you are there?” she asked Arcee.

“Enough to make Rattrap a little nervous, at least. He calls us rebels. Terrorists, too. A favorite word of his, I think.” Arcee let herself laugh at that. “But Orion found a pretty good word in the archives for us to call ourselves- Autobots.”

“Orion?”

Arcee threw a knowing smile over her shoulder at Afterburner’s question. “You’ll meet him when we get there.”

But where was ‘there’? Where was ‘here’, even? Nautica had spent her whole life on Caminus, so she knew when things were too good to be true.

“Hold on.” Her own voice echoed through the tunnels, making her feel very small and very trapped, as she stopped. “Arcee… how do we know we can trust you?” 

“Nautica, don’t be like that-” Afterburner argued, as naive as always, but Nautica chose to ignore him.

“I mean, it’s pretty convenient, you finding us just after we manage to escape. And we’ve seen Cybertronians who work for Rattrap. Ironhide, for one. He’s one of Rattrap’s elite guard. So… how do we know you’re not like him?”

Arcee looked back at her, and her expression was almost indecipherable until the glow from her optics revealed a small smile.

“It does seem pretty convenient, huh? That’s smart of you to notice. I like that. Means you’ll last a while around here. But you’ve already followed me this far, and I haven’t tried to kill you. Here, I’ll put my gun away.” She did as she promised, fitting the blaster into a harness on her back that lay between two winglets. The flashlight was still switched on, and it illuminated the area around her instead of in front. “Feel better now?”

“...A little,” Nautica admitted, while Afterburner gave her a weary look. If making sure that they weren’t about to be double-crossed made her annoying, then Nautica was happy to make herself the most annoying Primus-damned person in the galaxy.

(She was already like that to most people at home, anyway.)

“People like Ironhide don’t know any better.” Arcee went on with talking and walking, picking up her pace slightly now that she wasn’t carrying around a gun in her hands. “They were young when the TOs took over. They don’t know what it was like before… all this. They don’t know what it is that we’re really fighting for.”

“What are you fighting for?” Afterburner asked, and this time Arcee stopped in her tracks for a moment. She kept her back to them both.

“...We just want them to stop killing us.”

Then she was silent the rest of the way, until they finally reached the end of the tunnel after some twists and turns. It seemed to just be a dead end, but Arcee thudded a hand against the wall and the sound that came through was hollow.

“It’s Arcee. Heads up. I met some unexpected guests.” 

She stepped back from the wall, motioning for the Camiens to do the same, and the wall itself let out a screech as it moved aside. 

“It’s not another pet , is it?” a hidden mech asked over the cacophony. “Laserbeak and Ravage are enough of a handful as it is…”

Behind the wall was a tiny alcove that seemed to have been carved out of the surrounding metal, where a red mech was standing above a rugged ladder that led downwards.

“No, actually,” Arcee told him. “They’re Camiens. Windblade wasn’t the only one who managed to get away.”

“Huh…” The red mech observed the two of them as Arcee descended the ladder, and there was no other option but to follow her down. Nautica was the last to step onto the rungs, and as she did he heard the wall move back into place. The red mech must have been a watchman of some sort, because he remained where he was. 

The ladder led down a dark and lengthy shaft, but soon enough light started to bleed through from the bottom. Nautica tried to look down at Afterburner, but he must have been descending faster than her as she could only see more of the ladder under her. 

At least she could see the ground ahead as well. She let herself drop the rest of the way, and ended up almost blinding herself with the sudden influx of light.

“Orion!” Arcee’s voice called out from somewhere. “Got some people for you to meet.”

Nautica blinked rapidly, trying to clear the flashbulbs from her vision, and eventually her optics adjusted to the new surroundings. There was a mech standing before her, another one she didn’t recognise, with red-blue plating and the warmest blue optics she’d ever seen. By Solus, he actually looked happy to see her. That was a first.

“Camiens…! My name is Orion Pax, and I welcome you.” He shook Nautica’s hand, and then Afterburner’s (he was standing next to her, looking as dazed as she still felt). “Please, make yourselves comfortable. We’re all friends here.”

“Swindle would argue with you on that,” someone called out, and in following the new voice Nautica was forced to take in the true scale of where she’d just ended up.

It was nothing like anything she’d seen on Caminus, or any moon, or any textbook. To call it a library would be an insult to just how grand, how massive it was, because this was like no library back home. There were two levels separated by a railed mezzanine, and on the second level every wall was lined with shelves for datapads and sheaves. The first level held larger shelves for databanks and consoles, though most of them seemed to be inactive, and at its core was a cylindrical construct that stretched from floor to ceiling (at least, Nautica assumed it reached that high. She couldn’t see the ceiling itself). 

Even though most of everything she saw was crumbling and wrecked and obscured by rust, it was still a sight that demanded respect.

“What is this place…?” Nautica found herself drifting as she craned her neck around, trying to see as much of it at once as possible.

“When he was around,” Orion told her, “Alpha Trion had called it the Arcanimus. We call it home.”

“I like to call it a technorganic’s nightmare, myself,” Arcee said with a snort. “I should meet up again with Blaster. Orion, can you and Ariel get these two settled in?”

“Of course.”

“Nautica, come on.” Afterburner tugged on her arm. “I’m sure they’ll give us a full tour later.”

Nautica let herself be dragged along, only because she was too focused on looking at all the curious glyphs carved into the walls that had somehow survived the rust and dust. 

“Arcee’s told us about you,” another femme said; she too was pink, but her plating was a paler shade than Arcee’s. “I’m Ariel.”

It was easy to see where she got her name from, as the two aerials on her head seemed to twitch in greeting. 

“Uh… hi there.” Afterburner raised his hand to take Ariel’s, but then Nautica ran out between the two of them as she spotted something truly awesome, truly amazing against one of the few walls not lined with shelves.

“You have a Space Bridge?! ” Nautica had only ever seen technical diagrams of such things; they were responsible for the Cybertronian Empire so long ago, but after the Quintesson invasion they’d all been destroyed to stop the invaders from reaching the colonies. It was said that the Mistress had used the very last one to propel Caminus away from Cybertron, and it had been rigged to explode immediately afterwards.

“It’s non-functioning,” an orange mech informed her with a groan, “so don’t get too excited. I’ve been trying to make it capable of terrestrial transport, at the very least, but we don’t even have enough energon to test it out.”

Nautica heard him, but she was too enamoured with the ancient and intricate design of the portal to say anything back.

“You’re interested in technology, huh?” Ariel seemed to find Nautica’s sudden flight more amusing than anything else. “Wheeljack will like you. C’mon, I’ll introduce you to everyone we have here. You’ve met Ratchet over there. He’s our main medic.”

The orange mech beside the Space Bridge gave a weary wave at the mention of his name.

“Here’s Roulette and Shadow Striker- though we usually just call them ‘The Sisters’.” Orion introduced two dark-plated femmes who sat working on their weapons, and they nodded to the Camiens.

“That’s Drift sharpening his sword over there.” Ariel pointed over to a white mech doing just that, though he was too far away to hear his name.

“Moonracer is the one trying not to stare at you two.” Orion politely nodded towards a seafoam-green femme who was surreptitiously hiding behind a rack of shelves.

“Vibes and Bumblebee are on lookout at the other entrance. Rumble and Frenzy will be nearby somewhere. Springer and Megatronus are out, and I think Wheeljack is with Flamewar-”

So many places to look, so many names, so much to remember... Nautica literally felt her head start to spin. 

“Hold up, hold up, I’m… th-that’s a lot of people. I think I need to sit down…” She collapsed onto a stack of crates so she could at least anchor herself to a single position in space. Solus, she could calculate quantum coordinates effortlessly in her head and make masterpieces out of non-Euclidean geometry, but being around so many people at once just made her want to shut herself down. This was why she just locked herself up in her workshop, where the only unknowns were things that she could happily spend hours trying to find out.

But, her workshop was light years away. As fascinating as the Arcanimus around her was, it wasn’t a place of safety or comfort. It housed all these strangers, and they were all staring at her and Afterburner, they were staring and asking questions and wondering and it was just too much - 

“Drink this,” someone said next to her. “It’ll help.”

Nautica raised her head from her hands, and found an energon cube being offered to her. The hand belonged to another mech she didn’t recognise, another name she’d have to remember... but she was still grateful as she took the cube.

“Oh… thank you.” She was also grateful when the mech left as soon as she took the cube.

“And that was Perceptor,” Ariel said as Nautica guzzled the fuel- Primus, no wonder her helm had been spinning so much, her energon levels were almost at zero. “You can usually find him near Moonracer. Or vice versa.”

Nautica nodded as she gulped. She’d still have to clear some space in her memory banks just to note down all the new people around her, but at least now she wasn’t seriously about to shut down due to a fuel crisis.

“You have energon?” Afterburner had taken a seat next to Nautica, though she hadn’t noticed he was there until her cube was empty.

“Enough to keep our frames going,” Orion answered, “if we ration it carefully. But you two look like you need it. We usually siphon it from the fuel lines between cities, or steal it from refineries.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Nautica asked.

“Of course. Which is why we only do it when we have no other choice. But… if Caminus can help us, then we won’t have to anymore.”

“That’s why you came to Cybertron, right?” Ariel sat opposite the Camiens, with all the hope of the universe in her optics and her hand held tightly in Orion’s. Nautica looked to Afterburner, who in turn looked to her. They both knew they had to tell her the truth and scatter all that hope, yet neither could decide who would do it. When Afterburner gulped, Nautica knew that he had volunteered for the grim duty. He was better at talking to people anyway.

“I… we didn’t even know,” he admitted. “About what was really going on here. But, we’ll tell the Mistress everything. She’ll send help for everyone. We just need a way to contact her, and-”

The master wordsmith seemed to suddenly lose his vocaliser, but Nautica saw what had silenced him. There was a bot that hadn’t been there before, standing on the other side of the Arcanimus’ core. She was gold and black, and her shoulders were weighed down by an array of thin legs. She was clearly the same frame type as Tarantulas, the one Nautica had seen speaking out against Windblade. Which meant only one thing.

“That’s… a technorganic.” Nautica had to stop herself from pointing at her, even when Ariel and Orion both turned towards her.

“Blackarachnia.” Ariel kept her voice low. “I know how it looks. But she’s one of us. Been helping us for years now. She got us footage from Windblade’s trial.”

“How did that happen?” Afterburner asked, matching Ariel’s volume with a hiss. “I mean… how did she end up with you guys?”

“You saw Tarantulas, right? Rattrap’s resident evil scientist. Blackarachnia was his sparkmate. Keyword being was .”

“Sparkmate…?” Afterburner said the word as the anomaly that it was. Nautica knew what a spark was, of course. She’d seen her own a few times, out of curiosity and also out of spite  (because the Mistress of Flame had always told everyone specifically not to do that). But how did you make a ‘mate’ out of a spark? Was it another word for a friend, or a sorority or fraternity member?

“I know,” Ariel scoffed. “Can’t imagine anyone wanting to give their spark to that freak, but their daughter is proof of it.”

Nautica felt her head start to detach from her spinal strut again. “Oh, that’s more words I don’t understand…”

She clutched her helm with her hands, and Orion looked down with concern. “Is... she alright?” 

Nautica felt Afterburner clutch her shoulders, trying to stop her from curling into herself. It helped, somewhat. 

“Forgive us, Ariel, Orion,” he said, “but… well, we don’t understand a lot of things that you Cybertronians do. Like, we don’t know what a sparkmate is. Or a ‘daughter’, or… anything like that. You saw how Windblade reacted at the trial, because of that...”

Now it was Orion and Ariel who were confused as they shared a look between each other.

“I… remember seeing that,” Orion said, “but I’d thought it was some kind of Camien confusion tactic. You really don’t know what… families are?”

Both Nautica and Afterburner shook their heads. 

“Alright…” Ariel released her hand from Orion’s as she stood up. “Ratchet! Think I’m gonna need your help here!”

“I’m a little busy , Ariel!”

“Alright, fine…” Ariel turned away from the direction of the Space Bridge with a sigh. “Where’s First Aid? We need a lesson on Biology 101.”

Nautica had the horrible feeling that she’d been right not to trust whatever the Mistress had said for all these years. It was one of those rare times that she hated being right.

The rain seemed endless. Starscream chose to sleep through it. Or there might have been no choice at all; he simply could not keep his systems running any longer. 

During sleep, a Camien allowed their frame to rest and their databanks to write new memories to permanent storage. They preserved precious energon by shutting down all intensive programs, and their automatic coding could seek out problems in their software or hardware and repair them via nanites. Staying online for too long would lead to system crashes, hardware failures from stack overflow and overexertion, CPU threads getting tangled and confused, not to mention the very likely possibility of getting injured from trying to move in your digital delirium.

The first leading cause of all injuries on Caminus was dancers and actors not stretching enough before showing off for their audience. The second leading cause was people staying online for so long, refusing to let a good night end, that they inevitably found themselves face-down in one of the Titans vein-channels. Windblade assumed that Cybertronians needed sleep just as much as Camiens did, so she did not dare wake her companion. For many hours, she watched the silent downpour alone.

It was as if an ocean was being drained through the sky. She only knew what an ocean was from pictures, old records of unknown organic planets that may not even exist anymore. But they all looked the same; vast landscapes of liquid blue. She wondered if that was really what Vos looked like now. An entire city reduced to an anonymous sea. 

She reached a single hand out of her shelter, through the gaps in the starscraper’s chassis, and caught some cold raindrops in her fingers. It started to burn after some klicks, and when she pulled it back to safety she found many new dents chipped through her metal skin.

So Cybertron was a planet that could literally eat you alive. Yet she would rather be here, cowering from cold water, than safe and sheltered in a jail cell.

Velocity and Hot Shot were out there somewhere, likely in the same situation as her. The others were still trapped, and she could do nothing about it. And that hurt much more than any amount of rain on her palm could. 

There was a rumble very nearby, and she thought it was thunder. But then it was followed by a rough groan from Starscream.

“Get out of here…”

Windblade turned to face him, but he still seemed to be offline. His optics were closed, so he was talking to the darkness… or, whatever he could see in the darkness. Sleep was supposed to put a bot at peace, but enough damage to the optics or processor could turn any moment of rest into a nightmare. And Starscream had suffered enough damage to make his survival a miracle.

“Get away… I don’t want to…”

“Starscream?” Windblade approached him slowly with a whisper. His broken wings twitched with feeble flaps, and his denta bit deep into his lip with a sudden snarl.  

“No! NO! Get BACK!”

Windblade felt his claws cut into her neck, just before she was pinned flat against her wings by a crushing weight. He was bearing down on her, with optics like wild fireballs trying to melt her face off, and he was tearing his own mouth apart with his gritted fangs. His talons were digging into her spinal strut, and energon was trickling out of her severed fuel lines. 

He was really trying to kill her. Well, he’d warned her that this would happen. She just didn’t think it would be so soon. 

“Starscream, stop it! It’s… it’s just me! It’s Windblade!”

But he didn’t stop, not at first. Windblade felt the static grating against her vocaliser, and there was energon spluttering at the back of her throat, and her HUD exploded with warnings over Starscream’s furious face, and for the second time in her life she thought she was really going to die. 

“W...Windblade…?” 

Then he released her. She rolled over to tilt her head upright, to stop the energon from lying stagnant in her throat. Her vents were quick gasps as she tried to gulp the spilled fuel back down. It tasted like factory run-off, and she had to close both hands back over her neck to stop it from dripping back out from her broken fuel veins. There was no more bleeding, but she felt the aftermath drying sticky and cold over her chest.

“I hurt you… I did it again ...”

Starscream had backed himself into a corner, holding his blue-stained hands together as if he was restraining them. His optics were dripping like his fingers were, draining off the last of their fire.

And then he did something strange, strange even for a Cybertronian. He shoved several digits of one bloodied hand into his mouth, as if he was licking them clean. And he must have been, because when he pulled them back out they were spotless. Windblade was so mesmerised by the action that she almost didn’t hear him speak again.

“How bad is the damage?”

He sounded like he actually cared. Windblade dared to pull her hands away from her shredded neck, and she found them just as stained as his own. But she stopped herself from licking them.

“Only clipped some minor lines... I’ll be fine.” The alerts on her HUD were still there, harsh red lines letting her know that something was wrong as if she couldn’t see it for herself. But compared to what she’d already survived, she knew it was nothing to worry about.

Hell, Starscream had survived so much worse. Even if Cybertronians and Camiens weren’t quite the same, she wasn’t worried about herself at all.

“You should leave me,” Starscream told her, still hiding his face behind his stained servos. “You know it. You’re not stupid.”

“But I can’t leave you.”

Then he lowered his hands, only to look at her like she’d just offered to carry him on her back. 

“I know you were thinking of jumping, Starscream. Before you realised I was behind you. A fall from this height would break apart all that hard work Knockout did.” 

“I would hope so.” He curled his mouth, chewing at the broken skin on his lip with a fang.

“I don’t want you to die,” Windblade said. “I don’t want anyone to die.”

Starscream scoffed as he ripped away a layer of skin with his teeth. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew...”

He chose not to finish the sentence as he squeezed his own energon from the fresh wound, as if he thought Windblade would not press him to do so. 

“If I knew what…?” 

He enjoyed teaching her everything she did not know, after all. He could not resist parading his knowledge. It probably helped assure him that his processor wasn’t completely ruined.

“...If you knew what we were truly capable of,” he eventually said, wiping the energon from his denta with a swipe of his glossa. “Cybertronians and technorganics alike. Our shells may be different, but our sparks are the same. They can all become the same monster. I’ve seen what’s happened on this planet, through others’ eyes. The last flashes from their databanks, before...”

Then he shook his head and scowled. He’d become disgusted with himself over something.

“What am I saying…? You already know what they can do. What they have done. Rattrap and Tarantulas and everyone else dancing to their tune. Yet you’d sit there and tell me they don’t deserve death?”

He looked at Windblade, right at her face. She felt the stinging sensation of the rain again, but this time it was all over her optics. If she looked at a mirror, she was sure she’d see her Cityspeaker markings drawn over in energon.

“There’s nothing else I can say,” she said. “You’re just using the same logic they use to justify trying to kill us—”

“It’s NOT THE SAME! IT’S NOT THE FRAGGING SAME!”

Starscream surged forward on all fours, and Windblade couldn’t stop herself from flinching as he shrieked. But he also flinched from himself, as if the force of his own vocaliser threw him backwards. He looked at the broken floor; through the gaps there were the many flights to the hostile ground below that he’d almost thrown himself down. The pouring rain would have covered the sound of his outburst, but the shockwave around the building would be far more noticeable. Even so, he didn’t seem like he wanted to flee. He had rooted himself here, with her.

“Sentinel never rounded up organics and had them executed,” he hissed against the rain, still staring at the pitted floor between himself and Windblade. “Halogen never tortured them for fun. My father never hunted them down and MASSACRED their entire families! Where is the justice in what Rattrap has done?! If you would spare his damned spark from the Pit where it belongs, then what kind of justice is there at all?!!”

He did not shriek this time, yet his anger was still a palpable force of nature. Windblade could not stop herself from feeling guilty for standing against that force, even though she knew she had no reason to be.

“I know you’re right, Starscream. But I wasn’t raised to kill. That’s all I know.” That was what bodyguards, not Cityspeakers, were raised for. Chromia, and Afterburner and Maxima. They’d never had to kill anyone, as far as she knew, but they were ready to if necessary. And she wished they had managed to escape instead of her.

“When the time comes,” Starscream told her, “you won’t be the one to kill them.”

“Then what does it matter, if I think they should die or not?”

He shrank back, as if suddenly ashamed of his own anger, and hugged his legs to his chest.

“It matters to me,” he said. “Because I was the one who decided you should not die. And you’re almost making me regret it.”

He wasn’t snarling enough for the threat to be convincing. Even so, Windblade felt her wing cables go taut as the plates bristled.

“I’m not going to apologise for not perishing the moment you change your mind,” she informed him.

“You’ll have to, eventually.” He didn’t elaborate on whether he meant she’d need to eventually apologise, or eventually perish.

“Well,” she sighed, “until then, I guess you’ll just have to put up with me.”

“So you’re supposed to be my punishment, then.” He let out a snort. “Primus certainly does work in strange ways.”

Windblade didn’t want to be a punishment, or a burden. But it was too much for Starscream to call her, or anyone, a friend. She understood that much. It didn’t matter what he called her, only how he acted.

...And his actions involved trying to kill her just a few klicks ago. Her neck still ached from his claws slicing through the sensitive protoform. 

He hadn’t known what he was doing. He was suffering far worse in his head than she was in her frame. He’d stopped as soon as he realised who he was hurting. But he’d clearly killed people before. There was no hesitation to the act, only to who he was killing. He’d killed people with his spark, yes, but this was far different. He’d done so with his hands as well.

Windblade had no doubt that Starscream could kill Rattrap, or give his spark up by trying. It was already so broken that he probably couldn’t think of anything else to do with it. Once Rattrap was gone, he would probably give up and die. 

That was the only reason she could think of to keep someone like Rattrap alive at all. Only to save Starscream. 

He was glancing periodically at her under the shadow of his eyeridges now, as if making sure she was still there.

“You’re a Seeker, Windblade.” He seemed to be getting used to saying the name rather than the title. “Yet you weren’t born from a spark bond. How is that?”

It was the first time he’d admitted not knowing something to her. And, more amazingly, Windblade thought she might know the answer.

“Knockout mentioned that… Caminus took part of the Well away with him. It became his hotspot. He said that maybe that part of the Well was what could make Seekers…?”

Starscream scoffed, and a trickle of energon fell from the corner of his mouth. “To even suggest that we could come from the Well is a very high form of blasphemy. But… there’s no-one else around to care about that.”

Windblade had dealt with more than enough blasphemy in the last decacycle to last her for the rest of her life. But... she was a Seeker, like him. And her spark was already damned in some way, when it probably should have been extinguished by now.

“You said before that you— Seekers, I mean— chose a God that wasn’t of the Thirteen,” she said. “Is that because you didn’t come from the Well?”

Starscream grunted, though he seemed surprised that she remembered his words.

“Exactly. We... believed that the Thirteen played no part in our creation. So why should we give them any attention? It played to our advantage when the so-called Sentinel Prime banned all worship of the Thirteen outright.”

Windblade still wanted to hear the story of how Sentinel apparently hadn’t been a Prime at all, but that promptly took a backseat to the newest revelation. The Thirteen were the direct descendants of Primus, and in turn every Cybertronian was a descendant from their tribes! Solus Prime herself was practically a god all to her own on Caminus. How could someone outlaw any them from being remembered?

“Why… why would he do that?” she asked.

“The Quintesson invasion, of course,” Starscream informed her with a newly refined edge to his voice. “Camiens would know all about that, at least. Quintus Prime was the one who created those things. He was so proud of them that he even named them after himself. The survivors of the invasion believed that one of the Thirteen had directly tried to enslave Primus’ children, or exterminate them entirely. And so, the Thirteen would be abandoned. They would only follow Primus Himself.”

Windblade had to wonder what kind of logistical loopholes would lead to that kind of conclusion for anyone. To abandon the Thirteen was to abandon Primus— you simply couldn’t have one without the other. Even the Mistress with her near-eternal composure would have thrown a fit at such a suggestion. 

Then again, she’d done just that when she’d seen the technorganics for the first time. Even though they were spawned of the Allspark, of Onyx Prime himself…

Of course. Onyx Prime. He had represented facets of organic life that would evolve in Cybertron’s shadow. Yet Caminus had never housed or birthed bots who resembled him. Was Onyx the first technorganic, then? Was he the father of them all? Windblade didn’t expect to receive answers to questions like that, at least not yet. So she didn’t ask them.

“Is that why technorganics were hated?” she asked instead. “Because they resembled Onyx Prime?”

It didn’t make much sense though, when she said it out loud. Why weren’t femmes subjugated for resembling Solus, then? Why weren’t gestalts rejected for their relation to Nexus, or scientists or soldiers? Even those who insisted on rejecting the Thirteen were still a part of them, and they could not punish the population of an entire planet for Quintus Prime’s crimes. So why were Onyx’s children the only ones who had to suffer?

“That was one of the reasons given,” Starscream confirmed for her. “Though, perhaps that was only justification for hatred that already existed. Remember that technorganics did not exist until after the invasion. They came from the Well, and people were scared. They thought that Onyx was trying to take over through his creations. They feared that he and Quintus had gone down the path of Megatronus.”

Windblade couldn’t stop herself from shivering at just the mention of the corrupted Prime. But even though the Fallen had betrayed his siblings and turned his back on Primus, the Mistress did not outlaw any of the stories or discussion of him. On the contrary, some of the colony’s greatest plays and songs were dedicated to his doomed fight against Unicron. If one true Prime could fall to Unicron’s power, then the others would be just as susceptible to such corruption...

Windblade quickly figured that she should probably move back to a hopefully less depressing topic.

“But Seekers didn’t follow the Thirteen anyway,” she said.

“No.” Starscream seemed equally grateful for the change of subject, or just for the chance to show off everything he knew for certain. “As I said, we had our own God.”

Then he sighed, and as he closed his eyes his voice became soft and weary.

“Daedalus. He was a master blacksmith, said to rival even Solus Prime. With his unmatched craftsmanship, he created the first wings for himself. And so he became the first Winglord.”

“Daedalus…” Windblade found the name interesting. It was just like that of a Prime’s, yet he had no relation to the Matrix.

“What came next is a very long story that I can only remember scraps of,” Starscream confessed. “But, suffice to say, Daedalus made many more Seekers that way, four of whom were his downfall. Two were his own children. Another two were his brothers. With those brothers, he also formed the first trine.”

“Trine?”

“I’ll tell you another time. If we live that long…” He grimaced as a shudder took over his frame. “But what am I saying? These are just stories now. Lies. The first record of Daedalus wasn’t even from a billion years ago.”

Windblade tilted her helm. “Seekers have only been around for a billion years?”

“Of course not!” Starscream snapped, and then immediately looked guilty for it. “But… many records were lost during the Age of Wrath. Many people perished. Most who survived had only ever known a life in Quintesson servitude. Our knowledge of the Imperial Age is almost entirely second-hand. Almost…”

He stressed the repetition with a hiss, and then he looked right at her.

“But your Mistress would know exactly what happened back then, wouldn’t she?”

It was hard not to hear it as an accusation.

“I suppose she would,” Windblade admitted.

“And she would have her own ancient records of the era.”

Windblade nodded as she held her legs up to her chest. The records were public, but most had no reason to go reading them. Vertex enjoyed the old stories and mythologies, of course, but even those tasked with maintaining Caminus’ databanks and archives didn’t spend much of their free time reading any of it.

“If she comes to take us back to Caminus… you could come with me,” she offered. “We could read them together.”

Starscream laughed at that, a sound that was like a crack of thunder.

“Is that so? And I suppose we could have a chat with the Titan himself, since you’re so well-versed? Perhaps take a tour around the galaxy together?”

Windblade pressed her lips together. “Well, when you put it that way, it sounds completely stupid and foolish, now doesn’t it?”

And he laughed again, though the sound this time was far more suppressed. It rumbled in his throat as he shook his head.

“You’re a naive and hopeless optimist, Windblade. But… perhaps I need to think of such things, so I don’t go mad.”

As usual, he could only give compliments that were wrapped first with insults. But Windblade knew it was a compliment, at the very least, and she could accept that.

“How did you know of Caminus, Starscream?” she asked, thinking back to how he knew her home was a Titan. “You recognised it as a colony, but Knockout had never heard of it. No-one else has, it seems.”

Starscream shrugged as he closed his optics. “It was somewhat common knowledge in my time. Only to those who cared about history, though. The traitor colony. The ones who fled and left the rest of us to die-”

“That’s not true!” Windblade cut in. “The Mistress tried to save everyone . She tried to warn them. But they never listened.”

Caminus had known the invasion was coming, but only the Mistress could hear him. Cityspeaking was not a well-known talent in those days, so no-one believed her when she tried to pass on Caminus’ warning. That was what the records had said. That was what Windblade had been taught, when she’d been learning to develop her own Speaking talent, so she could understand just how important a talent it was.

Yet Starscream chuckled at her indignation.

“That’s not what Cybertron’s records said,” he told her.

“Well,” she snapped, “your records are wrong.”

“Or, more likely, your Mistress is. You already know that she’s lied to you.”

Windblade opened her mouth to protest, but her glossa was too heavy to move. She couldn’t argue without also lying herself.  

But the Mistress hadn’t lied. She’d told them that sparks were precious, and that was still true. She just… hadn’t said anything about bonding. Or carrying sparks. For their own good. 

Everything that the Mistress did was for the good of Caminus, and her children.

“And you think I’m an idiot,” Windblade said to Starscream, “for still wanting to believe in her.”

He didn’t laugh at her this time. “No. I don’t. I only think you’re an idiot for staying here with me.”

“Well. You need someone to keep watch,” she told him. “In case you fall asleep again.”

He kept his optics closed, but his head was held high. He kept chewing at his lip. “I don’t want to sleep. But I’m so tired.”

He didn’t want any more nightmares. He didn’t want to wake up to his claws around someone’s throat again. Windblade wouldn’t want to sleep either, in that case.

“I can try and keep you awake,” she offered, and she braced herself for a familiar scoff...

“...I would appreciate that.” 

What happened next was something surreal in retrospect. Windblade held Starscream’s head in her hands as he lay flat against her lap, and he stared up at the pitted ceiling as her digits constantly moved across his face. The disruption was enough to stop him from drifting off, but not so much that it would give him discomfort. Windblade watched the rain as she danced her fingers against him.

“Is that a Camien song?” he asked after some silent klicks, breaking her from her minor trance. She hadn’t realised her vocaliser had been humming, but the aftershocks at the back of her mouth could only be from one thing.

“Yes. ‘The Titan’s Heartbeat’. Supposed to be what Caminus’ spark frequency sounds like.” Windblade wasn’t much of a singer, certainly not like some other Camiens, but it was the first piece of music taught to all newsparks from the hotspot. For Cityspeakers, it helped them form a basis for learning the language of the Titans. For others, it helped them connect to their home.

“If that’s so,” Starscream said, “then I understand now why things must be peaceful over there.”

Windblade nodded. Caminus was peaceful. Not perfect, of course, but things like death and rain and bloody political coups were never a concern. The only things to worry about were reputations, and social standing, and keeping good friends. People like Nautica and Velocity struggled with things like that.

Maybe they would have fared better on Cybertron, before everything went so wrong. But Windblade would never know, because that Cybertron was long gone. She was five hundred years too late to save it, and she had to wonder if Starscream hated her for that.

“I’m sorry I asked so much about… what came before all this,” she said to him. “I didn’t mean to bring back memories.”

He let out a long sigh, and his cheeks vibrated against her digits. “You are a Seeker just as much as I am, Windblade. You have a right to know these things. Especially things that your own dear Mistress won’t tell you.”

Windblade’s wrists went still. Even though she refused to doubt the Mistress’ intentions, she still couldn’t suppress the fact that she had kept such important things a secret from the entire colony.

“Why wouldn’t she tell us that we can carry sparks?” Questions would help keep Starscream awake, and if they weren’t about Cybertron then he wouldn’t get worked up over them. 

“Surely you have your own theories as to why, by now,” he muttered.

“Knockout suggested it was for... population control.” There was a sour taste in her mouth when she said it.

“That would be the most logical answer.”

“But maybe not the only one?”

“Maybe.”

If Starscream wasn’t going to reveal any of the other possibilities, then he either did not know them or did not think it best to share them. And Windblade didn’t want to think too much more about it herself. She’d rather know more about the sparks themselves, how new life could be created so easily.

“Can you tell me more about sparkbonding?” she asked, though a grimace flashed under her digits.

“I... am not the best person to ask.”

She’d almost forgotten that he’d killed people by doing that.

“R… right. Sorry.”

“And stop apologising. I’m the one who almost severed your helm from your frame.”

Windblade saw the dried stains on her chest when she looked down at him.

“It would take more than that to kill me,” she informed him.

“I’m sure it would.” And he smiled as if he really believed her.

“That’s why we have to stick together,” she said, almost believing herself as well. “We’re both hard to kill.”

Starscream went silent after that. When her optics went to him again, he wasn’t smiling or looking up at her.

“But I’m not supposed to be,” he said with his gaze somewhere distant, far past the neglected walls around them both. “Rattrap… he made sure… he had contingencies. Just in case I ever escaped… or outlived my usefulness.”

One of his hands drifted to his head, just below her own fingers, as if it was searching for something.

“...It’s not just something wrong with your spark, is it, Starscream?” she asked.

He looked at her now, though his optics seemed to burn as they flooded.

“He put something in my head,” he told her. “He should have killed me with it. Why hasn’t he… why hasn’t it worked…?”

A killswitch. Of course. Rattrap would have seen Starscream as an investment. He’d already mangled the Seeker so much that installing something lethal in his processor would hardly have been an issue. But something like that should have been activated as soon as Starscream freed himself. Unless Rattrap was really so desperate to keep him alive…

“Maybe,” Windblade suggested, “we could go back to Knockout and ask him—”

“What happened to not putting him in further danger?” Starscream interrupted.

“I mean… we could just ask him,” she pressed. “He’s already taken the risk with helping us in the first place.”

“I’ve already had him rooting around in my spark,” Starscream growled. “I’d prefer to keep my head to myself, if nothing else.”

“Even if it’ll kill you?”

“Especially so.”

Windblade was expecting that answer. He was a mech who didn’t know how to ask for help, and who especially didn’t want to need any. He must have accepted some centuries ago that no help would come for him, so he could do nothing but reject it when it came at all. 

Though he’d allowed her to keep him awake, he’d likely never admit that it was help for him. He would not take it unless it was offered first. So Windblade would just need to offer whenever she could. 

A flash of light caught her optic. At first she thought it was lightning, to accompany the intermittent thunder that was indistinguishable from Starscream’s vocaliser, but it had a bright pink hue to it and it did not go away. 

“What’s that over there?” She was facing the rectangle of light that seemed to hang weightless in the air, though through the drizzle she could see that it was attached to another building in somewhat better repair than the one she was sitting in. It didn’t seem to be a spotlight, but she shied away from it regardless.

“Looks like an advertising panel,” Starscream said as he sat up with some effort. “Doesn’t Caminus have those?”

“Ours aren’t quite as bright as that one...” All the energon in the colony ran through Caminus’ veins, so it had to be used with respect and discretion. Such bright lights were only ever used when necessary, during long nights or festivals. She imagined that some parts of Cybertron probably followed similar rationing laws, which was why boards like the one in front of her weren’t switched on all the time.

But then a sudden jingle burst out from the panel, and she then figured that it only switched on when it was time to blow a bot’s audials out.

“Solus, that’s fragging loud!” she hissed.

“Good,” Starscream said, though he also flinched from the sound with a hand over his audials. “We’ll be able to hear it from here.”

The horrible music then stopped, replaced by a far-too cheerful voice from a femme that appeared on the screen. Though the rain had died down some, there was still a stubborn haze across the distance that stopped Windblade from seeing any details of her. But she could reasonably assume that she was technorganic, since she was allowed to be so visible.

“Good evening, Nova Cronum, this is Andromeda with your daily dose of news! The global alert for the Camien terrorist Windblade is still in full effect. All citizens are reminded to report any and all potential sightings and suspicious activity to your nearest enforcer department.”

“You’re rather famous, dear,” Starscream said. Windblade felt her spark clench in its chamber at the sound of her name echoing across the entire city, but at least there was no mention of Starscream as well. He was supposed to be a secret, after all.

“Now onto local happenings; the Technotronic Troops will be taking a trip into Technotropolis next decacycle, and all younglings aged two to ten cycles are encouraged to sign up! There’s no better way to learn the proud history of our people than with a tour around the capital! In other Technotropolis news, strange graffiti has recently been sighted in a number of zones around our dear capital.” 

Andromeda disappeared from view, replaced by snapshots of the bright graffiti scrawled across various infrastructure. Each one was identical, and Windblade found herself studying them intently. It was hard to make them out through the mist, but… she recognised them. She knew that for certain.

“Confirmed sightings have been found here in Nova Cronum, as well as in Tagan Heights, Praxus and Tyger Pax. Are there another set of aliens running around right under our olfactories, trying to disrupt Cybertron? Or is it just the scribblings of some young sparks with too much time on their hands? That’s what the Technotronic Troops are far, to keep young minds busy and young hands out of trouble! Public Order chief Silverbolt had this to say on the matter—”

She realised what the graffiti was just as the pictures disappeared.

“That’s Camien…! That’s mono-language syntax!” She dashed over to the edge of the building to get a closer look at it just before it flashed away. But she was sure, she was certain. She’d only ever seen markings like that back home.

“Mono— what ?” Starscream looked at her like she was the one who’d gone mad, and she realised that she’d somewhat shoved him out of the way.

“It’s a shorthand!” she explained. “Actors use it to remember their lines. Vertex tried to teach us some… I remember how it looks. But it’s not saying dialogue. It’s... some kind of formula…” They were numbers, at least, alongside some other symbols that looked like they belonged on one of Nautica’s essays.

Starscream’s optics creased, but his shoulders no longer sagged. “Tell me what it said.”

Windblade cast her optics aside as she pulled the footage from the most recent stack of her RAM. It was a handy function that let any bot re-watch anything their optics captured, for up to thirty nanoklicks into the past. She only needed a few of them to double check what was written, and she spoke each number out loud.

“Those are coordinates, Windblade,” he said, with some awe. “They point to the other side of Iacon.”

“A meeting place?” She could feel burning light in her optics as her mouth stretched into a grin. “It must be for me, someone wants me to go there—!”

But then Starscream immediately cut through all her hopes.

“It could be a trap. You know that, don’t you?”

Windblade’s spark hadn’t risen enough for it to now plummet, but its weight was still immense in her chamber.

“Rattrap wouldn’t know Camien calligraphy like that,” she argued. 

“He’s been interrogating your friends this whole time,” Starscream reminded her. “I’m sure one of them would tell him all about it.”

Interrogating. Torturing. The bodyguards were tough. But Nautica and Lightbright… how far could they be pushed before they’d spill their sparks?

Windblade couldn’t let herself think of things like that.

“Velocity and Hot Shot never got caught,” she said, mostly as a reminder to herself. “They could have left those messages, in case I… no, no, there’s something else. There has to be. Something Rattrap wouldn’t be able to copy so easily...”

She re-watched the footage from her optics, rewriting her own RAM with the same frame over and over until she finally caught it.

“The Hamiltonian!”

“The what ?” She hadn’t accidentally shoved Starscream this time, but he still sounded offended just because he couldn’t figure it out for himself.

“Nautica is a quantum mechanic,” Windblade said. “She’ll tell anyone who’ll listen about her work, but it’s impossible for most people to understand. The only thing she ever managed to really explain to me was Hamiltonian operators. There was one right there in the mono-language. She’d know I recognise it. She’s the only one smart enough to come up with something like this.”

It was a single symbol, but it was replicated perfectly across all the pictures. And Nautica had taught Vertex to pilot her own starship, so she must have learned some of mono-language from her. It all made sense.

“Nautica sent out that message,” Windblade assured. “I’m sure of it. Though… how did she get out? And how would she have written it in so many places?”

If Nautica had escaped too, then there should have been a global alert on her as well. Unless Rattrap wanted to keep it a secret, like Starscream’s existence.

“The Autobots could have found her,” Starscream optioned, and his skepticism seemed to melt slightly.

“Autobots?” Windblade didn’t let her confusion dampen her renewed hope for finding her friends.

“The rebels,” he explained. “The ones I was made to kill. There’s far more of them than you might think. If she’s escaped, and they’ve found her, then she should consider herself very fortunate. So long as she’s smart enough to not help them.”

If the Autobots were trying to rebel against Rattrap, then they’d be the only ones willing to take in a Camien. And they’d also be the only people who could help Windblade and Starscream. Knowing that, it seemed far too good to be true now.

“...Do you still think it might be a trap?” Windblade asked. Starscream sighed as he bowed his head.

“Of course it might be… but our only other options are to stay here and rust, or wander aimlessly until we’re caught.”

So that settled it, even if Starscream wouldn’t admit which option was preferable. Windblade pushed herself upright, wincing as a sudden electric-pulse ran down her spinal strut. She’d been sitting for so long that her joints had gone solid.

“Shall we go, then?” she asked, offering a hand to help Starscream stand.

At first he looked like he was going to ignore it, but then he begrudgingly let her help him upright. “If we must.”

They descended the ruined skyscraper together. The rain had stopped, and the sky was empty, and Nautica was out there waiting for them. Maybe the others would be as well, though Windblade didn’t dare hope for too much.

The grand memorial site was never empty, even so many centuries after the deaths of all whose names were engraved upon the steel slabs. These names were only a small portion of the casualties suffered from the old Senate’s hatred of technorganics; only those who had survived could remember those who had died. Friends, family, lovers, all the ghosts left behind in the ruins. But those who had no one left to remember them after the dust of the Gestalt Rebellion had settled were doomed to be forgotten.

If not for Rhinox, Airazor’s parents would have likely been among the doomed. If not for him, Airazor herself would have likely been with them both in the Allspark, chasing the winds across Onyx Prime’s eternal plains. But she was here, standing over their empty graves, trying to think of what they would tell her to do as she traced a claw over their names.

 

EAGLEYE

SKYHOOK

 

She had been too young to mourn them when they died. Rhinox had always refused to give her any details of the grim event, which only told her that it was the Senate that had killed them. They’d murdered everyone else, all the other thousands of names that surrounded her in a cold halo, either directly or indirectly. The then-Senator Ratbat had attested to that, with no claim of ignorance or of good intentions on behalf of the damned and dead, though his part in the execution of Sentinel Prime had apparently made him a hero in everyone’s eyes anyway.

Airazor had never known the evils of Sentinel, but she’d heard enough stories from her uncle to know that she should be glad of that. In fact, she’d never known evil at all, at least not firsthand, not until...

Not until the Camiens. The apparent terrorists. Those who looked just like the Cybertronians, the ancient oppressors, the ones who would have had her feathers torn out one by one and thrown away so that it would be harder to eventually find the rest of her body...

Those were the Cybertronians. What Airazor had heard of them, at least. But... Windblade hadn’t been like that. Not at all. She hadn’t even looked twice at Airazor, not until she transformed into her beast mode, and even then it was only a minor glance of surprise. Even Rhinox had said she was friendly, curious, polite… which only made him all the more furious to learn the truth about her.

The truth that the Chancellor apparently believed, at least.

“It doesn’t feel right,” Airazor muttered over her parents’ only resting place, hugging herself to hold the feathers down on her chest. “She wouldn’t… I just don’t believe it.”

She’d seen the trial, along with the rest of the planet. She’d seen what Caminus’ matriarch, the Mistress of Flame, had to say about people like her. But none of that outweighed what she herself had seen of Windblade. She’d only shared a few fleeting moments on the ground and in the air with the Camien, but they were still enough to convince her that Windblade was not what the Chancellor wanted everyone to think she was. 

The fact that she had escaped, too. For the femme that Airazor had met, it made no sense. She was being sent back to Caminus, which was all she’d wanted. If she’d just stayed in her cell, she’d be on her way home. Was she trying to find something before she was ejected? Was she still going to try to talk to Metroplex, just one time?

The other possibility, of course, was that she was following other orders from the Mistress of Flame and refused to go home with a failed mission. But no . That wasn’t it. That couldn’t be it. Windblade was a flyer. She was a painted frowning face. She was a homesick femme who could talk to cities. She was not a terrorist, and certainly not an assassin.

“Maybe the others would do it?” Airazor asked out loud. “But then why was she the one on trial… and why was she the only one who escaped?” 

She kept her voice low, but she still felt curious eyes flicking towards her. It wasn’t uncommon for people to talk to themselves here, those who found comfort in conversing with ghosts they either could or couldn’t see, but Airazor didn’t want anyone knowing what was on her mind. It would be treason, after all, and she’d already been guilty of that by getting Windblade to Metroplex in the first place...

But Windblade hadn’t sold her out. She’d insisted that she went alone, even though admitting to having a technorganic’s help likely would have helped her case. Or it would have just seen Airazor locked in a stasis pod for the next few centuries. Maybe Windblade even suspected that Airazor had sold her out to the guards after leaving her in Praxus… yet she’d still said nothing.

That had to mean something. It had to mean that Windblade wasn’t guilty, not of technorganic hate or of sabotaging her own city.

(Was Metroplex truly hers, if he was on Cybertron and she was from so far away? From how she had spoken of Metroplex, not as simply a city but as a person in need of help, Airazor could believe it.)

So what were the other options? Either the Chancellor was mistaken, fallen prey to his own paranoia and hatred- however justified- of those who didn’t come from Onyx’s spark. Or the Mistress of Flame had set something up, letting her delegation take the fall for it...

Or Airazor was just in denial, refusing to accept that she’d been so naive and wrong about someone. That was the easy answer. That was the one that would let her sleep easy at night, knowing that she wasn’t siding with the people who had killed her parents and who would happily take her next.

And that was why she couldn’t accept it. Her whole life had been easy, thanks to her uncle and the benevolent Chancellor and the mere circumstances of her birth. She had no nightmares, no scars from the past like the older bots. She had only ever known what she was told by those who had survived it, those who claimed to know better… so it was about damn time she started finding things out for herself.

“You’d understand, right, Mama?” She addressed her mother Skyhook most often, only because she had slightly more tangible memories of the beautiful white feathers that Airazor herself unfortunately hadn’t inherited. To make up for it, according to Rhinox, she at least bore a striking similarity to her sire Eagleye. She’d always wanted to apologise to Rhinox for that, especially after hearing one of his many stories about her sire, but it had always felt too awkward to do so. 

So this would be a second thing she could never tell him. How she had helped Windblade, and how she didn’t think it was the wrong thing to do. How she still wanted to help her… but how? She was on the run, and no-one knew where she was, and that was the best thing for her. Others would say that she would make a break for Metroplex again, to ‘finish the job’. But Airazor knew better. She wouldn’t go back to the place where she was caught. She would send a message home. She’d tell the Mistress of Flame what was going on, just in case the Chancellor had twisted the facts, just to make sure that help was on its way. 

And how would she do that…?

Airazor closed her eyes, still squeezing her servos around her chest, still anxious of stray optics and audios from her fellow mourners and orphans. There were many more here than usual, she now noticed. The arrival and apparent betrayal of the Camiens must have reopened many old wounds. So it was more important than ever that no-one knew what she was thinking, or planning, or trying to figure out.

She remembered stories of telepaths, people who could read thought patterns through EM fields. It was a stupid sparkling story, of course, like the Axiom Nexus or the Sparkcracker, and it still gave her the overwhelming urge to get the frag out of there. 

But she stopped on the turn of her heel, just as she was giving her parents a farewell. The foot of their slab was home to a tangle of roots and leaves. She’d noticed them before, but at some point between her arrival and now they had started to open their flowers. The heavy rain from before must have coaxed them to finally show themselves.

“At least there’s something pretty in all this ugliness…” Airazor had once never paid much attention to Cybertron’s plants, since they only ever graced the ground or the surface of water, but her spark was now close to one who adored all the natural wonders of their home. The bond had not been done yet, but she still picked up on his habits just as he picked up on hers, and his knowledge was hers just as his spark was. 

The Voscean was close to the grand memorial, so close that Airazor could faintly hear its waves pulling in from Luna 1’s grip. An abundance of water meant an abundance of green growing up from Cybertron’s depths, though usually any rogue plants were trimmed down severely so they didn’t damage any foundations. 

She liked this plant, though. The flowers especially; white petals, bearing thin black lines like veins under the soft skin. They immediately reminded her of someone, the one who had taken her spark. She knew exactly where he was, and she smiled because it was where she now needed to be as well.

(She also smiled because she always did at the thought of him.)

“Thanks for the help, Mama. And you too, Pop.” She plucked a single stem from the small bed of flowers, and she wondered if the two of them would have liked Tigatron if they’d ever had the chance to meet him.

✧✦✧

He’d been put to work at the Hydrax Plateau, constant guard duty of the Camien spaceship, and he’d treated it as a badge of honor even as he bemoaned the inept few guards who Dinobot had graciously allowed him to supervise.

(Airazor then usually reminded him that he could have been stuck with some of Monopoly’s creepy drones instead, which then just made him grumble into his energon until she rubbed his cheek and had him purring.)

The spaceport’s perimeter security was ironically rather lax, but Airazor supposed that all eyes would be on the Camien ship. No-one stopped her as she crossed the mostly empty docking bays, though she still felt her feathers puff up in anticipation of something going wrong. Because something would go wrong, surely. Even just asking about the ship would surely be suspicious. She hadn’t seen anyone yet, she could still turn around and fly away-

...No. No easy way out. And besides, she had nothing to fear from Tigatron. She could see him right at the front of the hefty ship, and he’d see her soon enough when he scanned the area. Airazor chose not to give him an unnecessary fright just yet.

“Tigatron?” She called out with a wave of her hand, immediately catching his attention. Tigatron took his job seriously, just as he did with everything in his life. His demeanor made him seem intimidating to most people, but the effect was rather diminished when you knew that just touching his tail without warning would make him leap several yards in the air. 

And that smile, of course. 

Even when it was full of fangs, it was impossible to ever be scared when he smiled like that.

“Airazor!” He rocked back on his heels, as if he was rooting himself to the floor so he wouldn’t run to her and abandon his post. “What a pleasant surprise. What are you doing here?”

Airazor waited until she was closer, so she wouldn’t have to shout across the docking bay at him, and by then a few of his guards had drifted over to see who their visitor was. 

“I’d like to speak privately with you,” she told Tigatron, with a wary glance at the two mechs now flanking him. “If I could.”

Tigatron nodded once, though the blue-plated mech next to him leaned over with a subtle mutter to his silver coworker.

“Trying to get him off alone so they can smooch , I bet-”

But it was not subtle enough for either Airazor’s or Tigatron’s audials.

“Powerhug.” Tigatron snapped his gaze to the blue mech, silencing him with nothing more than the glare. “Watch my post while I’m gone.”

“Y-yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Powerhug’s red antennae-like horns flicked against each other as he let out a guilty gulp, and the other mech took the chance to shift into his rabbit alt-mode and bounce away to the other side of the ship. Tigatron led Airazor back across the docking bay, away from any more nosy sensors, until they reached a set of storage containers. 

“I don’t mean to pull you away from your work, Tigatron,” Airazor said, “I just-”

Tigatron held up a clawed hand to interrupt her. “No need to apologise, my love. Please, tell me what’s on your mind.”

Airazor let out a heavy vent through her warm smile. Tigatron always listened, even when it was the most boring details of her day or yet another recounting of her trips flying over the magma pits of Tarn and Helex. When he asked what you were thinking, he truly wanted to know.

...Which made Airazor all the more cautious of what really was on her mind, the whole reason that she was here. But there was no point in wasting time; either he would help her, or he would cast her out of his sight. If she was going to do it, better to just get it over with.

“Well… it’s about the Camiens,” she said. “And the ship you’re guarding. I’d… I’d like to search it.”

Tigatron cocked his helm to one side with obvious confusion, but as Airazor hoped he didn’t yet ask why she wanted such a thing. 

“It has already been scanned,” he told her. “For a physical search, first we have to wait for Terrorsaur to complete his analysis of the defense systems. He is the only one allowed onboard, by the Chancellor’s orders.”

“But you do have a way to get inside, right?” she pressed. Tigatron’s optics narrowed, and his mouth hung open with his top row of fangs on full display. She saw them scrape his bottom lip.

“What is this about, Airazor?”

She tried to will her feathers to lay flat, anything to make her look less guilty as she tried to think of how much to tell him.

“I think the Camiens have been framed,” she finally said.

“Framed…? In what way?” Tigatron spoke gently, as he often did with her, but there was the faintest growl from his vocaliser. She imagined that it came from thinking about the Camiens at all.

“I... met with Windblade,” she confessed on the air of a sigh, “before she was found in Metroplex. I… I led her there-”

“You what?!” Tigatron compressed his outburst into a hiss at the back of his throat, but the sound still snapped against Airazor’s audios.

“Let me finish, please,” she hissed back, whistling harsh air through her beak. “I led her there because she told me Metroplex had sent her a warning. She could speak to him-”

“Airazor… please. Please stop.” He placed his hands on her shoulders, and though he did not press his claws in she could still feel them there through the thin gaps of her feathers. “Do you understand the gravity of what you’re telling me?”

“I wouldn’t be telling you if I didn’t understand it, Tigatron.” She resisted the urge to shrug his grip off; if he didn’t let her go, she’d just earn herself some scratches for the effort.

“Have you told anyone else?” he asked, still holding her with his hands and pleading eyes.

“Of course not. Not even Rhinox.”

“Good… good.” Now he chose to release her, pulling some stray feathers out as he dropped his servos.

“Will you please just listen to what I have to say?” Airazor brushed the dislodged fluff from her shoulders as Tigatron held the back of his head.

“What I’ve heard already is enough to get us both arrested,” he growled.

“So you have nothing to lose by letting me finish.”

He said nothing. Airazor took that as permission to damn them both.

“Windblade is not a terrorist, Tigatron. She didn’t even want to be here. She wanted to talk to Metroplex so she could do her job and go home.”

“Her job was to try and assassinate the Chancellor-!”

“That’s what he thinks, and it’s what he wants us to believe. Listen to me. If Windblade was going to be sent back to Caminus anyway, why would she go to all the trouble of escaping from prison?”

“So she’d have another chance to kill Rattrap. Or set a backup plan in motion.”

Airazor stopped herself from rolling her optics, only because she was anticipating the answer anyway. And because she so desperately wanted Tigatron to trust her on this.

“Do you really believe that, love?” she asked him, imploring him to think about it just as she had. But he only let out a yowl of frustration as his claws snapped out.

“What else should I believe? Airazor, you of all people should understand how some others see us! The Cybertronians ” —he couldn’t say the word without a snarl— “are not unique in their hatred. The Camiens are outsiders, ancestors of those who tried to exterminate us!”

Bless him for still trying to stay quiet, despite his boiling anger. And bless him for trying to think of her in the middle of all this, as if she was the greatest justification for that anger. He hadn’t lost family to the long-dead Senate, after all. He had no personal grudge against them, so he had to find other reasons that weren’t his own to hate them like everyone else. He was welcome to take Airazor’s reasons, only because she had no use for them, but now she was starting to get sick of people treating her like a righteous cause.

“Yes, Tigatron, I’m well aware of what’s been done to us,” Airazor told him. “But how are the Camiens guilty for crimes committed light years away and centuries ago? I’m not saying the Chancellor is lying, I’m just saying he might be mistaken . Or am I just not allowed to question anyone in charge? Am I obligated to just ignore what I think is right, because I’ll always be a victim of bots who’ve been dead for five centuries?”

It was more than what she’d meant to say, but she was still glad to have said it. And, for the first time in her memory, Tigatron looked like he didn’t know what to say at all. While she waited for him to find his fateful words, she had to wonder if she’d just ruined something. 

“...What exactly are you expecting to find on that ship?”

He wasn’t quite looking at her, not at her optics. Airazor tried not to worry too much about that fact.

“Honestly…” Air whistled through her beak as she inhaled. “I’m not sure. Just… something to tell me if I’m right or wrong. Mission directives from their leader. A comm log. Any kind of evidence that they were really trying to hurt us.”

“You understand the possibility that you may be wrong about these people?”

“Of course I do. I’m not an idiot.”

Tigatron finally looked at her now. 

“...Of course you’re not. I apologise, my love.”

Airazor was about to tell him that there was nothing to apologise for, but he started walking away before she could. She didn’t follow him, only because he was too close to the ship for anything she told him to go unheard.

“Everyone, listen up,” Tigatron called out with a clap of his hands. “Go get yourself some energon. Be back in fifteen klicks.”

Airazor felt herself freeze. He was actually going to let her onboard. Was he? Why else would he dismiss the guards? While she tried to puzzle out what he was really doing, three bots trickled out from around the ship’s perimeter- the two mechs, along with a silver-gold femme who had plate-metal wings and optics like wide green headlights.

“What about the ship?” the femme asked.

“I’ll be staying behind to watch it, obviously,” Tigatron informed her. Powerhug was cheering to himself while his silver friend clapped a hand on Tigatron’s elbow.

“I’ll bring back a cube for you, boss,” he said.

“Thank you, Stampy.”

The three guards took their leave, and when the docking bay was deserted Tigatron then made a summoning motion towards Airazor.

“Try and make it quick,” he whispered to her as he flicked a lever on the ship’s hull. There was a grating hiss as plates pulled apart, revealing an opening just large enough for passengers to board in single-file. 

“I will,” she promised. “Thank you.” She knew she didn’t have time to say any more just now, so she pulled herself inside before someone caught her. The opening sealed behind her, leaving the wall solid and almost seamless. There was a sign over the hidden opening, and though she didn’t understand the glyphs written on it she at least knew that it marked where she could get back out from.

So where to start? Spaceships weren’t exactly familiar to Airazor, since any travel off of Cybertron was almost unheard of, but her uncle had taught her enough about mechanics for her to comfortably repair any broken terminals or pod engines she might come across in her life. A Camien ship clearly operated under an entirely different language than what she was used to, but surely the interfaces would be similar enough to Cybertron’s technology that she wouldn’t be completely wasting her time.

The corridors were wide enough for two people to walk next to each other, and Airazor soon found herself at the engine room, then in what looked like a medbay, then at a dead end that branched into different cubicles that were minuscule hab suites. Were peoples’ rooms really this small on Caminus? 

Interesting, but not important. She moved on when she found only empty shelves, until she finally reached the front of the ship. There was a console under the viewport, set in front of two captain’s chairs, but she didn’t dare touch anything on it.

‘ Well, you’ll have to touch something if you want to start getting anywhere.’

Airazor sighed as she dragged her optics over the toggles and buttons and dead lights, trying to scan for anything familiar. She braced her servos on the very edge of the console-

And almost fell forward when the bare panel under her hand suddenly sank down. She’d just pressed a button, and a woosh behind her told her that it had done something.

She turned to face the sound, and found herself looking into a pitch-black void in the wall. She was fairly certain that it hadn’t been there before, but even if it had been there all along she still didn’t want to go near it. Even for her, who loved few things more than flying miles above Cybertron, just looking at the hole gave her thoughts of falling in and never being able to get back out. 

“Hello…?” Airazor gripped the edges of the console next to her, careful not to press any more secret buttons. If something came out to grab her, like a giant hand or a vacuum pull, at least she had something to hold onto-

“Please don’t hurt us.”

That wasn’t a vacuum, or a monster’s claw. It was a femme’s voice.

“Woah… who’s there?” Airazor didn’t release her grip on her anchor, but she did lean forward to try and peer into the darkness. At first there was nothing at all, but then a face popped into existence out of nowhere. The mech was short- shorter than Airazor, at least- and he had the same strange markings on his face that Windblade had. He gripped the side of the hole in the wall, as if he feared the outside just as Airazor feared the inside, and another bot appeared above him doing the same. This was the femme; cyan-plated and terrified, with an immense crest sweeping up from her helm that almost touched the top of the wall. Airazor recognised her from the Camiens’ arrival, though she didn’t remember her name.

“Hey, I’m not here to hurt you.” She released the console, to show that her hands were truly empty. “My name is Airazor.”

The Camiens said nothing, but they didn’t bolt back into the dark at least. And they didn’t threaten her, which lent at least some credence to Airazor’s theory that they weren’t dangerous at all.

“You’re here to drag us away like Maxima,” the mech said after a tense moment, “aren’t you?”

“No?” Airazor felt her face crease as her feathers stood up. “Who’s Maxima?”

“My bodyguard… they took her away.” The mech turned his head so that it was hidden, and the taller femme put a hand on his shoulder but still said nothing.

“How long have you been hiding here for?” Airazor asked, letting herself sit in one of the pilot seats. The femme stiffened, but it wasn’t enough to coax her out just yet. She gulped before she finally spoke again. 

“Two cycles… but our chronometers don’t work well in here, so it might be longer than that.” She held the sides of the hole as she slowly stretched a single leg out, then the other. The mech followed suit, though with obvious reluctance.

“I’m Velocity,” she said with a slight stutter. “And this is Hot Shot.”

At the sound of their names, Airazor started to remember. The trial broadcast had mentioned that two Camiens had managed to avoid capture. So they’d been hiding on the ship all along.

“Is he a Cityspeaker too?” Airazor asked with a nod to Hot Shot. “Like Windblade?”

“You know where she is?” Velocity’s optics immediately brightened at the mention of her friend. 

“What about Maxima?” Hot Shot asked, and his markings seemed to glow as he stood in front of Airazor. “And Lightbright? Are they okay?”

“I think those two are still in custody,” Airazor said. “But with Windblade… well, no-one knows where she is, actually. She escaped from prison a few days ago.”

The two Camiens looked at her like she’d just suddenly shed all her plumage.

“Wh… prison? What ?” Hot Shot almost fell back onto his aft, saved only by Velocity keeping him upright.

“You... don’t know what’s happened?” Airazor asked. 

“We’ve been hiding in that cabinet this whole time,” Velocity told her, pointing a digit at the hole they’d emerged from. “Ever since Maxima was taken away.”

Two cycles ago. There’d be no way for them to know of the trial if they’d been stuck on a dead ship since then. Airazor gulped.

“Right… Windblade was caught inside Metroplex. Rattrap thinks she was there to sabotage him. So he had everyone arrested, and he’s said he’s gonna send you all back to Caminus.”

“That’s a load of bullslag!” Hot Shot tore himself away from Velocity’s support in his outrage, though he kept his voice to a quiet hiss. “Windblade was trying to do her job !”

If Velocity was as disgusted as him, she didn’t show it. Instead she tapped her chin with a frown. 

“If he's just going to send us back home,” she asked, “why would Windblade bother escaping?”

“That’s exactly what I was wondering,” Airazor sighed. “So you weren’t told to try and assassinate Rattrap?”

“What?! No!” Velocity’s optics almost popped right out of their sockets. “Our only orders were to meet with him and find out what Metroplex was trying to warn us about. Windblade was in charge of that part.”

“I wanna go home.” Hot Shot sat on the floor, his back to the solid part of the wall as he hugged his legs. “I hate it here. I want Maxima back...”

Velocity wasn’t able to comfort him this time. And Airazor was keenly aware that she’d spent too long on the ship. Tigatron’s squad was set to return in five klicks.

“I can’t stay for much longer… there’s a guard waiting for me outside. Are you able to keep yourselves hidden here?”

Velocity nodded. “No-one can find us in the cabinet, it seems. We have energon. It should last us a decacycle, at least.”

“I’ll try and not be that long,” Airazor swore.

“You’re gonna help us?” Hot Shot looked up at her from his legs.

“I’ll try to.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.” That was the simple answer, and it was the only one Airazor could give. She couldn’t tell if the small Cityspeaker believed her, but she felt a squeeze on her elbow from Velocity and turned to see her smiling.

“Thank you, Airazor. C’mon, Hot Shot.” The Camien tried to pull her companion upright, but Hot Shot had glued himself to the floor.

“I don’t wanna go back in.”

“We have to,” Velocity told him as she kept pulling. “Just for now”

“I won’t be gone for long,” Airazor promised, while her optics darted across the viewport to make sure no one was around. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The Camiens said nothing more as they disappeared back into the wall, and the hole itself disappeared when Airazor pressed the secret button again. Just like the passenger opening, the plates of the wall simply slid back into place and hid it from any view. 

She made a straight line back towards the exit, thudding her fist twice against the ship’s hull. Tigatron immediately pulled her back down to the ground with furtive optics.

“Did you find anything?” he asked as he pulled the lever for the last time, erasing all trace of the intrusion. Airazor took a moment to catch her vents, as well as to figure out what to tell him.

“Yeah… something,” she admitted. “Not sure what it means yet, though.”

“What was it?”

If she told him the truth, he’d likely break his own orders and storm the ship to arrest Hot Shot and Velocity. If she lied, she’d struggle to look him in the eye. 

“I think the less you have to know,” she eventually told him, “the better.”

Tigatron’s face was indecipherable, even when he nodded. “If you say so.”

He really did trust her. And she had to wonder if she really deserved it.

“Thank you again, Tigatron. I’m sorry about this.” She took his hand in both of her own, gently pressing his claws into her palms, and for a moment he let her hold him before he brought both their hands to his face. He breathed a sigh over her knuckles. 

“I just don’t want them taking you away from me, Airazor.”

“They won’t,” she swore, knowing she’d already made too many promises for one day but unable to stop just one more, the most important one of all. “I won’t let them. I love you.”

The ridges of his mouth curled sharply, exposing all of his fangs at once. “And I love you.”

And how such a jagged mouth could be so soft, Airazor would never truly know.

“I told you!” a familiar voice suddenly called out. “I fragging told you! He sent us away so they could smooch!”

The three returning guards stood behind the two bots. Powerhug pointed at them both in accusation while the other two shook their heads.

“And this is why you’ll never get one for yourself, Powerhug,” the femme sighed.

“What’s that supposed to mean, Sonar!?”

“I’ll let you get back to work, then,” Airazor said gently, parting from Tigatron with one last squeeze of his hand.

“And I will see you again very soon, my love.”

‘Depending on how quickly I can think of something useful,’ Airazor said to herself in her frantic departure, ‘it might be sooner than you think.’

Chromia gave up on trying to punch through her cell when her fists became too slippery with energon to keep going. 

“You should be saving your fuel, Mia,” Maxima told her from the directly opposite cell, though her own hands were scarred from her equally futile attempts to break through the walls with them. “You can’t help anyone if you’re offline.”

Maxima had always been the lecturer, always the one to follow orders to the letter during their shared bodyguard training. But she was the one who was tasked with teaching Chromia and Afterburner how to defend themselves and those around them, so the rod up her exhaust pipe had turned out to be useful for everyone. And she knew how to relax when she was allowed to, could easily drink anyone on Caminus under the table and ask for another round. 

...Not that they’d be offered any drinks in a place like this. Chromia knew they were all still in the same detention center, even though she’d been dragged into a different cell block that housed three other Camiens; Maxima, Lightbright and Vertex. She had to wonder where the others were being kept, and why she had to be stuck with fragging Vertex , the pretentious primadona glitch… but most of all, she had to wonder about Windblade.

That was her job, after all. To wonder and worry about what the hell her Cityspeaker had gotten herself into. Primus, Windblade had never been this much trouble on Caminus. Afterburner had always joked that Chromia had the easiest assignment of the three of them; Windblade would never get lost down a dark alleyway, or get locked out of her habsuite after losing her keys at a club, or overcharge herself and have to be dragged back home…

(It was just Chromia herself who ended up in those situations. It may have only happened once, but she was still kicking herself over it.)

No, Windblade just made her fun by causing diplomatic incidents over her own impatience. Chromia was the last person on any planet who would actually side with the likes of Rattrap or any ‘technorganic’ freak who clearly hated her as much as she hated them, but even she had to admit that this whole situation was mostly Windblade’s own fault. She’d been told exactly what not to do, and she went and did it anyway. Which actually made it all Chromia’s fault, because she’d allowed Windblade out of her sight. 

Primus, the Mistress would have her head over this. Maybe even her whole spark torn from its chamber and interred in some forbidden vault at Caminus’ core. Chromia had heard stories about what was done to criminals in the imperial days, the only stories she could tolerate Vertex for long enough to listen to. The spark extraction method was supposed to be a less serious alternative to execution, yet it sounded like anything but. To have your spark exposed at all, manhandled by someone who believed you were evil enough to deserve such a punishment…

No, the Mistress wouldn’t do anything like that. But she’d surely have some form of penance ready for Chromia’s return.

“There’s just one thing I haven’t been able to understand.”

At the sound of Vertex’s voice, she suddenly imagined that the punishment would involve having to sit through one of the actor-pilot’s performances. Please, Primus, anything but that.

“And what would that be, Vertex?” Chromia huffed, caring somehow even less than usual about how hostile she sounded in her exhaustion. “The fact that they haven’t just thrown us to Sharkticons by now?”

Lightbright had been mostly silent, since she was still in her original cell, but now her head jolted up with a new wave of fear. “Y-you think they actually have… Sh-Sharkticons?”

Chromia rolled her optics, but really it wouldn’t have surprised her at all if Rattrap did have ancient Quintesson tech lying around somewhere. Maybe that was why it was taking so long for him to get around to dealing with his prisoners- he was making sure the things were working before he tried them out. They apparently found the metal flesh of the guilty most delicious of all.

“Whether or not they do,” Vertex went on with a barely-shielded sigh, “that’s not what I was gonna say. Rattrap told us how the ‘native’ Cybertronians oppressed his kind. And we know that there’s some truth to that from the reception that Windblade received, and from the Mistress of Flame’s… slight overreaction. But one of the Thirteen, Onyx Prime, was said to be more like organic beast than machine.” 

“One of the Thirteen also went crazy, killed his sister and tried to join up with Unicron,” Lightbright helpfully recalled. “They may have been gods, but none of them were perfect. Only Primus is.”

She must have feared the Mistress’ omniscient wrath from how she whispered that last part. The Thirteen were extensions of Primus, and therefore commanded the same respect as Primus Himself regardless of their ancient crimes. That was what the Way of Flame dictated, at least. Of the Thirteen, Chromia had only ever really paid attention to Solus and Prima in her studies after her birth from the hotspot. They could make and wield an entire armory between the two of them, which was all she was interested in.

“So,” Vertex said after a heavy pause of contemplation, “you think Cybertron had records of Onyx going down the same path as the Fallen? And that’s why his descendants were rejected?”

Lightbright let out a strangled noise, the same kind that Chromia heard in her head whenever Vertex spoke. “I don’t think anything. I’m too tired to think. I just want to go home .”

“We all want to go home, Light.” There was a creak of plating as Maxima rearranged herself (with effort that she’d just told Mia not to waste). “And we will. Just as soon as Rattrap is done with us...”

“He interrogated you, right, Maxima?” Vertex asked. Chromia had seen her fellow bodyguard hauled out of her cell when it was just the two of them set in a single block, and the drone-guards utterly ignored her when she demanded to know where Maxima was being taken. But she knew that it was the same place she’d been taken to herself- the interrogation room, with the spider. Chromia’s session had ended early, thanks to the spider underestimating her strength, and she doubted they’d try it again any time soon. When they came to relocate Chromia, they had an entire squadron of drones to hold her back.
“Wasn’t him that did it,” Maxima said with a shudder. “Just one of his people . Freakiest one I’ve seen so far. She had eight legs coming out of her back .”

Chromia had to shudder as well, though she was sure she’d managed to break at least two of them (or maybe it was that other buzzing guard that she’d hit. She’d definitely broken something , at least).

“What was she saying?” Vertex pressed.

“You can imagine. ‘What else are you planning, where’s the rest of you, what defenses are on your ship’? Blah fragging blah. She was acting like I was the one who came up with the whole Metro-sabotage thing and not her own boss.”

“So they’ll be going through all of us first,” Vertex figured, likely stating the obvious to just annoy Chromia even more. “Just to make sure.”

“They’ll... be coming for me? And Afterburner?” Lightbright tried to hide her whimper behind her hands, but her digits snapped away from her face a nanoklick later when the only door in the cell block opened with a hiss. 

The visitor carrying in energon cubes was not a drone, or even a technorganic. Chromia recognised him from the first day of what was now the worst decacyle of her life, and she wanted nothing more than to punch his optics out the back of his head.

“Been a cycle since your last refueling. Thought you’d be feelin’ it by now.” Ironhide, their apparent warden, looked around at them all as if he was anxious about intruding. Or maybe a circle of glaring femmes was something he just didn’t know how to deal with.

“I’m feeling a lot of things right now,” Maxima spat. “Hunger isn’t the worst of it.”

Yet she still grabbed the cube that was offered to her, almost taking off one of Ironhide’s digits with the speed of her hand. Ironhide hardly flinched.

“When are we being sent home?” Lightbright was less vicious in her acceptance of the fuel, but her vocaliser still held a healthy snap within itself. “We’ve been locked in here for days . Surely that’s long enough for our ship to be ready?”

“Interrogations still need to take place,” Ironhide informed her, “and your leader needs to be informed of your treachery.”

“The Mistress doesn’t know we’ve been imprisoned?!” Lightbright shot up to her peds with a new burst of fury, knocking over her (thankfully unopened) cube as she tried to lean into her cell’s plasma grid to shout at Ironhide. The grid kept a firm metre distance between herself and warden though, so Ironhide easily ignored her as he moved on to Vertex. The actor said nothing, packing all of her hatred into her optics as she stiffly took the energon from him. She was always better at hiding genuine emotions than trying to fake them.

“And what about you? Doin’ some kind of hunger strike?”

Chromia heard Ironhide’s voice behind her, but she refused to turn her head. The bare wall of her cell was far less infuriating.

“Just don’t feel like looking at a strutless coward,” she informed him, and she imagined that he was probably smiling at that. Some mechs just liked any attention, regardless of its nature, and she’d flagged him as one as soon as she saw him. 

What a waste of a pretty face, he was.

“The cube will still be there when I’m gone,” he told her. “I’d recommend drinkin’ it.”

“And I recommend that you bite me.”

There was a grunt from his vocaliser. Not quite a laugh, or maybe all he could manage of one in the current situation. She didn’t really care which one it was. 

“You’re the one called Chromia, ain’t you?”

The sound of her name from his voice caught her off-guard, but luckily he couldn’t see any of it.

“So you remembered my name. Sorry I didn’t bother with yours.” She turned around just for that moment; just to see what he made of the subtle lie, and just because she didn’t want to think too hard about how he still remembered her after such a brief moment together.

Ironhide was staring at her. The plasma grid was still there, burning lines between them both, but its humming threat felt like a match-flame against Ironhide’s optics staring right through it, right at Chromia. 

“You’re talkin’ like I have any choice in what I’m doin’ right now.” He wasn’t whispering, but it was clear that he wanted her to be the only other one in the cell block who could hear him. His closeness to the grid, to her, wasn’t an attempt at intimidation- he was probably trying to block out any cameras watching them. So Chromia didn’t hold back.

“Because you do ,” she hissed at him. “You’re just too scared to make any choice other than the obvious.”

Ironhide shook his head, as if he was disappointed in her. “So naive… just like that other one. But at least she managed to escape first.”

He turned to leave her, but Chromia threw herself against the plasma grid to stop him. She grunted as her armour burned and she was forced back by the magnetic field, but she’d succeeded in catching Ironhide’s attention.

“Who?” she demanded. “Who escaped...?”

Ironhide waited a long moment before telling her.

“I think you already know who.”

And he left her there with only one possible answer.

“Windblade got out…”

“You say something, Chromia?” Maxima was apparently the only one who heard her astounded mutter. 

“Windblade escaped…! Or one of us did, at least. That’s why we’ve all been put together in this cell block! So they can watch us better.” Chromia sat down with her back to one of the padded walls, not trusting her shaking legs to hold her up for much longer.  

“How d’you know it was Windblade who got out?” Vertex asked.

“Cause she’s the only one who’d have reason to. Nautica loves her ship , sure, but she wouldn’t try a prison break just to get back to it. And Afterburner wouldn’t try to leave without you, Lightbright.”

But even as Chromia said it, watching the hopeful expression bloom on Lightbright’s face, she knew that she was wrong. Ironhide said that Windblade had escaped first . That meant there were others who had gotten out… as far as she knew, Velocity and Hot Shot still hadn’t been found. So Nautica and Afterburner were the only other two unaccounted for. 

She hoped Windblade wasn’t the only one of them out there, at least. Primus, Solus, all of the Thirteen and beyond, she hoped she wasn’t alone. 

“You think she’ll try and get to Metroplex again ?” Maxima was asking as if she wasn’t so familiar with how stubborn a Cityspeaker could be, even if they just wanted to be rebellious to spite their bodyguard. 

“Of course she will.” Lightbright answered before Chromia could, speaking through her gritted teeth. “That’s all she cares about. Frag the rest of us-”

“Lightbright,” Chromia warned as she tuned her audios. “Shut it.”

“What, I’m not allowed to say what we’re all thinking? You’re not Afterburner, Chromia, you don’t get to order me around like-!”

“There’s someone coming , you idiot,” Chromia snapped, focusing on the approaching footsteps as they echoed down the outside corridor. “So be quiet .”

She didn’t know how she could hear anyone coming now, when Ironhide had been almost undetectable, but she knew that there were two of them. She could hear them talking...

“Take your time, my love.”

“Tarantulas says she’ll be a femme. But I still can’t think of a name for her…”

And she could feel the fury in their EM fields, both mech and femme. It was like standing on the cusp of a furnace. Chromia had only ever felt such a force once before, from her very first audience with the Mistress of Flame herself, but now it was amplified twofold and it almost made her scurry to the far corner of her cell just to get away from it. 

“We don’t have to choose one right away,” the mech was saying, a voice that Chromia didn’t recognise. “We can see what she looks like first. Which one of us she resembles most.”

“I hope she looks like you,” the femme confided, and there was a sound like a deep purr from the mech.

“Ah, don’t damn the poor thing so soon in her life.”

Their footsteps then abruptly stopped. The EM disturbance was so close that Chromia could see the grid of her cell fluctuating against it. And, if she angled her optics right, she could even see the two bots through the flux. She recognised the mech- the most monstrous of Rattrap’s elite guard, clad red plates that were like something burning. But the femme… Chromia had been expecting something equally horrifying. Some giant creature festooned in fangs and blades, something to match the weight of her hissing spark. 

But this femme was not a monster at all. She wasn’t even a technorganic. Her teal-beige plating was cracked in many places, and her red optics were wide with curiosity. She was several heads smaller than the mech standing beside her, yet she was not scared at all of being so close to him.

“Hm.” The mech growled, causing the purple spines over his mouth to quiver. “This door shouldn’t be open.”

Chromia realised that she hadn’t heard the door close behind Ironhide, which was how she must have heard the two bots approaching.

“We didn’t have prisoners in here before…” The femme sounded confused, and her EM field flinched with an audible crackle. 

“They were moved here due to the recent break-outs. We should keep moving-”

If the mech had been holding the femme in any restraints, she must have easily slipped out of them. She came running through the cell block, heedless of the magnetic chaos from her EM field’s radius, making a beeline for the first cell in her sights which happened to be Lightbright’s. The long panels on her back were fluttering like wings as her vocaliser started running a mile a klick.

“Are you the visitors? Rampage didn’t tell me much, but I really wanted to meet one of you, before you were sent away. What are those marks on your face? Did you paint them yourself?”

She was asking too much too quickly for poor Lightbright to even think of any answers, and when the mech marched in the effect of his EM field overlapping hers was more than anyone could bear to stand. Chromia had to clamp her hands over her head to stop her skull from ringing.

“Transmutate, we should keep moving ,” the mech hissed, with a hand on her shoulder. “Tarantulas will be expecting us. We shouldn’t keep him waiting.”

Transmutate seemed jolted out of her reverie by his touch, as if she’d just offlined and was wondering where she was.

“Oh… right. I’m sorry. Nice to meet you.” She seemed to address everyone with that as she was escorted out of the cell block; her red optics caught Chromia’s only for a nanoklick, but it was enough to send a dagger of static through the other femme’s processor.

Then, when the interference finally cleared, they were gone. The door definitely hissed closed behind them this time.

“Who was that ?” Lightbright was the first to find power at her vocaliser.

“And why was she so... friendly ?” Vertex asked.

“There’s something wrong with her EM field.” Maxima wasn’t out to answer any useless questions, just to figure out what she could from what she already knew. And there was definitely something wrong with Transmutate.

“Yeah… I felt it too,” Chromia said. “Felt like she was gonna explode at any moment.”

Maxima nodded. “It felt familiar. She probably has a spark parasite.”

“Really?” Lightbright’s heavy head immediately perked up.

“Yeah… I had one once,” Maxima confessed. “The Mistress took care of it.”

Chromia felt her eyeridges shoot up. She’d never known that about Maxima… then again, it wasn’t really something you’d want to advertise. Spark parasites weren’t infectious or taboo, but from what Chromia had heard they were unpleasant for everyone involved. That was why only the Mistress could deal with them.

“Did she… open your chamber?” she asked.

Maxima shrugged. “She had to. It’s the only way to take it out before it kills you.”

“How did you get it?” Chromia had the urge to ask, even though she already knew the answer.

“I don’t know!” Maxima sounded offended, as if Chromia was stupid for thinking that she would know the answer that not even Caminus’ best medics could figure out. “They just… happen.”

“Only to femmes, though,” Vertex added. “I’ve never known a mech who had to deal with them.”

“Cause we have more energy in our sparks than mechs,” Chromia informed her, relishing the opportunity to tell her something she obviously didn’t already know “Why would a parasite go for something that has less to take?”

Vertex made a noise like a grunt and nothing else, which assured Chromia that she’d just won the latest battle of wits between them. When you were imprisoned on an alien planet light years from home, you had to take what little solace you could find. Chromia thought she was fairly good at that, all things considered…

But others, like Lightbright, were obviously struggling.

“Lightbright?” She called over to the curled-up Cityspeaker, who had been silent now for a long few klicks. “You’re looking pretty blue over there.”

When Lightbright eventually raised her head, Chromia saw that she’d been accidentally literal- her cheeks were literally flushed blue from an energon surge. There wasn’t anything for her to be embarrassed or flustered over, so anxiety must have been taking over her spark for her fuel direction to go haywire like that.

“I’m fine,” Lightbright lied.

“Is it cause I called you an idiot?” Chromia pressed, knowing Afterburner would have snapped her head off if he’d heard it. “I didn’t mean it.”
“I know. It’s fine.”

But how fine could things really be, when monsters and victims alike were holding them hostage? Chromia decided not to press any further. She was depressed enough as it was, and she had the feeling that their next visitor would only be coming for another interrogation.

✧✦✧

 

Ironhide had gotten very good at minor rebellions. Not following encryption procedures,  switching off his audios, leaving doors open… little things that were never enough to get him caught. 

Yet he knew that even those little things could pile up and be weaponised in a nanoklick. He knew that any evidence would be used, and if there wasn’t enough then the ones in charge could always just fabricate whatever else they needed. He knew that his meagre resistance would change nothing.

...Yet he still did it anyway, and he didn’t even know why. 

The Chancellor had been good to him. He’d overlooked Ironhide’s flaws, his inexperience, his built-in allegiance to a species that no longer held the reins of Cybertron. He did not allow anyone to insult Ironhide because of his nature. He had allowed Ironhide to prove himself, to act as an example for others like him.

And this was how Ironhide repaid him. With petty disobedience. Even after the escape of Nautica and Afterburner, even after he only narrowly escaped the blame for it, he was still doing things that would get him killed just because it was in his programming to be a contrarian. In another life, he might have made an excellent advisor to a Prime. But there was no other life for him than this. 

He stopped in his tracks, considering going back to close the door he’d deliberately left open just so the Camiens would see how there was no other way out of the building. He even turned on his heel to do so.

But then he realised he’d have to face Chromia again…

He’d liked her, when he first saw her. He’d appreciated her sharp glossa, the way she carried herself and her armour like they were weightless. He’d admired how she was an alien who looked just like him.

And now she hated him. It had really happened that quickly. And he couldn’t even fault her for it. How else was she supposed to think of the person keeping her and all her friends locked up?

Maybe he could apologise to her, before she was sent home. Maybe-

“Oh, hi Ironhide!”

He should have felt the EM field before he heard the voice, but he was really so distracted that the electromagnetic effect was just an aftershock against his plating. He held himself to the floor with some effort as he turned to the small femme now standing before him. 

“Hello… Transmutate.”

He could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen Transmutate out of her quarters, and never without Rampage on her shoulder. He was surely nearby, which was why Ironhide wanted to get the hell away while he still could. 

“I can’t remember the last time I saw you.” Transmutate seemed to treat everyone she saw as a close friend, regardless of whether she even knew them (but when you were locked in one room for most of your days, you had to make the most of whatever company you could find). “How have you been? Where are the others? Rampage doesn’t mention them much. They always seem to avoid me. Why is that?”

And, as usual, Transmutate spoke in a rush without leaving room for answers. Her processor seemed to work so quickly that it simply couldn’t stop for anyone else- when it arrived on a new thought, it had to be said out loud immediately. The only person she had any patience for was Rampage-

And he had just turned the corner behind her, so Ironhide kept his mouth shut as he braced himself for the electromagnetic storm of them both.

“I have words to share with Ironhide, love.” Rampage was usually a mech of few words, but any that he spoke to Transmutate were always soft and swaddled in rumbling snarls. “I’ll meet you at the barricade.”

Transmutate’s optics glittered, like stark red rubies, as she nodded and seemingly forgot all about her other questions. She nodded to Ironhide as she scurried onwards, and as she brushed past him he felt like he was about to topple over a vast chasm before her EM field finally faded.

Yet there was no relief for Ironhide. Rampage was still staring at him.

“Why are the Camiens being kept so close to Transmutate’s suite?” This snarl was not at all soft. Ironhide fought back a gulp.

“It was… R-Rattrap ordered that they all be kept together,” he explained. “Quickstrike decided that keeping ‘em close to the surveillance hub would be best.”

Rampage said nothing, though the spines over his mouth clicked together with a low drone. Ironhide tried to kickstart his vocaliser before he choked on static.

“But, if… if Transmutate is bothered by them, we can have them moved somewhere-”

“They do not bother us.” Rampage interrupted with a growl that cut right through Ironhide’s excuses. “But she is asking questions about them. The Chancellor should have considered that.”

“Right…” It was impossible to tell who Rampage was really pissed at, but Ironhide had to guess that he was in the clear since the other mech wasn’t trying to tear his spinal strut out. 

He’d never seen how Rampage had earned his name, but he’d heard enough about it. The massacre at Vos. The birth of Abominus. He didn’t know how much of it was really true, and he didn’t want to know. He didn’t dare move as Rampage followed in his sparkmate’s footsteps, and the mech’s EM field felt like being in the middle of a minefield as it scraped along Ironhide’s.

It was nothing personal. Rampage just hated everyone that wasn’t Transmutate. That was the very first golden rule Ironhide had been taught.

...So then why did he lie on Ironhide’s behalf? During the last meeting with the Chancellor, when Ironhide was certain that he’d be thrown out on the street, Rampage had stepped in to cover for him, and he had no idea why. 

Airachnid had been overpowered by Chromia (and Ironhide wished he’d been around to see it), that much was true, but Rampage hadn’t been the one to help with it. Ironhide knew that because Waspinator had been complaining about two of his six legs getting broken during a scuffle with a prisoner (but most people couldn’t stand Waspinator, so his buzzing was mostly ignored). He’d never mentioned Rampage being present, just himself and Airachnid.

Rampage was hiding something. Or, at least, he had expectations for Ironhide that went beyond the Chancellor’s purview.

“...Rampage?”

Ironhide wasn’t expecting such an immense mech to stop at just a word, yet Rampage listened. He stood at the very end of the hallway, taking up the entire space so that there was nowhere for anyone to escape through. Ironhide got his words out before he could regret saying them.

“Why’d you defend me? Back in the Chancellor’s office? Not that I’m... ungrateful, I just…”

He was very careful not to call him a liar, and he was even more careful not to look directly at him as he turned around.

“Because I know what you’re hoping will happen, Ironhide. And we wouldn’t want the Chancellor knowing as well, would we?”

Ironhide could hear the energon swelling in his head. It sounded like thunder.

“...Can anyone hear us?” he asked, in the lightest whisper he could muster.

“Only if their audios can go through walls,” Rampage told him in a low and gliding hiss.

He could have been lying. He could have been trying to set Ironhide up, to lure him into a trap. But if he wasn’t… Ironhide didn’t hide his gulp this time, but he kept his eyes locked onto his feet. He didn’t know where all the cameras were located.

“Why do you let them order you around?” he asked. “I’ve heard the stories about you. What… Tarantulas did to you. What you can do. You could tear the whole council apart before they even knew their sparks-”

But Ironhide’s whisper trailed off as an immense pressure began to crush his spark. He could see the ends of Rampage’s clawed peds at the very edge of his downturned vision.

“They owe me something… precious,” Rampage told him. “Something that only they can give me. They must stay alive until I have it.”

Ironhide dared to blink, to wonder about what Rampage meant. He wasn’t talking about Transmutate, because he could see her whenever he wished, but what else would someone like Rampage care so much fo-?

...Oh.

Ironhide could look up now. Rampage’s green optics were searing into him, but it was nothing compared to the inferno of his EM field. With just a flick of his claws, Rampage could have easily scorched the entire planet. Or he could do it with nothing at all. That was how unstable he truly was… but he was holding himself together now. 

For Transmutate, and for their child.

“Do not make any more mistakes, Ironhide. Next time, I won’t be around to save you from them.”

Ironhide watched Rampage leave. He did not move until the other mech was gone from sight, though he had to double-check that his peds hadn’t melted to the floor. 

He was free to move. He was free to do whatever he saw fit… whatever he felt that he needed to do. He could make a difference, if he made the right choices at the right time.

Rampage was right. No more mistakes.

Ironhide left all the doors open behind him open as he returned to the surveillance hub. Quickstrike asked what had taken him so long, and when Ironhide answered that he ran into Rampage that was all the answer the other mech needed.

“Can we trust the Autobots, Starscream?” Windblade spoke in the barest whisper as she followed him through the waterlogged slums; away from any paths or roads, sticking to the cover of struts and shadows. He grunted at her over his shoulder.

“They’re the only ones trying to fight against Rattrap. They’re dangerous enough that he wants them wiped out.” 

Windblade waited for him to say more, but he remained silent. 

“That... doesn’t answer my question,” she told him.

“Because we won’t know the answer until we meet them. But whatever the answer is, we should be careful. If they help us, we’ll be in their debt. They’ll gladly get us killed if it helps spite the rat in some way.” Then he stopped suddenly, pulling himself and Windblade around the corner of a pitted building with a lurch. “Wait here for the pod to pass over us.”

Windblade followed the angle of his helm, though she could hear the rattle of the transport pod coming overhead. In these slums, the pods were kept away from the filth via elevated tracks that carved right through the neighbourhoods. Windblade imagined that the noise from the traffic every day could easily drive a bot to madness, but at least it also helped cover hers and Starscream’s movements. If the entire planet knew who she was, what she looked like, then she couldn’t afford anyone catching even a glimpse of her. Rattrap would likely pay handsomely for her capture… and people who had to live in cities like this would be desperate to claim any reward.

But at least Starscream could be overlooked. No civilians knew who he was. Even with Knockout’s repairs, he could likely just disguise himself as a pile of scrap in the street and no-one would look twice at him…

On second thought, Windblade didn’t want to see that as a positive. 

“One thing I never understood… about the Autobots.” He was muttering next to her, still holding himself flat against the building though the pod had long vanished from sight, leaving only the vibrations of its passing that still shook the ground. “I would see parts of their lives. Through their sparks. I even saw glimpses of their base. Yet Rattrap never used a cortical psychic patch to see it for himself.”

Windblade stood there in the shadow of the ruins, trying to decipher what Starscream had said to her, for so long that he was already moving on without her.

“A cortical… what?” She scrambled to keep up with him while trying to keep her wings flat against her back- other than her worn Cityspeaker markings, her wings would immediately give her away if anyone saw them.

“One of Senator Shockwave’s final inventions,” Starscream revealed. “Before Tarantulas... disposed of him. A cord that links two processors together. It allows one to enter another’s mindscape. You can physically interact with memories and data stacks within it.”

He motioned for her to go ahead of him when they reached the end of the rust-coated alleyway, which turned immediately onto a road lined with broken streetlights. A good sign that it was abandoned.

“Sounds dangerous,” Windblade said, though a part of her wondered if using a patch was any different from Cityspeaking. In the brief moment that she’d spent with Metroplex, listening to his words as they engulfed her presence, it had felt like she was a tiny electron being allowed inside his mind. Perhaps the difference was being allowed inside. The psychic patch sounded like a forceful intrusion.

“Indeed.” Whether or not Starscream knew what else she was thinking, his grunt was still grim in its agreement. “Shockwave had developed it for medical use, to help erase traumatic or unwelcome memories from databanks. Ironically, his methods were turned against him and he became nothing more than a shell of logic circuits.”

“They erased his memories?”

“Not memories. Emotions. Which might have been a mercy. He would have felt nothing at all when he perished.”

Windblade wouldn’t have said that anything about it was ‘merciful’; but with what Starscream had been subjected to, he clearly saw anything ending in death as a mercy. She cleared her vocaliser, more than ready to steer the conversation back to its origin.

“Maybe Rattrap used a patch on the Autobots before… before they were brought to you?” she suggested, though having to bring up Starscream’s imprisonment made her regret saying anything.

“Maybe. But then they should have been annihilated by now.” He didn’t betray any obvious discomfort, though Windblade couldn’t see his face and she didn’t want to turn around to be sure.

“Could he be waiting for us to find them?” she tried. “And then he’ll… trigger the killswitch?” Solus, she literally couldn’t say one sentence without making things horrifically awkward. Maybe Starscream was secretly laughing at her, for being so socially inept, and she was sure Nautica would get a kick out of seeing someone else struggling to socialise for once. If she was waiting at the coordinates, Windbade could tell her all about it… if she was waiting at all.

“Rattrap doesn’t have that much patience,” Starscream told her. “Besides, he has no way of knowing that I would even find the Autobots. Or want to find them.” He spat out that last part, as a sound like a bite down on his glossa sailed over Windblade’s shoulder and brought her to a sudden stop. She recalled that Starscream wasn’t impressed by the people who dared to rebel against Rattrap. He called them brave and stupid. But the venom in his vocaliser wasn’t from contempt. More like disgust, or disbelief… or fear.

Like how a murderer fears their guilty verdict.

“Do they know about you?” she asked, turning to face him just below a sole flickering streetlight. “About the Sparkcracker?”

She didn’t stutter or pause around the name this time, and he seemed grateful for it. The flickering light above them did well to hide his broken parts.

“I imagine they would,” he reasoned. “Not by sight, of course. But they know that there’s something killing them. I... wouldn’t use that name around them.”

The warning was gentle, swaddled in unfamiliar concern. The sound of it took Windblade back for a moment. 

“No,” she eventually agreed. “Of course not.”

They left behind the empty road and its temporary lights, coming to a faded sign that greeted them to the edge of ‘Technotropolis’. There were familiar ditches around the edge, the same ones Windblade and Starscream had skulked along when they fled the capital, but now they were partially flooded with rainwater. There was nowhere to go but forward or around. Starscream chose the latter, though not before he ripped the greeting sign from its struts to use as a mobile shield. 

“They might notice a sheet of metal walking around by itself, Starscream,” Windblade mentioned, though she also hid behind it.

“Only from above,” he assured her. “But you’d be surprised at what people are likely to overlook when they’re in a frenzy.”

Windblade was willing to take his word for it, if only because some cover was better than none at all. Unlike the slums they’d just left, Iacon would have optics everywhere. They couldn’t rely on hiding in the shadows anymore. 

“Wait here.” Starscream brought them both to a stop at the beginning of a neglected bridge, lowering the shield-sign so he’d have clear line-of-sight. “Need to make sure there’s no patrols around.”

Windblade nodded, though she leaned around their cover to look across the bridge. There were definitely guards waiting at the other end, though they were hopefully too busy marching back and forth to notice any optics on them. The distance made details blurry, but Windblade could tell that every guard had the same build and plating.

“There’s a lot of drones out there…” She ducked back with a nervous gulp, and Starscream copied her so that they were both lying flat against the far tower of the bridge.
“And they’re all looking for you,” he reminded her. She gulped again.

“It’s enough to give a girl stage-fright.” She had to let out a nervous laugh to stop her spark from shaking in its chamber, and out the corner of her optic she saw Starscream smile even though he wouldn’t have known the significance of the stage to a Camien. Maybe he just liked hearing her laugh. Ever since she arrived on Cybertron, she hadn’t had any reason to do so until now.

“Tell me about your friends, Windblade.” He waited until they’d safely crossed to the other tower before he asked. “Who should we be expecting?”

Windblade took a moment to calm her spark, waiting to be certain that they wouldn’t have to start running from bullets in a nanoklick. “Nautica’s the one who would have come up with that message. She’s a scientist. Quantum mechanic, to be exact. Think I mentioned that before... and the bodyguards might have been able to overpower the guards-”

“Bodyguards?” Starscream interrupted, cocking his helm as he looked at her.

“Each Cityspeaker has one,” she explained. “We used to be rare, so we had to be protected. That isn’t much of an issue now, but we still have guards assigned to us. Just because of tradition, I guess.”

He looked away for a moment, a single nanoklick of contemplation. “Are bodyguards the only ones on Caminus trained to fight?”

“I think so.” In her moments of intense boredom, Windblade had watched Chromia and the other warriors carry out their daily training regimes. Bodyguards were the only ones who were there every day, though overzealous actors and dancers would sometimes join the sparring just to try and show off. Most of them learned not to try again when they saw the bruises they’d gained the next morning.

(Maybe that was why Vertex and Chromia never got along- some kind of rivalry over a sparring session gone wrong. Then again, actors and bodyguards always seemed inclined to dislike each other.)

“Cityspeakers are given swords,” Windblade added, wishing she still had her own, “but we’re not expected to ever really use them. So… I think you’re right. Our bodyguards are the only other ones who have weaponry.”

Starscream said nothing for a moment, as he rested his back against the barricade they were sheltered behind.

“So they’re like an army that doesn’t call itself an army,” he eventually decreed.

“I… well, yes, I suppose so.” Windblade had never considered that before, so she wasn’t sure at first why it unnerved her. And Starscream didn’t give her enough time to figure out an answer for herself.

“How is a Cityspeaker chosen?” he asked. “Are you taught? Or is it a natural skill?”

She felt her mouth fall open in surprise. She wouldn’t have thought that he wanted to know much about Caminus… or about her.

“It’s… a bit of both,” she answered. “You have to have a specific neural architecture to learn how to Cityspeak. And if you have it, you still have to study to be fluent.” It was like the difference between skill and talent; you could be born with the latter, but if you never knew about it or trained it into a skill then you would never make use of it. During the doomed journey to Cybertron, she had wondered how many potential Cityspeakers might have been born from the Allspark without ever knowing what they were capable of. When Caminus and the Mistress of Flame left Cybertron, they took the art of Cityspeaking with them… and the Seekers from the Allspark, if what Knockout had theorised was true. 

“How long did it take you to learn?” Starscream asked, jolting Windblade from her thoughts. 

“A century. Then I spent the next two of them monitoring Metroplex.” Three hundred years, her entire life so far. By the time she was even capable of understanding the thoughts of a Titan, she was still far too late to hear the message Metroplex sent five centuries ago. She tried to take some meagre solace in that fact. 

“Did you choose him?” Starscream pressed. “Or was he simply assigned to you?”

“Again, a bit of both. I was compatible with him, and I wanted to talk to a Titan on Cybertron.” If Windblade had known that Titans kept their memories locked away, or that this would be her fate, she might have chosen someone else. 

If she’d been given the choice to do or be anything else, she might have never chosen Cityspeaking at all.

She was expecting Starscream to ask why she wanted to speak to a Cybertronian. But, for now, his questions had run dry. He simply nodded to his right, indicating that they should keep moving. Windblade was glad to get away from any further conversation. Talking about Caminus exhausted her more than running for her life.

They passed by another guarded bridge, retreating from the edge in order to escape detection from the blinding floodlights. Starscream must have known some hidden way into Iacon, but so far they’d just been circling the city limits. He finally stopped again when they reached a pipeline of gigantic cylinders that stretched across the flooded ditch and into the city itself. Windblade recognised them as fuel reservoirs, similar to the ones that lay under Caminus’ outer skin. They must have transported energon from Cybertron’s mines across the different cities.

“So help me understand something, Windblade.” Starscream once again slumped to the ground, with his back to the curved surface of the fuel pipe, as he broke his silence. “Your Mistress of Flame is a Cityspeaker. She communicates with Caminus. She has some control over the hotspot within his spark, correct?”

Windblade sat opposite him, pulling one leg under her frame while the other held up her weary arm. “I… suppose she does, yes.”

“So she can directly control what kind of sparks emerge from him. Correct?”

“She… she could. In theory.” Whatever Starscream was trying to tell her, she wished he would just get to the point already.

“So if she, let’s say, wanted to create an army of trained soldiers who didn’t know they were soldiers, all she would have to do is create a surplus of Cityspeakers with bodyguards to protect them… correct?”

Windblade now wished he hadn’t gotten to the point at all.

“Why would she want to do that?” she asked, despite the risk of Starscream calling her an idiot for not knowing. But he only shook his head, brushing dirt from his knee as he held it to his chest.

“You know her better than I do,” he said. “You tell me.”

Windblade looked away, buying herself some time to think of anything else other than what she already knew. But there was nothing else, of course. 

“In case… she had to fight off a threat,” she finally admitted. “In case someone went to war with her.”

“Someone like Rattrap.” Despite the fuzz in his vocaliser, Starscream sounded somewhat impressed that she was able to say it out loud. Windblade shook her helm, turning his sad smile into a blur.

“But she’d have to have known far in advance that there’d be a threat to prepare for,” she protested. “And she would have told us about it. She would have had no reason to hide it-”

“No reason at all?” Starscream interrupted. “Not unless she wanted a war...?”

Windblade wanted to shake her head again, but the strength for it wasn’t there.

“You think she wanted to fight Cybertron all along,” she said, only able to say it at all by posing it as someone else’s idea. There was a creak of metal as Starscream shrugged.

“It is your ancestral home, after all. The body of Primus. And someone who speaks with the voice of Primus would surely want to take it back at some point.”

Surely she would. Surely, if she knew that technorganics had infested it, that the true Cybertronians were being slaughtered. Surely, if she had known all along what had become of Cybertron and only needed an excuse to take it back.

And what better excuse was there than her people being captured and killed?

“How far away are we from the co-ordinates?” Windblade asked, dragging the words around the lump in her vocaliser.

“You’re trying to avoid the truth, Windblade.”

“I know I am. How far away are we?”

Starscream smiled again at her. Despite the harsh lines of solder still marring the corners of his lips, the expression was starting to suit him.

“Just up that incline. Across the pipeline.” He pushed himself upright to point it out, indicating a small hill leading up the other side of the chasm. “That’s where they’ll be expecting us.”

Windblade nodded, but someone interrupted her before she could speak.

“Good for us to know.”

It was a third voice coming from behind them, one that was unfamiliar until Windbade’s helm snapped around to face it. The mech towered over her even when she scrambled to her peds, and a wide fan of feathers framed him with iridescence in the dark.

“Monopoly-!”

“Why hello there, my dear.” Monopoly, the one who had ordered her as the first victim to face Starscream, didn’t seem to pay any attention to the other Seeker at all as he strutted forward. “You don’t look very happy to see me! And you’ve gone off and made a new friend… I’m hurt. Oh well.”

Another mech then shoved past the reach of his feathers, one of Rattrap’s elite guards, and levelled a blaster in the space between Starscream and Windblade. “I will deal with these intruders!”

Monopoly scowled and folded his fan into a long trail behind him, revealing a squadron of armed drones that were previously hidden. “Don’t be an idiot, Inferno, leave them to the drones-”

“The drones are cannon fodder!” Inferno spat. “I am the royal guard! I will defend the colony!”

“Oh, whatever, suit yourself.” Monopoly rolled his optics as he turned with a flick of his feather trail. “Just keep the femme’s frame intact… she’ll be useful for making new model-”

Windblade tried to lunge for Starscream, but Starscream moved first. Despite his ragged plating, the Seeker was nothing but a flash of red as he grabbed Monopoly’s feathers and, with a guttural screech, slammed the technorganic into Inferno before using him to sweep the first line of drones to the ground. Monopoly squawked and struggled against Starscream, trying to kick him with his clawed peds, but Starscream’s strength was too much. Even when the few drones still standing started shooting, Starscream only let go when the feathers started to tear from their roots in his grip. Windblade dived for a gap underneath the fuel pipe, emerging on the other side with scuffed plating, and she watched the scene unfold through the gap. Starscream then disappeared from sight, but just as she feared that he’d been riddled with smoking holes he landed right next to her after a grand leap over the top of the pipe. 

“Get out of here, Windblade,” he snarled, “use your wings-!”

“No!” She grabbed his arm, emphasising that he wasn’t going anywhere without her. “I’m not leaving you behind, Starscream!”

“Then we’ll both end up dead!” He took her wrist and yanked it away from his servo, yet he still held onto it as he growled in her face. “You said you weren’t foolish, yet you remain here when there’s no other way out-!”

“I don’t want a way out that means abandoning you!” They both spoke in frantic hisses, knowing that they only had nanoklicks before the drones jumped over the pipe and surrounded them both once more. Yet Starscream still hesitated, pressing his claws into Windblade’s wrist before looking across the distance that stood between them and safety.

“Then I hope you know how to keep your balance,” he told her, before using his other hand to launch himself, and her in turn, up on top of the fuel pipe. Windblade immediately realised what he’d been planning to do all along, and she wasted no time in running. Though the surface under her feet was curved, it was thankfully wide enough that they’d both be safe as long as they didn’t trip… or take a laser to the legs. 

“Don’t shoot at the pipe , you morons!” She could hear Monopoly still squawking from the ground somewhere behind her. “You’ll blow up the entire fuel supply! Inform the Chancellor immediately, have the Constructicons-!”

“This is my victory, Monopoly!” Inferno hissed. “ I alone will seize the glory of this kill!”

But Inferno’s pride was no match for meagre drone programming; Windblade could tell they had also climbed the pipe and were giving chase from the deafening chorus of clanging metal behind her. The fuel pipe must not have been very full for there to be such an echo… hence why Monopoly didn’t want to risk wasting what little energon there was inside the whole network. The drones’ aim would be much safer here where they could shoot straight ahead-

“Get down, Windblade!” Starscream’s shout came just before he slammed into her, but in her panic she lost her balance and sent them both careening towards the chasm below, and the stagnant rain water within. Her thrusters automatically fired, and though her wings couldn’t do much with Starscream pressed against them she was able to at least carry them both to the very edge of the ditch. Windblade’s face hit the water first, and it surged into every part of her face as she flailed on the shore. At first Starscream’s weight was holding her down, but he quickly released her frame and pulled her helm free of the waterline. They were able to stand, with the water coming up to their shins, but they still weren’t safe just yet. 

“We just need… to get up that hill.” Starscream threw his servo up at the incline before them- it had looked small enough from the other side, but now it looked like an impossible mountain. “You can make it if you fly-”

“And you’ll be stuck down here to get dragged back to that death chamber.” Windblade spat out a mouthful of foul water as she sighed. “ No . What if... I circle in the air to draw their fire-?”

But once again, she was cut off. Not by an enemy’s voice this time, but by the crack of a bullet. The drones were using plasma as ammunition, with high-pitched whines as each bolt went out, so it wasn’t one of their weapons. Windblade heard a harsh splash in the water as one of the soldiers fell in, so it definitely wasn’t one of them. 

“What the hell was that?!” She instinctively covered her head as she stepped back, trying to scan her surroundings for any new threats.

“Sounds like a missile….” Starscream stood in front of her, shielding her with his body, and she saw that he had taken a few plasma rounds to his wings that he must not have felt. 

“No…” he then corrected, “no, there’s a sniper nearby.”

“Where?” Just as Windblade asked, she heard another two violent cracks and saw another two of the drones on top of the pipeline tumble to the water.

“Seems we have a guardian Prime on our side,” Starscream said, with no small amount of disbelief. “But there’s no way one sniper can take out the whole-”

A cough of static through a vocaliser then came from above, and at the top of the incline stood a small red mech with giant pillars attached to his servos. 

“I’d hold onta’ somethin’ if I was you, amateurs,” he called down to them, just before he slid down the hill as if he was skating. “These guys are gonna crumble… before Rumble!”

Without further warning, he set the pillars on his servos to the ground and rooted himself firmly as they started pounding up and down in rapid succession. Windblade immediately lost her balance, but Starscream held onto her as he in turn held onto one of the pipeline struts. The ground was quaking, the water worked into massive waves that smashed against the fuel pipe and swept the few drones still standing right up off their peds. The waves even reached the other shore, a tsunami that drenched the ground and surely wiped away the remaining forces. 

The assault only last for a klick, yet it was enough to clear the whole area. Rumble grinned when he finally stilled his machinery, though he was clearly tired from the exertion. Starscream released his hold on the strut, but still held Windblade as if he expected another hail of lasers to strike them at any moment. All she could think of were the wounds he’d already taken for her, but then there was a yowl and a nudge against her hand. She looked down to find a four-legged mechanimal looking up at her with red optics set into a pitch-black head.

“A cirkitten?” Starscream’s hold on her loosened from his surprise. “I thought they were extinct-?”

“His name’s Ravage,” Rumble informed them, still holding his position as if he was preparing for a second round of ground-quaking. “Follow him. He’ll take you to the others. Me ‘n Moonracer’ll deal with the rest of these goons.”

Windblade guessed that Moonracer was the guardian Prime who had sniped the first few drones. “Thanks… Rumble.”

He nodded at her over his shoulder. She had to pull Starscream behind her as she did as she was told, following Ravage’s lashing tail as he led them around the shoreline. The cirkitten, as Starscream had called him, hissed at the leftover waves that came into lap at his paws, but was otherwise silent as he padded ahead. The fact that Starscream wasn’t immediately going in the other direction meant that he must have somewhat trusted the creature, but Windblade was still brimming with anxiety from yet another near-death experience narrowly escaped. She hoped she wouldn’t just get used to the feeling. 

Ravage then turned a corner, still only visible from the movement of his tail, and Windblade found someone waiting around it. 

“Windblade?”

He wasn’t who she was expecting, but he still made her grin. 

“Afterburner!” She released Starscream’s hand to run forward, capturing her fellow Camien in a tight embrace. “Where’s Nautica? Is she here? I saw the message, I knew it was her-!”

“We escaped together,” Afterburner told her, still holding her shoulders as he pulled back. “She’s okay. She’s at the Autobots’ base…” He trailed off when he looked over her shoulder, when he must have caught sight of Starscream.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s alright, Afterburner. He’s a friend. We’ve been helping each other.” Windblade freed herself to return to Starscream’s side, though the Seeker’s skepticism was still plain on his face. Or maybe it was something else. By Starscream’s own definition, Afterburner was a fellow Seeker. Maybe it surprised him to see another so soon. 

Afterburner, meanwhile, was able to hide his expression much better thanks to his faceplate, but it was clear that he was squinting at Starscream with just as much caution. Ravage sat next to him, though when he closed his eyes he seemed to utterly disappear into darkness. 

“He looks like a pile of scrap metal,” the bodyguard soon said. Windblade felt herself tense, expecting yet another fight to break out, but Starscream only scoffed.

“I’ve looked worse, if you can believe it.”

Afterburner might have laughed at that, but his visor flashed as Ravage suddenly arched his back with a hiss. “Behind you-!”

Starscream and Windblade both whirled around to face the threat, but the snap of a plasma blast moved faster than they could. A dead drone lay smouldering on the ground behind them, one that must have been following them for an ambush.

“Some drones are smarter than others,” a mech’s deep voice lectured. “Harder to kill, too. Always watch your back.” 

When Windblade and Starscream turned back towards Afterburner, they found the new arrival towering over him. He was clad in black and grey, and the massive cannon mounted on his arm let out a thin trail of fresh smoke. 

“I could have dealt with it if I had a weapon, Megatronus.” Despite the size difference, Afterburner obviously didn’t fear Megatronus as he lectured him right back. 

'Wait, Megatronus...?' Windblade felt herself flinch at the realisaton that hit her. 'He was named after the Fallen?'

On Caminus, the most devout followers of the Flame feared that even uttering the Fallen's true name would summon him from the Pit. He was the sole member of the Thirteen that was not worshipped, only reviled. Yet Cybertron obviously held different sentiments, if they thought nothing of giving mere mortals the names of their progenitors.

“You never asked for one.” Megatronus looked down at the smaller Camien with a bare smile. Afterburner’s visor glared up at him. 

“Well, can I have one now ?”

“Sure. Here comes our walking storage closet now.” The tall mech turned to the area of darkness behind him, and from the shadows a third mech, this one even larger than Megatronus, emerged. But, unlike Megatronus, this one sported bleached-white plating, and his head was bowed as if he was focusing on something unseen. 

“Coast is clear,” a femme’s voice relayed from his comm link. “Think I got the fancy one right in the optic.”

“Good job, Moonracer. We’ll meet you and Rumble back at base.” Once he was fully in sight, Windblade noticed that he also had wings. At least Starscream would feel like he was in good company… or so she thought, until she saw him look at the mech as if he was a ghost.

“Skyfire…?” Starscream seemed to be magnetised, drifting towards him without a single stumble of his weary peds. Skyfire, if the name was correct, looked at him with only minor curiosity.

“Yes, that’s me. How did you know?”

Then Starscream stopped right in his tracks, as if he’d just hit a wall.

“You… no, you’re… you don’t recognise me?” he asked. Skyfire cocked his helm, and creased his big blue optics with a sorry shake of his head.

“I’m… afraid not, no. Afterburner, you want a lead-slinger or plasma-thrower?” Skyfire addressed the Camien while Starscream still stood there blinking in disbelief. 

“Gimme one that doesn’t need reloading,” Afterburner grumbled, while Windblade went to Starscream’s side. He didn’t register her presence, or her gentle touch on his shaking shoulder. Instead he turned to Megatronus, who was regarding him like he was a scraplet.

“And you’re Megatronus. Correct?” Starscream’s voice whistled through his clenched denta.

“I am.” Megatronus’ voice was clipped, but still as deep as the flooded chasm that was thankfully far behind them all. 

“May I have a weapon as well, Megatronus?”

Starscream’s measured request was at first met with high eyeridges, but Megatronus nodded to Skyfire and took the long ray-gun offered to him.

“Just in case there’s any more of Rattrap’s soldiers nearby…” He inspected the ammo bay before handing it to Starscream. “You know how to fire it? Mount it on the servo, hold the trigger down gently and-”

Megatronus’ explanation of the gun was promptly cut off by the sound of the barrel discharging, sending a plasma bolt right through the mass of molten slag that was formerly Skyfire’s head. Windblade didn’t believe that that was what she saw; not at first, not until she then saw Starscream crushed under Megatronus’ weight as the other mech tackled him to the ground with a furious roar.

“Starscream, what the frag did you just do?!” Windblade didn’t want to see her protector, the one Cybertronian she’d thought she could trust on this Primus-shell of a planet, being treated like a rabid animal, but she also didn’t want to look at the corpse that had just collapsed- he was dead, Skyfire was dead, she’d never seen someone dead before-!

“He was an imposter,” Starscream snarled against the pitted ground, struggling against Megatronus’ weight and Ravage’s teeth bared in his face.

“A what ?” Megatronus’ rage turned his vocaliser into a furnace, but his surprise must have lessened the pressure he placed on Starscream. The Seeker bucked his spinal strut to try and right himself, though his arms were still forced behind his back. Afterburner stood right next to the corpse, looking down at it with just as much shock as everyone else felt. Even though he was the one Camien trained to fight, he’d likely never seen a dead body before either.

“That wasn’t Skyfire,” Starscream insisted, directing his glare on the imposter’s body. “I knew Skyfire. I saw him die five hundred years ago. That thing is just wearing his armour…”

“Uh, Megatronus…?” Afterburner had gathered enough courage to kneel closer to Skyfire’s chassis, and with averted optics he held up the melted shell that remained of the mech’s helm. Even though it was still soft from the heat of the plasma, it was obviously hollow right through. The processor had fallen out, but it was nothing but a tiny circuit-board that Ravage nudged across the ground with his snout. A Camien’s CPU was a solid slab of many processing pins, but this Cybertronian’s brain was more like the innards of a calculator. 

Something wasn’t right. Even Megatronus knew that much, though his grip was still tight on Starscream’s wrists. 

“Open his chest,” Megatronus ordered, though Afterburner balked even more at that demand than he did at being near a corpse. 

“Um… is that really appropri-?”

“Do it.” The larger mech’s tone allowed no further argument. Afterburner gulped as he gingerly pried apart the seams of Skyfire’s chest plating, though he was firmly keeping his helm turned away. Windblade stepped in to help, forcing herself to look right at the chamber that was revealed…

But there was no chamber. Just a mass of dead circuitry, with a single speck of a dying light amidst it all. From what little Windblade had seen of Starscream’s machinery, she knew that this was not what a Cybertronian was supposed to be made of. 

“See?” Starscream spat as he tore himself free from Megatronus’ failing strength. “All drone on the inside. Barely has the sliver of a spark in his chamber.”

“He was a spy this whole time…?” Megatronus sounded far more hurt than angry now, and he didn’t move at all when Starscream approached the drone’s body to give it a long and distasteful glare.

“How long had he been with you?” he asked.

“The last... two centuries.” Megatronus was clearly going back over those two centuries in his mind, trying to find signs that he’d overlooked. Starscream scoffed while Ravage’s tail lashed like a violent whip.

“So they held onto his body for three before putting it to work. I suppose I should be grateful they waited at all.” He raised his leg as if he wanted to kick the fallen frame, but he restrained himself and instead turned on his heel so he wouldn’t have to look at it any longer. 

“Windblade,” Afterburner whispered from the other side of the Skyfire mimic, “what have you gotten yourself into this time?”

He asked as if it was somehow all her fault. She couldn’t help but narrow her optics at him. “I could ask you the same, Afterburner.”

As usual, it was hard to tell what his expression was. When he didn’t say anything else, Windblade stood up to face Megatronus. The other mech had managed to suppress most of his shock by now, and once again he regarded Starscream with utterly unveiled contempt.

“She said your name was Starscream,” he stated. “The prince of Vos. The lost Winglord. That Starscream?”

The Seeker didn’t bother shrugging. “If that means anything to you.”

Megatronus scowled. “Not much. Explain where the hell you’ve been all this time, and then maybe it will.”

As he spoke he took a step forward, and that one step was enough to almost close the distance between himself and Starscream. Afterburner suddenly popping up between them was all that stopped him from trampling the Seeker. 

“This isn’t the place for it, Megatronus,” the bodyguard scolded under a sigh. “We should take them back before anyone else shows up.”

Megatronus looked down at Afterburner, but the contempt was still there in his glare as he chucked his chin towards Starscream. “We should take him in stasis cuffs.”

“Why?” Windblade pushed herself beside Afterburner, craning her neck to look up at Megatronus. “He didn’t do anything wrong. Hell, he did you a favor-!”

“If he was wrong about Skyfire, he would have slaughtered an innocent Autobot.”

“If I had any doubts whatsoever,” Starscream argued, “then I wouldn’t have killed him in the first place.”

Megatronus growled, and his EM field was a simmering mass that threatened to short-circuit everyone in range. Windblade held her ground.

“I’ll keep an optic on him,” she promised. “He’s been fine with me so far.”

She couldn’t see what Starscream’s reaction to such a claim was, but she didn’t really want to see it anyway. She was sure that he was only even more angered. 

“So far... so you’re Windblade.” Megatronus said her name with as little emotion as possible. “Public enemy number one.”

“Yeah… if it means anything to you.” 

Megatronus was inscrutable. He moved past the Camiens effortlessly as hauled the Skyfire body over his shoulder with just as little trouble, holding the murder weapon under his other arm. 

“Let’s get going, then.” He didn’t wait for them before he started moving. With his back turned and Ravage stalking his heels, Windblade dared to let out a sigh of relief.

“You’ll tell us what’s been happening with you, right?” Afterburner asked her. “When we get to safety?”

There was a silent and obvious plea for her to explain who and what Starscream was, which Windblade wasn’t so eager to share with everyone. But she nodded anyway. “Of course. You go on ahead.”

Afterburner hesitated- of course he didn’t want to separate from another Camien so soon after finding her again- before sprinting to catch up with Megatronus. Now that they were finally alone again, Windblade reached for Starscream’s shoulder.

“Are you alright?” She knew the answer was no, and that he’d never tell her so. But she also knew that just being asked at all was sometimes enough. Whoever Skyfire was to him in his past, whatever Rattrap had done to him, this incident clearly wasn’t something he could just shrug off… especially after killing the creature that had been wearing his friend’s face.

But the fact that he’d killed with absolute certainty, no hesitation over consequences or mistakes whatsoever… she couldn’t help but admire that about him. 

Starscream closed his optics, and he seemed to lean into her touch before he let out a growl.

“I don’t like him.” He nodded towards Megatronus, whose imposing shape was still in sight in the distance.

“He helped save our lives,” she reminded him.

“I still don’t like him.”

Windblade decided to leave it at that, since she couldn’t honestly say that she felt much different. Anyone who took the name of the Fallen wasn't someone she wanted to trust.

They were able to keep up with Megatronus and Afterburner at first; Windblade heard all about Burn’s and Nautica’s escape, and how the Autobots took them in, and Nautica’s genius idea to spread messages through the graffiti that the Autobots helpfully painted all over the planet. The Camiens’ hushed voices and the scrape of Ravage's tail against the barricades were the only sounds allowed as they crept around the outskirts of Iacon, until Starscream collapsed with a hiss. Windblade was by his side in an instant, trying to hold him up off the ground.

“What’s wrong with him?” Megatronus sounded utterly uninterested as he stood in the shadow of the city barricade, still holding onto the Skyfire shell. Windblade was too busy pulling Starscream upright to glare at him.

“It’s been a long few days,” she said, sighing around the obvious. “And we haven’t had any energon.” She’d managed to avoid feeling the pangs in her tanks until now, thanks to the overclocking processes that had been keeping her going this long. But she’d been running on fumes ever since she left Knockout’s clinic, and the energon she’d lost from Starscream’s nightmare attack was all that she’d had left. 

Even so, as bad as she felt, she knew Starscream himself would be feeling much worse. She could feel his exhaustion weighing down her shoulder, and he didn’t even try to argue against her help (or even Afterburner’s, when he appeared at Starscream’s other side to take some of the burden off of Windblade’s frame).

“Still an hour’s walk until we reach the base,” Megatronus informed them all. “Tough it out.”

Then he turned away, obviously not wanting to waste any more time in compensating for his stragglers. Windblade had to wonder if he was allowed to act like a complete aft just because he was so intimidating… or if the Autobots were all like him. Even Ravage seemed to hiss in Megatronus' direction as he lashed his tail back and forth.

“You shouldn’t be carrying that thing around, you know.” Starscream’s voice, the first time it had come out since they started moving, was a rattling wheeze between Afterburner and Windblade, and it was the only thing that made Megatronus stop in his tracks. He knew instantly what Starscream was referring to, and he scowled as he held it even tighter to his shoulder.

“This thing is still the body of Skyfire,” Megatronus growled. “The others will want to see it for themselves.”

“If they went to the trouble of putting a spy in your ranks, they’ll have a tracker on it as well,” Starscream argued. Megatronus’ scowl deepened, blending into the scars that crossed his face in a jagged collage.

“I’m not throwing it away like a load of old scrap.”

Starscream let loose a harsh laugh at his stubbornness. “Because you still think it was once a person.”

“The person may have been fake ," Megatronus argued, "but memories of him are still real.”

Starscream’s vocaliser then consumed itself in static, and he lurched forward out of Windblade and Afterburner’s helping hands to confront Megatronus face-to-face. “Don’t talk to me about memories . I knew Skyfire better than anyone alive today. He wouldn’t want to be remembered as someone else’s puppet .” 

He spat as if he wanted to tear something apart with his teeth, yet Megatronus didn’t even flinch. Even knowing who Starscream was, he thought so little of him that he wouldn’t even crane his head down to look at him. 

“We can move faster if we shed the dead weight, anyway,” Afterburner offered as he stepped forward, appealing to Megatronus’ practicality over what few emotions he dared to hold onto. Burn was always good at sizing people up, determining how best to defuse them; he’d had practice from Maxima’s drunken rampages back home.

(Primus, Windblade missed Maxima. Almost as much as Chromia. But at least she now had some war stories of her own to share with her, when they finally reunited.)

“Fine.” Megatronus levelled his glare at Starscream as he let the Skyfire body fall from his grip in a metal heap, causing Ravage to jump in surprise. “Then you can explain to everyone what happened to him.”

“Fine,” Starscream agreed, and in a show of total apathy he stepped right over Skyfire’s parts as he forced himself to keep walking without assistance. Despite how hard he clearly was to kill, he’d get himself offlined with his own stubbornness at this rate. 

Maybe the constant sight of Skyfire’s body ahead, the reminder of his own mercy killing, was too much for him to deal with. Now that it was left behind, only now he could push himself onwards. 

“He’s supposed to be a prince?” Afterburner whispered in Windblade’s audial, but she shook her head.

“Not here, Burn.” Even if they were huddled on the Hermitian , everyone safe and sound after waking from this nightmare, she still wouldn’t be ready to tell anyone about Starscream. Seeing how Megatronus treated him only made her more determined to guard his secrets from prying strangers.

She was just as much a prying stranger herself, true, but… well, they’d seen each other’s sparks. That had to mean something, even on this world where the privilege wasn’t solely granted to gods.

No more words were spoken in the wilds of Iacon. It was better to stay quiet when Rattrap's beasts could be lurking around any corner… but there were no more ambushes waiting for them, no warning yowls from Ravage. Rattrap must have been preoccupied cleaning up the mess of Inferno and Monopoly. Besides, if Skyfire really had been a spy for the technorganics all along, Rattrap already knew where the Autobots were hiding out. He could just hit them directly whenever he felt like it. Whatever reason he had for keeping Skyfire as an asset for two centuries, the Autobots could only pray that the reason still existed to protect them. 

While red fuel warnings started to flash all over Windblade’s HUD, Megatronus finally stopped at their destination. This was a place underneath Iacon, where Cybertron started to fragment into its submetallic levels, and before them was a door so coated in rust that it was almost unrecognisable as a door at all until Megatronus rapped his hand on it twice. 

“Password,” a femme’s voice on the other side demanded.

“‘Til all are one’,” Megatronus recited, and instantly the door screeched on its hinges. The femme letting them in bore a red-crested helm, bright yellow flames over her disproportionate chestplates, and two fangs that showed themselves in a grin when she saw who was standing behind Megatronus.

“Son of a glitch,” she laughed. “It actually worked. Where’s Skyfire?”

“Long story.” Megatronus pushed right past her with Ravage at his heels, earning a scowl at his back before she turned back around to the others with a shrug.

“Don’t mind him. He takes some getting used to. Name’s Flamewar. Your other friend’ll be happy to see you.” She nodded to Windblade on that last point, though her smile faltered when Starscream trudged past her. Flamewar didn’t seem to recognise him, but she could still sense that something was wrong. Windblade hoped that whoever else was waiting inside wasn’t so perceptive… but there was only one of them who she wanted to see.

“Nautica!”

“Windblade! I knew it, I knew you’d be okay!” Nautica was usually much less receptive to affection than other Camiens, but she still dropped her datapad so she could run toward Windblade and throw her arms wide around her shoulders. Nautica’s EM field completely washed over Windblade’s, a fizzling storm that almost completely paralysed her.

“It’s so weird here!” Nautica was gushing in a frantic whisper, still holding onto Windblade. “Did you know Cybertronians don’t need hotspots?  And they show each other their sparks!? Like it’s completely normal! Wait, only if they really like each other, though- Orion mentioned that part a few times…”

“Y-yeah. I heard.” Windblade gently released herself as she craned her neck around, both taking in her surroundings and trying to find Starscream. The area was something immense, like a tiered library of glowing shelves, but she was more interested in the people that were all staring at her. They all looked just like Camiens, but with faded paint and scarred plating and tired lights in their optics. Megatronus was discussing something with three other smaller mechs, which included Afterburner, and everyone else tried to mask their own curious whispers. Ravage was by the side of a small blue mech, one who was identical to Rumble in all but color and who was vigorously petting the cirkitten.

So these were the Autobots… these were the Cybertronians who refused to be killed. 

“Maybe if they’re comfortable with it,” Nautica kept on babbling, “they’ll let me do some experiments that the Mistress never even let me think of- like energon consumption! Or how the physical size of the chamber affects the spark within, or- Solus, I could even find out how spark parasites form! I could change Caminus forever! And then people like Firestar’ll feel pretty stupid when I-”

She only silenced herself when she realised that Windblade wasn’t paying much attention. Not that Windblade wanted to be rude, but she’d finally caught sight of Starscream- still hanging back in the shadows of the tunnel that they’d emerged from, as if the lights overhead would melt him if he dared step out.

“Oh... who’s that?” Nautica’s EM field went fuzzy from her curiosity.

“Starscream,” Windblade told her. “He’s… a long story. But he helped keep me alive. He’s a friend.” She turned her face towards her friend again, but Nautica had already jolted forward to go right up to the surly Seeker. 

“Nice to meet you, Starscream. I’m Nautica!” She wasn’t usually this sociable, especially not to strangers, but maybe she sensed a kindred spark in how Starscream cowered from the room full of people. He didn’t seem surprised at her appearance, nor at the hand she stretched out to greet him with, but he didn’t take hold of it. He watched her as if her grin might suddenly morph into that of a Sharkticon’s.

“You put the message out that brought us here?” he asked.

“Yep! I wasn’t sure if it would really work, honestly… but it was the best thing I could think of. And the Autobots were willing to send people out to put it all over the cities. They knew where to put them so it’d end up on the news.”

Starscream seemed to glance over Nautica’s shoulder, as if seeking reassurance from Windblade standing behind her, but it was only for a moment before he nodded.

“Very clever of you.” In all the time Windblade had known Starscream, it was the highest compliment he’d ever given someone. Nautica didn’t seem to know how fortunate she really was as Starscream moved past her, finally able to brave the stares of the muttering Autobots.

“He seems nice,” Nautica decided.

“When he wants to be,” Windblade added with a mutter, still keeping him in sight in the corner of her optic. “So who’s in charge here?”

“No-one, really. But I think Orion, Ariel and Megatronus are the ones everyone listens to. And Ratchet too. He and Velocity would get along.”

“And they’re willing to help us?”

“As much as they can. So long as it isn’t too risky, of course.”

Of course. Camiens were still outsiders even to Cybertronians. They couldn’t expect the Autobots to be willing to sacrifice any of their own in order to help them. Hell, they’d technically already lost someone with Skyfire’s demise- even if he’d never been “one of them” to begin with, not everyone would see it that way. That was what Megatronus, Afterburner and the other red-blue mech were probably discussing, and they all nodded as the unnamed mech turned away from them.

“Good news, Blackarachnia,” he called up to one of the balconies. “You’re in the clear.”

Blackarachnia was hard to see until she descended from the balcony on some kind of wire, and Windblade hardly had time to register that she was a technorganic (one that looked just like Tarantulas, no less) before she scoffed with a wave of her giant striped claws. 

“That’s hardly news to me.” As Blackarachnia hissed, another femme (thankfully not organic at all) appeared with confusion on her face. She was pink, and from the appendages sprouting like horns from her helm Windblade assumed that she was the Ariel Nautica had mentioned.

“What do you mean, Orion?” she asked the red-blue mech. “Where’s Skyfire?”

Orion opened his mouth, but the words seemed to fail him. Megatronus stepped in to take over the duty.

“If I could have everyone’s attention…” His voice boomed all through the base, lifting up through the balconies and instantly commanding everyone’s eyes. “Operation: Vandal was a success. We managed to extract Windblade. But we cannot celebrate... we discovered that Skyfire was a drone all along.”

“What?!” Ariel’s shock was most audible of all, though Blackarachnia barely widened her many optics at the revelation. Megatronus gave a grim nod of confirmation as the gasps and murmurs all around him died down.

“We had to leave the shell behind. He was probably feeding information on us to Technotropolis this whole time-”

“It’s called Iacon .” 

Starscream’s appearance was clearly as much of a shock as the truth about Skyfire. He dragged himself forwards, pushing himself amidst the shocked people, spotlighting himself in the middle of the library. 

“ Not ‘Technotropolis’,” he insisted with a sneer. “ Iacon . And we only know what Skyfire was because of me . Because I did what had to be done.”

He turned his head as he spoke, as if dragging his glare over everyone who would dare to try and meet it. The entire base was silent in the wake of his simmering self-righteousness. 

“Who is this?” Ariel was the first to speak, whispering to Orion with nervous glances at Starscream. 

“He looks hurt.” An orange-white mech emerged, just for a moment before he darted away with his back turned. “I’ll get the tools.”

And then the flood of curious whispers came forth from all around, walls of them which overlapped and droned like buzzing EM fields.

“He looks like… no, it can’t be.”

“Is that…? The paint looks familiar.”

“Are those supposed to be wings? I thought Skyfire was the last Seeker…”

“Well?” Megatronus’ voice was still making announcements, as he addressed Starscream with narrow red optics. “Aren’t you going to introduce yourself to everyone?”

There were barbs still lodged deep within Megatronus’ vocaliser, but Starscream didn’t back down. He appraised his audience once more, and his gaze finally settled on Windblade. She was too far away to be by his side, but as she took a step forward he shook his head. This was his stage, and he wouldn’t share it with anyone. He wouldn’t put anyone else under the scrutiny he was about to force upon himself.

“I am Starscream,” he confessed. “Son of Windscythe and Cloudchaser. The last child of Vos.” He paused only to gulp. “Formerly… the Sparkcracker.”

A collective gasp shook the air; anger, surprise, grief and denial. It all sounded the same, carrying the same stench of ozone from EM fields going haywire. The entire building could have collapsed in that moment, yet in their private bubbles of mute outrage no one would have noticed.

“The Sparkcracker…”

“It was real? They really did that ?!”

“It was another bot the whole time…”

“I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Hey, Windblade, what’s a ‘Sparkcracker’?” Nautica was whispering next to her, but Windblade wasn’t in the frame of mind to give an entire lesson on why Starscream was now the most hated person in the room. She saw a shadow fall over the Seeker as a hand clawed into his shoulder.

“You never mentioned that part,” Megatronus snarled, forcing Starscream to face him with a violent pull on his trapped arm. Starscream groaned in pain, but was still able to speak through his gritted teeth.

“You never asked for further details .”

“How many of us have you killed? How many sparks did you tear apart ? How many did you take from us!? HOW MANY?!” Megatronus took hold of both shoulders, and he was shaking Starscream’s entire frame as if he could knock his helm off with enough kinetic force.

“Megatronus, that’s enough!” Orion tried to pull back one of Megatronus’ arm, but he was knocked aside right into Ariel. Blackarachnia attempted to wrap some of her shimmering wire around Megatronus’ other wrist, but it snapped as soon as she tried to yank it. Afterburner was smart enough to stay out of the mess, and apparently no one else wanted to try to save Starscream from the assault. 

“Get your hands off of him!” Windblade practically threw herself against the larger mech, managing to surprise him enough that he released Starscream’s shoulders. She shielded him with her whole frame, spreading her wings as wide as they would go as she faced Megatronus’ manic snarl down.

“Move aside, Camien. This creature is responsible for the slaughter of thousands of our people-!”

“He didn’t have a choice !” Windblade snarled right back. “He was imprisoned , it was Rattrap and Tarantulas who did this to him! They turned him into a machine !”

Megatronus looked as much like a beast as the technorganics that were hunting his kind down. He raised his cannon-mounted arm to swat her aside.

“This does not concern you, Windblade!”

“Yes it does ! Because he was supposed to kill me as well!”

Megatronus stood frozen. Behind him, Orion and Ariel were watching with wide optics and weapons in their hands. They might have used them on Megatronus, if Windblade hadn’t managed to make him stop. She gulped, knowing she didn’t have long to make her case in the small moment of time she’d bought for herself.

“He was supposed to kill me,” she repeated. “Me... and everyone else I brought along.” She made a point of looking at Nautica and Afterburner as she spoke; they both looked astounded at the fact that she’d survived coming between Megatronus and someone he wanted dead.

“We were never going to be sent back home. But something went wrong. I don’t know what, but it was enough to wake Starscream up. He saved my life. And he’s not a monster. So don’t you dare treat him like one, when he’s just as much a victim as the rest of you.”

She kept herself spread wide, almost wrapping herself around Starscream at her back. She could hardly feel his EM field, so she couldn’t tell what he thought of her attempts to help him. He’d call her foolish and stupid and all the other usual words when he recovered, she was sure. Then she’d know that he was just fine.

“No wonder he killed Skyfire so easily...” Megatronus spat as he turned away. “He was made to eradicate us.” The ground beneath his peds quaked as he stalked into the shadows of the library, disappearing into one of the rooms that seemed to line the circular walls. All focus was on his back, as if he might suddenly stampede, but he was gone for a whole klick before the uneasy silence was broken.

“Well, if no-one else has anything to say, I’d like to get to work with some privacy.” The orange-white mech returned, and he must have been a medic from how confidently he took hold of Starscream and led him over to a cordoned off area that was assumedly a makeshift medbay. “Go on, shoo,” he scolded the lingering bots around him with a scowl. “Leave us.”

Windblade took a guess that he was Ratchet, from how Nautica had described him as someone like Velocity. But she didn’t want to leave Starscream alone, especially when he surely had enemies around every corner of this supposed safe haven.

“Starscream-?”

“I’ll be fine, Windblade,” Starscream groaned as he let Ratchet herd him into a sterile corner, waving his hand to dismiss her. “Go. Go be with your friends.”

Windblade had been thinking of her friends all along, wanting nothing more than to know they were okay… yet it still took effort to put Starscream out of her sight. Her own wounds from the scuffle they’d just escaped were nothing worth looking over, especially not compared to what Starscream was still suffering from. 

Maybe they should have gone back to Knockout after all...

 “You have a gift for words, don’t you?” Windblade snapped her helm towards the voice, finding Blackarachnia standing beside her with a fanged smile. “First your little speech at the trial, and now your defense of every Cybertronian’s worst nightmare. At least you won’t have to worry about everyone clamouring to talk to you.”

Windblade looked away from her, trying to seek out either Nautica or Afterburner, but now they had both vanished. Fragging great. She’d just marked herself for death among the only ones who could help her, and now a sarcastic spider was going to remind her of just how fragged she was.

“I can’t tell if you’re mocking me or not. And I don’t really care, either way.”

Blackarachnia snorted, a lazy laugh. “I’m being sincere, believe it or not… ” 

But then she trailed off, and one row of her optics saw something on Windblade’s wrist. The two striped claws on Blackarachnia’s hand peeled back, revealing a set of regular fingers which grasped the scarred wrist and held it up to her face. Windblade stiffened, but Blackarachnia released her before she could try and free herself.

“He put razorsilk on you.” It wasn’t a question because it didn’t need to be one; Blackarachnia simply knew with grimmest certainty, and Windblade could only nod.

“You’re familiar with it?” 

“I showed Tarantulas how to make it.” There was no pride in the spider's voice, no venom in her fangs as she confessed. “Just one of my many regrets, where he’s concerned.”

“You used to work for him?” Windblade had suspected as much, with the uncanniness of their frames, but Blackarachnia smiled as if she was asking the wrong questions.

“A long time ago. Before I knew what was happening. And I’ve been trying to atone for it.”

Windblade thought back to what Orion had first said to her, and thought again on the fact that a technorganic was working with the Autobots at all.

“That’s why some people thought you were a spy,” she realised. If Skyfire had truly been leaking information to the Council, then people would have eventually noticed. A scapegoat would have had to be found… and the sole technorganic was the obvious option. Blackarachnia only shrugged, as the spider legs on her arms clicked together.

“Even after a few centuries of doing your best, some people just don’t want to believe that my kind is capable of change,” she sighed. “But I don’t worry about it. I know who I am, and what I want, at all times. Anything else is secondary.” Her gaze started to wonder as she lamented, but it returned to Windblade with a glint in each of her optics. “Look after yourself, Windblade. I think you and your friends will make things rather exciting around here.”

She patted Windblade’s shoulder with her slim fingers before her claws snapped back into place, and then she transformed into a new frame that was skittering away too quickly for Windblade to get a good look at it. Considering how it made her protoform crawl, she took that as a blessing.

“Sorry I disappeared.” Now Nautica decided to reveal herself, pulling Windblade by the shoulder over to a quiet corner. “You know I don’t like crowds… you must be starved. Here. Perceptor keeps it cold for everyone.” Nautica handed Windblade a small cube of energon, and she was gulping it down before she even knew what it was. Now that she finally had some fuel to run off of, Windblade could finally take in her surroundings properly. There weren’t as many people around now, and she could pretend that they weren’t watching her so long as she kept her back turned.

“Are you and Afterburner the only ones who got out?” she asked, aching for another cube already.

“Seems so…” Nautica sat opposite her with her arms crossed over her chest. “If anyone else managed to, it might be a while until we hear about it. Me and Burn have been free for over a cycle now, but the newscasts are only just putting the word out about us.”

“I’m still here, by the way.” Afterburner announced himself as he approached, taking a seat next to Windblade. “Orion was just telling me about… well, about Starscream. And… spark cracking.” He seemed to choke on the word, and Nautica flinched just from hearing it.

“...They were really gonna kill us?” she asked. Windblade was still savoring the energon, but she didn’t want to just give a weary nod.

“With sparkbonding. They modified his chamber. It… his spark pulls yours out of the frame and then it…”

Her own spark flared against her walls, a violent surge of energy that stopped her from remembering any more. She must have started shaking, from how Afterburner looped his servo around her shoulders to try and calm her down.

“Primus…”

“I’m so sorry, Windblade,” Nautica whispered, leaning forward with tented fingers. “You must have been so scared.”

“I was.” Windblade nodded, though she was glad that at least she was the only one who’d been subjected to the method. “But... at least something good came of it.” 

She looked over to the medbay with its plastic sheet shielding it from view, just as it was pulled aside and the medic standing behind it locked optics with her.

“Windblade? I might need you over here.”

She excused herself immediately and dashed over, pulling the plastic curtain closed behind her. “Is he okay?”

The medbay was clearly converted from a study room- a cramped space littered with more stained sheeting stretched out under surgical tables. She assumed Starscream was secluded behind one of the alcoves, but she’d wait for the medic’s verdict before she’d go hunting for him.

“I saw that his worst wounds have already been patched up,” Ratchet said as he peeled back another curtain, now revealing Starscream lying on his side on top of a slab. “Impeccable work… who fixed him first?”

“His name was Knockout. He was Starscream's family medic, before… everything that happened. Just got lucky that we found him, I suppose.” Windblade watched Starscream’s expression, but his gaze was distant. She hoped he’d been given something to shut his processor down, just long enough for him to sleep without dreams.

“Well, he’ll live,” Ratchet sighed. “Not much more I can do. I’m more worried about you , those cuts on your neck look deep-” 

He reached out a hand as if to examine the marks of Starscream’s claws, but Windblade pulled her face away. “I’m fine. They’ll heal on their own.”

Ratchet’s eyeridges went up, but he just shrugged, likely feeling grateful for not having to use up more of what few supplies he had. “Well, if you insist… anyway. My usual assistant, First Aid, he’s out on the field right now so I need someone to stay here while I go talk to Orion. Don’t want anyone else trying to attack him.”

“Right.” Windblade nodded automatically as she sat next to Starscream’s slab, though when she looked down at him her optics caught the mirror hanging directly behind him. Her borrowed armour was marred with scars and dried energon, and her wings were almost scraping the ground from how low they sagged on her strut. But the most jarring sight of all was her face, and the red markings that were completely gone, worn away from the days of running and hiding. Caminus had disappeared from every inch of her, and she wasn’t a Cityspeaker anymore.

“You might be the only friend he has around here, Windblade,” Ratchet went on, oblivious to her private crisis. “Can’t say I envy you.” He shook his helm as he moved past the drawn curtain, just before he turned around to poke his head back through. “I’m Ratchet, by the way. Sorry you got such a... sour reception.”

Unlike Blackarachnia, he actually did sound sincere. But he was gone before Windblade could thank him. 

Though they were both alone now, Starscream said nothing. He didn’t even move his optics from that invisible point so far in the distance, where the stars were lingering out of sight. Windblade hoped he was asleep as she tried to avoid looking at her reflection again, but then his lips moved some klicks later.

“I killed Skyfire, didn’t I?”

He was still lying on his side, and more than ever his wings looked like slabs of molten slag.

“You killed the drone wearing his armour,” Windblade corrected, though she doubted that it made much difference in his hazy eyes.

“I'm sorry you had to see me do that.”

"I'm sorry you had to do it."

That much, the assurance that nothing else could have been done, seemed to satisfy them both. Windblade looked away, only so the mirror and the stranger within it would stop lurking in the corner of her optics.

“There’s not a single person here that I haven’t seen in my nightmares,” Starscream told her. “Not a single person who I haven’t taken a spark away from. I know them all from the agony of their loved ones. They’re right to hate me.”

Windblade closed her optics as she shook her head once. “Hating you makes as much sense as hating a gun, or a sword. The weapon itself is not evil. Only the person who wields it is.” She didn’t like referring to Starscream as a weapon, but that was what the Autobots now saw him as. And to hate him for being one was simply asinine- if Starscream had perished long ago, if the Sparkcracker had never existed, Rattrap still would have killed the people he caught. The means of the execution made no difference.

Starscream huffed; he knew she was right, but it gave him no comfort.

“They already hate Rattrap,” he said. “But they can’t hurt him. As weak and pitiful as he is, they know they can’t touch him without taking losses they can’t recover from. They’ve been at this for centuries, and that hatred reached boiling point a long time ago. Now they finally have someone they can hurt. An enemy that they can deal with, with their bare hands.”

And his own hand was hanging off the edge of the slab beneath him, the curled digits dangling empty and cold. Windblade reached out to take hold of it.

“Do you want to leave?” she asked.

Starscream's hand remained limp, though his digits curled slightly into the warmth of her own.

“Death by soldiers, or death by Autobots… I’m spoiled for choice.”

“If you want to leave," she pressed, "I’ll come with you.” And she meant it. They weren't locked in. They could just up and leave, and keep surviving like they'd already managed together. She could convince Nautica and Afterburner to join them, and they'd figure something out. Living in fear of people like Megatronus wasn't worth any help they could get. 

But Starscream shook his head, and his hand drifted away from hers.

“Don’t you dare," he warned. "The Autobots can help you, at the very least. They’ll keep you and your friends safe.”

It was wishful thinking at best, and a blatant lie at its worst. Windblade wondered if that was how she usually sounded to him: hopelessly naive, stubbornly optimistic. So now he was the foolish one.

“Do you really believe that?” she asked him, as a smile started to spread wide across his face.

“Now you’re starting to think like a Seeker.”

And that took the new record for the highest compliment he'd ever uttered. He finally pushed himself up off his side, grunting as he settled upright on the slab. The mirror at his back only highlighted the mangled state of his strut and the dead weights anchored to it. Windblade hoped that he wouldn’t turn around, or see it out of the edge of his optic.

"You and I share a sense of duty, don't we, Windblade?” Starscream looked to her with his arms crossed over the top of his knees, and when he was hunched over he seemed to be smaller than her for once. “Mine's to the city that I've lost. Yours to the Titan that you never knew."

Windblade wanted to argue at first, but he was right; until now she’d never known Metroplex as a friend, or even a person. She’d only seen him as a pattern of processor flashes and automated functions so many light years away. She hadn’t even known what his voice sounded like, until the transmission that had brought her here to her doom. 

Yet Metroplex had known her by name. He knew that she was watching him all along… which must have made the five centuries of waiting for help all the more torturous. 

She shook her head, trying to not think of who was to blame for that. "Both of us serve our homes.”

Starscream still sat hunched over his knees, but now he raised his chin to her. “And our homes are turning against each other.”

And it took Windblade a moment to register what he was really saying, calling back to what he’d been trying to tell her all along. Starscream, the Sparkcracker, was a weapon; one that Metroplex and even Caminus himself was capable of being. A weapon of genocide. Metroplex had known what was happening the whole time, what was done to Starscream. 

Five centuries of waiting...  while the Mistress of Flame cultivated a colony full of clueless Cityspeakers and bodyguards, while Rattrap turned Cybertron into a graveyard. It was as if they’d both known all along that Caminus and Cybertron would have to fight each other. As if they’d been preparing for it, right up until Windblade and her friends were offered as the catalyst for the war to come.

“You think we’ll have to choose sides,” she stated. Starscream had closed his optics at some point, resting the back of his head against the mirror that bore all his worst scars for everyone to see.

“Which is why you shouldn’t be trying so hard to keep me alive,” he told her. 

But she didn’t see it as ‘trying’ at all. She was just doing what she would do for anyone else who needed help, as she would want anyone else to do for her in turn. But a knock on the outside wall stopped her from saying so, and the plastic curtain twitched aside to reveal a mech that didn’t look like a medic at all. 

“Pardon me, I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced.” His white plating was dull with scratches and nicks, but his blue optics were bright in the medbay’s gloom as they settled on Windblade. He let himself in, revealing a slim frame flanked by two swords at his hips and a much larger blade holstered on his back. The hilt poking over his shoulder bore a striking similarity to that of Windblade’s own sword, the one that was surely still languishing and locked up somewhere in Ferromax. But her attention was quickly pulled down to the hand that he offered her.

“I’m Drift.” He squeezed her fingers when she held his palm, but when he offered his other hand to Starscream the Seeker predictably ignored it. He tolerated being touched, but he wouldn’t subject himself willingly to anyone else’s hands.

“What do you want, Drift?” Starscream said his name as if it was a curse word, but Drift didn’t seem offended at all. 

“I just want to talk. With both of you. I’m not supposed to be here, really, so I’ll be quick.” He sat himself on another empty slab that lay opposite to Windblade, while she tried to appraise him. He was certainly the most friendly Autobot she’d met so far, but her experience with Tarantulas forced her to remain suspicious.

“About what…?”
"You're Windblade, right? The Cityspeaker? I talked with the other Camiens a little, but you're the one I was looking forward to seeing.” He was grinning as if he meant it, like she was some kind of celebrity. “So I wanted to ask… do you know about the Circle of Fire?”

He was looking at her for her reaction, but she could only squint in confusion.

“Er… no. Should I?”

Drift didn’t seem surprised at her lack of understanding. “What about you, Starscream? Have you heard of it before?”

Starscream shrugged with a grunt. “Can’t say I have.”

Drift nodded to himself, looking down at his peds. “Interesting... I came out of the Well after the Age of Wrath, so I’m an acolyte of the Circle of Light. Wait, sorry, you probably haven’t heard of that, either-”

“Are you trying to make a point here, Drift,” Starscream growled, “or are you just trying to piss me off?”

Windblade wanted to kick Starscream for being rude, if only because now he was being rude to someone who hadn’t earned it, but Drift only laughed. If he knew Starscream by reputation like Megatronus did, then he must have known that was the best way to respond to him.

“I never try, but I tend to do that anyway… so I’ll keep it brief, for all our sakes.” Drift cleared his vocaliser with a burst of static as he straightened in his seat and held up three digits.

“The Circle of Fire existed in the Imperial Age alongside two others; the Circle of Light — hello — and the Circle of Death.” He counted them off on his raised digits, then shrugged. “That one sounds morbid, I know, but only cause it was named after Emperor Deathsaurus. So the Light governed the Allspark, the Death governed the Pit and Unicron, while the Fire governed the worship of the Thirteen Primes.”

He mostly looked at his hands as he spoke, but now he rested his eyes on Windblade as the foreboding realisation dawned on her.

“And they were led,” he finished, “by someone calling herself the Mistress of Flame.”

Even though she’d braced herself for the Mistress to be mentioned, Windblade still struggled to understand what it meant. Everyone knew that the Mistress had been a prominent figure of Ancient Cybertron, before she fled the Quintesson incursion, but she’d never gone into detail about what her role was so long ago. Only the Torchbearers would have any knowledge of things like that.

 “I… well, it must have been a common title,” Windblade guessed. “Our Mistress of Flame’s never mentioned any Circle of Fire-”

“But she still preaches the Way of Flame, doesn’t she?” Drift cut in. “That all of Primus’ children are gods?”

“Wha-? How do you know about-?”

He raised his palms to her in interruption, shaking his head apologetically. “I might be getting ahead of myself, sorry. Never thought I’d actually meet someone who knew the Mistress- she’s a lot taller than I thought she’d be from the stories… anyway. All I wanted to say was… you’re a descendant of the Circle of Fire, Windblade. All Camiens are. And that makes us siblings!”

Drift spoke with such pride and conviction that Windblade actually felt guilty at being so confused. “I… I don’t understand.”

“The Circles of Light, Fire and Death are all linked together.” Drift interlocked his digits to emphasise his point, darting his gaze between Windblade’s tilted befuddlement and Starscream’s impatient scowl. “They were the three pillars of the Empire, led by the three leaders- and Esmeral!” He then snapped his fingers together, as if he’d just remembered. “The very first Cityspeaker! Allegedly, at least. But she's still interesting. You know about the Imperial Age, right, Starscream?” He faced the Seeker while Windblade sat with her mouth dropped open- the first Cityspeaker? She’d never heard of anyone called Esmeral before, let alone a Cityspeaker before all others on Cybertron. Just when she thought she was finally understanding how Cybertronians operated, she was left with more questions than she could even ask. If only Vertex was here- just as Velocity would get along with fellow medic Ratchet, she would have had a field day swapping tales from history with Drift.

“I know enough,” Starscream grumbled, pushing himself off of his slab and onto his peds. “But just how do you know all this? You said yourself, you hadn’t even been born during the Age of Wrath… when the Mistress fled Cybertron.”

Drift was still smiling despite the accusation in Starscream’s vocaliser, though his face was now screened with sadness. “Tyrants can wipe databases and erase records, but they can’t touch your memories so long as you can stay alive. My mentor, Dai Atlas… well, he’s dead now. But he told me all about the planet he was raised on. The Ancient Cybertron, as it was ruled by Deathsaurus, and Esmeral and Star Saber… and the original Mistress of Flame."

Windblade blinked at the names she could finally recognise- Deathsaurus, of course, had been the facilitator of the Cybertronian Empire alongside Star Saber. They both disappeared, likely perished, with the invasion of the Quintessons. They were only ever a footnote of Caminus’ oldest records.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you both.” Drift nodded to each of them. “A son of Daedalus, and a daughter of the Mistress, both finding each other… it’s interesting. Proof that history is a circle itself. Anyway. I better leave before Ratchet comes back to chase me out with a chair.” He dusted off his knees as he hopped down, and he departed with a wave to Windblade. “Nice meeting you, sister!”

When he was out of sight, Starscream scoffed as he slumped back down to his seat. “Here I was hoping the Lights had been wiped out as well. Pretentious doormats, the lot of them. Knew they were useless when Ion Storm joined them, after Sunstorm went and downloaded all of Vector Sigma into his head...”

Windblade was still reeling from everything she’d just learned, and everything she couldn’t figure out. "I think I know how that feels right now..."

"Then lie down, for Primus' sake.” Starscream gestured to the slab that Drift had vacated, and Windblade at least sat while cradling her head. She didn’t want to lie down in case she struggled to get back up.

“I thought he’d be angrier,” Starscream muttered across from her. “He must not have known… what happened to Wing.”

Windblade was tempted to run out and chase Drift down, to demand an explanation for all the headaches he’d just given her. But she felt safer with Starscream, knowing that he was still alive and that no judging eyes could find either of them here.

“What did Drift mean by that last part?” she asked. “About history being a circle?”

Starscream sighed, obviously not wanting to answer, but he did anyway. “I believe he’s referring to an old story about your Mistress of Flame. One that I don’t believe you would appreciate.”

Windblade had to smile. As if she hadn’t already thought of all the possible blasphemies of her leader. “I’d still like to hear it some time.”

“Some time, then.” His face was a reflection of hers, exhausted amusement. ““If we live long enough.”

“And you still need to tell me about trines,” she reminded him. “And Daedalus.”

“Of course. I’ll make it my eulogy.”

Seekers, and Circles, and ancient sins and stories… Windblade knew she wasn’t in a nightmare at all, because she couldn’t possibly have come up with so much to wonder about.

"He called me sister…” She spoke the word slowly, the first time in her life she had ever spoken it at all. “Only sorority members and the Torchbearers call each other that."

Starscream made a noise, like an engine coughing. "Next time he says it, I'll make him stop."

"No, no,” Windblade said. “I like it. Makes me feel more at home." 

An ironic thing to feel, when no-one on Caminus had ever called her their sister. Cityspeakers were not made for sororities or fraternities. They were made for their Titans… or, in this case, for building a secret army. 

So it was the opposite, really. Cybertron was not Caminus at all, and she dared to take comfort in that. It stopped her from dwelling on what was to come, at least. When she would have to choose sides. When, in the end, she would have to choose Caminus no matter what.

And what would the Chancellor do this time? Even though Dinobot had had nothing to do with the catastrophe, he still dreaded delivering the full weight of the bad news to him. He would surely have someone’s head… or maybe three, just to amuse each of his own.

Once again, Dinobot found himself called in to clean up someone else’s mess. Nowadays, that seemed to be all he ever did. But at least it gave him the chance to turn each mess into a lesson for himself. ‘How not to serve Technotropolis’, a guide stashed in his databanks that was bursting at the seams with everything he’d seen. Either everyone else was terrible at their jobs, or he was just so much better at his own. Neither option gave him much confidence for the future of Cybertron… or, Technotron, as the Chancellor apparently wanted to rename it. The final declaration that the technorganics were the true sovereigns of Primus, one last necessary blow to bring the Cybertronians as low as they needed to be. Rattrap was going to unveil his grand idea after his upcoming audience with the Camien leader… but that wouldn’t come until the prisoners were finally recaptured. 

There were five of them loose now. Five. Dinobot had known of the first three, of course, but then the other two came out of nowhere. Waspinator had let it slip out during the last refuelling round- he , the laughingstock of the entire Council armory, knew exactly how many Camiens were running loose, yet Dinobot did not. At this rate, by this time tomorrow the entire detention center would be deserted. 

The fact that the Autobots were apparently now involved only worsened Dinobot’s headache. Even without Inferno and Monopoly letting the two prisoners slip right through their claws, neither of them could even dispatch one of the damned upstarts for their trouble. 

But of course the Autobots were hard to kill. They were survivors by definition, each of them a relic from the Gestalt Rebellion. If he’d been a younger mech, Dinobot would have had to admire them for being too stubborn to die. But he was older and wiser now than he’d ever been, and he knew to keep such thoughts to himself, lest he end up making a fool of himself in the foyer of the council tower. Inferno and Monopoly were both doing a very good job of that as Dinobot tried to pass by without noticing them- they must have been due to head up to Rattrap’s office soon, which was why they were trying to wear each other down beforehand. 

“If your drones knew who to take orders from,” Inferno snarled through his clacking jaws, “then my victory wouldn’t have been squandered! The Chancellor will know right away that this was your fault!”

“ My drones take orders from me , you self-righteous insect! If it wasn’t for your useless grandstanding, then we’d all be sipping high-grade in the penthouse by now!” Monopoly, now only sporting one whole optic with a silk-spun patch over the hole of the other, didn’t seem to notice the small puddle that had formed under his taloned feet as he stood gesticulating with his spark, and job, on the line. His feathers were still dripping from the deluge he’d suffered on the city’s outskirts; the Seacons had to be deployed to fish him out of the water, because his idea of swimming involved flailing his useless wings until he was almost halfway out to the Voscean. Inferno, meanwhile, would be lucky if he was even still allowed inside Technotropolis after his pathetic defeat. He had surely lost his right to a place amongst the Elite… which meant that someone else would have to replace him. Dinobot forced himself to not hope for much as he reached the elevator, curling his lip at the full sight of the two other mechs making such a scene of their mutual failure.

“What a disgraceful display...” It was just as well that the Chancellor had been keeping himself to his office nowadays, so he didn’t have to bear witness to it. If his ‘Elite’ Guard was supposed to be the best that the planet had to offer, then he must have lost all faith in their species. 

How awful it must have felt, to save his people from a lifetime of persecution and to be repaid with incompetence… so Dinobot would rise above the rest. He would never let the Chancellor down, and he would assure Technotron’s place as a safe haven once again. 

The elevator came to a stop at its final destination. This level only held the Chancellor’s office and various maintenance closets, so it was mercifully deserted. Dinobot wasted no time in making towards the office ahead, momentarily bracing himself for the righteous anger that would come as he opened the door-

“Evening, Dinobot.”

Ratbat, not Rattrap, stood at the desk in the humming blue light of the energon lamps. He did not raise his helm from the data sheets he was examining. Dinobot was cautious as he closed the door behind him. Ratbat was one of the original Tripredacus Council formed after the Rebellion, alongside Tarantulas and Rattrap himself, so his presence alone in such a privileged area should not have been concerning. 

Yet it was.

“Where is the Chancellor?” Dinobot asked, silently scanning his optics around the room as he held the encrypted datapad tight under his shoulder. Ratbat still did not look up. 

“You’ll find him in the relic vault,” he revealed, “if it’s really so urgent. Otherwise, I’d leave him to his nostalgia trip if I were you.”

Ratbat was not Dinobot, and Dinobot would never want to be Ratbat anyway. He’d only been fresh from the Well when the Senator had presided over the old Cybertron, yet the fact that Ratbat had waited so long to make a move against the Senate was enough for Dinobot to dislike being alone with him. Rattrap had been a meagre citizen like the rest of them, and Tarantulas had been an outcast even amongst other technorganics. That was their reasons for biding their time… but someone in Ratbat’s gilded position had little excuse for himself. He’d waited for other people to do all the hard work for him, and only stepped in to reap all the rewards. 

“I have a report,” Dinobot relayed through a veiled growl, “on the recent Autobot incident to deliver to him.”

“Just leave it with me. I’ll ensure he sees it.” And Ratbat still refused to look at him, though the design of his helm made it seem like the thin faux optics embedded within were always watching. 

“I would rather hand it directly to the Chancellor, if it’s all the same to you, Senator.”

Dinobot was careful to keep his tone perfectly cordial, yet Ratbat chose now to flick his true amber optics up at him.

“One would think you don’t quite trust me, Dinobot.” The Senator spoke as if there was supposed to be a laugh in there somewhere, but Dinobot couldn’t hear anything of the sort.

“Why would one have any reason to distrust you?” Dinobot asked. There wasn’t even the shadow of a snarl in such a sincere query, but somehow Ratbat could still hear one lodged at the back of Dinobot’s throat. The Senator’s helm snapped up, just as his patience did the same. 

“Let’s just cut the slag and be brutally honest, shall we?” Ratbat remained stiff behind the desk, crossing his servos over his chest. “I know how desperately you wish you were one of us. Dinobot. One of the Chancellor’s advisors. A lynch-pin of his circle. You think that if you scurry around him enough, he’ll finally reward you. Commander. Elite Guard. Maybe even an office of your own, one just like this one.” He let out his mounting laugh as he gestured his claws to the walls around him, the same ones now brimming with the sarcasm bounding off of them. 

“But you’re still just a soldier . Always have been, always will be. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. People work best when doing what they know best… that’s the one thing the old Senate got right, at least.” Ratbat didn’t hide his smirk, in fact he ensured that Dinobot received a good look at it by leaving the cover of the desk to stand right before him.

“So be a good soldier, Dinobot,” the Senator advised, “and just do as you’re told.”

The two mechs were not equal in size; Ratbat was smaller, so Dinobot was forced to look down at him while, in turn, Ratbat looked down at him in every other way. 

But Dinobot was not in fact looking at the Senator. He looked past him to the wide window that showed Technotropolis’ proud and sprawling streets, the lofty view that the Chancellor had posited as making all the hard work worthwhile. It was the highest point in the city, perhaps on all of Technotron. And it would be so easy to just charge forward, catching the Senator in his arms, before crashing through that window so they could both tumble to their certain and mutual demise. 

So easy. So sudden. Ratbat would be too shocked to activate his T-Cog in time to save himself. Dinobot felt his claws tense around the datapad, threatening to crack the casing. He kept his optics bolted to that tempting horizon as he threw the pad silently at the desk behind Ratbat, only tearing himself away when the weight finally left his hands. 

And once outside the office, finally free of the cage and prying optics, he allowed his fangs to twist his face into something murderous. He didn’t have to look at any reflection to know exactly what it looked like.

Rhinox had once gently informed Dinobot, after the other mech had almost torn Waspinator’s wings from their joints, that he might possibly have anger issues. Dinobot had retorted that he didn’t see any issue with being angry. What else were you supposed to be when your own kind, people who had spent centuries being quietly exterminated, didn’t give you any fragging respect ?

He was still surrounded by windows. He still wanted to break one of them, but he also wanted to avoid his own reflection at all costs. To see his own rage would only amplify it further and further, until the entire floor was destroyed in his wake.

And then he’d just be proving Ratbat right. Dinobot had very few friends in the council, but it was those who were closest to the Chancellor that he seemed to especially loathe. A simpleton would probably write it off as jealousy, just as Ratbat had done. But Dinobot knew that they did not deserve their places. They did not serve the Chancellor, or the interests of Technotron. They were simply at the right place at the right time, all those centuries ago when the world was saved. 

Ratbat’s voice, his smug assurance that his place so far above Dinobot was secure, still lingered in the other mech’s processor as he unhooked his clawed peds from the floor, ready to leave the whole ridiculous affair far behind. 

...But then Dinobot heard that same voice once more through the cracks in the office door, yet there was no-one in the office that the Senator could have been speaking to. 

And despite his simmering rage and the repulsion from the voice itself, he couldn’t help but listen.

“You know I’m technically not supposed to be here,” Ratbat had hissed, “so make it quick. I only just managed to scare off an unexpected visitor.”

“And here I was, all ready to lecture you about trespassing.” Tarantulas, unmistakable in its silk-lined humor, must have been coming through on Ratbat’s comm-line. “I just thought you’d like to know that one of Sky Lynx’s components has gone offline. The valuable one.”

‘Sky Lynx…?’ Dinobot only knew the name by reputation… but what a reputation it was. One of the very few technorganics from the dark ages who was deemed too valuable to oppress, due to his triple-changer affinity and ability to ferry people to and from Luna 1. The one who had killed Sentinel Prime, crushing him within his own cargo bay, in front of the entire planet. Dinobot had seen only snippets of the archived broadcast that had heralded the end of the Cybertronians, only the parts that he could watch without feeling his scales crawl. Even he, who had no sympathy for any Cybertronian, found it difficult to hear Sentinel’s final screams and the crunch of his frame being torn apart in Sky Lynx’s gears.

Nowadays the mighty mech was in hiding, his true identity and whereabouts only known to Rattrap. That was what Dinobot had thought, at least. But these two, the parasites on either side of the Chancellor, apparently knew more than what they let on. This was clearly a conversation that wasn’t meant to leave the room.

Eavesdropping on the Chancellor was tantamount to treason. But the Chancellor was nowhere in sight. Dinobot pressed himself close to the wall next to the door, where he could hide behind it in case Ratbat decided to emerge. 

“Was he discovered?” the Senator asked. 

“I don’t think so. The Autobots wouldn’t have killed him for it, so long as they believed he had a full spark. Though, with their track record they might have kept him alive even knowing he was a drone.”

‘The Autobots?!’ The Senator and the spider were collaborating with the greatest threat to Technotron?! Or, at least, they knew much more about their actions than the Chancellor did. Was that why the Camiens were allowed to slip away? Dinobot struggled to keep himself quiet as he continued to listen.

“Do we have the body?” Ratbat asked after a moment of silent consideration, and Tarantulas responded with a moment of his own. 

“At first it seemed like the Autobots were going to take it right to their base, but alas they changed their minds. We retrieved it not far from where the skirmish took place. I have the spark shard stabilising right now.”

“Will a new body be ready in time?”

“That depends on just how long it will take for our dear leader to get desperate.”

“He’s anxious to talk to Caminus. I give it a decaycle, at the very most.”

“Plenty of time, then. But he’ll be asking questions. He’ll want to know how Sky Lynx came under fire in the first place.”

“Fabricate the coordinates in his telemetry module. We’ll play it off as an anti-Cybertronian incident. Some overzealous civilians might have thought he was an escaped Camien.”

There was a sustained hiss, Tarantulas version of laughter. “I suppose that’s the trouble of Seekers being extinct. Hard to tell any of them apart when you finally see one.”

“Indeed. Have Monopoly deal with the salvage when it’s ready. Get him to stop squawking over his optic.”

“What about the Constructicons?”

“The Chancellor still won’t authorise Devastator, but they should still be kept busy for a while yet.” 

There was silence for another long moment. Dinobot began to worry that his EM field had leaked through the walls, and Ratbat knew he wasn’t alone. He was fighting the instinct to run for the elevator, counting each nanoklick with a gulp at the back of his throat.

“...We’re just stalling at this point, aren’t we?” Ratbat eventually said. Tarantulas answered him with a weary sigh that didn’t suit him at all. 

“We’ve been stalling ever since he came up with the damn idea.”

“I recall that you were all for it at first, Tarantulas.”

“At first , yes. Before I knew what it would cost…”

Dinobot didn’t have much chance to wonder what they were talking about before he realised he was being watched. There was no-one else he could see in the hallway with him, no-one hovering outside the window to spy on him… but there was definitely another EM field overlapping his own, coming from overhead-

The ceiling. His optics flicked up. There, hanging above him on her eight limbs, was Airachnid. She seemed amused to catch him so easily, and she placed a single claw over her lips as her other hand pointed down the hallway towards the elevator. Then she turned around, clearly expecting him to follow her. 

Dinobot didn’t appreciate being given orders by anyone he didn’t respect, but what other choice did he have? She was Tarantulas’ daughter, and she’d probably heard just as much as Dinobot had. She clearly had designs for blackmail… as if they would work on the likes of Dinobot. And there was no other way to leave the floor.

She was already in the elevator, now on two legs with her spider limbs folded neatly at her back. Dinobot made a point of ignoring her, even though their fields were right next to each other. He was sure that his own was a buzzing mess that only intensified when the elevator doors closed, trapping them both in that precarious box together. From the two glowing numbered buttons, he saw that she was alighting just a few floors above the ground. So he’d be stuck with her for most of the ride.

Truthfully Dinobot had no vendetta against her, if only because he hadn’t spent enough time around her to earn one. But he’d heard enough about her to know that she was just like her father, and that was all he needed to know.

“It’s fun, isn’t it?” Airachnid asked, after ten floors worth of silence. “Hanging around places you shouldn’t be.”

Dinobot was never in the mood to be mocked, but he saw no point in trying to deny anything. “I suppose you would know all about that.”

“My father’s authority actually gives me full access to any chamber in this building,” the spider informed him. “What authority do you have, Dinobot?”

“My service to the Chancellor speaks for me.”

“You call it service, the others call it slavery…”

“If that is what others wish to think, then I have no time for them.”

Airachnid was likely holding in laughter behind her usual sardonic smile. Dinobot refused to check, keeping his neck firmly bolted in place as he waited for the damn elevator to finally reach the bottom.

“You want to know what my father’s up to, don’t you?” It wasn’t a true question, because she had already assumed the answer for herself. Dinobot didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing she was right.

“You would know all about that, surely,” he growled, and this time her laughter slipped out.

“I’m only his humble lab assistant,” she insisted. “He clears the room whenever the Chancellor pays us a visit. But I hang around on my webs. And I hear things. And I see things… things I cannot change. But perhaps someone else could.”

Dinobot was still looking to the elevator doors, waiting for when they would finally release him, but then something intruded on his vision. It took him a second to realise that Airachnid was holding something in front of his optics.

“What is this?” As his vision adjusted, he saw that it was a programmable key for the council halls. Each area had their own keys, though Dinobot already had one on hand for anywhere the Chancellor might need him to go. He had no need to go elsewhere.

“The biomechanical labs have intricate security,” Airachnid said, “as I’m sure you know. Father likes to keep his toys to himself.” 

So she’d made a copy of the keys to Tarantulas’ lair, and somehow expected Dinobot to take it from her. He shook his head, letting it rest to his left so he was now facing her.

“Trying to bait me into an obvious trap, Airachnid? I expected something better from you.”

And she smiled, letting her fangs glint over her lip as she grabbed his hand, too suddenly for him to pull away, and pressed the key into his palm.

“Just think about it. It’s there, if you realise you might need it.” She released his hand, and he was surprised that her claws hadn’t left scars on his blue skin. The key was almost weightless in his palm, and though he couldn’t see himself ever using it he closed his claws over it anyway, just to hide it from view when the elevator finally opened its doors. This was her stop, and she wasted no time in leaving as if she was just as suffocated in the enclosed space as Dinobot was.

“If this is not a trap,” he demanded, following her out of the elevator just to stop himself from being caged again, “then why else would you give such a thing to me?”

There was a hum as the elevator went on without him, leaving him standing there before Airachnid in desperate need of an answer. Dinobot wanted to be convinced. He wanted to have something plainly told to him, even if it was from someone he had no logical reason to trust. Airachnid took her time to give him what he wanted.

“Because the Chancellor’s plans for us may not be what is best for us. Because I believe you’re not just a soldier, Dinobot… and I am not just a slave to my instincts.”

Before Dinobot could get anything else from her, she assembled her back legs to crawl away and vanished in a single optic shutter. With Airachnid gone from sight, the entire floor seemed to be utterly deserted. 

Dinobot felt the key carve a groove into his palm as he held it, but he did not dare lighten his grip. He wouldn’t feel safe with it, or with himself, until he was out of the building entirely. He didn’t bother calling the elevator again, not when this floor had stairs that would take him outside without any more delay. He went in the opposite direction that Airachnid had fled to, while trying to figure out what she was really trying to tell him. 

‘ A slave to her instincts…’ That was all you could really call her, with her well-known sadistic streak and hobby of hunting the streets of Technotropolis for people that no-one would miss. Tarantulas had been the same, allegedly, before he found his experiments to keep him occupied. Maybe she was finally calming down as she matured? 

And then there was the other mystery, of the Senator and the scientist. Ratbat was lying to the Chancellor, and Tarantulas was involved in something that not even his own daughter could support. 

Dinobot knew that he had many choices available to him, with the key that he now held. He could go straight to the Chancellor, to try and warn him with nothing but hearsay. He could break into the labs and do his own research. He could throw the key away and ignore it all.

None of them felt quite right… and perhaps that was Airachnid’s ploy all along. Whether or not the lab was a trap, Dinobot would still be urged to investigate. Whether or not he informed the Chancellor of what he knew, or set out on his own to find the truth, he would likely still regret whatever he came to choose.

Airachnid’s specialty was torture, in just about every meaning of the word. She could not physically hurt Dinobot, so instead she dangled a lifeline right in front of him and dared him to take it.

And would he take it? That was something he’d have to consider… some other day. He just wanted this one to be over. Free of the stairs, now he just had to make a detour through the Justice Chamber, where Windblade and her conspirators had been found guilty. The place had been practically abandoned since the prison breakouts, and this was the first time Dinobot had entered it since the trial.

And he knew immediately that there was something wrong. Something was missing. Right there in the middle of the chamber, there was always supposed to be a statue standing. A broken Seeker, the only one left in existence (ignoring Tarantulas’ cryptic remark about them), a sword in one hand and scales in the other. But the space was deserted now.  

“Snip snip!”

Well, almost deserted. Some younglings were having the time of their lives running all around the chamber, darting in between the benches and trying to jump up onto the balconies. Dinobot only recognised Powerpinch, the youngest relative of Inferno. Apparently he preferred to be called Scissor Boy now, some sort of gang nickname that only the youths would ever think was cool.

“Cut it out, Scissor!” a brown-haired boy whined as he ran from the other mech’s claws. “I spent ages growing that fur out!”

“You gotta step it up, Tasmania! If you were an Autobot, I’d’ve cut you all up by now!”

Dinobot curled his lip as he tried to find a way through without tripping over one of the whelps. He wasn’t very fond of younglings, but at least they weren’t old enough to purposefully aggravate him like their parents could.

“You there… you children,” he called out, finally making them pause just for a moment. “Didn’t there used to be a statue here?”

He pointed to the deserted plinth, where a young girl was pretending to sit on a throne. She shrugged.

“I dunno. Maybe. Wanna play with us?” she asked, and her wide optics glittered as if she actually wanted him to say yes.

“No… thank you.” Dinobot at least had to appreciate how simple children were by design. A young mech or femme didn’t care about politics, or bootlicking, or magically disappearing decoration. All they wanted to do was play. He wished he’d had the chance to be a child.

“Is uncle Inferno in trouble?” Powerpinch snapped his claws on Dinobot’s knee to get his attention, and that was the final straw for the mech’s patience.

“Yes,” he lied as he shook the boy free from his leg. “He’s going to be executed tomorrow.”

“Nooo!” Powerpinch’s plaintive cry rang out behind Dinobot while he took the chance to finally get the hell out of there.

“Haha,” the other boy who’d been under assault from the claws taunted, “your uncle’s gonna be dead!”

“That’s not funny, Tas!”

“OW!”

That was another thing Dinobot envied children for. When there was a score to be settled, petty violence was always a valid option.

✧✦✧

Windblade stood shaking before the Mistress of Flame, drenched in her suffocating warmth as coolant melted the red blood of Caminus from her eyes.

“Well?” her mother asked. “What are you waiting for?” 

Beyond her blinding aura, the torn tapestry of Cybertron’s surface lay beneath an impossible sky. It was not a sky at all- Windblade recognised its true form after only a nanoklick. Caminus was looming in orbit, as if ready to collide with Cybertron at any moment. Only a thin sliver of void hung between them, too thin for any stars to shine through. Or perhaps the Mistress’ glow was drowning them out. 

“Your Father is listening, Windblade,” she informed her daughter. “He came all this way, and now all you have to do is give him the order.”

Windblade’s mouth was dry, baked from the Mistress’ heat. Any words she wanted to say evaporated on her glossa, leaving her with only one thing that she could say.

“Why is he here?”

The Mistress smiled, and when she turned her gaze to Cybertron her searing optics finally became visible, and they reflected the mountains of bodies that covered the planet. “To save you. To save us all.”

Windblade found Starscream’s frame at the peak of the mountain, and she awoke before she could see what was supposed to come next. The weight of the relief kept her optics closed for another few klicks, long enough for her to assess her surroundings. No voices this time. No nightmare pleas for mercy. She decided that it was safe to stay awake.

As Windblade stretched her cramped calipers she was expecting an interrogation from Starscream, but she found him deep in stasis on the slab opposite her own. He might have been dead, just as her dream had promised, if not for the steady wheeze of his cooling fans.

“Good to see you awake.” Ratchet pulled the privacy curtain aside, revealing the rest of the empty medbay and another smaller white-red mech, who was busy logging something on a datapad.

“Has he been sleeping long?” Windblade nodded to Starscream, careful to keep her voice low.

“Don’t worry, he’s in stasis lock,” Ratchet informed her. “I figured it would be best if he couldn’t dream. He’ll be out for another few breems. This is First Aid, my assistant.” He gestured to the white mech, who looked up from his datapad to give Windblade a wave.

“The others are waiting out there for you,” First Aid said, and his voice was somewhat muffled by the mask over his mouth. “We’ll be here to keep an optic on him.”

Windblade bought herself some time by working the stiffness from her stasis-lagged joints, trying not to think of what would be waiting for her. Another confrontation with Megatronus, or an interrogation over Starscream, or anything equally exhausting. She almost wanted to go back to her dream with the Mistress… if not for the Mistress smiling at Starscream’s corpse.

No. Whatever it was, she’d be better off just getting it over with. But before she threw herself into the proverbial Sharkticon pit, she turned to Ratchet with a sudden burning idea.

“Ratchet… there’s something in Starscream’s head. A killswitch that Rattrap put in. Can you try and get it out, while he’s in stasis?” She didn’t exactly want to give people yet another reason to hate Starscream, and she would have felt much better asking him for permission to tell Ratchet about it at all. But, as a medic who apparently didn’t want Starscream dead anyway, he was the best chance they had so far of dealing with it. And it had to be dealt with.

Even so, Ratchet was clearly uneasy and First Aid had stopped writing.

“I can... have a look, at least,” he pledged, turning his anxious optics to Starscream’s prone form. “But I’ve never been comfortable looking inside processors… Chromedome was always better at that.”

“And he took that whole skill with him when he died,” First Aid sighed. 

Windblade decided to leave before she made anything even more accidentally awkward, and she found an entire audience waiting for her. If not for Nautica and Afterburner making a beeline for her, she would have turned on her heel and fled immediately.

“There she is! How are you, Wind?” Afterburner clapped a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it with a smile in his optics. Windblade lost her voice with all the optics on her, so she could only nod as Orion came forth.

“I hope you’ve recovered somewhat, Windblade,” he told her. “And I must apologise for the… unfortunate circumstances of your arrival.”

Then Ariel appeared next to him, her optics dim and tired but forced open wide as if she was still awake from willpower alone. “We’ve been talking about what our next steps should be. Since they concern you Camiens, we wanted to wait until you were all present.”

Windblade scanned the congregation behind the two de facto leaders; no-one else she could name seemed to be present. “Where’s Megatronus?”

“Somewhere far away,” Ariel said, after some hesitancy shared between herself and Orion. “He just needs to... blow off steam. But he’ll be fine.”

So the cooler heads would prevail, if only for now. Windblade tried to relax as she leaned against one of the grand pillars holding up the many balconies above her.

“Well, the rest of us are all here,” Nautica said, sitting on top of a table with her legs crossed under her. “So what are we going to do?” 

“We have limited options,” Orion confessed. “There’s rumors that the Constructicons have been drafted to help with hunting you all down. They’re the bots you saw inside Metroplex, Windblade.”

She remembered them, the green-purple mechs crawling inside her Titan like parasites. “They were doing modifications to him… for some reason.”

“Well, whatever they were up to must have been put on hold.” A green mech was speaking, covered in far more bulk than a regular alt-mode would call for. “From the looks of things, Rattrap is trying to keep everything low-key so at least we won’t have to worry about Devastator-”

“Devastator?” Nautica rolled the word off her glossa with a sour taste.

“The Constructicons are a gestalt team,” Ariel explained. “One of the last teams still alive, cause they pledged total loyalty to Rattrap. Their combined form is Devastator, and he’s just as bad as he sounds.”

“We’re confident he’ll only be brought out as a last resort,” Orion added. “But we can’t take risks. We have to ration our energon carefully as it is, so we can’t spend too long idling, and we can’t go too far from the Arcanimus.”

Those were the Autobots’ terms, then, as far as they were willing to go. It was more than Windblade had been expecting.

“Can’t we try and reach our ship?” she asked. “So we can at least contact Caminus-?”

But three heads, Orion and Ariel and the green mech, all shook in unison.

“The spaceport is completely locked down,” Ariel said. “If we try and storm it, we’ll take massive casualties no matter what.”

“Therefore,” Orion optioned, “our priority should be on rescuing the remaining Camiens-”

“ No ,” a red mech called out, barging to the front of the patient crowd, “we should be conserving our strength for when Rattrap comes for us! Skyfire will have told him everything, and now that he’s gone there’s no reason for that rat bastard to wait!” He was waving his arms wildly, even grabbing Nautica’s shoulders and shaking her so that her head bobbled back and forth.

“Just relax for a klick, Red Alert!” The green mech pulled him away before poor Nautica’s optics rolled out of their sockets, holding him still with firm and heavy hands. “We don’t know for sure that Skyfire was a spy for Rattrap.”

“Who else would have been able to pull that off, Springer?” Red Alert tried to free himself, but Springer must have been used to defusing similar outbursts because he held on tight.

“But if Rattrap knew where our base was this whole time,” a light green femme pointed out. “There’s no reason for him to wait to wipe us out.” 

“Monopoly is the one in charge of the drones,” the stoic red mech standing beside her added. “He could have sent Skyfire in as a free agent.”

“According to Starscream,” Afterburner decided to pitch in, “the real Skyfire died centuries ago.” He must have thought he was being useful, but the murmur of the gathered Autobots died as soon as he mentioned the cursed Seeker.

“And why the hell should we trust him ?” an orange-purple mech spat, holding his arms crossed tight over his shoulders with a hook glinting on one wrist.

“Especially when there’s still one thing he ain’t told us.” Rumble may have been small, but his voice was still able to carry over the silenced crowd from where he stood on his table-perch. “Like what really happened during the fall of Vos.” 

“Not to mention,” the identical blue mech standing next to him said, “why he was the only one left alive.”

The two of them kickstarted a whole new slew of skeptical murmurs, and they didn’t hide the accusing twin gazes that they drilled right into Windblade.

“We should get a Cortical Psychic Patch on him!” A purple-gold mech grinned at the prospect, as he readjusted his cracked violet visor. “See what he’s hiding for ourselves-”

“Even if we had access to such technology,” Orion’s voice boomed over everyone else’s, “we should not allow it to be forced upon anyone.”

“Why not?” the gold mech argued. “He’s clearly hiding something. I bet if Chromedome were still around, you’d already have needles in that fragger’s brain!” He pointed an accusing digit at Orion, who simply stared it down.

“I would do no such thing, Swindle. Didn’t we take you in without question? Are you implying that it was a mistake not to have you confess every crime that brought you here?”

Swindle’s grin suddenly faltered, though he still tried to keep his hand held aloft as if it would help him make a better point. 

“I… I didn’t… I ain’t saying… whatever.” He gave up with a scowl as he retreated to the back of the crowd, and now Orion addressed all of them.

“I understand that everyone is feeling emotional right now. Everyone here has lost someone during this long war. But please believe me when I say that Starscream is not our enemy.”

“And who are you to decide that, Orion?” A black-and-white mech turned his blue optics to glare at him.

“I am not deciding anything, Prowl, I am simply saying that we should not turn against anyone who can help us-”

“You think that thing sitting through there can help us?” The orange mech with the hooked arm pulled Prowl out of his way to face Orion with a scowl that could put Starscream’s to shame. “We’d be better off just leaving him for scrap like Skyfire-!”

“ Enough, Impactor-”
“Don’t you ‘enough’ me, you self-righteous slagger! You’re not the one who lost five fragging brothers cause of Rattrap! You’re not the one with an entire family wiped from the face of the planet-!”

“Impactor, calm down!” Springer now tried to defuse Impactor, standing between him and Orion. “You’re not the only one here still mourning , you know!”

“Shove it, Springer!” And he actually did shove him, so hard that Springer fell on his aft and there was no-one to stop Impactor from skulking away with a trail of bustled bodies behind him. Springer gave chase as soon as he picked himself back up, and he drew most of the crowd with him.

“Been a while since I saw a good ol’ brawl,” Flamewar grinned with bright optics. “Think they’ll keep it up outside, Cee? Wanna take bets on who wins?” She elbowed the pink femme standing next to her, who rolled her optics.

“You know I’ve got nothing to bet with.” But the two of them decide to go watch anyway, and the Camiens were left utterly alone with Orion and Ariel.

“Well!” Nautica chirped up after an uncomfortably long silence. “That was awkward!”

And if it wasn’t awkward before, it certainly was now. Ariel shielded her optics with a hand pressed to her forehead, as if her processor was aching behind her plating. Windblade knew the feeling intimately, but she tried to turn attention back to her priorities with a cough of static. 

“So… what are we supposed to do? We can’t go to the ship, and we can’t try and break into the detention center…”

Orion looked somewhat helpless without an audience of Autobots around him, but he seemed to regain some of his balance when Ariel placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Do you think the others might be able to escape on their own, like you did?” He addressed Nautica and Afterburner. They both shrugged.

“Chromia and Maxima could pull it off,” Afterburner guessed, “if they could overpower the guards. Vertex too, with all her dancer strength. Lightbright would follow after them. But we still don’t know where Velocity and Hot Shot are...”

“I think they’re in hiding,” Nautica offered. “They might not have recognised my graffiti message, if they even saw it at all.”

“So d’you think we need another one?” Windblade asked. “A message that they can’t possibly overlook?”

Afterburner shrugged again. “You have one in mind?”

Though she didn’t, not at first. Velocity was smart, but she wouldn’t be able to recognise any of Nautica’s favorite formulas or any stage play shorthands. As for Hot Shot… well, Windblade was just glad that he had Velocity on hand to keep him alive. So they needed something that any Camien could recognise on sight, something that would slide right under a technorganic’s nose.

Windblade only let herself smile when she finally pulled it from her processor.

“You remember the stage play that the Mistress would hold on the Exodus anniversary, ‘Our Titan’?”

“Of course,” Afterburner scoffed. “Everyone knows it.”

Even Nautica, who only ever attended her sorority’s many recitals to avoid becoming a dreaded pyroclast, nodded in recognition. 

“And the one line everyone remembers the most...” Windblade trailed off to let the two of them finish it for her.

“Find us at the Titan’s Crown, to give our home a loving kiss upon the brow, to thank him for our light.” Afterburner would have made Vertex cringe from his hollow reading, but the line itself was perfect for their needs. Caminus’ crown was his northest point, where the star that he orbited would never set on the horizon. It was a popular spot for celebrations, especially for Exodus Day when people would put on displays of life from Ancient Cybertron. It was the only time anyone truly acknowledged Cybertron as anything other than Primus’ resting place.

“Is it possible for us to reach the northest point of Cybertron?” Afterburner didn’t need Windblade to explain to him what she was planning; he turned to Ariel and Orion with a cautious hope in his eyes.

“That’s just outside Iacon’s outskirts,” Ariel said. “We haven’t scouted there for a while, but it’s mostly closed off.”

“D’you think it’ll be safe enough to set up another rendezvous team there?” Afterburner pressed. 

Orion frowned as he looked away for a moment. “Nowhere outside the Arcanimus is safe… but there’s places we can hide, if needed.”

“So if we can get that message out across Cybertron,” Nautica said, “we can wait there and see if any of the others show up!”

“But how will they know where the northest point is?” Afterburner pointed out to her.

“They probably won’t know,” she admitted. “But if they know we’re waiting for them there, then... they can find out somehow?” She was frowning because she knew just as well as everyone else that it wasn’t a good answer.

“If they even hear the message, that is,” Afterburner added. “And if they can make it to the point alive.”

“There’s a lot of ‘ifs’ in this plan,” Windblade said, and she was starting to wish she hadn’t mentioned it at all.

“Can you think of anything better?” Nautica sighed. It wasn’t an accusation, more like a genuine plea for anything else with an even slightly better chance of working. But Windblade had nothing else to offer. Orion seemed to take the silence as an agreement, and he walked off to a sheltered corner of the grand library. There was a mech standing there who Windblade hadn’t noticed before, and he was plugged into some kind of terminal.

“Blaster,” Orion said to catch his attention. “Can you and Vibes intercept the radio signals to get a message out to the remaining Camiens?”

Blaster disconnected the wired device from his audios with a grin. “Sure can, my man. If we can get a jammer near the major towers around Iacon, we can set it up to hijack the stations every few breems. The delay’ll make it harder to track.”

“That’s one part settled, at least,” Ariel muttered. “Now we just need to get people willing to camp out at the rendezvous point.”

“We’ll volunteer,” Nautica decided as she leapt down from her perch, darting her gaze between Windblade and Afterburner. “All of us. Right?”

“Of course,” Afterburner pledged. Windblade hadn’t considered going outside again so soon, but who was she to say no? She wanted to see her friends alive and well just as much as anyone else. So she nodded, and Ariel mirrored the gesture.

“And I’ll come too,” the pink femme offered. “We’ll have a while to prepare, so I’ll go around and see who else is up for it. Anyone who isn’t distracted , that is...” She turned a glare in the direction that Impactor had been last seen making a run for, with his trail of spectators following behind, and started going around the library’s levels to find other willing soldiers. Orion was still discussing details with Blaster and a new orange femme who had appeared, so the three Camiens were once again left all alone.

“You think it’ll really work?” Afterburner needled, while Nautica visibly sagged from exhaustion (being around too many people at once had that draining effect on her).

“I don’t want to think at all, right now,” Windblade answered, letting herself sit down with a heavy thump while her wings dragged against the floor. She was glad that Afterburner only shrugged at her.

“Fair enough. Hey, did that Drift guy come up talking to you as well? He keeps calling me ‘brother’, like we’re from the same fraternity.” He said it with confusion; some Camiens took their brotherhoods and sisterhoods very seriously, mostly bodyguards for some reason. Chromia had never talked much about her sorority to Windblade, but Afterburner might have been one of the zealots.

“Drift’s the first person to ever call me ‘sister’ without trying to make fun of me,”Nautica mentioned with a smile. “I like him.”

“Well, he and Vertex will definitely get along, at least,” Afterburner conceded. “Maybe she can make sense of whatever he was babbling about.” 

Windblade didn’t realise that he was addressing her again, not until she saw him staring expectedly at her for some silent nanoklicks. Her mind was back in the medbay, worrying over Starscream and the secret ticking timebomb in his head.

“Yeah, yeah… I have to go check on something. I’ll be right back.” She stood up and climbed over the seat so she could reach the medbay quicker. The curtain was shielding Starscream from view again, and Ratchet was cleaning the tools he had laid out in a tray.

“Whatever was going on out there sounded bad,” he grumbled, setting down a gleaming scalpel with a sterile clink. Windblade assumed that First Aid was attending to their patient behind the privacy shield.

“Is it usually like... that around here?” she asked. Ratchet laughed, a hoarse grunt that wheezed out for only a second.

“It’s worse when Megatronus is around." He emptied his hands and dusted them together as he faced her. "So, the good news; we found something. Bad news… it isn’t a killswitch.”

Windblade felt her face scrunch up. If she had any of her Cityspeaker markings left, she was sure they'd be cracking apart. “What is it, then?”

Ratchet made a whistling sound, and First Aid emerged from Starscream's recovery corner to place something in the other medic's waiting hand. Ratchet then held it out to Windblade, and she had to squint to even see it.

“Exactly what it looks like," he told her. "A burned-out circuit board. Whatever it was supposed to be, it stopped working a long time ago.”

Windblade blinked as she poked the blank circuit chip, its surface flecked with brown rust. “That’s… good, right?”

“Good for us, if this was the only means Rattrap had to keep Starscream in check." Ratchet dropped the dead chip onto the tray with his tools. "But… imagine, Windblade, being locked up for centuries. Forced to slaughter your own kind with your spark. Seeing their life memories spill out in their dying moments. Maybe you can try and escape at first. Maybe you do try...  but there’s a bomb in your head as well. It keeps you chained in place as much as any other restraint can. And then, later on, you find out that there was no bomb at all. At that point, you’d actually wish there was one.”

Windblade gulped, yet her voice still had to force itself around a bitter lump at the back of her throat. “So it was just a sick game to Rattrap...”

Ratchet made a sound as if he wanted to spit something out, but he swallowed it instead. “When he wakes up, Windblade, whatever you do, do not tell him that killswitch was fake.”

“Of course not,” she said with another shudder. “I know what that would do to him.”

Ratchet nodded, a single motion of mutual understanding. "Keep watching his signs, First Aid. I'll go talk to the others." 

The elder medic took his leave, and First Aid continued to keep himself busy. Windblade leaned over to try and see behind the drawn curtain, but there was no glimpse of Starscream in sight.

“Is he still in stasis?” she asked, interrupting First Aid as he filed away the sterilised tools. He nodded.

“We intensified the lock during the surgery, so he’ll be offline for another while.” He seemed to be sorting the scalpels by size, from how he held them up to his visor to check them closely. But he seemed to keep losing his focus, and he turned to Windblade again after a moment.

“There’s no tracker in him, at least,” he told her. “If it helps.”

Windblade had no real reason to smile, but she gave him one anyway. “Thanks, First Aid.”

“If you don’t mind me asking…” He started to stutter behind his mask. “Are you two… are you... bonded?”

Windblade almost choked on a burst of static, and she quickly shook her head. “No, no. I didn’t even know what bonding was until a decaycle ago.”

“Right. Sorry, I forgot."

Windblade had assumed that Nautica and Afterburner had received the same kind of biology lesson Knockout had given her, which meant the Autobots all knew how clueless Camiens could really be. Considering how the technorganics apparently saw Camiens as an entirely different species because of their ignorance, it was little wonder why some of the Autobots were just as reluctant to help. At least First Aid and Starscream were somewhat polite about it.

"I just thought, cause..." First Aid started to speak, but then shook his head. "Well, nevermind.”

Windblade looked at him, trying to meet his optics with an incline of her head. "Because what?"

"Well, Starscream wouldn't let us put him under until you fell asleep first," he explained. "I think he wanted to be sure you were getting some rest."

And she was surprised to hear that, for some reason. She didn't remember falling asleep, but she'd assumed that Starscream must have dozed off first with some medicinal help. Was it his way of thanks, or apology for all that they'd been through until now? Or was it another Seeker thing she'd never understand until it was spelled out for her?

“We keep each other alive,” she said, after some quiet consideration. “I’m not sure if there’s a name for that.”

First Aid grunted behind his mask as he finished up his task. “Sounds enough like a sparkmate to me.”

Windblade was too tired to argue against it.

...But this was the kind of tired that sleep couldn’t fix. After the nightmare she’d had, Windblade didn’t want to sleep anyway. She didn’t want to go out and face any more questions or accusing glares, and she didn’t want to be around Nautica and Afterburner and be forced to think of everyone who was still missing.

So there was nothing else to do but sit and wait. If Starscream was awake, she could have at least asked him what he thought of the suicidal plan she’d been pulled into. But she already knew what he’d say, something about her being a fool who was too eager to save everyone around her. He was predictable, though that was a comfort when she was surrounded by so many strangers. Starscream, for all his flaws, was the only Cybertronian who she knew wasn’t plotting to kill her at any moment. 

Though, maybe that would change when she told him that she’d allowed a medic to literally rummage through his brain casing. Even if Windblade had to lie about the ‘killswitch’, she would at least tell him that it was gone and hope that it meant something good for him. Whether or not that would make up for the violation of his helm… well, that was one thing she couldn’t predict. 

But if First Aid’s assessment of them both was accurate, then Starscream must have trusted her somewhat. Even if he may never admit it, he couldn’t erase witness testimony, and First Aid had no reason she could think of to lie. He’d hardly said another word to her since he made his observation, as he simply returned to typing up data in peaceful silence.

Now that she’d had a moment to reconfigure her databanks, Windblade was tempted to ask him more about sparkmates, what she’d wanted Starscream to tell her before he promptly shut it down. She wanted the full context for what they were, why they came together so intimately when raising a new life would be such a heavy responsibility.

(That was why it was a job better left to Primus, after all.)

“Hey, First Aid?” She waited for him to acknowledge her with a tilt of his helm. “Are any of the Autobots bonded?”

His optics flashed, and he set aside the datapad he’d been working on. “Officially, only Orion Pax and Ariel. They’ve been together long before we all had to go underground. Not to say there aren’t other couples around, but… well, they know better than to bond while we’re fighting a war. Cause if one partner dies, the other dies too.”

Windblade felt her glossa dry up, leaving her with the sensation of standing in front of a furnace that was still fresh from her nightmare. “I… didn’t know about that part.”

“There’s exceptions, sometimes,” First Aid went on. “Very rarely. But anyone who survives a broken bond usually wishes they didn’t.”

Windblade had to wonder if he was speaking from experience. Hopefully he was once again just speaking from observation, but she had to imagine that viewing such a thing wouldn’t be much better.

“If you ask me, though,” First Aid added, “that’s why Ariel and Orion became the center of the Autobots. Having two bots still in love after all this slag, knowing they could kill each other with one wrong move but still managing to survive and stay together… it helps keep us going. Gives us hope that we’ll have the same waiting for us when our work is done.”

He trailed off in a warm mutter, as if saying it out loud was embarrassing. Or, more likely, because he didn’t want to speak too soon. Windblade hadn’t seen enough of Ariel and Orion together to notice that they were so close, but now she was curious. 

“Do they have any children?” she asked, and she assumed yes; maybe some of the Autobots she’d seen outside, since they were bonded and bonds apparently made children. But First Aid laughed as he shook his head.

“No, no. That’s what firewalls are for. A bond doesn’t guarantee the birth of a new spark, but firewalls reduce the chance even further. And for those who don’t want to bond… well, there’s always plain old interface. But I never really understood interfacing with someone you didn’t love like that.” He shrugged as he returned his gaze to his work, but then suddenly looked back up and over to Windblade. 

“You know what interface is, right?” he asked, and she had to fight not to roll her optics. The people around her really did think Camiens were completely clueless.

“Of course I do,” she assured, and that was as much as she would say on the subject. Nautica got enough mockery back home for not being as interested in it as she was ‘supposed’ to be, and Windblade only escaped the same by absorbing herself so much in her Titan studies. A date with Metroplex’s monitor was much more appealing to her than with a fraternity stranger… or a date with her digits, if it was needed. Not that anyone needed to know about that.

But First Aid only seemed more confused by her admitted knowledge. 

“So you know about that, but not sparkbonding?” He shook his head again. “Caminus sure is a strange place.”

Windblade sighed as she hit her head against the wall at her back, once again unable to argue even if she wanted to. “It’s been so long since I left, I’m starting to think that it might be strange too.”

First Aid responded with a chuckle that at least went some small way to making her feel better. “Well, full disclosure, interface without firewalls can also lead to newsparks. Much much lower chance than a bond, but it’s still possible. We think it’s an evolutionary leftover from the tribal days.”

Windblade narrowed her optics. Interface was easy to understand, but she’d had no idea that firewalls had anything to do with it. They existed to prevent the same darkness that had corrupted The Fallen from infecting your spark… at least, that was what the Mistress had preached. Which meant that it was likely bullslag. Windblade still had a while to go before she would stop automatically believing everything she was taught as gospel from Primus.

“So the firewalls stop newsparks entirely?” she asked, spacing out each word to make room for whatever next world-shaking revelation First Aid was going to give her.

“That’s what they’re designed for,” he said. “Which is why Ratchet is a hardass about everyone keeping theirs updated.”

“What’s that about my ass, First Aid?” Ratchet’s frame barely creaked as it marched into the medbay.

“I said it’s as perfect and shiny as ever, boss,” First Aid declared without pause as he promptly went back to work. Ratchet only rolled his optics, though they froze when they spotted Windblade sitting on the same slab she’d been perched on for the last twenty klicks.

“You know, you don’t have to stay here all the time,” he informed her with a nod towards Starscream’s cordoned-off corner. “We’ll keep his spark going just fine.”

Windblade didn’t doubt that, since if either medic wanted Starscream dead they could have easily carried out some malpractice when she wasn’t looking. And, of course, she couldn’t stay in the medbay forever, but with Starscream still in his dreamless stasis it was the only safe place she had.

“I don’t like having him out of my sight,” she confessed. Ratchet mumbled to himself as he turned away, spraying his hands with two conservative pumps from a cleanser bottle.

“You shouldn’t let Megatronus scare you,” he told her. “He was a gladiator, before everything changed. He’s used to being able to just fight his way through life. But he’s a reasonable mech, when he’s allowed to calm down.”

Windblade wasn’t scared of Megatronus at all. She was only scared of what he or one of his friends might do to Starscream, after everything she’d done to try and keep him alive. No, there was only one Megatronus worthy of any fear from a Camien… 

“Why does he have that name?” she asked, and it took Ratchet a moment for him to register the question. First Aid lowered his helm to his datapad, as if he was determined to stay out of it.

“Well, like I said,” Ratchet began as he took a seat near her, “he was a gladiator. When he wasn’t fighting, he was mining for energon in Kaon. Miners were one of the lowest castes, back when the Senate was around. But fighting in the pits was a good way to make some more credits, if you could survive it. Most gladiators took on a different name, a Gladionym, when they were in the pits; both to protect their real identities in case some dead bot’s family wanted to hunt them down, and to intimidate their opponents.”

Windblade started to nod. “And there’s few names more intimidating than the Fallen’s.”

“There you have it.” Ratchet clapped his hands together once in a sweeping motion. “No-one knows what his real name as a miner was; not even Orion, and he was his closest friend. But he’s happy enough to just be called Megatronus.”

If Windblade had known that Megatronus had apparently made a career out of killing, she might have been more hesitant about making herself into a shield between him and Starscream. But she’d survived that encounter, so she still had nothing to fear from him.

“And what did you do before all this, Ratchet?” It felt rude to be asking so much from the mech without even knowing anything about him. Medics were selfless by nature (or at least Velocity was), but she could only imagine how thankless being an Autobot doctor must have been. And Ratchet’s blue optics did indeed light up as the corners of his mouth twitched.

“Same thing I’m doing right now,” he revealed as he rearranged his posture. “I was a medic in Protihex for a long while, then I briefly retired to teach classes at Medical Mechanics. First Aid was my best student.” He nodded to the small mech, who seemed to freeze at being mentioned. “And he still is.”

First Aid let out a muffled burst of static as he kept scrolling through his datapad. “The others were better at listening during lectures...”

“A few of them, maybe. But you didn’t have to be told much in the first place.” And he smiled, though First Aid still stood frozen at his table. Then the smaller mech turned and left without another word. Ratchet sighed as his smile vanished and he pushed himself to his feet.

“Is... he alright?” Windblade asked, still staring after the empty space that First Aid so abruptly left behind.

“His team is still a sore subject,” Ratchet explained over his shoulder. “They found each other at MM, called themselves the Protectobots. He lost most of them to the Gestalt Massacre.”

Rattrap had called it the Gestalt Rebellion, but ‘massacre’ now felt like a much more fitting word. 

“Were they combiners?” she asked in a hush. Ratchet was now bent down, searching through a storage locker as he spoke.

“They had the T Cogs for it. But I don’t think they ever formed together. Just cause you have a bunch of machinery from Nexus Prime doesn’t make combining them together an easy feat. And, after Sentinel’s mandates, most gestalts preferred to keep to themselves.”

“You mean when he outlawed worship of the Thirteen.”

Ratchet looked over at her with surprise with two glasses of pale energon in his hand. “You know about that?”

“Starscream told me.”

The medic huffed as he looked to where she nodded, and he drank from one of the glasses. “Yeah, he’d know all about it… his family stood right by the Senate. Seekers had no stake in the Thirteen, so they didn’t really care what happened to anyone else.”

He set the empty glass down, then placed the other near Windblade in silent offering. “Even so… what happened to Vos was a damn shame. And what happened to Starscream was downright evil.”

Windblade was grateful for the fuel, especially when the Autobots had to ration it so carefully, though she couldn’t bring herself to drink. Instead she cradled it in her hand, letting the sharp cold leak through her digits. “I don’t think the others have much sympathy for him.”

“They would,” Ratchet decreed, “if they knew half of the agony he would have been in. But some people around here have spent so long fighting a stalemate against Rattrap, they’ll jump at the chance to hate someone else for a change.”

It was a grim assessment, but the fact that he’d reached it made Windblade sure that he knew how important it was to keep Starscream under guard. The Autobots were likely no strangers to killing, if they thought it was necessary. 

“Hey, Wind?” Nautica’s voice was a sudden and soothing interruption as her helm poked around the door of the medbay. “I need your perspective on something.”

But Ratchet didn’t give much chance for response as he dragged a thick plastic curtain over the doorway, blocking Nautica out. “No visitors allowed!”

“It’s vital scientific research!” she argued as her shadow furiously pointed at the datapad in her hand. “My data integrity depends on it!”

“It’s fine, Ratchet,” Windblade said, struggling not to smile at her friend’s life-or-death attitude to research. “I’ll just go outside. Thanks for the energon.” 

She took the glass with her as she stood up, and the medic gave her a parting touch on her shoulder as she pushed past the curtain. The medbay had been so cozy and empty that stepping back out into the rest of the Arcanimus almost made her dizzy. She kept her optics closed as Nautica grabbed her hand, leading her to somewhere quiet.

“So, what’s up?” Windblade found that she was in another section of the base, some kind of battle training set-up with laser pistols and crude techorganic caricatures for target practice. She could hear the clash of steel nearby over muted grunts, so she assumed someone was using a sword just out of sight. 

“You’ve never had spark parasites, right?” Nautica asked her, holding her datapad close to her chest. “I won’t tell anyone if you have, I just need to know.”

After a moment of surprised hesitation, Windblade shook her head. “No, none at all.”

“Right…” Nautica quickly made a note with a stylus. “I’ve never had them, either. Afterburner said that Maxima had them once, but I want to ask her myself before I add her to my dataset. I tried asking the Autobot femmes too, but none of them had any idea what I was talking about. Did Starscream mention anything similar? Maybe they only exist in Caminus’ part of the galaxy? Or they might call them something else here. Solus, this would be so much easier if I had Hermitian’s database for cross-reference...”

She was rambling far too quickly for Windblade to get a word in edgewise, but that was typical for her. Nautica had claimed that she wanted outsider knowledge, but Windblade could tell when she just wanted someone to bounce questions off of while she tried to answer them herself. But at least she had something not utterly depressing to keep herself occupied.

“Do you really think we’ll be able to find the others, Nautica?” Windblade asked while her friend was frantically scribbling theories down. Since Starscream was still out of action, Nautica was her only other option for a brutally honest assessment. Her stylus halted, and she chewed her bottom lip.

“If you want honest probabilities… assuming that only Velocity and Hot Shot aren’t imprisoned and the prison cells are kept apart, the chances of just one of the others receiving the message and then being able to reach the rendezvous are about…”

Her optics flicked upwards as her processor did the calculations, and she twitched her digits with each number. “Sixty klicks in a breem, one message every breem, thirty two of them in a Cybertron cycle with, let’s say two thousand possible listening locations… sixty four thousand in one.”

She couldn’t even muster a weak smile.

“And... that’s just the odds for one of them hearing our transmission,” Windblade said with a sinking spark.

“Yep. For all of them to hear it, you multiply that odd by six and you get three hundred and eighty six-”

Before Nautica could doom Windblade’s hopes even further, she was interrupted by a mech calling from the other side of the room.

“Hello again, sisters!” Drift waved at them both with his sword lain across his shoulders as he approached. Afterburner was next to him, bent over double with ragged vents. He also had a weapon, but he left it on the floor at his feet. So they were the ones responsible for the clashing sounds.

“Afterburner was just telling me about life on Caminus while we practiced,” Drift said, offering an arm to help the other mech stand straight.

“Mostly just trying to distract him so I could get a point in,” Afterburner admitted, rolling his shoulder as he picked his sword up, and he almost toppled forward when Drift clapped him on the back.

“Don’t put yourself down, brother. I haven’t seen parrying like that since Axe was around. And he used… well, an axe, so he had to put a lot of work into fending off strikes.”

The strange mech turned to the femmes again. “Do you do sparring, Windblade? Afterburner told me that Caminus gives swords to Cityspeakers.”

“And are you gonna drink that?” Afterburner pointed to the pale energon she was still holding onto. Windblade shook her head and handed it over while a soft heat of shame flushed over her face. Her ceremonial sword was still locked away somewhere in Iacon, not that it would have served her much use anyway. 

“That’s true, but…” She shrugged. “Well, they’re not much use if you don’t know how to use them.”

Drift didn’t laugh like she was expecting. “Well, it’s never too late to learn. Here, use mine’s.”

He offered her the blade across his shoulders, the one that had looked so similar to her own. Windblade was eager to examine it closer, to see where the similarities ended, but as soon as Drift handed it over she almost lost her arms from their sockets.

“It’s… much heavier than it looks,” she grunted as she tried to lift it up. Afterburner stepped forward to help, but Windblade shook her head. Drift seemed to nod in approval when she finally managed to hold it straight.

“That’s a Great Sword,” he told her. “The Circle of Light passes them down from mentor to student during a Linking ceremony.”

Windblade gritted her teeth as she fought the ache in her cables from straining to pull the blade’s weight up. “What’s that?”

“When an acolyte’s spark is strong enough, it can link directly to the Allspark.” Drift started to circle around her as he explained. “And when it does, the sword is used as a conduit between the acolyte’s frame and Primus. Of course, with the Well gone, there’s no way for the living to reach the Allspark anymore. But this sword was forged long ago, so it still holds the link.”

He came to a stop right in front of Windblade, and pressed his hands around the hilt. He didn’t take the weight away from her, only helping to hold it perfectly still so that, when he removed his hands, her arms were no longer shaking. 

“My friend Wing… he passed it onto me,” he said. “He wasn’t my mentor, but he had no student to gift it to. It held the light of his spark once, and now it holds the light of mine.”

He spoke with such reverence that Windblade suddenly felt very inferior, unworthy of holding such a profound relic. “And… are you sure you’re okay with me using it?”

Drift smiled. “Of course. I haven’t activated the link, so you won’t do anything to my spark. Go on, give it a swing.”

She did as she was told, though she stumbled forward as the massive weight of the blade pulled down on her. Looking up from the ground she found Afterburner standing off to the side, trying to be encouraging with a thumbs-up as he guzzled his energon, while Nautica had gone right back to her studies with her face pressed to a different datapad.

“You’re not gonna join us, Nautica?” WIndblade wheezed as she struggled to heft the sword on her shoulders like Drift had done. Nautica looked up with a jolt, and shook her head.

“Sparring’s never been my thing. Besides, I have a lot of reading to do.”

‘So I’m all on my own in looking like an idiot. Great.’ Windblade was really regretting turning down all those times Chromia had invited her to bodyguard training sessions. Only bodyguards could partake, but she could have at least watched and learned. And she would need to learn, if she wanted to survive out in the wilds of Cybertron. 

“See if you can parry me,” Drift offered as he held up Afterburner’s abandoned blade. “I’ll start slow.”

Windblade cringed even as she held her sword at the ready. “Can’t I use that smaller sword instead?”

“It’ll be a lot harder to fend off attacks from a larger weapon,” Drift explained. “And if you train with something heavier, you’ll find using a light sword much easier.”

So she really had no choice. Windblade sighed as she nodded, giving Drift the cue to begin. As he promised, he moved as if in slow-motion so she had plenty of time to prepare. After she got used to the ache in her shoulders she managed to fall into a rhythm, and Drift slowly increased his pace to match it.

“I wanted to ask you more about the Circle of Fire,” Windblade yelled over the dull shing of blades coming together. “And… well, everything else you mentioned before.”

Drift’s optics pulsed, but he didn’t pause his forgiving assault. “Where would you like me to start?”

Windblade already knew what the most pressing issue for her was, even before she’d been confronted by her latest nightmare. “The Mistress of Flame. What do you know about her?”

She was expecting Afterburner to come rushing over to tackle her to the ground- as a bodyguard, he had a duty to deal with any manner of disrespect towards the Thirteen, or Primus, or Caminus’ beloved Mistress. But Nautica must have been influencing him, because he simply remained silent by the sidelines. 

Drift finished his attack before he gave an answer, giving WIndblade a precious moment to clear her vents.

“What I was told,” he began, “is that the Mistress was the first true child of Solus Prime from the Allspark. You know about the Tribal Age, right?”

Windblade grimaced. The Imperial Age was only a footnote in Caminus’ records, but the Tribal Age was barely a single line of ancient text. “Only a little.”

“Well, with most of the Thirteen Primes gone, their tribes were fractured and without proper leaders. The Imperial Age began when the Tribal Age ended. It’s hard to say exactly what made it end without being there to see it, but I was taught that it coincided with the birth of the Well. And the one known as the Mistress of Flame was one of the first sparks to emerge from it.”

Drift nodded to her, waiting until she was ready to begin the second round. She was already coated in coolant, yet his own armour wasn’t even damp.

“So how did she become one of the Imperial leaders?” Windblade pressed, starting to move her peds so she could escape Drift’s more elaborate advances.

“The story goes that she was a Point One Percenter,” he revealed as he lunged forward. Windblade managed to fend off the strike, but a surge of confusion almost made her lose grip on the blade.

“A what?”

Drift looked at her from between their crossed weapons, mirroring her own frown. “You’ve never had any on Caminus? They’re just what the name says; point one percent of all sparks born will turn out as one. Those sparks hold immense amounts of energy. A few stories say that some of them are even reincarnations of the Thirteen, but I never really believed that part.”

“Hold on, hold on, I gotta write this down!” Nautica must have been reading and listening at the same time; she scrambled to grab her writing pad and stylus as her glossa stuck out.

“And... the Mistress of Flame was one of them?” Afterburner asked with skeptic’s hesitance while he sat next to Nautica.

Drift nodded, now pulling back so Windblade could stand up straight. “People could tell that she was powerful, so she quickly gained a following; especially from the tribes of Solus and Quintus. That was how the Circle of Fire came to be.”

It was no surprise to hear that the connection to Solus Prime had been there since the beginning, but Quintus being involved was news to Windblade. “And the other two?”

“The Circle of Light was originally headed by Star Saber. He was part of Prima’s tribe, and he took over from him when the Thirteen vanished. The Circle of Death was governed by Emperor Deathsaurus, who came from Onyx Prime. And his sparkmate, Esmeral, was born from a union of the tribes of Solus and Onyx. She was like a mediator for the three of them.” He stretched his digits as he explained, loosening the joints that had been wrapped tight around his sword’s grip.

“You said she was the first Cityspeaker as well,” Windblade added, and she couldn’t ignore the heat that flared in her spark as she said it. Hearing so much about the Mistress she’d never known was one thing, but to discover a new piece of history about herself was almost more than she knew how to handle. Drift seemed to notice that, either in her stance or how her blade grip was trembling, so he smiled and held his sword tip-first to the ground. Behind him, Nautica was constantly looking up while her stylus danced madly on her datapad and Afterburner was looking over her shoulder to see what she was writing down.

“Indeed she was,” Drift said. “That’s how she and Deathsaurus came to rule the Empire together. She took direct control of Chela— Onyx’s Titan— to dominate the tribes, but taking out the forces of Star Saber and the Mistress would have killed off over half of the planet. Even with the Well creating new life, that wasn’t a sacrifice anyone was willing to make. So the four of them decided to govern Cybertron together, and that was how the Empire began.”

Windblade nodded, trying to absorb it all. Even though she could read Nautica’s notes later to understand it better, she wanted to remember Drift’s own words as much as possible. “How did Esmeral learn to Cityspeak?” 

“Well,” Drift shrugged, “how did you?”

Windblade’s shoulders mirrored his own. “I was born with the ability to learn. So I learned until I could.”

Drift narrowed his optics in slow acceptance. Then, without warning, he swept his sword up into both hands and launched a vicious strike towards her. She managed to block it with the sheer edge of the Great Sword, and Drift grinned in approval. He carried on for two klicks with relentless pace, so much that he seemed to be overheating when he finally stopped. Windblade gladly collapsed on the ground, trying to blink away coolant from her optics while the same poured from her protoform.

“If your Mistress is the same one from the Imperial Age,” Drift panted, “I’m surprised she never told you all of this. After all, isn’t Esmeral the reason why you wear those markings around your eyes?”

Windblade was still shaking coolant from her face, but now she looked up at him with puzzlement. “No…? We wear them to mimic Caminus’ face.”

“I see…” Drift looked away for a moment, as if he was considering whether or not to say more. He fortunately chose the former. “Someone else gave him those marks, though. Esmeral was born with a defect, you see. Her optics.” He used two digits on one hand to gesture to his own. “They would constantly leak coolant. It was thought to be hereditary, so she was almost cast out from Solus’ tribe for it. As Empress, she could have had it fixed, but she decided that it wasn’t a defect after all. So the Thirteen Titans were given those markings to mimic her coolant tracks.”
Windblade was glad that she was already sitting down. 

“I didn’t even know who Esmeral was until you mentioned her...” And yet she’d apparently been wearing her face for the last three hundred years.

“Right… and Caminus doesn’t allow spark bonding?” Drift asked.

“Well, it’s not that it’s not allowed ,” Nautica called over to correct him. “We just didn’t know that it was possible.”

Drift inclined his head, and his gaze was distant as he thought for a long moment. 

“That’s why Esmeral would have been written out of your records,” he eventually said with a fascinated drawl. “She was born from a carrier, not from the Allspark. She would have ruined your Mistress’ plans to keep you ignorant.”

Then there was a scoff from the shadows. “Here I thought that ignorance was supposed to be bliss.”

Windblade and Drift both turned towards the rough voice, while Nautica and Afterburner snapped their heads up.

“Starscream!” Windblade saw him standing in the shadow of the doorway, almost out of sight save for his unmistakable red optics. She wanted to run over to him, but the weight of the Great Sword kept her rooted in place. Starscream must have noticed her brief jolt forwards from how he shook his head.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” he told her. “You seemed to be getting the hang of it.”

“Actually,” Drift said, “I think we’ve earned a break. We’re not allowed to train too much and waste fuel on exertion.” He patted Windblade’s shoulder and retrieved his sword from her grip, wielding it effortlessly despite the exertion glimmering on his frame. 

“I suppose that’s why Autobots favor guns,” Starscream grunted as he started to approach. In the light of the training room, he seemed to be surrounded by a halo of vapor from his vents, and his time in stasis had given him the strength to stand fully upright.

“Most of them do,” Drift agreed. “But my sword is my spark, so I’m an exception.” He was still smiling, but then his face wrinkled as Starscream drew closer. Windblade didn’t realise why until her vents took in a new stench of burned solder and medical grease. Either Ratchet didn’t care about how his patients came out smelling, or Starscream had carried the miasma with him all along and Windblade somehow never noticed it until now.

“Er… don’t take this the wrong way, Starscream,” Drift said as gently as he could, “but when was the last time you had a cleanser scrub?”

Despite Drift’s plea, Starscream clearly did take it the ‘wrong’ way from how he glared at the other mech. “Five hundred years ago.”

“Right.” Drift breezed right over the deadpan with a renewed and stubborn grin. “Well, we have to ration our cleanser as much as everything else, but the washracks should be empty right now. They’re just outside to the right.” He pointed in the direction, and Starscream grunted as he turned towards it. 

“What?! There were washracks here this whole time!?” Nautica was so indignant that she actually set her stylus and datapad down, and Windblade shared the sentiment. She hadn’t even noticed the doorway because of the Arcanimus’ relative darkness, but apparently it was right there in front of Drift’s digit. If she’d known there was somewhere she could clean off the last decacycle of grime, she would have made that her very first stop. 

“I think I could do with a rinse as well,” Windblade said, “if that’s possible.”

But Drift lowered his arm, scratching at the back of his head. “Well… you’d have to wait a breem after Starscream. It takes time for the liquid to be recycled.”

Windblade narrowed her optics. Surely it wasn’t so bad that only one bot could wash at a time? On Caminus, there were communal bath houses on practically every corner.

“Well, why don’t I just join him?” she offered, and for some reason Drift blinked at her like she’d just suggested running outside in neon paint. Starscream, meanwhile, froze on the spot.

“There’s... enough cubicle room for two people, sure,” Drift eventually said. “If you’re okay with it, Starscream.”

The Seeker turned on his heel, and he looked just as unsure as Drift was. Even so, he nodded. “I suppose so.”

Windblade caught Nautica’s jealous pout (even when she was locked up in her lab, she always took cleanse showers at least once a cycle) as she went to join Starscream. Afterburner, meanwhile, kept a cautious gaze on Starscream as they both walked out of the room. Windblade had to wonder what the other Autobots had been telling him when she wasn’t around.

“How long were you standing there for?” Windblade waited until they were both in the cold corridor, out of any others’ sight, before she spoke.

“I arrived just in time to hear the riveting tale of Point One Percenters,” Starscream informed her. So he’d been watching her flail around with a sword that was almost taller than herself for at least five klicks. At least he wasn’t laughing at her. 

“I’m surprised you didn’t try to interrupt him earlier, then,” she muttered.

“Why would I? He seems to know what he’s talking about. Which is proof he really is a Circle of Light leftover. They were always insufferable know-it-alls.”

Windblade felt herself almost skip a step, as she tried to go over everything she’d just learned about the Mistress. “He was telling the truth, then?”

Starscream stopped walking to face her with a shrug. “As far as I can possibly know, he was. And so was I. You were doing quite well for yourself with that bloated slab he calls a sword.”

He didn’t hide a hint of surprise from the praise he gave her, but Windblade was just as surprised herself. She’d thought she’d made an absolute aft of herself, especially with how patient Drift was in his instruction, but if Starscream of all people couldn’t find a bad word to say then there was hope for her yet. She just wished she had her own sword on hand, so she could finally put it to use.

“Did you rest well?” She waited until Starscream went on walking to ask, and he grunted.

“Yes… for once. If you ask me, that medic should be the one in charge around here.”

“Did he tell you about...?” 

He abruptly stopped again as Windblade trailed off, and he blinked slowly. “Yes. The killswitch is gone… thank you.”

He gulped around his gratitude, and his optics darted to the floor.

“I would’ve waited until you were awake to ask,” she added, “but I thought-”

“You thought correctly. And I knew you would.” He went on moving without another word, until they reached the washroom proper. It was a simple cell lined with tiles, clearly converted from a neglected storeroom. Two splattered shelves held up minuscule tins of paint for touching up armour, and a chain-activated faucet on the other wall was waiting for someone to step onto the drain beneath it. The room itself was large enough for two, but they would have to huddle close under the faucet when it started pouring out the cleanser.

Starscream scanned the room much faster than Windblade did, but he seemed to hesitate.  

“I… will have to remove my armour,” he told her, rather bizarrely. Windblade could only blink at him.

“That’s to be expected, I suppose.” She struggled not to laugh as she started to loosen the closures on her own plates.

“I have no issue with being seen,” he went on, “but… I won’t be offended if you avert your gaze.”

Windblade froze, and she looked at him with the same amount of confusion that he apparently had towards her. “Why would I do that?”

Starscream looked away for a moment, darting red flies in the hum of the incandescent light overhead. “It’s considered somewhat... embarrassing, for one Cybertronian to see another naked.”

So it was another weird cultural thing. Windblade shrugged. “Well, you’ve already seen my protoform. I have nothing to hide. But, if you’d rather I didn’t see you-”

He silenced her with a single shake of his head. “You make a good point. I’ve seen your protoform, so it’s only fair that you see mine.”

That wasn’t at all what Windblade had been thinking, but she figured that objecting would only offend him. With that verdict, he started to shed the armour that was more like broken sheets of metal cobbled together and bolted to his frame. Seeing him shove them off himself, as if he was desperate to escape their confines, reminded Windblade of when Knockout had removed the horrific Sparkcracker modifications from his chest. But, unlike then, she didn’t look away from it. 

The bare protoform left behind was scarred and mangled in so many places. It was supposed to be a solid dark grey, with subtle red biolights in the creases of his limbs, but each mark that Rattrap had left behind was a harsh outline of silver that covered him like molten veins. Most noticeable and haunting were the deliberate grid marks on his chest, where the protoform would split apart to show his spark chamber, where Tarantulas and Rattrap had put most of their efforts into. 

Knockout and Ratchet had both done their best to fix him. But those scars would likely never fade. Her digits tingled at the thought of tracing their ragged edges.

Starscream said nothing, not even when he caught Windblade staring at the remaining wreck of his body. She tried to save face, immediately pulling her eyes away as she busied with her own armour, but when she was stripped down to her skin she found him staring at her as well. He was not critical, or leering, or even curious, as he stood waiting for her under the faucet. She didn’t know what to make of the look, so she made nothing at all of it.

The cleanser that came out was an inconsistent stream, starting out as a trickle, then pounding down on her shoulders, then barely dripping out at all before starting the cycle over again. But Windblade was just grateful to have any to work with, so she wasted no time as she rubbed the solvent into her skin. 

Starscream was less eager; the trickle of cleanser hit him like acid rain from the sky at first, before he eventually stopped shaking under it. Then he mirrored Windblade, with efficient mechanical movements that were designed to not accidentally touch her. 

“It is interesting, though,” he admitted as he scrubbed the grime from his arms. “Cybertronians hide our bodies, and Camiens hide their sparks.”

Windblade hummed as she pressed a handful of solvent to her face, rubbing away the last stubborn slivers of pigment from her cheeks. “Knockout didn’t seem very fazed when I was left naked.”

“He’s a doctor. He’s used to sights like that. I’d have thought he’d be more surprised to see your wings... all his old training must have helped him forget that we’re supposed to be extinct.”

Starscream’s glossa tripped on the last word, and he turned slightly so the cleanser would cascade down the side of his neck. He held a well-worn scrubber that he reached over his shoulder, but he grimaced as he tried to move it back and forth, finally giving up after some futile nanoklicks.

“Would you mind… cleaning along my strut?” he asked, and Windblade took the scrub from him without a word. Back home, she always had to ask for help with reaching her wings (and, unless the person knew what they were doing, she usually ended up regretting it). But at least it wasn’t so awkward on Caminus as it must have been on Cybertron, where you couldn’t even look at a naked frame without causing some offense.

“Let me know if I graze anything sensitive,” she told Starscream, but he only scoffed with his back presented to her.

“Don’t worry. I can’t feel anything back there anymore.”

Even if that was true, Windblade still took caution. It was the first time she’d been able to clearly see the damage to his wings, and it made her own start to flutter under the dying solvent trickle. What little was left of them were skeletal struts ringed with dead cables. There were signs that parts had been clipped away, likely by Knockout or Ratchet to reduce the broken bulk on Starscream’s back, but most of the metal had been torn off by someone’s bare hands. Only minuscule chips of red paint remained on the stubs, red that might have once matched his optics centuries ago.

Windblade hoped that he was telling the truth, that it was utterly numb. Otherwise… just having one of her own wings knocked the wrong way was enough to make errors flash on her display. To have them reduced down to the struts would make her every moment nothing but agony.

“We have a plan to find the others,” she said as she did her best to scrub his spine. “We’re going to the north point of Cybertron, and hopefully they’ll meet us there.”

Starscream didn’t react at all, not even when her hands sponged over the remains of his wings. “How hopeful are you that it will work?”

Windblade saw no point in lying. “Well, Nautica says the odds are against us. And she’s never been wrong. But… at least it will get us out of here. Maybe you should come with us.”

There was a tremor under her digits as he stiffened. “That wouldn't be wise.”

“Why not?” She’d thought that he wanted to get away from the Autobots, especially ones like Megatronus who would definitely be staying behind. But he shook his head with a heavy sigh.

“Because I’m only dead weight, Windblade. The Autobots that are joining you, they’re the only ones with any modicum of sympathy for your kind. But the moment they get hurt, or worse, they’ll turn on you like Sharkticons. And if you have me around, someone will get hurt.”

He was starting to snarl, and Windblade took her hands off of him. But, despite apparently being numb, he seemed to notice the release from her grip, because he went silent as soon as she did so. She still had the other wing stub to clean, so she went back to it when she sensed that she could.

“I just want you to be safe,” she told him.

“I will be,” he pledged. “I’m better off looking after myself.” 

Windblade couldn’t disagree more, but she said nothing. Starscream must have hated the hiss of the shower all on its own, because he kept on talking anyway.

“Besides… I’m sure that Drift fellow will be tagging along as well. I’ll gladly take Megatronus over him.”

Windblade had to laugh— he wasn’t saying that just because Drift was likely more dangerous than Megatronus (if he had to be). “You really don’t like the Circle of Light.”

“Most Seekers felt the same way. It’s a long story, and you’ve already had plenty of those for one cycle. Even if he wasn’t one of them… I’m sure he dislikes me just as much in return.” He turned around, twitching the sterilised wing stubs as he faced her, and took the scrubber back from her. Then he motioned for her to face the wall as well, so he could return the favor. Windblade was always cautious of anyone being near her wings, but someone who knew how sensitive they could be was someone she could trust to treat them right. Though she tensed as soon as Starscream pressed against her strut, she quickly eased to his touch with a sigh that pushed out ghosts of steam from her vents. He was quick, knowing that the cleanser stream was close to shutting off, but he didn’t rush so much that Windblade felt like she was going to have a seizure. 

(That had happened once in the communal shower with Lightbright; only once, because Windblade had never let her try it again).

This was far different from the clumsy swipes and rubs that she could expect from back home, and she could tell that Starscream was focusing intently on the task. If he ventured too close to a cluster of nodes that made her start twitching, he would immediately retreat until her wings returned to a stable position…

And it was hard to say that she wasn’t disappointed when he did so. Harder still to deny that she wished she was facing him. There was a gust of air at her throat, just over her shoulder, and she wanted to believe that it was Starscream’s exhale even as she felt their EM fields fizzle from the close overlap.

She trusted Starscream. Despite everything, or more aptly because of everything they’d been through, she liked being with him. 

They kept each other alive. And they couldn’t take their optics, or hands, off of each other.

On Caminus only one of those traits would apply to a lover, and that was why Windblade had never found one. Because the galaxy was so much bigger than just Caminus… because her spark belonged to Primus, and Primus was Cybertron, and Cybertron had summoned her to rescue its prince.

Or, perhaps now, it was the other way around. 

“There’s something you should know, Windblade…”

Starscream was holding her by the waist with one hand, the claws so softly grazing her hip, and she gasped just as the cleanser stream let out its last trickle over her chest. He was speaking at her neck, at one of the half-healed scars left by his claws, and the gust over her shoulder was now undeniably from his mouth. Without the hiss of the cleanser to mask it, his voice was a lone rumble of thunder that almost made her flinch. 

But she didn’t want to move away from him, not by a single inch. Not when his other hand, still holding the scrub, appeared in front of her and, with a single squeeze from his claws, released the last of the absorbed liquid over her front in a heavy stream. From her chest, to her abdomen, to the heat between her legs, the liquid seemed to mark a path that Windblade was desperate to have explored. As if Starscream was directing each drip himself.

‘Well…? Are you going to tell me what I should know? Or are you just going to keep torturing me?’ 

Starscream had to have known what he was doing. The effect. The reason she was frozen, with those claws placed so deliberately over the swell of her hip. He seemed to be waiting for her first, to speak or do something. But Windblade couldn’t even gulp, not when all her focus was on keeping her wings tied in place. 

And then Starscream pulled away, leaving her alone on the precipice of whatever else she’d been expecting. She shuddered, the cold only now assaulting her damp frame as the warmth on her cheeks and thighs failed to fight off the chill. Her wings fluttered the most, scattering the last drops of solvent over the tiles, before Starscream appeared in front of her with a ragged cloth.

“Drift never told you that Star Saber was a Seeker,” he said, as he handed her the rag. “That was what he meant, about a son of Daedalus and a daughter of the Mistress finding each other.”

Windblade was still recovering from his touch, so she was hesitant to graze his talons with hers as she took the thin cloth. But mostly she was confused, which she was more than used to feeling by now. 

“Daedalus was... Star Saber’s father?” She mopped up the last trails of solvent from her protoform as she asked.

“Only symbolically. I mentioned before that he only ever had two true children… but that’s a whole other mess on its own.” Starscream seated himself on the bench near the paint shelves, apparently content with letting himself drip dry. ”The story goes that Daedalus crafted wings for those who deserved them. Only a small fraction of Cybertron earned that right, including Star Saber. Then, after his children fell from grace, he destroyed the blueprints and refused to forge ever again.”

It was a tragic tale, one that seemed tailor-made for one of Caminus’ stages. Windblade rubbed the rag around the back of her neck as she frowned.

“Did Daedalus... actually exist?” she asked. 

In place of a shrug, Starscream grunted at the floor. “Depends on who you ask.”

“Well, I’m asking you.”

He looked up at her now, and he spared her a sad smile. “No. He didn’t. Seekers just liked to think that he did, because it helped them feel better about not being in Primus’ plans.”

Windblade had to wonder how recently Starscream had come to that belief. From what Ratchet had said, it would be surprising if he was able to keep faith in anything, even Primus, after what had been done to him.

“If Star Saber was a Seeker,” she said, trying to steer the subject elsewhere for both of their sakes, “did he have a trine?”

He scoffed. “You don’t even know what that word means.”

“Because you’ve refused to tell me,” she reminded him, struggling not to snap with her vocaliser. But he still flinched from the little bite she was unable to hold back, and she immediately regretted it. 

“Right…” Starscream sighed as his hands lay limp on his knees. “Tell me, Windblade. How does it feel to be alone?”

She couldn’t answer at first, because she was immediately taken back to her first moment alone with him. His first chance to feel safe, and her first chance to get answers.

“Caminus must be a very lonely place, then,” he’d said. And she’d thought it was the opposite, simply because she was always surrounded by people, and because those people could meet and dance and sing and interface whenever they wished.

But for all of Caminus’ people, those people who didn’t even know how close they could truly be to each other, how many friends did she really have? Everyone she’d dragged along on this suicide mission... but no more than that.

And when she didn’t even have those few friends, how did it feel?

“...Can’t say I enjoy it, most of the time.” She couldn’t hide the croak in her voice, but Starscream pretended not to hear it.

“So you seek out others,” he said. “But no more than two people at a time.”

“I… never really noticed before. But…”

Hot Shot and Lightbright. They’d gone through their Cityspeaker studies together, but there had been others in the same class. What had drawn her to those two specifically? Velocity and Nautica too; Windblade had only befriended them as a pair at first. All her friendships came in twos. 

Starscream seemed to find her dawning realisation amusing.

“That’s your trine instinct,” he informed her. “You’re compelled to seek out others, two extremes who can balance out your spark. Seekers can be… volatile creatures, if left alone. I’m sure you’ve noticed. So we need companions who can keep us anchored, and who we in turn can anchor.”

“I see.” Windblade was nodding blindly as she re-examined every interaction that had brought her here, how she struggled to interact with people on her own (or people in general). She’d avoided being branded a pyroclast— the lowest of the low on Caminus, those who had no friends at all and no means to make them— but that was more from luck than actual effort on her part.

Maxima would have been able to help Windblade sort out her new thoughts… but she was somewhere far away. She would have been yearning for a trine as well, without even knowing what one was. 

Windblade had so much to tell her, when she finally found her.

“One of my favorite stories,” Starscream began with a hesitant halt, “was of Daedalus’ two brothers. Iapetus and Hyperion. His trine. They couldn’t stand each other, and they almost fought to the death. So Daedalus tore their sparks from their bodies and trapped them in orbit around his own. That was the only way he could get them to behave.”

Windblade blinked. She didn’t even know if that was medically possible (but, then again, it was just a story). “Did... it work?”

“I suppose it did.” Starscream shrugged as he stood up and faced the paint shelves bolted above him. “And to answer your first question; no. Star Saber didn’t have one.”

His back was to her as he scanned the small canisters, picking some up to peer at their contents. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry to rearmor himself, so Windblade retrieved her own plates and snapped them into place. Somehow, she felt more indecent redressing without him looking than she did undressing with his optics locked onto her. 

“You said there was a story with him and the Mistress,” she reminded Starscream as she pulled her chest armour on. And he chuckled as he set a yellow-stained tin back into its place. 

“Quite simply,” he told her over his shoulder, “it was believed that they were in love. Emphasis on ‘were’.”

Windblade’s digits froze, leaving her right thigh-plating half hanging off of her leg. 

“...They were bonded?”

“No-one knows that for sure. But they were consorts, at the very least. Until the Quintessons came.”

Windblade’s breath was a hiss as she clad her legs in her chipped red plating, not only because she was trying to avoid the coil of heat that still lurked between them.

“Quintus made the Quintessons,” she said, thinking out loud as she tried to fathom the Mistress, the blessed voice of Primus, ever having her spark belong to a mortal mech. “And his tribe was part of the Circle of Fire. Is... that how the Mistress knew Cybertron was to be invaded?”

She looked up at Starscream, so she could see on his face if she was right or wrong. But he only showed her half of his face over his shoulder.

“Perhaps,” he answered. “Or, when your Mistress miraculously discovered the art of Cityspeaking, one of the great Titans could have warned her.”

He looked at her now, swivelling his waist so that his ruined wings were just shadows behind him, and he seemed just as curious to her expression as she was to his. Windblade fought the urge to hide her face, because she knew it would tell him everything she’d been so wrong about.

“That’s what we were told happened,” she whispered. Caminus had seen the invasion coming, and had whispered his warnings to the Mistress. Her followers, the Circle of Fire, were the only ones who escaped Quintesson slavery because only they could believe that the Empire was about to fall.

“You were also told that she tried to warn the others,” Starscream said, not ungently. “To save them.”

Windblade let herself sit, to save herself the indignity of collapsing. 

“...She didn’t, did she? She just left them all behind.”

As she should have known all along. 

Why would Primus let her leave all His children to be enslaved? Why would he command her to leave His body to be desecrated? If He even spoke to her at all.

“It’s hard to know what’s true, when all the witnesses are dead,” Starscream told her, as a way of softening the blow. But this was what he’d been trying to tell her all along, and he could not deny that even with the best intentions. Windblade could hardly hold her helm up as she sat with the weight of horrible realisation pulling on her neck, where all trace and comfort of Starscream’s warm breath was gone.

Why would the Mistress do such a thing, if the Mistress she knew was truly the same one who led the Camien exodus? Only one answer presented itself to her, the only one that made sense to her from what she now knew of her matriarch.

Star Saber was a Seeker. 

Seekers came from the Well, once upon a time. 

And, when the Mistress of Flame decided to condemn Cybertron, she took that part of the Well away with her. It could be nothing more than an act of cruellest spite, if she wanted to ensure that no more Star Sabers would ever walk or fly on Cybertron. If she wanted to curse the planet long after the Quintessons were gone.

“Was it because of Star Saber?” Windblade’s voice was a shaking ghost that barely rose over her roaring fans. “Whatever broke them apart, did she leave Cybertron to die because of it?”

Starscream had left her to think, without moving or speaking to interrupt or distract her, and now he seemed to seriously consider her hypothesis. He’d probably considered it himself, since he’d known all along these terrible tales, but he must have been surprised to hear her figure it out for herself so quickly.

“That would be the simplest answer,” he said, as he finally began to pull armor over his scarred protoform. “If there is an answer at all. But, from how your Mistress reacted to the sight of beasts… I might wager that Deathsaurus and his dear wife had something to do with it.”

Once his broken plates were in place he chose another paint tin from the shelf— this one with half of its crimson contents dried down its side— and inspected it with a scowl while Windblade struggled to factor the other two into the equation. 

Esmeral and Deathsaurus… each of them had been descended from Onyx Prime, the original technorganic. If the Mistress had known them both personally, and had agreed to rule the Empire alongside them, then why hadn’t they disgusted her as the other technorganics had done? It couldn’t be that modern technorganics were so different from their ancestors, because Starscream wouldn’t have mentioned the Emperor and his mate if they weren’t like their descendants. The only explanation on hand was that the Mistress had always hated children of Onyx, and that hatred spurred her to abandon the empire that had been founded by them.

“But Esmeral was a Cityspeaker,” Windblade recalled. “She would have known what the Titans were saying. She could have been warned about the Quintessons as well-”

“She could have,” Starscream interrupted, “if the Empire hadn’t been so bloated and insatiable. Esmeral’s Titans were flagships of war. By all surviving accounts, she was a career coloniser just like her husband. It was rare for either of them to be seen on Cybertron. By the time they would have known about the invasion, your Mistress and Caminus would have already been light years away. And Star Saber was too busy trying to bring her back to see the end of everything he’d built.”

“Right…” Windblade’s gaze was distant, and she was desperate to lie down somewhere flat. She felt her EM field frizzle as Starscream approached her, ending in a kneel before her.

“It’s a lot to take in,” he said as his claws probed the red paint canister. “I won’t blame you for not believing most of it.”

If he’d told her this awful truth sooner, she probably would have thought he was lying just to make her more miserable. But if he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have told her at all. “There’s no reason for me not to believe it.”

“Other than to save your own spark?” His optics flicked up, and hers were immediately caught in their line of sight. She shook her head. 

“My spark isn’t worth so much effort to save.” 

Then her neck was forced still, but not firmly or suddenly. Starscream’s claws rested on her face, framing the chin, while his other hand held talons dripping with red paint. He directed her face towards him, commanding her gaze only by focusing on hers, and with that marked hand he traced the naked metal under her eyes. At first Windblade thought he was only mirroring the way she had pressed her digits into his cheeks, to keep him awake and sane while they waited out the downpour, but the familiar pattern of the pressure and the color of the paint on his claws told the truth. He was drawing her Cityspeaker brand for her, the marks of Caminus and Esmeral that meant so much more now than they had when she first painted them on.

“If you truly believe that, Windblade of Caminus,” he told her, in a whisper that barely grazed her lips, “then you are the greatest fool of all.”

She hadn’t realised that he’d come so close to her, not until his warm breath returned to grace her. And then he pulled away, and it was gone once again. This time, she wasn’t sure if he was doing it on purpose. 

“We should get back,” he said as he rose to his feet. “Before they send someone to drag us out of here.”

Windblade blinked in his absence, finding that her mouth was parched and packed with static. “Right… I might be leaving soon.”

“Right.” And that was all that Starscream had left to say. He seemed oblivious to the disturbance from Windblade’s EM field, and the lingering effect of his touch on her. Though it was almost impossible to, Windblade felt that she had no choice but to ignore it as well. 

Her priority was, as it always was, finding the others safe and sound, and she couldn’t be distracted from that. 

(Which was a fact that Starscream must have been aware of, so she had to be grateful for him refusing to give her further distractions. If that was what he was doing at all.)

As soon as they left the lonely corridor to the washrack, they were torn from each other. Ariel waved over to Windblade, and Starscream made himself scarce as soon as the pink femme started to approach. 

“There you are, Windblade. Come meet the rest of our team.” Ariel took Windblade by the arm and, with surprising strength, pulled her over to a contingent of equal-parts friends and strangers. Nautica and Afterburner were eyeing her, as if they’d thought they lost her again, though Windblade chalked it up to them just being surprised to see her markings in place again.

“So,” Ariel finally released her arm and gestured to the other two familiar faces, “you already know Drift and Flamewar.” 

“Yo.” Flamewar held up two digits in greeting with a barbed grin. 

“You’re looking better already, sister.” Drift was equally beaming, and his Great Sword was planted on the ground as he leaned on it. 

“This is Hound, and Skids. And this one is Bumblebee.” Ariel pointed out three other mechs, green and blue and yellow respectively. Skids seemed more interested in staring at Nautica than making any acquaintance, but he at least nodded when his name was said.

“Hiya.” Bumblebee must have been the youngest of the three from the pitch of his voice, but his bright armour bore enough scratches to prove that he could look after himself.

“Frenzy will be our scout,” Ariel went on as she pointed out a small blue mech, the same one who had called Starscream a liar just a few breems ago. “You’ve met his brother Rumble already.” 

Frenzy nodded in greeting like Skids, but Windblade couldn’t fathom why he was coming along. She’d have thought he’d be on Megatronus’ side, happy to let the Camiens rot. But if Ariel thought he was fine to help, then she had to accept it.

“First Aid will be our field medic,” Ariel inclined her head to the masked medic, who was as usual glued to his datapad, “and Roulette and Shadow Striker will watch our flank. Should be plenty to keep us all safe.”

The two femmes, both clad in purple with red optics, shared a look before Shadow Striker spoke. 

“Wasn’t Arcee coming as well?” she asked, and Ariel peered around as if she was expecting to see the missing member.

“She said she would be, but I haven’t seen her,” Drift added. “Must be making some last-klick preparations.”

“Well, we’ll give her five klicks to show up,” Ariel decreed. “We need to move before dawn so we can avoid the patrols.”

No-one argued against her, so Windblade realised she had limited time before she’d have to be gone. There was nothing she needed to gather, no more preparations she could make in such little time… but there was one thing she had to be sure of. 

She found Starscream lingering near the medbay, as if he was ready to flee inside at the first sign of trouble. That helped assure her that he’d at least be safe, if he wanted to stay behind.

“Are you sure you won’t join us?” She approached him from behind, but he must have sensed her coming because he didn’t flinch.

“You won’t need me around,” he insisted without turning around. “It’s better… better that I stay here.”

And there was no point in arguing with him. Even so, Windblade couldn’t walk away to leave him just yet.

“But you’ll still be here,” she said, “when I get back.” It was a statement rather than a question, but it still demanded an answer. Starscream shrugged, and the great weight of his wings betrayed that answer.

“I don’t know if I can promise that,” he told her. 

“Then just promise me that you’ll rest, at least.” She forced him to look at her by going around him, standing before him just as he had knelt before her. “You deserve it.”

Her hand was on his shoulder, the lightest pressure that he could easily shrug off if he wanted to. He stared at her fingers, and his own— still stained red from the paint that was drying on her cheeks— hovered over them briefly before coming to rest on top of them. His grip was warm.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Windblade,” he sighed. “I’ll do whatever you ask…” 

She didn’t like how absolute he made the statement sound, but she knew better than to correct him before he gave her his verdict. “Yes?”

He took her hand from his shoulder, holding it in his own like a scrap of energon held tightly between desperate teeth.

“If you’ll do whatever it takes to keep yourself alive,” he said, staring at her over the curled fist he held her with. “No matter what you have to do, you just do it. So long as it keeps you alive.”

And his grip tightened with each word, to the point that Windblade was sure her fingers would be dented. But she didn’t fight to free herself. She only nodded.

“Okay, then,” she swore.

Then he immediately relaxed, though he didn’t let her go just yet. If he could have, he might have not let her go at all. Windblade wouldn’t have minded that, but a new commotion finally pulled their optics attention away from each other.

“Arcee, please just think about this-”
“I have thought about it, Prowl. And I’m going.” 

Prowl, the black-white mech who had argued with Orion, was trailing after the pink-white femme who had taken fight bets with Flamewar. He was obviously pleading with her, and she was obviously not listening.

“You and Orion and Ratchet would have me waste away in the dorms,” she yelled over her shoulder at him, “when I could be out there making myself useful!”

“Keeping yourself safe is not letting yourself waste away!” Prowl grabbed her by the shoulder, forcing her to stay still while spinning her to face him. By now, Windblade wasn’t the only one staring at the scene they were causing. Prowl and Arcee both glared at each nosy face until they cowered away, and then they made a silent agreement to move elsewhere. Windblade watched them retreat to a faraway corner, and from her position she could only see Arcee.

The two kept arguing, though the words were inaudible now. Then Arcee grabbed her own chestplates, holding them firmly as if they were making a point for her, and Prowl put his own hands over hers as if trying to release them. And then, finally, all hands fell down, and Arcee pressed her head against a surface that could only have been Prowl’s obscured face.

Windblade stopped watching them, only now feeling like she was intruding. Starscream had left while she was distracted, but she had nothing else to say that wouldn’t make her stay behind with him.

No. Her friends needed her. And she had a point to prove, to Chromia and Lightbright and the rest of Caminus. She could show that Cityspeakers weren’t so defenseless after all, but only if she was there to show them. 

Besides, Starscream would take care of himself. So long as she kept herself alive, he would do anything she asked of him. Windblade returned to the others without another moment to waste, and this time Arcee was with them. Whatever she’d been arguing with Prowl about, he must have given up on fighting her.

“Where’s Ariel?” Windblade only noticed that their leader wasn’t around as she scanned the rest of the team. Flamewar motioned over her shoulder with her head while her hands focused on cleaning the bulky weapon in her lap.

“Can’t leave without saying goodbye, y’know.”

Ariel was standing with Orion, not secluded in a corner like Prowl and Arcee were, while the two held each other's heads close together, as if they were magnetised. And now Windblade could see how close sparkmates were supposed to be.

“Look after yourself, love,” she heard Orion tell Ariel.

“Only if you do the same,” Ariel vowed. “Promise?”

Orion nodded against her forehead, and they closed the distance between each other with a mere tilt of their necks. 

As she watched the tender and unfamiliar farewell, it was impossible for Windblade not to think of Starscream, how close they had come to doing the same, and only Starscream. 

"Well? All ready to go?" Afterburner addressed everyone, but he placed a hand on Windblade's shoulder specifically. She jumped from his touch, then nodded furiously before he could notice the heat from her armour.

"Ready as I'll ever be." And that much wasn't a lie. She would never, ever be ready enough.

So was she really going to push her luck all over again, and risk everything in her life for some alien strangers? Well, she’d made a promise. And she didn’t like thinking of Hot Shot and Velocity being trapped in that dark closet for any longer than they had to be. 

Hell, the only reason Airazor waited at all was to ensure that Rhinox wouldn’t be wondering where she was off to so late in the day. Their schedules in the spark of Technotropolis usually put them together at home at the same time, which she was usually grateful for, but in this case she was almost pulling her feathers out waiting for the chance to slip away-

“Typical.” Rhinox almost cracked the casing of his comm pager as he dropped it still-blinking into his subspace. “They always wait ‘til my day off to drag me in.”

Airazor hid her anxious grin behind the rim of her energon glass. “Must be something bad if they can’t just have Razorbeast deal with it.”

That was Razorbeast’s whole job after all, at least according to her uncle; low-level admin work that always needed done, and that Rhinox was too old to have the patience for anymore. 

“Yeah, that damn Inferno must have done something to really piss off the Chancellor.” Rhinox groaned as he rose from his favorite chair, plaintive and pitying as if he’d just been shot in the chest. “He’s been suspended from the Guard for a vorn, and I’m the only one who can revoke his security clearance.”

The feathers on Airazor’s eyeridges twitched, but she’d learned a long time ago that there wasn’t much point to asking him any questions about his work. There wasn’t much he was allowed to discuss, and what little was allowed wasn’t anything worth asking about. So she just tried not to gulp down her fuel as she watched him prepare to leave, though of course he was taking his sweet time just to spite whatever aft had disturbed his precious peace. She was almost choking on the dregs by the time he finally went for the door.

“No wild parties while I’m gone,” he told her.

“Course not. I’ll wait til you get back.”

She didn’t even wait until the door was fully closed. She had no idea how much time she had, how long it would take to get inside the spaceport, if she’d even be able to slip past the security…

But she had to try. She’d never forgive herself if she didn’t do that much. 

Maybe it was worth sending a comm to Tigatron before she left. He might have been waiting for her to message first this whole time. But… what would she say? If she told him she was once again putting her life, his job, at risk, if she tried again to get his help in doing it; Primus, he’d want nothing to do with her. It was selfish and stupid getting him involved at all in the first place. 

No. She’d go alone, and, if she had to, she’d go down alone. Airazor left the door unlocked, went for the window at the other side of the house and thanked Onyx that Rhinox chose a suite on the ground floor of the complex. A curfew had been put in place after the second prison break, ostensibly to keep citizens safe from the Camiens now running loose across Cybertron. Airazor would have to keep to the shadows on the ground, until she was far enough away that the neighbours wouldn’t recognise her. A random watcher wouldn’t be able to pick her out from a hundred other feather flyers, but the people she lived near would know her just from her silhouette, and they’d take any chance at a reward for turning in a suspected traitor. Didn’t matter that this wasn’t the slums, nor that no-one went hungry. Money was money, and those who had enough of it were always looking for more anyway. 

When she was finally far enough out to fly, her joy from being able to soar was almost able to drown out common sense, that shadow-voice screaming at her to turn back before she got herself gunned down. Maybe it was her father’s voice, but she’d never know for sure. 

The nights were starting to warm up now, but the protoform under her feathers still shivered in the wind. Airazor told herself it was just the wind, even when she reached the end of the safe airspace outside of the port. 

Surprisingly, the security didn’t seem to have been increased since her last visit. Not unless there was a new chameleon guard patrol she didn’t know about. But, with the curfew in place, she couldn’t just waltz in like last time with an ‘urgent message’ for Tigatron. Hell, she didn’t think she could get away with that twice in a row anyway. So it was just as well she had a trump card in her subspace, the reason she’d been watching Rhinox intently as he gathered his work supplies, and why she now crept over to the maintenance access gate away from the floodlights.

Rhinox had never noticed the missing access key from his tablet case; which wasn’t like him, but he was in such a slump to leave that maybe he overlooked it on purpose, so he’d have an excuse to take even longer to fix the issue that ruined his day off. The security at Technotropolis would give him a temporary one in the meantime, so he’d be stuck in the capitol and none-the-wiser that he was apparently paying a visit to the Hydrax port at the same time.

A technical glitch. Aging hardware, and all the recent snow and rain, just making things difficult to keep track of. People in charge were more likely to believe excuses than the worst-case-scenario even if it was happening right in front of them. Airazor had worked on the fringes of the council— ostensibly as a courier, but more like an errand girl nowadays— long enough to count on that as a fact. 

Even so… like how she didn’t want Tigatron involved in her mess, it felt wrong to drag Rhinox, the mech who had raised her, into this as well. It had felt wrong from the moment she had the idea, and especially so when she realised it was her only option.

She’d already made her choice. Her father’s voice was only a mute shrill in the back of her mind, and it could not stop her now any more than she could stop a tsunami with the flap of her wings. She tried not to touch the door as she pushed it open, not wanting to leave any more evidence of her crime. 

The Camien’s ship, the Hermitian , was still the sole occupant of the port. In fact, Airazor had to wonder if the port had housed ships at all in the last few hundred years. Seemed like a waste of space to her, but the Chancellor clearly must have been anticipating visitors in the last five hundred years if he insisted on keeping it around. 

Hmm.

The guards she was expecting weren’t in place, which she could only assume was because their shift was during the day. Tigatron was the general commander, so he could be working day or night. Dammit, she should have at least asked if he was working. See if he was free, so she could see him. She still could. He was just a comm call away…

But she couldn’t, really. Not until she was out of here. Besides, he wouldn’t be asked to supervise guards that didn’t even seem to be on duty. Whether they were just on break or on strike, Airazor didn’t wait to be caught. She dodged the floodlights until she reached the ship and, using the same secret entrance she’d found before, slammed herself inside before she could regret it. 

It was pitch-black, too dark to even see the blue flush in her faceplate. She had to feel her way over to the command pod, and the light leaking in through the viewport was just enough for her to find the release button for the Camien’s hiding place. 

“It’s Airazor.” She announced herself just as she pressed it, so the Camiens wouldn’t burst out to try and kill her in self-defense. She could only see the light of their optics when they crossed the threshold of the cabinet to the ship, and it was a dull and bleary light when it came about.

“How long has it been?” Hot Shot was the first to speak, and his voice was a hoarse whisper.
“Since we last spoke? Two solar cycles.” Airazor resisted the urge to kneel down to speak to him. It was hard to believe he was a full-grown mech when he was so small.

“It feels longer than that.” Velocity sounded a little more lively, but the tremor in her vocaliser indicated that she hadn’t been using it much in those two long cycles. Airazor wished she had good news to tell them, something to make the wait worth it, but all she could manage in good conscience was a meager offering of hope.

“I think I can try and get you two out of here now.” She craned her neck to look out the viewport as she spoke.  “The coast is clear, from what I could see. This is probably the best chance you’ll have.” 

Hot Shot’s optics immediately flickered brighter, bringing his cracked markings and auspicious grin into view, but Velocity’s frown could be heard if not seen.

“But… we can’t abandon the ship,” she said. “It’s our only way to get a message to the Mistress.” 

“And… she’s the only one who can get us home,” Hot Shot added, and his smile could be seen falling just before the light from his optics died back to a dull glow. He sat down with a heavy clunk. 

Airazor didn’t know what to tell them next. Regardless of her own suspicions about the Camiens’ matriarch, they clearly trusted her and her alone to save them. The Mistress was their protector just as the Chancellor was the protector of technorganics, and there was nothing a stranger could say that would convince them otherwise. At the same time, this was their best chance to get out, and if they didn’t take it now then it was only a matter of time until they were discovered. But even if they agreed to follow her off the ship, where would they go? She hadn’t thought enough about that part. 

“Well…” Airazor looked from the Camiens to the viewport, expecting the latter to be suddenly filled with people in the space of a blink. Then she looked down at the command console, which was still as foreign and intimidating to her as it was the first time she saw it. 

“Rattrap had his engineers shut all the ship’s major systems down,” she said as she turned her head towards Velocity. “I could try to reactivate them, but… I don’t have the right security clearance codes. I might set off something that’ll get us surrounded.”

The ship itself had no alarms set in place, likely to save Terrorsaur and his keyboard techs any headaches from setting them off by just moving around. But the controls would have definitely been rigged so that only Terrorsaur or the chancellor himself could access them. Even if the Camien’s had an indecipherable command interface, it was easy enough to set up a security system for the buttons themselves. Even if Airazor knew what the hell she was doing, she doubted that Rhinox’s credentials could help her here.

“Well, you can just run away, right?” Hot Shot asked as he hugged his knees to his chest. “They won’t be able to catch you.”

“And leave you two behind to get caught? I’d rather not.”

“I don’t get that,” Velocity said, shaking her head with as little effort as possible.

“Get what?” Airazor asked, and Velocity’s head picked up pace as she closed her optics.

“Why are you risking so much to help us?” she pressed. “You’re supposed to hate us.”

Hot Shot said nothing this time, but his cautious gaze spoke for him. Airazor forced her feathers to lie flat as she shrugged.

“Like I said. I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. So you shouldn’t be punished for… not doing anything.” She didn’t know how else to say it, what else she could say. The Camiens had no reason to trust her other than her own assurance that she just wanted to help, but she couldn’t give them any other reason. She got nothing out of saving them, other than a clear conscience. But that was enough for her.

“Rattrap wants us punished anyway,” Hot Shot muttered.

“Well, screw him,” Airazor huffed as she sank to the floor across from him. “Whether he’s just wrong or stupid… screw him.”

It was the first time she’d ever spoken such things out loud. And it felt good. If he did this all on purpose, just to make Camiens look like monsters… screw him. Screw him .

“Is there really no way for us to call the Mistress?” Velocity pressed. 

Airazor sighed.  “I don’t know. It’s your ship, not mine.”

“Not ours, either,” Hot Shot corrected. “It was always Nautica’s. Loved it like a lover. I mean… she still does. Cause she’s still alive.” He spoke through a failing smile.

“We don’t know how any of the controls work,” Velocity elaborated. “I’m a medic, not an engineer. And Hot Shot’s… well, he’s…” She was clearly struggling to come up with what he was useful for, until she finally thought of something. 

“...good for getting into tight spaces.”

It should have been an insult, no matter how veiled, but Hot Shot seemed to take it with pride. “That’s the same thing Maxima always told me.”

At least they hadn’t lost their senses of humor yet. Airazor pushed herself to her feet with some effort. “Okay… well, I’m no pilot either. Never needed metal wings to fly anywhere.” She addressed the waiting console, prodding the air above it with her claws as if she could sense which one would free her as well as the Camiens. They  clearly weren’t going to leave without at least knowing for sure that they were fragged if they stayed.

“So… if I was designing a ship… and I was gonna put the comm button somewhere, I’d put it…” 

Some of them were circular. Some long, or minuscule. Some with printed symbols. None of them were obviously useful. So she went with her spark’s instinct and just hovered over the largest one, with a whispered prayer to Onyx.

“Here?”

She grazed her claw against it, and that was enough to trip the alarm. The oscillating shriek of the siren was enough to almost make her fly off the floor, and her spark was ready to soar in the opposite direction straight out of her chamber. On the plus side now there was light in the pod to see by, but it was a flood of red that painted the whole ship as a dangerous place to be.

“Okay, that was bad,” Airazor yelled over the noise as she tuned her audios down. “Bad idea. Horrible idea.”

“We’re all gonna die!” Hot Shot was still curled up on the floor, and he masked his audios with his arms wrapped tight around his head.

“We are not ,” Velocity called over at him, just before she grabbed Airazor by her shoulder. “Airazor, are we gonna die?”

“Not if we get the hell out of here. Move it!” She practically shoved Velocity forwards to get her towards the exit, and she didn’t pause to prod Hot Shot up when she could just pick him up around the middle and carry him out. He was heavier than he looked, but too stunned to struggle in her grip.

In the rush it took only five nanoklicks to get peds onto the port’s metal paving, but it was still five too long. A team of flyers could clear the air from Technotropolis to Hydrax in less than a klick. The skeleton crew of the port would already be surging towards them. There was no time for words; Airazor pelted towards the same gate she’d slipped through with Hot Shot frozen under her arm, and she could only hope that Velocity was keeping up behind her. There was a roar in her muted audios, either the wind or the ghost of the alarm or the cries of guards who’d spotted her. She didn’t stop to check which one it was, didn’t stop at all until she had to set Hot Shot down and fumble in her subspace for the access key. 

Every sound was a distant muffle; the crash of Velocity’s body into the fence, her lagging vents, Hot Shot’s whimpers. Every sound except one; still a mumble in the chaos, still painful to hear, but unmistakable when she witnessed the soft mouth that formed the word. A bot, no matter how distracted or deafened, always reacted to their own name.

“Airazor?”

There was someone on the other side of the gate, someone looking at her with such hurt confusion that it broke her spark. The last person on Cybertron she’d wanted to see her.

“ Commander Tigatron, what’s the situation?”

Airazor reset her audios, heard the tail end of the order from Tigatron’s comm unit. He didn’t answer it at first, perhaps because of shock or anger, or just to give Airazor enough time to slip past him. In the leeched glow of the floodlights, his green protoform had the hue of a pale infection, and his fur was ghostly. Airazor felt herself shaking her head, but otherwise she could not move at all. Behind her, she was sure that Velocity and Hot Shot were in the same state.

Tigatron broke the silence, his fangs staying veiled as he spoke into his unit.

“False alarm, sir. Just a petrorabbit caught in the vents.”

And that was it. The distant sirens were swiftly killed, and whatever other bodies were being sent towards them were called back. Airazor wanted to be relieved, but such feelings were impossible to muster.

Hot Shot had the right idea to make a run for it while he still could. He was able to slip right past Tigatron, and the other mech didn’t even acknowledge him.

“Thank you, Tigatron.”  Velocity at least took the time to nod at him before she followed. Once again, he hardly looked at her. All of his attention was on Airazor. 

It was the same cutting appraisal he’d given her when they first met, but without the glow of curiosity to soften the blow. An intimidating glare with a permanent frown- everything about him was unwelcoming at first, but Airazor had quickly learned that he just didn’t realise how scary he could look. When she’d told him that, he’d started putting effort into not scowling around her. She didn’t realise that it was a clue to what he really thought of her, not until some vorns later when he finally realised how oblivious she really was and just asked her outright if she was single. One day she was, and then the next day she wasn’t. 

And now it felt like she was going to lose him just as swiftly.

“Tigatron, I can explain-”

“You could explain.” His snarl was nothing like anything she’d heard from him before, certainly not anything he’d wanted her to hear.  “But they’d still have you dragged away and locked up for this. Or worse. What the hell were you thinking ?”

Airazor forced herself not to gulp as she closed the gate behind her. “I told you already. They’re innocent. They don’t deserve to be hunted down like this-!”

“That isn’t what matters, Airazor!” He kept his voice to a low hiss, a rumble from the depths of his spark. “This isn’t our fight. This isn’t your responsibility. You owe them nothing .” 

He pressed a talon into her chest for emphasis, and her feathers were so stiff that he almost pulled out a clutch of them when his hand fell.

“Neither do you. So why didn’t you call them in?” Airazor accused. 

“To protect you, of course.”

“No. You could have come up with some excuse for me. You would have made yourself look like a hero-”

“I don’t want to be a hero.” He held her shoulders now, his head bowed under a heavy weight. In the shadow’s relief, she could see new markings on his face that she hadn’t noticed before, or that he just hadn’t allowed her to see. Wrinkles and sags in the protoform. 

“I don’t want to be part of this… but I have to. For both our sakes.”

Airazor finally realised that he wasn’t arguing with her about the Camiens. It didn’t matter at all if they were innocent. Because even if he believed her, he couldn’t admit it. He couldn’t do anything about it.

“I understand.” She took his hand from her shoulder, squeezed the palm before freeing him from her presence. “I won’t drag you into this any more than I already have.”

“Airazor, wait.” Tigatron tried to grab her again as she passed by.

“You should get back to work,” she insisted, shrugging off his hand for his own good. “They’ll get suspicious.”

“Do you hate me for this, Airazor?”

She stopped in her tracks. The wind pulled her feathers flush against her back.

“Do you hate me for it?” she asked as she turned towards him. 

“I could never hate you.” There was a glisten to his eyes as he shook his head, no trace of a hiss or snarl in his words. And Airazor ran back to him, throwing herself around him so there was no doubt in his mind just as there was none in hers.

“Then there’s your answer. Never forget it. I’ll call you when it’s safe.” She could only peck his cheek, cold and roughened by so many late nights spent betraying himself, else she knew she wouldn’t be able to leave him.

“Please,” he sighed. “Please stay safe.”

She still couldn’t make that a promise to him. She could only try. Even if it meant putting at risk the only safe place she had on Cybertron… 

But the Camiens had nowhere else they could go. She certainly had nowhere else to go. She just prayed to Primus that Rhinox was still far away in Technotropolis.

 

✧✦✧

 

Velocity still didn’t understand what had happened with Tigatron, why he’d let them go, or why Airazor had taken so long to catch up with them. But, at a time like this when they were still a long way from safety, she knew such things weren’t worth worrying over. And Hot Shot could do enough worrying and panicking by himself for the both of them. 

He’d actually, shockingly, managed to stay calm in the claustrophobic grip of the ship’s cabinet, soothed by the slowed passage of time in that empty darkness. Now that he’d been pulled out of it, he looked like he just wanted to run back to the ship and dive inside where no-one could find him. But there was nowhere to go but forwards, or whatever direction Airazor was taking them in. This part of Cybertron was thankfully full of tall structures, starscrapers and stout factories that could shield them from the overhead glare of scouts and searchlights. Airazor crept between the steel struts as if she was a wanted criminal as well, and she didn’t need to tell either Camien that being seen by anyone at this point would be a death sentence. 

“Where are we going?” Hot Shot couldn’t help himself, hissing behind a hand that cupped his mouth. Velocity didn’t bother shushing him because it would have just meant more noise to give them away, and because, honestly, she’d wanted to ask the very same thing. Airazor’s answer was delayed until they reached the end of the deserted block, and it came with a relieved sigh. 

“Somewhere safe. I promise.” She motioned for the Camiens to go ahead of her, down a ramp towards a line of dark windows, and took the lead once more as she hid herself under the view ledges. Hot Shot’s small size saved him from having to crawl, while Velocity almost had to press herself flat to the ground so that her helm’s crest wouldn’t be seen moving past the viewports. Airazor at least didn’t make them travel the whole length of the building; she stopped just before the halfway point, then reached up to the window and pushed against it. With one last frantic look around her, she pulled herself up by the ledge in a single smooth motion, and fell inside. 

Velocity didn’t know what was waiting for her inside that place, but the longer she spent out in the open the more certain she was that she’d soon find a bullet or blade in her spark. She was craving the security of walls and a roof as much as Hot Shot was, and she didn’t have time to be cautious. She followed Airazor’s movement, and this time there was a feathered hand grasping hers to help pull her in through the window. Meanwhile Hot Shot, whose size was now a clear disadvantage since he couldn’t reach his arms up high enough, had to rely on Velocity and Airazor pulling on each arm to get him inside. He managed to not land on his face, at least.

“This is your house?” he asked when he regained his balance. The room they’d been deposited within was dark, but a thin strip of light came through the edges of a nearby door. 

“Half of it is,” Airazor answered as she sealed the window. “That’s what my uncle says, at least.” She was still whispering, and she didn’t move or speak for a full klick as her green optics darted to every corner of the room. Then she went to the door, and though it opened automatically from her approach, letting in a flood of light that bleached her brown feathers, she only peeked around the edge of the frame. By the time she was able to face Hot Shot and Velocity again, she looked utterly deflated.

“Seems like he’s still out,” she told them as she motioned for them to go on ahead. “I’ll keep the lights on low.”

Velocity didn’t bother with questions, and surprisingly neither did Hot Shot, as Airazor led them out of the dark. The house, suite, whatever Cybertronians called their hideaways, didn’t really seem any different to a hab on Caminus. The walls were smooth steel, albeit not full of a Titan’s energon and the soothing hum of his engines, the floor set in uniform and slightly tarnished tiles. There was a receiving room with a refuelling station, tables and chairs and an entertainment array, and three other closed swing-doors that must have concealed personal recharge pods, and likely a washrack. It was much plainer than a Camien’s living space, no sign of personal effects or memorabilia (even someone who didn’t love the limelight and noise, like Velocity, still held onto leaflets and trinkets handed out from various productions and shows back home), but it was still undoubtedly the home of a mechanical being. Velocity could only assume that anything else organics made use of was out of sight, and she pulled Hot Shot by the back of his neck when it looked like he wanted to go snooping around to see for himself.

‘ I need to ask Maxima how the hell she keeps him behaving when I see her,’ she noted, though she was sure that just Maxima’s sheer presence could terrify a Sharkticon into submission. Doubly-so if she’d been drinking. Triply-so if…

If she was even still alive.

“We have some energon in the cooler. Take as much as you need.” Airazor pointed to a translucent storage pod at the refuelling station, and the ache from Velocity’s tanks helped pull her mind away from places that existed only to torture herself. 

Hot Shot didn’t need to be told twice; he easily freed himself from Velocity’s grip with the pull of promised cool energon that hadn’t been sitting stagnant in an engine for several vorns. Even if he wasn’t deprived, he could have easily drained an entire trough all by himself any day of the decacycle. But, with the sealed canister in his hand, he stopped himself from gulping it straight down. Instead he popped the seal, passed it under his olfactories, gently tipped the edge so that it grazed his glossa. Did he think it might have been poison, or just strangely flavored because it was from Cybertron? Either way, he eventually gave into his instincts and chugged the rest, and even reached for a second serving before he stopped himself again.

“Here, Lottie. Have this one.” He tossed it over to her with an underhand throw, and she almost dropped it with a sudden loss of strength. She knew in theory that fuel-grade energon could only keep base functions going for so long, but she’d never actually felt what starvation was like firsthand. She sat down and gulped the fuel so quickly that she couldn’t even taste it, almost spluttering in her haste to not shut down. 

“Don’t worry about keeping quiet,” Airazor said, though she was still whispering out of habit, while Velocity forced fresh air through her vents. “I’ll put the radio on so the neighbours won’t get suspicious.”

She switched a dial on the broadcast array built into the far wall of the living area. The sound that came out was nothing that Velocity recognised, of course, but the rhythmic drone helped block out her worst thoughts as the energon warmed her limbs.

“Thank you for all of this, Airazor,” she sighed. “We won’t stay long. Just… long enough to recover.”

Hot Shot was sitting next to her, also letting his systems refuel in peace, and he nodded while looking away. He knew as well as Velocity did that they still couldn’t afford to let their guard down. This place was safe for now, but whether it would stay safe for another hour or only another klick was impossible to say.

“Of course.” Airazor stayed standing at the foot of the table. “Do you… have anywhere else to go?”

Her hesitance made it clear that she couldn’t help them find anywhere else. Velocity closed her eyes. “No. Not that I can think of.”

The only place they had was the ship, and that was now firmly out of their grasp as much as Caminus itself was. 

“What’s that?” Hot Shot’s head whirled back around and nodded towards the broadcast array that was now hissing out a veil of static. Airazor blinked. 

“It’s… our radio,” she answered, but Hot Shot shook his head.

“I mean, what’s that noise coming through it?” He lifted from his seat, and Velocity followed him. It sounded like a bad reception, or a glitch with the hardware, until a mech’s voice pierced through the static with a chuckle.

“ Sick of my voice yet, Cybertron? Well, I ain’t going nowhere, so you might as well listen. Your leaders are liars. Con-artists. Thieves. Murderers. But you all already know that, don’t you? You just don’t care. Cause they don’t steal from you. They don’t kill you . Not yet, at least. ”  

Airazor scoffed halfway through the spiel, and she reached for a dial to turn the volume down. “Autobots. They’ve been doing more of those signal hijacks lately. Don’t know why they bother, though.”

Hot Shot gave her a quizzical look. “Autobots?”

But Velocity hushed him as she leaned in. She wanted to hear the whole thing.

“But nothin’ good lasts forever,” the mech continued, with no trace of humor left in his drawl. “ Look at the Age of the Primes. Look at the Age of the Empire. You live in the shadow of those great eras, yet you think it’ll end differently this time?”

He paused, and Velocity could almost see him shaking his head on the other side of the signal.

“The Autobots are not your enemies. You stole our home from under us, you starve us in the slums and steal our sparks off the streets… but we don’t hate you. We can forgive you, if you’d only listen to us. If you’d wake up and see what the rat is doing to you. To all of us.”

He seemed to pass over to someone else, a femme this time. There was a hint of music in her voice.

“If you understand us,” she pleaded, “if you hear us, if you’re ready to stand against the three heads of fear, the tyranny of the Tripredacus… then find us at the Titan’s Crown. To give our home a loving kiss upon the brow. To thank him for our light.”

Velocity heard it, though at first she was sure that she didn’t hear it at all. But she looked over at Hot Shot, and he was just as shocked at what she most definitely heard.

“Hm.” Airazor was oblivious as she set the volume back up. “They’re usually not as long as that.”

Both Camiens shared a silent look. 

“That last line she said…” Hot Shot gulped. “I recognised it.”

“Exodus,” Velocity recalled. “‘Our Titan’. That’s…”

“That’s Vertex’s favorite play. Caminus has the only copy of the script. But how… how would someone else know-?”

“Wait, wait…” Velocity closed her optics behind her hands with a groan. “Let’s just slow down a klick. Airazor, who are the Autobots?”

Airazor was undoubtedly lost in the Camiens’ private epiphany, but that wasn’t why she was hesitant to speak. Her green optics kept drifting in their sockets.  

“They’re… well, they’re bots like you,” she answered. “The way you look, I mean. They’ve been doing what you’ve been accused of for the last few centuries. Fighting back against the Chancellor.”

“Rattrap never mentioned them,” Hot Shot said, and Airazor shrugged.

“No-one really does. Not unless they have to. They don’t want to accidentally spread their message by acknowledging they even exist.”

“And that message is that technorganics and mechanicals shouldn’t hate each other.” Velocity had phrased it as a question in her mind, but it didn’t come out of her vocaliser that way. Airazor seemed lost again, only for a moment before she shook her head.

“It’s not that simple. Autobots aren’t to be trusted. They put on a good show, but they actually are terrorists. They don’t care about hurting people, so long as the council suffers for it along with everyone else.”

Velocity was grateful to Airazor, even able to trust her now, but she couldn’t make herself believe what she was saying. 

“And who told you that?” Hot Shot pressed. “Chancellor Rattrap?”

“Not just him,” Airazor insisted, with a new edge to her voice that almost made Velocity flinch. “Plenty of people have had businesses ruined, buildings burnt to the ground, families hurt by Autobots.”

“But Rattrap was wrong about us,” Hot Shot reminded her. “Who’s to say he’s not wrong about the Autobots as well?”

He had a good point, and at any other time Velocity would have told him so. But Airazor, her optics flashing like strobe lights, was clearly left at a loss, teetering between starting an argument or having a breakdown over whether or not she was right or wrong. Neither option was helpful to anyone.

“Whether or not that’s true,” Velocity pointedly stepped in, “that’s not our concern right now. Windblade managed to escape, right? Maybe some others as well, if the Autobots helped them. They’re the only ones who would know that play.” She motioned her hand to the humming radio. “That line from it. So that must have been a message meant for other Camiens. For us…”

Hot Shot was nodding, but the grin that was growing on his face was quickly swept away. “Unless… Rattrap interrogated the others for the information,” he pointed out. “And it’s a trap. Right there in his name, after all.”

“I doubt that,” Airazor said. “Those two Autobots you heard, they’re always the ones who give out the messages. You could maybe get away with synthesising one voice, but two of them together leaves more room for mistakes. Besides, why put in the effort? You’re the only two still confirmed missing, and no-one knows where you even are on the planet.”

So if it wasn’t a trap, and the Autobots were offering help…

“They’re waiting for us… at the Titan’s Crown.” Velocity felt her spark start to skip at the thought of being so close to potential safety.

Hot Shot looked up at her with scrunched optics. “Do they mean Metroplex?”

That was Velocity’s first thought as well, but after Windblade’s incident she didn’t think anyone offering help would force a Camien to go somewhere like that all over again. “No. They mean Cybertron itself, I bet. The northest point.”

“Would be as good a place to rendezvous as any,” Airazor added with a nod. “That far north was too overgrown to build over so it was just left alone, as far as I know.”

Velocity was tempted to ask what ‘overgrown’ meant, but she’d had her priorities firmly set in stone from the moment she saw Maxima being dragged away by her bloodied servos. No time or room for stupid questions. Even Hot Shot seemed to understand that easily.

“Okay…. we have somewhere to go.” He was starting to smile again. “So how the hell do we get there?”

The most sensible question was also impossible to answer. Internal magnetics could point anyone with a working frame towards a direction, but if that someone was also on the run from the security forces of an entire planet then things became much more complicated. Velocity turned to Airazor for an answer— she’d spent her whole life on Cybertron, so she must have had some vague idea of the journey they’d have to take— but the other femme was looking off somewhere much further away with much brighter and wider jade optics, as if she could see something coming through the walls of the room. Her feathers stood upright like lines of soldiers, making her frame appear almost twice as large as it was supposed to be. 

Velocity thought to break Airazor out of her trance by tugging on a feather, but she didn’t even touch her before the other femme grabbed her wrist with stiff talons, with enough force to almost crack the plating along its seams.

“You need to hide! Quick!” She was already shoving Velocity along, herding her towards one of the closed doors that was pushed open by the medic’s back. Hot Shot was similarly yanked aside and thrown into the room, too sudden for him to even protest (which was likely what Airazor intended). Velocity forced herself quiet, recognising the muffled sound of another door clicking open over the roar of her fuel pump— working at full speed to compensate for so long spent working at a half-powered slog. 

Airazor had mentioned an uncle. He must have been the one now letting himself in.

“Rhinox?” Airazor called out to him just as Velocity pulled the door closed the rest of the way. Hot Shot had already taken a corner of the new room for himself, and though Velocity’s processor was scrambling data she managed to take in many details of the room in just a few blind nanoklicks.

This was clearly Airazor’s own recharge pod, and it was where all the decoration in the house had gone to. The walls, which were easily two-storeys high, were plastered with colorful paintings and posters and beaded lanterns, the berth strewn with woven sheets, every other surface covered in downy white feathers or thin brown branches arranged in moulded pots. The top of the far wall was lined with a long narrow window that let in no light, far too high up to serve as an escape route. But what stood out the most was what lay on the closest desk— a holophoto bordered in white, showing Airazor and Tigatron with one’s arm around the other. That was the only thing that felt out of place, because otherwise it was like seeing Velocity’s own room on a whole other planet. The intimacy, the lazy mess, the chance to know everything about the occupant in just one glance. 

More importantly, it was likely the safest place for the Camiens in the whole house. Even so, Velocity still kept her back to the door— to try and hold it closed, and to hear the voices coming through it.

“You will not believe the slag I had to go through just to get in the building.” Rhinox, she assumed, had a voice that could shake walls, and Velocity could feel the vibration of it through her frame. It sounded familiar as well, but she tried to ignore that. 

“There I was,” he went on with the click of an energon canister popping open, “chancellor service smile all painted on and ready to go, when I see Waspinator is the one on duty tonight. Already a bad sign. Then I check my kit, of course I’ve left my access key behind. Wouldn’t be the first time. I tell Waspinator to just give me a temp pass like he’s done hundreds of times before so I can do my job, but there’s a problem , because apparently I’m already logged in somewhere else. At the Hydrax Spaceport. He kept on insisting I was over there, even while I was standing right in front of him. Un-fragging-believable. Wasted ten klicks of my life arguing with him before he finally figured out I can’t be in two places at once.”

Velocity focused on the voice, the words, only to stop herself from crying out in panic. For now, there was no escape route, no other hiding place. Hot Shot had crawled out of the cluttered corner, navigated the comfy detritus on Airazor’s floor with painstaking silence, just to sit next to Velocity. She pulled an arm around his shoulders, letting him hide his faded face against her chest. If he had to break down, at least she could try and dampen the sound.

“Must’ve been a software glitch.” Airazor took some time to answer her uncle, though the mech didn’t seem to find anything wrong with the hesitation.

“You mean with the check-in system or with the wasp?”

“Maybe both.”

“You might be right. Can’t think of where the hell I could have left my key, though. Maybe in the study?”

Rhinox’s voice started to fade, showing him moving away from the living room. Velocity dared to relax, but she didn’t let go of Hot Shot. She wouldn’t move for so long as Rhinox was still in the house at all. 

“Airazor,” he called out after mere nanoklicks, “could you check your room for me?”

This time, Airazor managed not to hesitate. “Sure, sure. What if it’s fallen out your subspace somewhere outside?” 

She didn’t wait for Rhinox’s answer before she eased the pod door open, only enough to squeeze herself inside. Velocity and Hot Shot shifted aside when they felt the door push at their backs, but remained on the floor as Airazor flattened herself against the slab of steel and gulped. With how frantically she was breathing, her chest pulsing with each gasp, the whole room would run out of air in less than klick.

“What should we do?” Hot Shot asked, barely mouthing the words as he sheltered himself in Velocity’s shaking embrace.

Airazor looked at them both, still gasping, still trembling within her inflated feathers. When she finally spoke, she sounded even more terrified than she looked. 

“...I don’t know.”

“Hang on, Raze,” Rhinox’s voice was a tremor through the floor, “I’ll help look through your room. Save you a few breems spent tearing the place apart.”

No, it wasn’t the voice that was quaking the ground. It was his footsteps. Airazor almost leapt into the air as she cracked the door open once more, slipping through the meager gap as if she was liquid metal. She must have only just stopped Rhinox from barging in. 

“Uh, did you check your own recharge pod?” she asked on the other side of the wall. “I can see you now; you come home in half-stasis, just let it fall on the floor before you fall on the berth.”

Rhinox let out a laugh, which was perfectly timed to cover a whimper that Hot Shot couldn’t hold back. “My pod’s a little more organised than yours, Airazor. I would’ve noticed it if it was in there.”

“Might be worth a check anyway!” Airazor’s own laugh was utterly unconvincing, and was followed by a choked silence.

“Are you hiding something?” Rhinox was not amused anymore.

“Why do you think that? What would I have to hide?”

“Airazor, step aside.”

The door’s lock clicked, and Velocity almost tore through her lip with her denta. The energon was sour on her glossa as it bled through. 

“I-I broke the window!” Airazor chirped as she must have grabbed Rhinox’s hand, stopping him from turning the lock any further. “Okay? That’s it. That’s all it is. I was… trying to do a launch from my berth, and I broke the glass. I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to do.”

He must have been at least caught off-guard by her outburst, if still not convinced. “Well… okay. We can get it fixed. Need to see the damage first, though-”

“No, no, don’t-!”

There was nothing more that Airazor could do, not with a mech that was twice her size and determined to go somewhere. Velocity saw Rhinox for herself, standing in the doorway and blinking in the light of the lanterns. He was one of the mechs who had first greeted them to Cybertron. He was the nice one.

“What is this?”

Airazor was barely visible behind him, but she managed to shove herself past his massive frame. “Rhinox, just-just give me a klick-”

“Who are these people? Are they-?”

Whether it was Hot Shot’s coolant-stained Cityspeaker markings, or Velocity’s sheer terror, or the mere fact that they both obviously weren’t organic, Rhinox didn’t take long to put the pieces together. He hardly seemed to move his hand before a weapon appeared in its grip.

“Don’t move. Either of you.” 

Hot Shot was trembling too much against Velocity to disobey even if he wanted to. What good would it do to even try? Neither of them could slip past Rhinox fast enough to avoid a bullet. 

But, apparently, Airazor could. That must have been why she stood in front of him, a barrier between the gun and the Camiens. She was close enough that Velocity could once again almost touch her feathers, but they were no longer shaking.

“Airazor,” Rhinox growled, “get out of the way.”

“ No , Rhinox.”

“Airazor, now .”

“You’re the one holding them at gunpoint, and you’re acting like they’re the threat here?”

“They’re wanted terrorists . Criminals! For Onyx’s sake, Raze, these are the kind of people who got your parents killed! What would they think if they saw you defending their killers?!”

“Lottie is not a killer!”

Before Velocity could hold him back, Hot Shot had pulled himself free from her arms and planted himself at Airazor’s side. He mirrored her stance exactly, and though Velocity couldn’t see his face she was sure that it was a sight to behold.

“With… all due respect, sir,” he said, craning his neck up at Rhinox (who seemed utterly baffled at being confronted by a mech who barely reached his knee). “My friend Velocity is a medic. The best one on Caminus. She saves lives. She’s never taken one in her life, and I doubt she never will.”

Velocity certainly wasn’t the best on Caminus– hell, she wasn’t even the best in her quarter– but she had to break a smile at the compliment anyway. 

“And what about you, tiny?” Rhinox accused, now inching the gun’s barrel towards Hot Shot. “What’s your kill count at?”

“Zero, sir. And I intend to keep it that way.”

Rhinox didn’t seem inclined to believe him. But he hadn’t fired anything yet. Velocity forced herself to stand, though she didn’t dare move forward.

“Our leader— the Mistress of Flame— said horrible things about Cybertronians,” she began. “We know they were horrible. We didn’t know that was how she felt. And we don’t agree with any of it. We’re… we’re not terrorists. We don’t want to hurt anyone. We just want to go home .”

“Rhinox, put down the gun.” Airazor was inching towards him, as if to take the weapon away from him. “ Please .”

But Rhinox was not so easily fooled. He took a single step back, which was enough to restore all the distance between himself and what he saw as threats. “Airazor, what were you thinking? Bringing them here of all places? You should have turned them in.”

He didn’t sound angry anymore. Only tired, and confused, and hurt.

“I wasn’t going to keep them,” Airazor told him. “I just… they just need to rest. Then they’ll be on their way.”

He scoffed. “To where? Gonna sneak into another Titan and have it trample us all?”

“That’s not how Titans work!” Hot Shot protested, but Airazor held him back with a hand of claws on his chest.

“Rhinox, you’ve worked for the Chancellor for over three centuries,” she pressed, “and you’ve never once questioned him?”

“Sure I have. But not when he’s just been trying to keep us safe. You’ll understand that one day.”

That must have set something off in Airazor; she marched up to Rhinox, close enough that a bullet would be at point-blank range.

“If he was right about these Camiens,” she insisted, “then I’d be dead by now! They’ve had every chance to try and hurt me, and they never took any of them. You told me yourself that one of them was sweet. Windblade, right? That same day you came home from the spaceport, you said that she reminded you of me.”

‘Well, the resemblance is definitely there,’ Velocity had to note. Of the three Cityspeakers she was most familiar with– Hot Shot, Lightbright and Windblade– she knew that Windblade was the only one who wouldn’t give up a cause at the first hurdle, no matter how impossible it was to get past. 

Rhinox blinked, but that only served to narrow his optics. “That was before she tried to assassinate our entire government.”

“She didn’t !” Hot Shot must have been on a crusade to defend everyone today, and you had to commend him for it. “That’s not what Cityspeakers do!”

“Rhinox, just put the fragging gun down!” Airazor could have easily grabbed it for herself, but that wasn’t her intention. “We can talk this through if we just calm down.”

“You don’t have to like us,” Velocity tried, “but you can at least listen to us.”

For the first time, Rhinox seemed uncertain. He kept the weapon at a wide range, letting his optics aim at every bot that he could end up hurting with it. He did eventually, miraculously, put the gun down on the table, but it was with a heavy thud and a shake of his head.

“Airazor… I’m sorry. It’s too late.”

Airazor looked confused only for a nanoklick, and when her feathers lay flat once more it was like each soldier was laying down in defeat. 

“You already called it in,” she said, numbly.

“I’m sorry.”

If Rhinox had any more to say, he wasn’t given the chance to say it. A deafening crash came from behind him and a flurry of smoke filled the room in an instant, but he was the only one who didn’t flinch or even scream. 

“Everyone on the ground! Servos empty, get on the ground!”

Velocity didn’t know who was speaking, who was grabbing her, only that they had talons that almost cut right through to her protoform. Stasis cuffs burned tight on her wrists, and her vents were clogged with the smokescreen that wisped away as suddenly as it appeared. She was forced to her knees by three bots restraining her by her arms and shoulders, and from her captured perspective she saw both Hot Shot and Airazor in similar positions, as well as a smug femme with gangly skeletal wings who clapped Rhinox on the shoulder.

“Nice work, Rhinox. When the Chancellor hears about this, he’ll grow a fourth head that’ll be smiling all the time.”

“Thank you, Nightscream.” Though he didn’t look thankful at all.

“Oh, don’t thank me yet,” Nightscream chided as she consulted a datapad at her hip. “There’s still the issue of your access key being used to trespass on their ship. But I’m sure you knew we’d notice that.”

“What? I never-! I was in the council building all evening! Just ask Waspinator!” Rhinox was shrugging off a clawed hand that tried to grab him, but another two took its place. 

“Ask Wasp?” Nightscream let out a vile shriek of laughter. “Right, cause he’s such a reliable source. Let’s move it, Rhinox, you’ve got a long night ahead of you-”

“It was me!” Airazor tried to shuffle forwards on her knees, but her captor had a firm grip on her frame. Even so, she kept her helm high as she faced Nightscream. “I did it. I stole his card. It’s still in my subspace. See for yourself.”

Nightscream raised her eyeridges, and nodded to one of Airazor’s holders who did just as she’d requested; from her subspace, he fished out a flat card that Nightscream examined with great interest.

“Well, well,” she snickered. “A certified traitor in the family. Alright, let’s get going. Take all three of them.”

“Airazor!” Rhinox tried to lunge for Airazor, but the guards escorting her bristled and shoved him back with relative ease.

“It’s fine, Rhinox,” Airazor hissed as she was shoved out the door. “I’ll be fine.”

Velocity was the next to be dragged to her feet, marched outside towards a transport pod that was waiting open for her like a coffin. There were three in total, one for each prisoner, but with their minuscule size and amount of guards that had been dispatched to complete the capture, she knew that she’d practically be crushed when it was time to go. At least Hot Shot didn’t need much space for himself. 

“Where’s Maxima?! Where the hell are you keeping her?! What are you doing to her?!”

From what Velocity could see, he was putting all the energon he’d drained to use in trying to fight off the guards and tear free from their grip. But all that his efforts gave him were new scars on his armour, and the coolant from his optics washed the last few remnants of his Cityspeaker markings away. 

For once in his life, Ironhide was grateful that his work day was dull. Not because he was finally accustomed to the boredom— an ‘Elite Guard’ rarely had the chance to actually earn any of the acclaim that such a title suggested, even when the entire planet that he was supposed to be guarding was apparently tearing itself apart. No, his relief was solely because, if nothing was happening, then there was nothing he had to worry about. There was still plenty more that he could fret over, and he did, but at least his livelihood didn’t depend on fixing the chaos that was reigning outside of Ferromax’s cramped security room. 

He had one job, one simple and thankless job, and he’d sworn that he wouldn’t make any mistakes with it. He watched the cameras. He checked the locks of each door on the electric grid, including ones he’d left open just for his own convenience. He didn’t bring a datapad in with him, no mods to his audio configuration, nothing that could possibly distract him or give Chancellor Rattrap reason to blame any more mishaps on the sole Cybertronian in the detention center.

(Though that was a rarity, actually. Usually the cells’ only occupants would be Cybertronian agitators, or suspected Autobot agents. Even after Ironhide was selected for the Guard, the riots and incidents from the people like him didn’t slow down as the Chancellor had apparently hoped.)

Sitting at his station, the metal of his frame would creak during the few times that it moved. His tanks gurgled. The only other sound in the control room was Quickstrike’s sharp footsteps and the dull buzz of the radio, which was only switched on as a concession to Quickstrike so he wouldn’t be pacing in silence. 

Ironhide preferred the silence, but he’d learned a long time ago that there was nothing to gain and everything to lose by trying to argue with a technorganic, even one who was supposed to be his equal. So he maintained his own silence as he watched the cameras, as he watched the Camiens. As he watched Chromia.

She wasn’t the largest of the four femmes, her frame more stout and bulky than towering like that of her winged friend Maxima, but she was easily the fiercest. He could have guessed that even before she almost managed to break two of Airachnid’s legs off at the back joint. But the last three days spent in her cell was starting to take effect on her. She no longer tried to destroy the walls with her bare hands. From how she cradled them together, lying sideways on the berth-slab, he had to wonder if she’d finally broken them with her efforts. The only medic onsite was Panzer, and he had a reputation for leaving his robotic patients worse off than they were to start with… which was likely why he was placed at Ferromax in the first place. 

But technorganics had different bodies to Cybertronians, different medical needs. Hell, Ironhide didn’t even know how many Cybertronian medics were left on the planet. There had to be at least a few; those smart enough to fix people would also be smart enough to stay hidden. And the Autobots had to have at least one in their ranks, else they’d have been wiped out centuries ago. Panzer likely just wasn’t as skilled at fixing up frames that weren’t like his own… 

That was what Ironhide chose to believe, in case he ever found himself in range of the white-furred medic’s pitch-black optics. He also chose not to summon Panzer to the Camiens, in case what he believed was wrong. Being trapped was punishment enough for them, and even if Chromia had hurt herself, she was tough. She never hid her face, so Ironhide knew that no coolant had ever left her optics during her stay. She only spoke to fling insults at Vertex, or to answer Maxima’s questions, or to try and comfort Lightbright.

The Cityspeaker was the smallest of the four and, ironically, she hardly spoke at all. Quickstrike had a theory that her kind were mythical wavemancers who didn’t need vocalizers; they could communicate by broadcasting frequencies straight from their processors to all those around them. It would have explained how they could talk to Titans. Ironhide wasn’t entirely convinced though, mostly because he hadn’t noticed any attempted hijacking of his brain when he delivered fuel to the Camiens, and because of how truly miserable Lightbright looked. 

This wasn’t someone who was going to orchestrate another grand prison break… though Ironhide didn’t understand why the Camiens kept trying to leave in the first place. They were only delaying their return home. Maybe, now that their plan for Metroplex was foiled, they were under orders to disrupt Cybertron at all costs. They would either return home victorious, or not at all. 

Ironhide would have admired their resilience, if they weren’t trying to destroy his home. No matter how much it might have deserved it.

“Hm? Someone break the transmitter outside again?” Quickstrike was thumping a fist on the radio, which was letting out a squeal of static in protest. Ironhide hadn’t noticed the change in noise, not until his co-worker called attention to it. He turned in his chair, and now the static was clearing in the wake of a mech’s voice. It was one that Ironhide recognised.

“Hey, turn it up.” He nodded to Quickstrike, who narrowed his optics but obliged with a twist of his claws on the volume control. 

“ Sick of my voice yet, Cybertron? Well, I ain’t going nowhere, so you might as well listen.”

“Dear Onyx, not this guy again.” Quickstrike practically spat in disgust as he trudged back over to his station. The Autobot on the other end of the broadcast had been identified long ago as Blaster, and he must have been a wavemancer of some kind from how easily he managed to hijack frequencies across the planet, no matter how many times the Chancellor upgraded the infrastructure in each city. Blaster was often accompanied by an accomplice who called herself Vibes, the melody to his speeches. They would craft new broadcasts every other decacycle, and though their recording boxes were swiftly found and destroyed each time the bots themselves managed to evade capture. 

When he managed to catch a hijack live at home, Ironhide often recorded it. He knew that, if he didn’t, the first time he heard it would also likely be the last. Purely to preserve evidence of their criminal activities, of course. He never played the recordings back, not when other audios could be listening in. Most of them only told him what he and countless others already knew.

“ You stole our home from under us, you starve us in the slums and steal our sparks off the streets… but we don’t hate you. We can forgive you, if you’d only listen to us. If you’d wake up and see what-”

Before Blaster could reveal the mind-blowing conclusion to his propaganda, the radio abruptly switched over to a mindless tune. Ironhide’s head snapped to Quickstrike, who had just thrown the radio remote over to the far table.  

“I was listening to that,” he informed him. 

Quickstrike scoffed. “What, trying to get ideas?”

Ironhide knew to ignore the accusation. “It was a new Autobot broadcast. It needs to be reported to the Chancellor.”

“Go ahead.” Quickstrike shrugged as he propped his peds up on his station desk. “Turn your back for one klick, and let another mass breakout happen right under your nose. I’m sure the Chancellor’ll let you off rust-free once again.”

If Ironhide was a technorganic, he would have had feathers or fur or scales standing on end all over his protoform. That was the major flaw of the organics; their bodies almost always betrayed them. As a mechanical being, he only had to stifle his energon flow to stop his face from going blue. 

“I don’t see you doing much else to show your loyalty to him,” he accused Quickstrike.

“Cause I don’t need to prove anything, Ironhide.” The other mech let out a hiss behind his mouthplate, which was his version of laughter.

“Right. Even though you went through the exact same selection process I went through to even be here,” Ironhide pressed. 

“You weren’t even alive when I was chosen to be Rattrap’s guard,” Quickstrike sneered. “How long has it been for you, Hide? Three, four centuries? Not much time for you to build up trust with.”

It was an empty threat, one that he could only get away with when the Chancellor wasn’t around to hear it. But if he could get away with it, he’d spout such things off at any chance he had. Ironhide was desensitized to them by now, but he knew they’d just keep coming unless he bit back.

“My oath to the Chancellor is still valid now as it was the day I gave it. What about you, Quickstrike? Like you said, you’ve been around a lot longer than me. More time to see things. Doubt things. Kind of things that might have you start changing your mind.”

And immediately he regretted saying so much at once, even though he knew that he couldn’t stop himself. Quickstrike either didn’t notice how Ironhide tried to bite his glossa as if he could strangle his own defiance, or he found it amusing. 

“Oh really?” His denta clattered together. “You have any examples of those ‘things’ for me?”

Ironhide swallowed his vocaliser, so that he could chose its next words carefully.

“Of course not,” he answered. “That would be treason.”

With a mouthplate in place, it was often hard to tell what someone was thinking. But Quickstrike was a mech who spoke with his eyes, and he let Ironhide see them go wide before he shuttered them with a grating laugh.

“Then maybe you’re not as dumb as you look, after all.”

It was the closest thing to a compliment that Ironhide supposed he could ever expect from him. He left Quickstrike to his radio distractions, keeping his bobbing head out of the corner of his optic as he turned back towards the camera views. 

Chromia was still lying on her side. He wondered if she knew she was being watched. If she’d wreck the camera, if she knew where it was. Maxima seemed to twitch her wings now and again— could she actually fly with them? Ironhide had never seen one of his own who could. He wasn’t an engineering mind, but he couldn’t see how wings like that could get any airtime; they were just flat planes of metal, unable to flap or glide or generate any kind of thrust. Cosmetic then, some kind of Camien fashion statement like the markings on Lightbright’s face. The Cityspeaker kept that face hidden, as if she was trying to preserve the red paint behind her hands, and in the cell opposite hers… 

Ironhide looked closer. It was empty. The panic that gripped his spark almost made his digits tear the keys from his console as he flipped through the rest of the cameras, and then—

Relief. Sanity. Vertex was being escorted by two drones towards Airachnid’s interrogation chamber. If Quickstrike hadn’t distracted him with his unnecessary hostility, he would have seen the transfer happening and saved himself from a spark convulsion. 

Not that Quickstrike would have felt guilty about Ironhide keeling over, or having to call Panzer over to restart his spark matrix. Once the Camiens were gone, he told himself that he’d file a report with Rhinox about lack of professionalism in the workplace. Rhinox was agreeable, most of the time. He didn’t hate Ironhide on sight, at least. He’d even been willing to greet the Camiens to Cybertron with open arms…

Well. That hadn’t worked out so well. Apparently Chromia had made the worst impression of all of them, and the theory was that she was exaggerating her personality to distract people from the true terrorist of the group. But Ironhide quickly came to realise that there was no act, she really was just that abrasive. She’d managed to bite one of Inferno’s legs when she was first brought in, and every drone that was sent near her cell suffered chunks torn from their armour. 

The only one that got anywhere near her without suffering for it, the only person she hadn’t tried to attack, was Ironhide himself. Maybe that was why he still had his job, because he was still useful in some way. 

A barking laugh from Quickstrike, a sound that almost shot him out of his seat, interrupted Ironhide’s hopeful thoughts. 

“Some good news at last. Those missing Camiens finally got dragged out of hiding.” Quickstrike tapped his screen with the arrangement of spindles that made up his right hand, while the head of his left hissed in amusement. 

(One had to wonder if the Chancellor kept Quickstrike around because his own three heads almost looked normal in comparison.)

“Which ones?” Ironhide left his seat to look at Quickstrike’s station over the other mech’s shoulder. Of course it was Quickstrike who received the news first, or at all, but that wasn’t worth bringing up to start an argument all over again.

“The medic and the short one.” Quickstrike pointed them both out on the screen, which displayed the Camien portraits that had been captured when they first arrived on Cybertron. Three were still greyed out; Windblade, Nautica and Afterburner, but those of Hot Shot and Velocity were now glowing green. 

“We only have rough details until Nightscream’s squad brings them in,” Quickstrike went on with a pleased grumble. “Sounds like some dumb citizen near Nova Cronum got tricked into helping them.”

Ironhide let out a non-committal grunt. “Has the citizen been arrested as well?”

“Of course. Camiens will get the cell treatment while the idiot undergoes interrogation. Hope it’s not with Airachnid, for their sake.” Quickstrike muttered that last part, but Ironhide still heard it loud and clear.

“Is that you sympathising with a traitor, Quickstrike?” he asked when he returned to his chair, and his fellow guard shot a glare over at him in answer.

“I’m sympathising with one of my own who’s clearly too gullible to live,” Quickstrike growled. “Doesn’t mean they don’t deserve what they’re gonna get.”

“Suppose so.” Ironhide shrugged; he only wanted to see what the mech’s reaction to the accusation would be, to see if he too would feel sorry for a traitor who happened to look like him. “What about the other three?”

“They won’t be far away, I bet.” Quickstrike’s head-burdened hand snapped open and closed, impatient and hostile. “Chancellor has the Seacons swimming in every puddle from here to Kaon, and the Constructicons are combing a new city every day.”

The Constructicons were likely the only Cybertronians who weren’t spat on in the streets, a team who was actually feared by those who hated their frames simply because of their connection to the Chancellor… and, of course, because of what they were capable of without him. 

“Wonder if the Chancellor will let them off the leash,” Ironhide said. The Chancellor was the only thing holding the Constructicons back, after all; him, and the mighty relic that had brought an end to the civil war centuries ago.  

“You never got to see Devastator in action, huh?” Quickstrike clacked his teeth together with a hiss, as if he was gloating over himself. “He was a fragging colossus, even for a Cybertronian. Not as big as a Titan, of course, but that doesn’t matter when you’ve got five brains all set on causing some damage.” 

Ironhide often commuted past the towns that were still in ruins from Devastator’s last emergence. Either the damage caused was so extensive that there was no hope in repairing it, or the Chancellor saw no reason to dedicate resources to places that only Cybertronians had to live in. After all, why fix a place that might just get destroyed again?

“I saw Piranacon once,” Ironhide mentioned, “if that counts.”

Quickstrike shook his head with a scoff. “Piranacon’s a Voscean sideshow. He keeps the Mariners happy, but put him on dry land and he’s as useful as Waspinator doing… well, anything.”

“Well, better him or Devastator than… the other one.” Just as there were three heads on the Chancellor’s shoulders, and three mecha to the Tripredacus Council, there were three gestalts still functioning on Cybertron’s surface. The third was one that was rarely mentioned, and rarer still even named. Quickstrike shuddered, and he didn’t bother trying to hide it.

“That’s one thing we can agree on,” he muttered. “I heard the Chancellor keeps him locked up in the vault, tied down with chains that are bolted to the wall. Heard he’s been kept there ever since the Rebellion.”

Of course Quickstrike would have heard a lot in his position, though how much of it was actually true wasn’t worth debating over. 

“You ever see him firsthand?” Ironhide pressed. 

“Thank Onyx, no. I have enough nightmares without him. And I’m sure as hell not asking Rampage what he was like.”

Of all the mechs on Cybertron, Rampage was the only one who could have known what he was like and lived to talk about it. Ironhide had even mentioned the gestalt to Rampage, during that one conversation that he still wasn’t convinced had actually happened. To share words with Rampage at all was surreal enough, but to understand what he was suggesting…

If he was suggesting anything at all. If he wasn’t just warning Ironhide to keep his head down, to not make things difficult for himself and Trannsmutate and whoever their child would turn out to be. 

Whatever Rampage was up to was none of Ironhide’s business. Whatever the Chancellor was up to was none of his business either. His job was to watch the Camiens, nothing more and nothing less, and thanks to his attentiveness he likely knew more about these aliens than he knew about anyone else on the planet.

Through the cameras at his station, he saw that Chromia had shifted onto her other side. For the first time since her arrival, he couldn’t see her face. Yet he could imagine the expression on it, the scar-like scowl and flecks of silver around where her denta tore into her lips. She hadn’t smiled once, not from Ironhide’s recollection, not even a smirk. She didn’t have much to smile about. He couldn’t imagine what such a sight would look like; it was impossible for his processor to calculate the edges of her mouth turned upwards. He wanted to see it though, just once before she had to go. It was a waste to only see her in caged misery.

“Prisoners inbound in the next breem.” Quickstrike sounded giddy, as if he was looking forward to dragging fresh blood through Ferromax. Ironhide was only glad that each captured Camien brought the rest of them closer to finally going home.

“I’ll send out some drones to prepare the nearest cells.” He keyed in the appropriate commands without having to take his eyes off the camera feed. 

“The max cells are all taken,” Quickstrike informed him. “Still waiting for Silverbolt to upgrade the others, if he’ll ever get off his tail and finish the damn paperwork.”

“Mid-risk will do for now. The Chancellor will probably want to see them personally. Find out where they were hiding this whole time.” It was impressive, honestly, two bots staying hidden for almost a decacycle with an entire planet on the lookout for them. Maybe the naive citizen had managed to shelter them for that long.

“I don’t think he’ll wait much longer.” Quickstrike’s hiss was another vague sound of laughter. Ironhide’s autonomous keystrokes paused as he looked over at the other mech.

“Wait for what?”

“For the other aliens to get rounded up. Six of them is more than enough to put on a show.” Quickstrike kicked back in his chair with a pleased scowl.

“But he can’t send them back unless he’s got them all in one place.” Ironhide spoke slowly, unsure of the misunderstanding. Had he heard Quickstrike wrong, or had someone been given the wrong orders? But it was Quickstrike who looked over at him as if he’d just suggested taking a soothing soak in a smelting pool.

“C’mon, Ironhide, I thought you weren’t as dumb as I thought. You really thought he was gonna let them leave?” Quickstrike shook his helm as his hand snapped its teeth. “Waste of good energon, and they’ll just be back in a few vorns with an entire army behind them. It’ll be a massacre. Nah, the Chancellor’s smart. He’s gonna make the first move. Show that Mistress glitch that Cybertron isn’t up for grabs.”

Ironhide nodded, as if he both understood and agreed with whatever the hell he was talking about. “Right… so what is he gonna do?”

“My guess is public execution. Something grisly to show off for their leader. He’s held off on contacting her this whole time, so he must be waiting for the right opportunity to hit her where it hurts.”

“I-I see. Right. Makes sense.” Ironhide nodded again. He could hear the bolts in his neck creaking in protest while the rest of his body was forced to remain silent.

“Course it makes sense,” Quickstrike jabbed with a fleeting glare. “Then the other three will either give themselves up, or let themselves get killed. Either way, it’s a win-win.”

“And when Caminus launches a war against us for killing their diplomats?” Ironhide pressed, struggling to keep his vocaliser steady. “What then?”

“We’ll be ready well in advance. They’ve gotta come to us, after all. A Titan’s a scary thing but it’s, what, a fraction of Cybertron’s surface? We’ll outnumber them by the thousands. Caminus will be flying right into a slaughterhouse.”

He wasn’t lying just to confuse Ironhide. He wasn’t smart enough to come up with such a ruse all on his own, and especially not smart enough to realise that he should have kept it to himself. But the most damning evidence was Quickstrike’s laugh; not a grunt or a hiss, this time it was a sound that was real and rich and all the more sickening. He couldn’t hold it back as he imagined an entire colony of ancient Cybertronians, Ironhide’s ancestors, being eradicated.

Ironhide had never met the rest of them. Never would, if Quickstrike’s prediction would come true. But the few that he had met, the small doomed collection he’d been watching over for the last decacycle, did not deserve extinction when they had not killed in turn. Even the most loyal councillor, the most ardent hater of Cybertronians and anything of pure mechanics, would surely agree. Even Dinobot. 

Who else even knew of the Camiens’ true sentence? The Chancellor, of course Senator Ratbat and Tarantulas, most likely. The rest of the Elite Guard, apparently. If it was a justified sentence, then the Chancellor would have made it the official verdict. But not even he was charismatic enough to convince a planet that death was the only right option, and he knew it.

And so he lied. So he could buy himself time. So he could start his war with Caminus on his own terms.

“I’m gonna go check on the occupied cells,” Ironhide announced. “Make sure they don’t know the others are coming in.”

He didn’t wait for a response before he made his way to the door, but before he could escape he received a huff from Quickstrike anyway.

“You go do that. Make yourself useful.”

Ironhide was going to do just that. He’d make his life useful for one thing, for the very first time since he was sparked.

The keycards for the cells were stored in the armory that was some feet away from the security room; a convenient fusion, since most guards were wise to arm themselves before they ventured anywhere near the prisoners, and the armory was the most difficult room to break into by default. Ironhide was vaguely familiar with the weapons inside; how they were organised, the differences between plasma casters and laser-sights and lead-slingers, how the liquid in the acid-blasters was supposed to be properly disposed of. He counted himself lucky that he’d never had to use any of them, but if there was a war on the horizon…

“You know they deserve it, after all.” Quickstrike had either been talking to himself while Ironhide was gone, or waiting for him to pass by again before he resumed his diatribe. “Not just for trying to kill the Chancellor, but for being so damn stupid about it. You want a king dead, you don’t send a friendship crew with one bot to actually do the dirty work. You send an army.”

He cut himself off with the sound of chewing, as he shoved energon from his ration pack into his mouth. Ironhide was standing outside the security room door, only looking in while his frame pointed towards the cell blocks.

“Maybe they didn’t send an army cause they don’t have one,” he suggested, and as he said it he was somewhat amazed that apparently no-one else had considered it before him.

“Then they’re even more stupid than I thought.” 

“Even more stupid than me?”

Ironhide didn’t know why he asked. Maybe just to give Quickstrike one more chance that he didn’t deserve, to let him say something that might change what had to happen. The mech actually took the effort to turn his head towards Ironhide, if only to let it smugly swivel on its neck hinge. 

“You’re smart for one of your kind, Ironhide. Even I’ll admit that. But only cause you know the golden rule the others just don’t get; stick with the people who’ll keep you alive. Always have someone, anyone, to watch your back. Just look at Transmutate. She did the smart thing, shacking up with the scariest guy on the planet. Only reason a freak like her has stayed alive so long.”

The mech was feeding himself again, scoffing around crystals of energon that stuck to the spindles of his digits like flaky tumors. If he’d been paying attention to his screen, he might have noticed Ironhide standing behind him with the pulse pistol. If he’d been smarter, he would have been expecting it.

“You’re forgetting one other thing, Quickstrike.”

“And what would that be?” The mech’s last words were a mush of unwarranted superiority and wasted fuel.

“Make sure the person watching your back isn’t looking down a barrel.”

Quickstrike, ironically, was not quick enough to turn around before Ironhide pulled the trigger. One head exploded in a burst of energon while the other, the fanged mouth on his left wrist, let out one last hiss of indignation as the disabled body crashed to the floor. 

The head was not alive, never had been; every hiss and snarl was only a reflex action from its host. But as Quickstrike’s leftover electrical pulses faded, his motors and fans ceasing to spin as his spark fizzled out, Ironhide was almost convinced that the snake eyes staring up at him from the floor were in pain. Or maybe that was just what he wanted to see in them.

“Well, I was gonna quit sooner or later.” Nothing answered Ironhide’s sigh, and that was all the assurance he needed that he still had time before the alarms went off.

Pistol in one hand, keycard in the other, he stepped over Quickstrike’s corpse and set out to finally make himself useful.

✧✦✧

Chromia almost managed to finally sleep, but the swish of the cell block door awoke her before any nightmares could. She’d told Maxima to keep her awake, to not let her shut down no matter what lest she be taken by surprise again, but she could hardly blame her fellow bodyguard for failing when she was fighting the current of stasis just as stubbornly as Chromia was. 

And, just like Chromia, Maxima had also been jolted from any chance of rest by the new arrival. The two femmes were mirror images as they both glared at Ironhide. Lightbright was either fast asleep or pretending to be asleep, and Vertex was still missing from her own cell. Chromia couldn’t even force herself to be happy about that.

“We’re not hungry.” Maxima didn’t bother sitting up as she spat at Ironhide. “Frag off.”

But the mech didn’t turn towards her, didn’t even seem to hear her. He kept on walking, until he was outside Vertex’s empty cell at the end of the block. Then he swiped something against a panel on the wall, and in an instant there was silence in the room. The constant hum of the plasma grids keeping the Camiens caged was gone, and so were the grids themselves. For the first time in what must have been cycles, Chromia could see her friends without a violent violet glare bleaching her optics. But for the moment they all looked to Ironhide, who now stood in the open doorway as if he was waiting for them.

“We don’t have much time,” he said. “Get moving.” 

“What?” Lightbright was the first to voice everyone’s confusion, which confirmed that she wasn’t sleeping after all. Like Maxima and Chromia, she elected to stay on the floor despite the removal of the plasma barricades.

“The doors from here to the processing bay are open,” Ironhide went on. “Including the armory. There’s only drones from here to the exit, so take what you need and take out anyone in your way.”

He kept inclining his head towards the escape route he was holding open, and though he addressed all three femmes he seemed to focus on Chromia. Likely because she was closest to the door. With his frame towards her she now noticed specks of bright blue over his chest, and a pistol held by his side. She’d never seen him armed before, and he seemed unsure of how to properly hold the weapon as his digits kept fluctuating between stiff and loose.

“You’re… letting us go?” she asked, and she felt the rust rattling in her vocaliser. 

“Obviously,” Ironhide told her. 

“Why?”

“Does it matter?” He rolled his optics, apparently impatient and annoyed that the Camiens didn’t immediately leap to attention for the one who had been holding them prisoner for days on end. That single flick of his irises was enough for Chromia to get off her aft, for the express purpose of slapping him across the jaw. Her strength wasn’t what it should have been, but the impact of her palm was still enough to resonate off the walls and snap his helm sideways.

“Are you stupid or something?!” She couldn’t keep her voice down, but it was so weary from captivity that her most indignant yell was nothing more than a hoarse wheeze. “No, wait, scratch that, you must think I’m stupid if you think I’m gonna fall for that slag! Frag you ! If you’re gonna hurt us, be a mech about it and just get it over with!” 

She was back in her cell by the time he recovered from her assault; holding her knees to her chest on the floor, holding his optics with hers. From his bright gaze she could tell he was surprised by her reaction, but not hurt. If he dared to try and make her feel sorry for him, she’d have just hit him again.

“What she said,” Maxima grunted, staying rooted on her side of the room. “We’re not doing your work for you. If you want us to walk right into a trap, you’ll have to drag us out first.”

Ironhide shook off his shock quickly, and his optics diverted to both Maxima and Lightbright, the latter of whom still held her limbs frozen together. Then he just turned around and walked back out. The door did not close behind him, so his footsteps echoed for a long while.

“Should… we run while he’s gone?” Lightbright peered around the edge of her cell, still refusing to leave it even with nothing stopping her. Chromia understood why; whatever the hell Ironhide or his boss had in mind for them, they weren’t going to take part. Besides, they couldn’t go anywhere without Vertex in tow (as much as Chromia would have liked to). Anyone left behind would mean a verbal lashing from the Mistress of Flame, or worse.

The footsteps in the distance paused. Chromia was going to say something back to Lightbright in the silence, but it didn’t last long enough. Ironhide was coming closer again, but the sounds of his approach were heavier this time, each step forward taking longer to carry down the outside hallway. Lightbright was still leaning around her cell, narrowing her optics at the oncoming mech, and Maxima mirrored her pose to see the difference for herself. By the time Chromia gave into her own curiosity, Ironhide was already right outside. He had a bulk of something slung over his shoulder, and he immediately threw it down onto the floor for the femmes to see.

Chromia recognised it as the other guard, the one who thankfully came along far less often than Ironhide. He was lying on his front, his size able to fill the floor-space between Chromia and Maxima. He was also entirely missing his head.

“There’s no trick,” Ironhide grunted. “No trap. He’s dead. He’s dead, and I killed him.” His vents were shallow, but not from the weight of the corpse he’d been carrying, and when he looked down he was staring past the body rather than at it. Smoke wisped from the hole that was left at the neck strut, and the smell that accompanied it was like that of a blacksmith’s furnace.

“That’s… th-that’s really a dead… oh, Solus…” Lightbright scurried back against the nearest wall, trying to hide her face behind her hands.

“Don’t look, Light.” Maxima was closest to the Cityspeaker so she went to shield her from the grisly sight, using her larger frame to block the view even as her own optics shunned the corpse. Lightbright had never seen a dead body before. Neither had Maxima, nor Chromia. In fact, for as long as either femme had been alive, no-one born on Caminus had ever died. Everyone knew what death was, of course, the fate that came from illness or injury or lack of fuel, but the only time it was ever seen was during the climaxes of dramatic plays, or in the middle of ancient eulogy performances, only ever as parodies and re-enactments of what the end of a spark might be. Death was just a prop for a good story. No-one ever had to die on Caminus, because Solus Prime had already sacrificed herself for them all. 

But Solus’ grave wasn’t here on Cybertron. There was only the grave of this headless sparkless mech, the fresh pool of his energon spreading across the floor, bleeding towards Chromia’s frozen peds. The fluid was still warm when it touched her, and only lingering shock stopped her from flinching.

“What I said is the truth,” Ironhide insisted, still staring past his victim, now holding his weapon far too tightly. “Every door is open. Anything from the armory is yours. That’s all I can offer.”

Was he apologising for not doing more? As if committing murder wasn’t enough! Chromia would have slapped him on the other cheek if she didn’t know that he meant it.

“You still haven’t answered my question.” She had to wade through the energon trickle to stand before him. “Why are you doing this?”

Ironhide tore his eyes from the floor. “Cause it’s the only way you’ll ever get out of here alive.”

Chromia hadn’t realised her spark was at stake. Why would it have been? But Ironhide wouldn’t have gone to these lengths unless something like death was a possibility. He was still speaking the truth, still as serious as the Mistress herself. There was still the question of why he would even care, if the lives of the Camiens had nothing to do with his own, but Chromia knew what was worth asking and what was worth saving for somewhere safer.

“Are we the only ones still kept here?” She already knew that Windblade was on the run, and possibly Nautica and Afterburner had managed to break out. But she had to know for sure who was coming with her.

“Three of you are still missing,” Ironhide told her. “Windblade, Nautica and Afterburner. The two we couldn’t find, Hot Shot and Velocity, they just got captured. They’ll be here very soon.”

“Hot Shot?” Maxima’s concern was palpable, but there was another voice behind her that was even more spark-rending.

“Afterburner got out…?” Lightbright’s whisper was muffled behind Maxima’s presence, but the hurt in her words was unmistakable. Even though this was an unprecedented situation, even though Afterburner would have just wasted his escape effort by trying to free Lightbright as well, she was right to feel betrayed. The duty that a bodyguard had to their Cityspeaker was priority above all else. A bodyguard was ready to sacrifice anything, even their spark, for their speaker if they had to. Maxima was ready to die for Hot Shot, just as Chromia would die for Windblade— even now that they knew what death looked like up close, that was the fact of their lives. That was what their sparks were made for, what Primus had deemed for them, and there was simply no question of it. Such things were lost on aliens like Ironhide, of course.

“It was a few days ago,” he went on, as if the timescale of the escape was what had left Lightbright shaken. “They managed to slip out during your little tussle with Airachnid.” He addressed Chromia now with a tilt of his head, though she was so concerned with Lightbright that she didn’t notice at first. Maxima was holding the Cityspeaker steady enough in her arms, and the two bodyguards shared a nod of mutual understanding. One would handle Lightbright, and the other would get them all out of there. Then they could both wring Afterburner’s neck when they caught up with him.

“If there’s two of us being brought here,” Chromia asked Ironhide, “shouldn’t we stay and wait for them?”

“They’ll have reinforcements in the pods with them,” he revealed. “We can’t overpower that many guards, but if we cause a loud-enough scene here then the transfer will at least be delayed. You can figure something out once you’re somewhere safe.”

Chromia noticed how he singled her out, leaving himself firmly out of the escape equation, but she didn’t have the chance to press him on it before Maxima spoke up.

“But Hot Shot… I can’t go without him. Velocity, too. We need to stick together-”

“He’s right, Max,” Chromia cut in, and it was surreal to find herself speaking for the mech who had been holding her hostage until just a few klicks ago. “We can’t help anyone if we get swarmed.”

“They won’t do anything to either of them while they’re in transit,” Ironhide assured, and he too seemed surprised by Chromia coming to his aid. “With you gone, they’ll be the only two Camiens in custody. They won’t be hurt.”

Maxima bristled, and she moved her mouthplate over just to hide her frown. “Well, we still can’t leave. Not without Vertex.”

As much as Chromia was tempted to disobey her, she already knew that leaving Vertex behind wasn’t an option. She addressed Ironhide once again.  

“Where is she?”

“Still with Airachnid,” he said.

“How much security is with her?”

“There’s six drones stationed outside the room now, thanks to you.”

Chromia had to smile. “Good to know I’m making a difference in the world. Is it nearby?”

“I’ll take you there. But you should arm yourself first. Take this for now.” He turned his pistol so the grip was held out towards her. His digits had left deep indents in the metal; cavernous compared to her own slender fingers, and still warm. Chromia had held weapons before, even though she’d never had to fire them. But this weapon was different from the compact cannons given out on Caminus; the weight of the ammunition in the chamber was enough to make her shoulder ache. It was powerful, and perfect. She held it in both hands with a nod, and Ironhide took that as a cue to get moving.

Following his lead, the Camiens finally left their prison cells behind. Lightbright stayed close to Maxima, holding the bodyguard’s hand just as Chromia held her weapon. The laser-sight took some getting used to, but Chromia knew to keep it trained against her optic as she scanned the open corridors. She watched the left while Ironhide monitored the right, though he paused at one intersection. 

“Ironhide?” Chromia followed his stare; the hallway was blank, no different from any of the others in the detention centre that she’d been dragged down. There was a single door at the end of it, a security panel on its left. It was another cell, but there was no way to see what was inside it. Ironhide must have known what was kept inside, though he quickly diverted his gaze to Chromia.

“So you did remember my name,” he said. 

“Do you want to get slapped again?” she asked.

“Not particularly. Head’s still ringing from the first one.” He moved on without another glance at the mystery door. 

They found a congealed mess of energon in what must have been the main control room, but they moved on quickly for Lightbright’s sake. The armory was beyond, left wide open as Ironhide had promised. Racks and lockers held up armaments that Chromia had never seen before; she couldn’t even guess what half of them were capable of. Maxima reached out for one of the unfamiliar guns, and she too was thrown-off by its weight. Ironhide helped himself to a modest rifle, automatically checking the ammunition. Somehow he seemed both experienced and out-of-his-depth at the same time, maybe one pretending to be the other.

Lightbright seemed the most nervous while surrounded by killing machines, which was understandable. Afterburner had surely never had to be armed around her. Maxima had tracked down the smallest weapon, a dinky pistol barely larger than her palm, but Lightbright still looked at it like it was a death threat.

“It’s not gonna bite you, Light,” Maxima said. “Just take it.” 

But Lightbright flinched when Maxima tried to press the gun into her hand, snatching her limb back as if she might lose it entirely. “I… I don’t know how to use it.”

It wans’t just that, though. Lightbright had now seen what even a minuscule pistol could do to someone. She’d seen the aftermath of death, and she didn’t want anything to do with it. Chromia and Maxima had the advantage of knowing they couldn’t balk until they were safe, but Lightbright had been promised a life of safety and security, of never having to dirty her hands like a bodyguard might have to.  She had no safety net, no reference for what she was faced with. 

But Ironhide once again failed to understand; he took the gun from Maxima, and it looked even smaller in his massive hand as he held it in front of Lightbright.

“It’s simple enough,” he told her. “Lever loads the cartridge, trigger fires it down the barrel. Throw back your elbows so the recoil doesn’t knock you over.” He showed her how to remove the ammo cartridge as well, though the demo was so quick that even Chromia couldn’t follow it. But, amazingly, Lightbright actually took the weapon from Ironhide when he offered it this time. 

“R… R-right…” Her fingers were shaking as they wrapped around the grip. She was more likely to shoot herself than any enemy, but at least she wasn’t completely defenceless now. “Primus, I wish Afterburner was here.”

“Sooner or later, Light,” Maxima said with a hand on her shoulder, “you have to learn to look after yourself.”

Lightbright gulped in answer. Of course Maxima was just hiding the fact that she wished Afterburner was there as well (for very different reasons), but she still made a good point. No-one else was coming to save them. The Mistress likely didn’t even know they were in trouble… not yet.

“What about you, Chromia?” Ironhide asked. “You ever fired a weapon before?”

Chromia heard him, but there was another sound further away that she focused on. It was outside the room, down the hall. She tightened her grip and moved past the others, flattening herself against the armory’s still-open door with her gun held up. She saw the approaching drone just a nanoklick before it saw her, though its trigger-speed was faster than hers. A metal slug slammed into the door just an inch from her face, and her laser bolt cleared the distance from muzzle to chestplate a second later. It was enough to knock the drone off-balance, and Chromia used up the rest of her cartridge making sure it stayed down on the ground.

“I have now,” she answered Ironhide. He seemed impressed, though she imagined that was only because he couldn’t hear her spark pulsing like a broken engine. One mistake, and she would have been just another puddle of energon on the ground. She padded over to the drone; its fluids were thin, its components smoking and sparking, but with its pure metal armor she almost felt homesick looking at it. Or maybe it was just the regular kind of sick. 

“They know we’re running loose, then,” Maxima decreed, nudging the drone’s body with her ped. “We shouldn’t waste any more time.”

Everyone nodded, even Lightbright. Maxima and Chromia kept her safe in the middle of their march as Ironhide led the way to the interrogation chambers. More drones were in the way, but they were caught by surprise. Maxima secured her first kill on a finned frame, tearing right through one of its arms with a volley of pellets, while Lightbright fired wildly in the confusion. Ironhide’s shots were rare but powerful, loud enough to rattle the walls. The sound caught the attention of every other guard in the sector, but that made it easier to pick them all off as the drones surged towards the source of the commotion. 

Whatever Airachnid was doing with Vertex, she was apparently too absorbed in it to notice all the noise. Or, more likely, the chambers were specifically designed to limit sound coming in. Chromia remembered how she could hardly hear her own voice in that damn room, how it drove her mad enough to gnaw at her shackles and pounce on her captor. But there was still plenty coming out of the room; she could hear the spider’s snarl as Ironhide’s pace slowed.

“You seem to be a little slow in the processor, so I’ll give you one last chance to save yourself. Where is Windblade?”

There was a pause, then a cough. By Chromia’s count, Airachnid had been ‘entertaining’ Vertex for the last fifteen klicks. It had only taken that long for the actor’s centre-stage voice to be reduced to a grainy grunt, but it still wasn’t enough to shut her up. 

“Enter stage left; Nova Prime, resplendent in his ceremonial armor. The Matrix hangs from a chain of thirteen links around his neck, just below his scornful scowl.”

“She’s rehearsing at a time like this?!” Lightbright hissed to keep her voice low and Ironhide was certainly perplexed, but Chromia understood what was really happening. Vertex was stalling, or just doing her best to annoy Airachnid. Either approach was damn brave of her.

“Has she allied with the Autobots?” the spider pressed. “And what about the other two?”

Then Vertex’s voice exploded, a boom summoned out of nowhere which was the only fitting voice for Nova Prime. “Enough of this nonsense! You call yourself an Emperor, and this is how you show yourself? People should be ashamed to die because of you, Deathsaurus.”

“You’re not answering my questions, Vertex. You’re not making sense at all, and you’re really starting to piss me off .”

Ironhide shook off his confusion swiftly. He made a sign to Chromia, holding his weapon towards the door of the interrogation room. She signed back, telling him to wait. Airachnid was still being too careful, too aware of her surroundings. They had to deal with her swiftly, before she was able to call in for help again.

Vertex, at least, was doing her best to make Airachnid’s spark boil over. She’d had enough practice getting on Chromia’s nerves that she probably could have driven the Mistress herself to murder if she really tried to.

“Emperor Deathsaurus laughs,” Vertex recited, “a sound that shakes the stars from their orbits. ‘Tell me, dear Nova, which of the Thirteen helped you come up with that insult? I can tell you’ve been waiting to use it for so long, you must have stolen it from one of them.’”

Maxima held back a chuckle. Her favorite parts of any play were the insults she could steal and make her own. Chromia had once looked through a three-hundred page monologue credited to Star Saber from the Camien archives, just to find a line to one-up her.

“I’m starting to think you might be insane,” Airachnid sighed on the other side of the door. “That means I’ll have to put you down. Do you know what that phrase means, Vertex?”

“From the center of the stage, the Mistress of Flame emerges. Her light is blinding.”

“People like you would say it a lot to people like me. It means someone who’s not worth keeping alive. It means you’d be better off dead .” 

Chromia could hear the venom in her voice, soaking through each word. She looked to Ironhide, a quick flick of the optics in instruction. He nodded as his digit pressed into his weapon’s trigger.

“She turns to the mechs,” Vertex announced with a wheeze, “stoic and silent, before she unveils the long-lost Forge of Solus Prime. The argument is forgotten.”

“Is it, now? Well, I’m not hearing much argument in your defence.” There was a distinctive scrape of metal against metal. “Maybe I’ll be doing you a favor. So I’ll just have to take my time, won’t I?”

Ironhide didn’t need the final cue. He fired point-blank at the door, and with no time for Chromia to dampen her audios the impact was as deafening for her as it was for Airachnid. The slugs tore right through the steel, and Ironhide ripped them open wider with his bare hands as he barged inside.

“What on Technotron is-?” Airachnid’s strange cry was silenced by, of all people, Lightbright snapping to Ironhide’s side and unloading her last few bullets into her. The laser barrage was enough to stun her, allowing Maxima and Chromia enough time to coordinate a simple but effective attack; two fists both slamming under her chin. Airachnid was sent flying to the other side of the torture room, lying in a tangled mass of her own legs. They twitched, all eight of them (the other two must have grown back quickly, Chromia thought), before Ironhide wrapped his hand around them and lifted her up. She tried to spit, but her acid only dripped down her own chest as Ironhide threw her into the nearest wall. When she collapsed this time, she didn’t twitch at all. 

“And that’s a wrap.” Vertex still managed to laugh, even though she was hanging from the ceiling by her servos. That alone was enough to count as torture, but Chromia also noticed parts of her armor where the paint had been burned off, leaving behind wispy scars. 

“Can you stand?” Maxima released Vertex from the hanging harness, holding her up as she slumped forward.

“Stand, yes,” she groaned. “Walk, no.” 

Maxima didn’t wait for her to ask; she lifted Vertex into her arms with a servo secured behind her wings, easily carrying her slender form while the actor winced. 

“Are you gonna be okay?” Lightbright asked, matching Vertex’s painful expressions in sympathy. Vertex nodded, trying to smile for the speaker’s sake, but her mouth fell when she saw Ironhide kneeling by Airachnid’s body.

“Is… this part of the interrogation?” she asked.

“He’s helping us, Vertex,” Chromia informed her.

“Why?”

“Hell if I know. But I’m grateful for whatever we can get.”

If Ironhide heard her, he didn’t make it known. He dusted his hands off with one last look down at Airachnid. “She won’t be out for long. You have to go now. You won’t get another chance.”

Maxima carried Vertex out of the awful room with Lightbright in tow, but Chromia stayed behind. 

“You’re not gonna kill her?” She angled her helm to Airachnid, who looked dead enough but apparently wasn’t. Ironhide opened his mouth, but nothing came out at first.

“I’ve… I’ve already killed one person today. I don’t… I can’t-” His vents were starting to lag.

“Okay.” Chromia didn’t force him to finish. “It’s okay. I get it. I’m not used to it, either.” She didn’t want to get used to it, truth be told. She’d only dispatched drones until now. A full-sparked bot would be another story entirely, she was sure. 

Ironhide gulped, and she could tell he was grateful. He started to move past her, but he stopped as his EM field scraped against hers.

“Femme as tough as you, I’d have thought you were a stone-cold killer,” he told her, and there was a fizz in his field just before he smiled. 

“Sorry to disappoint.” She shrugged, trying to stop herself from matching his expression.

“You haven’t disappointed me. Just surprised. That’s not a bad thing.”

He had a nice smile. She had to wonder how many times he was allowed to show it in a place like this. All the more reason to get the hell away from it.

“So where the hell are we supposed to go?” Even though she was in agony with a barely-functional vocaliser, Vertex apparently still refused to shut up. “The whole planet will be looking for us. Our ship is on lockdown. We’re more likely to get ourselves killed out there than in here.”

“Any ideas, Ironhide?” Maxima addressed him by name for the first time, either a sign of growing trust or a sign that she was already exhausted by having to lug Vertex around. Ironhide’s gaze wandered as he thought, though Chromia didn’t think he’d have any miracle solution for them. All he’d promised was a way out, and the means to secure it. That was all he could offer.

“North of Cybertron.” Lightbright’s voice was quiet, as if she didn’t want to be heard. “That’s where we need to go.”

Everyone looked at her, and she definitely looked like she wished she hadn’t been heard.

“How do you know that?” Chromia asked. Lightbright’s red markings almost went blue from the flood of energon to her cheeks.

“I… there’s been… someone’s been speaking to me,” she stuttered. “Whispers. I don’t recognise the voice, but it’s a mech. He said there’s people waiting for us up there.”

Maxima and Chromia shared another look, but this one was of mutual concern. Even Vertex seemed worried under the mask of pain, and Ironhide was simply lost.

“You never told us about that,” Maxima said, and though it wasn’t supposed to be an accusation Lightbright still flinched.

“I didn’t know what to make of it… thought I was just going crazy, at first.”

With everything they’d gone through in the last decacycle, Chromia wouldn’t have blamed her for letting some of her screws go loose. But this wasn’t that. She wouldn’t have brought it up at all if it wasn’t worth listening to, and it would explain why she’d been so quiet the last few days. “Go on, Light.”

“He knew I was a Cityspeaker. Said he’s been waiting for someone who can hear him.” Lightbright’s voice was more steady now, gaining confidence with at least one person willing to hear her out.

“And he found you?” Maxima pressed.

“Well, Windblade is already tuned into Metroplex, and Hot Shot…” Lightbright shrugged. “I guess wherever he’s been this whole time, he couldn’t hear him. The Mistress never assigned a Titan to me and him. We just helped Windblade look after Metroplex.”

“You’re talkin’ to a Titan? You can really do that?” Ironhide was the one who asked this time. He’d have known that Windblade could communicate with Metroplex, but he must have been unaware of anyone else having her talent.

“I guess so.” Lightbright shrugged again.

“Does he have a name?” he asked, though Lightbright seemed hesitant to answer. She breathed in, dragging her glossa over her lips before she summoned anything to them.

“F… Fortress Maximus,” she revealed, hugging her servos to her chest. It was certainly a powerful name, though Chromia couldn’t tell why she was so scared to speak it out loud.

“That name mean anything to you, Vertex?” Chromia asked. The obnoxious actor knew more about history on both sides of the galaxy than anyone else alive, but she looked skeptical.

“Definitely not one of the original Prime Titans,” she croaked, and she hissed as Maxima rolled her shoulders and jostled her. “He might be a Quintesson war machine left over from the Age of Wrath, reprogrammed to serve Cybertron. Or an invention of the old Senate. Can’t think of anyone else who would have the tech to build a Titan from scratch.”

“What about you, Ironhide? You ever heard of Fortress Maximus?” Chromia turned to the mech, figuring that it must have been familiar to a native Cybertronian rather than a Camien. But he just shook his head.

“No. Sorry.”

“Well, sounds enough like a Titan to me,” Maxima decreed. “If Lightbright can hear him, and she trusts him, that’s good enough.”

“ Can we trust him, Light?” That was the only question important to Chromia, the only one she had time left to ask. Lightbright hesitated again, but only for a nanoklick. 

“Yes. He’s been awake a long time. He couldn’t tell me everything, but he told me enough. It was… a lot. I think we should do what he says.”

“Not like we have much else to choose from,” Maxima grumbled. 

In any case, they were out of time. Chromia could hear footsteps. They were far away, dull thuds through the walls, but still far too close for everyone to still be standing around basking in the smoke from their own exhaust pipes. They had to go, and they had to go now, and there was only one place to go at all.

“You know the way north?” She was pulling on Ironhide as she asked, pushing on his bulky frame to get it going. 

“Er, vaguely. The way out is close, around the corner. Just follow the trees outside. The tall green things, I mean.” He was letting her push him, pointing her where she had to go, but still refused to move on his own. Chromia gave up with a roll of her optics.

“Alright, then.” She made sure her weapon was loaded, held it steady until she saw the fabled way out in front of her. It was a deceptively simple door, probably some kind of staff or drone entrance. Most importantly, it was open.

“Ironhide. Let’s go already.” Chromia took the lead this time, waiting for him to follow her. But he just stood there shaking his head like a damn moron.

“But… But I can’t come with you-”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Maxima told him as she pushed past with Vertex. “Where else are you gonna go?”

“Ditto.” Even Lightbright got a jab in at him as she ran to keep up with the others.

No-one gave him a chance to argue any further, because there was nothing to argue over. Chromia didn’t waste time looking back, but she could eventually hear the weight of his footsteps above all others. The sound had already become so familiar to her, just as the deep grooves of his fingers left on the grip of her weapon were. 

Starscream hated silence.

The time he’d spent in Rattrap’s basement had been nothing but silence, occasionally interrupted by agony that might have been felt as relief for a lesser mech. The machines that had kept him functioning were intentionally dampened when not in use. When he couldn’t hear the struggle of his engines, his own rusted vents and empty tanks, he’d been convinced that he was dead but somehow still conscious. It seemed like a fitting punishment for him, but even knowing that hadn’t allowed him to take any solace in it. 

The med-bay was silent; supposedly for his benefit, because these Autobots must have thought he’d fall apart if someone so much as blew their fans at him too aggressively. He would have liked to be somewhere else, but the medic was convinced that this was the safest place for Public Enemy Number One to stay for now. Starscream was sure that Megatronus wasn’t the only Autobot who would hurt him, if any chance to do so came about. 

So far, he could count the number of people he trusted on a single hand; Ratchet, the medic, because he could have easily let Starscream perish under the knife and passed it off as a tragic accident if he’d wanted to. Nautica, the other Camien, because she was a rare breed who was blessed with brains and who also knew how to use them. She’d tried to shake his hand, even though he was covered in centuries of grime and grease, and because she didn’t even acknowledge his sorry state, she didn’t pity him. Starscream appreciated that. 

And then there was Windblade, of course. The prodigal daughter of Caminus, the long-lost haven where long-dead Primes and lies were both worshipped with equal fervour. Long ago, Starscream had heard it said that when the Titan Caminus abandoned Cybertron eons ago, the hole that he left behind in Primus’ shell was what Vos was built within.

The city of Seekers, formed from the ruins of the only place they could now be born from. Even if Primus hadn’t created Starscream, He clearly enjoyed toying with him. Windblade, her very existence, was surely just an extent of the torment He had in mind for the last living mech who refused to worship Him. 

Starscream ached to be near her, to even look at her. When he could see again, for the first time, and when Windblade and her impossible wings were the first thing he saw, he’d known almost nothing about her; he only knew that she would ruin him, but not before he ruined her in turn. 

Because he simply couldn’t help himself. He ruined everything he touched. The moment she’d taken his hand, she was doomed. And the more he touched her, the quicker her doom would come. The time he’d spent with her under the spray, washing her of the sins of Cybertron, had likely reduced her lifespan by several million years. He wanted to regret it, for her sake. But he only regretted not pressing himself closer, while he had the chance.

Selfish Starscream. Foolish Starscream. He was so used to being tortured that, even now that he was free of Rattrap’s bindings, he couldn’t stop doing it to himself. He was only still alive because of her, and he would continue to live only for her. She’d done so much for him, that he owed her what little that his life could still give. 

But she wasn’t here. She was off fulfilling her purpose, doing something good for the universe, and he tried to be happy for her even if he wasn’t sure what that was supposed to feel like anymore. He’d lost count of how many times he’d asked himself why she stayed with him. 

She was a species that no longer existed on Cybertron— not only a Seeker, but utterly selfless. If she’d left him behind, she would have eventually found her friends, maybe even done so faster without Starscream to hold her back. She was smart enough to not get caught on her own. He knew that, even when he’d called her stupid for refusing to abandon him. It wasn’t stupidity at all, but kindness. He’d simply forgotten what kindness looked like. 

No matter how much he’d tried to push her away, for her own good, she’d refused to budge. And now she was finally gone of her own accord, and he hated it. 

He knew he couldn’t join her, even when she’d offered, even when he convinced himself that she’d sincerely wanted him to come. He was dead weight. He had nothing more to offer for her quest. She was finally at a point where she didn’t need him explaining everything for her, and he wouldn’t take that from her. In Seeker terms, she had finally learned how to fly on her own. 

Against his will, Starscream remembered when Skywarp had accomplished such a feat. He’d been the smallest of them all, even smaller than Slipstream was when she came along. The winds of Vos would assault him as if there was a target on his back, almost pushing him all the way out to Praxus. He’d tried weighing his armour down, bolting thick plates onto his wings which left him unable to even lift off the ground. Then he’d tried to convince Thundercracker to slap a rope between their frames and tow him through the skies, like he was some kind of obnoxious advertising banner.

It wasn’t until Slipstream’s surprise arrival, when Skywarp was almost out of his fledgling phase, that he finally buckled down and learned how to control his jets properly. He was scared of being outclassed by his baby sister, as much as he tried to deny it. 

Skywarp and Slipstream had never gotten along. They were too similar to each other. But Skywarp, at least, had his trine to balance him out and keep him in line when the eyes of the entire city on him couldn’t so. Slipstream never had that privilege. She didn’t have many friends, and even less people who were willing to trine with her. Not even the influence of the royal family could convince people to put up with her. 

If she’d had more time, she could have found her people eventually. If she’d just been allowed to find them. The problem was that she didn’t want a trine to change her, and Starscream was the only one who understood that. A Slipstream who was easy to get along with wasn’t who his sister was. 

Who she’d been.

Slipstream. Thundercracker. Skywarp, Thundercracker, Mother and Father. Skyfire. His friends. He missed them. 

He missed them. 

He’d killed them. 

It was his fault. 

The fall of Vos, of the entire planet, was all his fault—

Starscream put his claws to his face, shaking, trying not to touch the lines still carved into his mouth and chin. He pressed them to his cheeks, assuring that he was here and solid and not a ghost. It was supposed to be comforting, but his own talons threatened to sting if he pressed them in too far. They were nothing like Windblade’s smooth digits, utterly flawless from her supposed soft life on Caminus, and by Daedalus he envied her for them. How she’d drummed out her Titan’s sparksong on his face, just so he wouldn’t have to lie in silence. He’d imagined that rain falling against him would have felt the same, though her fingers didn’t threaten him with rust.

‘You still killed them. No amount of rust or rain will change that. Windblade certainly can’t. Nothing can. Primus, you’re pathetic. No wonder He wants nothing to do with you.’

His wings were a lost cause. His spark was a wreck. His chronometer had stopped working eons ago, and it still hadn’t been fixed (he didn’t want it fixed. He preferred not knowing how long a century really was, let alone five of them). But his conscience still worked perfectly. He didn’t recognise its voice, but that didn’t matter. 

It was only telling him the obvious. That was the only reason he tried to drown it out. He was many things, but he wasn’t stupid. So, just as Windblade had played out a song from her home for him, he attempted to mimic it from memory with the fingers on his cheeks. 

But he was distracted. He wondered if the reason it was so comforting to him was not because it came from her, but because it was like the heartbeat of Vos itself. The city was dead, but its ghost still lingered in him, and in Caminus. And he wondered if he’d be able to see Caminus, just once, before he died. Just to see if it was familiar to him. And just to see Windblade at her best, in a place that was safe if not at all good for her.

There was another problem, though this one not borne of his mind and the stranger within it. Starscream’s claws were simply too sharp to replicate the lullaby without cutting himself. He could have asked the medic for a metal file, or clippers to remove the excess from his hands. But he didn’t want to ask for anything, not when he’d already taken so much. And his claws were his only weapon. Better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them. Better still to not have or need them at all.

“Starscream?”

He jumped from his slab at the sound, but slumped back down when he realised it wasn’t Windblade’s voice. It was a mech, but it was not the medic either. Starscream only vaguely recognised the tone before the speaker revealed himself. Red and blue streaks made up what was left of his paintjob. He’d been with a pink femme. Starscream couldn’t remember much else about him.

“Were you expecting someone else?” Starscream did not face him as he spoke. He just wanted to shake off the rust from his vocaliser, so that it wouldn’t crack in front of company. 

“I apologise for taking so long to meet with you.” The mech apparently chose to ignore his sarcasm. “Things have been hectic, and I wanted to ensure you had time to recover before we spoke.”

Starscream made a curt sound of acknowledgement. So this was the one running things around here. He supposed this would be the long-overdue interrogation.

“Do you mind if I sit with you?” The blue mech was standing in front of a slab directly opposite Starscream, the same one Windblade had rested on. Starscream shrugged.

“You’re the one in charge. You can do what you like.”

“No-one is ‘in charge’ around here, Starscream.” The mech exerted effort as he sat down, hunching over so that his optics were level with the Seeker’s. “I offer solutions, and people often find them helpful. Or they might choose something else that suits them better.”

“You expect people to take matters into their own hands, then.” Starscream watched the mech’s hands, how he clasped them with his elbows on his knees. He’d be prepared for when they inevitably came lunging towards his throat.

“You knew that Skyfire was a drone. So you took matters into your own hands.”

Starscream tried not to flinch at the sound of his friend’s name. He’d managed to kill him without doing so. Same with everyone else he cared about. Unlike them, he’d killed Skyfire twice. 

“So I did. You’re welcome.” Starscream dragged his thumbs down his longer claws, filing them. Keeping them as sharp as they might need to be.

“Some are still coming to terms with what happened.” The mech continued as if he couldn’t hear the scrape of the talons. “The drone had made friends in the last three centuries. Some still refuse to believe that he was a spy. But he was, and I won’t punish you for doing what was right in the moment.”

It was supposed to be reassuring, Starscream reasoned. But it was not.

“Did you not think it odd,” Starscream asked, still watching the other mech’s hands as he clenched his own, “having a Seeker in your ranks when we were supposed to be extinct?”

The blue mech blinked, and released his hands from each other. Starscream could hear a hiss from the mech’s vents as he straightened his strut.

“No-one wanted to believe they… that you were extinct,” he explained. “Hopes were high, those few hundred years ago. They’re starting to climb up again, thanks to the Camiens. I think you could have the same effect on them, Starscream. Once the shock wears off.”

Starscream could tell he was smiling, even though he refused to look at his face. If he flicked his optics just that inch upwards, he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from clawing that insipid smile to shreds.

“What was your name again?” he asked, forcing himself to not grit his teeth.

“Orion.”

“Why are you here, Orion?”

"Straight to the point, then.” There was a cough of static, a creak from stiff joints as Orion picked up something lying next to him on the slab. “We have a list of people who’ve gone missing over the centuries. We’ve never found out what happened to them. So, to put it bluntly, we’d like to confirm the Autobot casualties that you were involved with."

Now Starscream had to smile in turn, a flash of a grin that only lasted as long as it took for him to realise how much danger he was in. "That's a friendly way of asking me how many of your friends I've murdered."

"I won't ask for details. I'll say a name, and you just tell me if they came to you. Does that sound acceptable?"

“I suppose it will have to be.” Starscream looked up at Orion now. If he was going to die today, he’d at least be brave enough to see his killer’s face. And, immediately, he realised that Orion had been right; he wasn’t a leader. He didn’t look like one, at least. Starscream didn’t believe that he’d ever even killed someone before. The Autobots were much worse off than he’d thought.

“We don’t have to go through the whole list at once,” Orion told him, as he held the datapad in his lap. “Let me know if you want to stop.”

Starscream wanted to laugh. The mech was discussing dead bodies with a serial killer, and he was worried about the killer’s comfort. The Autobots had no chance. “Just get it over with.” 

Orion nodded, though there was still some hesitation from him before he finally did as he was told. The first name came after a heavy sigh.

“Afterburst.”

Starscream recognised it instantly. He’d been a grounder, though most of his wheels were punctured when he was brought to Iacon. He was born from the Well, a son of Alchemist Prime. He’d been training as a chemical engineer, suspected of engineering anti-organic compounds before he was captured. Starscream knew all of this, but he could not recall the mech’s face. Even now, just a second after hearing his name, everything he knew about Afterburst was quickly fading. As if he’d just pulled it all from an emotionless database, and not from memories of his final moments. 

“Yes.” Starscream swallowed as Orion made a note.

“Airwave.”

The recognition was slower this time, but it was still there. Another mech. A copter. Not as sleek as a Seeker, but still useful for cargo. He’d hated his job. He was going to quit and join the Autobots full-time, a decacycle before he’d been caught ferrying forbidden texts between Kaon and Crystal City. “Yes.”

“Arcana.”

Starscream remembered her, much more intimately than the other two. Bond-born. She’d worked at the observatory in Tyger Pax. She was already bonded to someone, Run-Over, when he split her spark in half. He’d felt both of their deaths all at once. “Yes.”

When Orion eventually reached the B’s on his list, Starscream was feeling sick. The people on that list were only a fraction of everyone he’d killed. Not everyone had been an Autobot. Some hadn’t even been mechanical.

“Brainstorm.”

That one had put on a brave face, right up until they pried his chamber open. Then he started screaming. “Yes.”

"Brawn."

That one had refused to scream at all. “Yes."

“Beachcomber. Beta. Bluestreak.”

 Starscream said yes to all three in quick succession, and then came the C’s.

"Chromedome."

That was the first name to give Starscream pause. One of the first who’d been brought to him, who had introduced him to the reality of what he’d been turned into. And, during it all, Chromedome had tried to comfort Starscream. They’d never met each other before. They’d known absolutely nothing about each other. Yet Chromedome, who was going to be torn apart from his spark chamber, had tried to soothe the machine that was killing him. He’d been a mnemosurgeon. He’d known what it was like to see other people at their worst moments.

"He was the one who carved out Senator Shockwave's brain…” Starscream’s optics drifted, accidentally finding Orion’s face. And the other mech was blinking, as if shocked. If he hadn’t known that fact about one of his dead friends before, he knew it now.

But Orion only coughed, making another note on his datapad. He was refusing to make this a true interrogation. And he went on.

"Greenlight."

“Yes.”

“Hubcap. Huffer.”

“Yes.”

"Mirage."

"Yes."

Every single answer was the same. Every name was one that Starscream could see coming from miles away, every face he could see if he closed his eyes. He wished he’d gone with Windblade. He wished he’d been left to die.

"Wing."

And there it was. The name he’d been dreading most of all. Of course it had to be the last one, lurking, waiting for his weakest moment. Starscream closed his optics, seeing Wing’s agony all over again behind the lids, hearing the scream that swallowed his last words.

“Is that mech Drift nearby?” Starscream kept those eyes closed, his jaw firm with his teeth clamped together. The fact that he asked, that he knew Drift’s relation to Wing, should have told Orion all that he needed to know.

“No. He is with Ariel and Windblade.” Then Orion waited. There was no mark on his list, no mercy. Starscream had to say it out loud before he’d be allowed to move on.

"...Yes. I met Wing. I killed him.” He made it obvious, painfully so for himself and for Orion, just so he would never have to repeat himself. It was done, it was out there, and he never wanted to think about it again.

(He should have known by now that he would never get what he wanted, but old Vosian habits died slower than the city they came from.)

“Well. That does it.” Orion looked as exhausted as Starscream felt by the process. Maybe it was empathy, but it felt more like mockery. “Thank you for your cooperation, Starscream.”

"Let me guess” —Starscream finally released his clenched teeth, throwing his head back from the effort— “Megatronus will be in next to take out everyone’s anger on me."

And he smiled, to show Orion that his attempts to make him feel safe had not worked at all. All that effort, gone to utter waste. Even in his deepest despair, in his inevitable final moments, Starscream would always have the last laugh. 

Orion looked disappointed by the accusation, as Starscream had hoped. But not for the reasons he’d been hoping for.

"No. Megatronus will not come anywhere near you. If he tries, we will stop him." 

Blunt, simple assurances. Starscream almost believed them. “Good luck with that.”

He turned his face away. He was tired of trying to keep control over it. His eyes hurt from the pressure of the thousand ghosts fighting for attention in his brain. His claws hurt, stinging where he’d scraped the metal coating off. Everything hurt. At least when he’d been in Rattrap’s basement, he was allowed to be numb when he wasn’t in use. Some relief from a torture you couldn’t stop was better than a torture that you could stop yourself, very easily, if you weren’t a coward.

Starscream might have made himself a coward, if he didn’t have Windblade to live for, and if he wasn’t certain that whatever was waiting for him after this life would be far worse.

“I have one more question for you, Starscream.” Orion was still sitting across from him, apparently unable to take a hint. “But this is one you are under no obligation to answer.”

Starscream wanted to tell him there was no point in asking it then, but that many words was too much effort for him. What came out instead was a grunt. “Hm.” 

“As I’m sure you noticed, most of the names on that list were mechs.” Orion suddenly sounded more uncomfortable than he had when he was reading out the graveyard of his friends. “Yet you, as a mech yourself, were able to absorb their sparks. Do you know how that was possible?”

Starscream considered staying silent. He was allowed to not answer at all. Even if he’d had an answer for Orion, he probably wouldn’t have given it over. And he knew he was better off not knowing why, whatever the anomaly’s reason was. Another one of Tarantulas’ sick experiments. False memories crafted by another mnemosurgeon. Or a loophole of physics, designed solely to torment him to the highest degree. 

It didn’t matter how it happened, only that it had happened.

“No,” Starscream said. “I don’t.”

“I see.” Orion nodded, doing well to hide his disappointment. “Ratchet was curious. I think he’d like to take a look at your spark, if you’d be alright with that.”

Starscream almost cut him off with his instant reply. “I would not.”

“Very well. That’s all I wanted to know.” Orion stood, and the creak of his struts forced Starscream to consider how long they’d spent sitting together. He would never know for sure how long, thanks to his broken chronometer. “I’ll leave you to rest. If you need anything, just let Ratchet know and we’ll do our best to accommodate.”

He took his time with leaving. Every movement he made was deliberate, calculated; even if the mech himself was as weak in his core as a sparkling, the frame he inhabited almost made up for it. It was probably why people listened to him, because they could convince themselves that he was as strong as he looked. Starscream had come across a few like him before, in the better days. He’d thought they’d gone extinct, just like his fellow Seekers.

"You're were a Pax, weren't you?” he asked, making Orion pause on his heel. “Before all of this.”

Orion looked over his shoulder, before he eventually turned to face him again. “In many ways, I still am.”

Starscream laughed, even though it hurt. 

“Of course you’d think that,” he told Orion through an aching throat. “You have that insufferable look in your eyes, the same one every Pax used to have. The kind of mech who thinks, just because he knows everything that went wrong in the past, that he alone can do the one thing that's right. You think you can save the world."

He should have known, as soon as he’d heard the first word from Orion’s mouth. The Pax were the so-called peacekeepers of Cybertron, Iacon born-and-bred. If the Senate was Primus’ voice, the Pax were his weapons. One created the laws, the other enforced them without question. This one must have not been on the job long before everything fell to ruin. If he was the same back then as he was now, he wouldn’t have lasted three months.

And Orion must have known it for himself. Even though Starscream put his gaze on full display with nothing to hide, the Pax couldn’t bring himself to meet it anymore, not for some long klicks that passed by blindly. Then Orion summoned the strength to face Starscream’s accusation, the same strength it took for him to speak.

"After all that you've been through, Starscream, do you think that this world can still be saved?"

“If you don’t believe it can,” Starscream pressed, “then why are you trying so hard?”

“I do believe it can. But I’m asking if you do as well.”

Starscream was sick of being asked things that he didn’t want to think about. He was sick of being reminded that this world would happily go on without him. 

(If anything, it was probably better off that way.)

“You won’t like my answer, Orion. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep it to myself.”

Orion did not nod this time. Instead he sighed, and the weight from his vents was the very first indication of just how old he really was.

"We are not your enemy, Starscream. And if you can't believe that… at least believe that I am not. We’re all working towards the same goal here."

“And what would that be?” 

“To depose Rattrap. You’re a victim of him, just as the rest of us are.”

“Some might not see me as a victim.”

“Perhaps not. Some will still see you as you once were. As the Prince of Vos.”

Starscream wanted to laugh again, but it wasn’t the pain that stopped him this time. He knew that if he jolted his head too quickly, something would start leaking. “Vos no longer exists.”

“Neither does Iacon. But it’s still my home. And, at the end of all this, it will exist again.” Orion was already leaving as he finished, as if he no longer cared whether Starscream believed or not. He knew when to give up, at least. 

“Pax.” Starscream called out to him only when he was out of view, his voice a pitiful sound in the empty med-bay, and when Orion didn’t reappear he thought he had finally and truly gone. But then footsteps came and there he was, his hand holding the privacy screen aside.

“May I have… a blank datapad? And a stylus for it.” Starscream couldn’t stop himself from feeling embarrassed by the request, as minor as it was. But Orion almost seemed pleased to hear it.

“I’ll have one brought to you. Though, may I ask what you intend to use it for?”

Starscream could have easily not told him. Orion was only asking if he could ask at all. But he wanted to. He needed at least one person to know what he was doing, so they would know how important it was.

“As you said. I’m the last son of a dead city. Not the last Seeker, as I’d always feared… but the last Vosian. When you die, there will be others who still remember Iacon. But when I die, everything from my home dies with me. So I want to leave a record of what I know. So that… when my time comes, at least someone else can take what I know. Make use of it.”

He thought about mentioning Windblade. She was the reason he wanted Vos to survive, after all. She would benefit most of all from all that he had to share. But that would spoil the surprise. And he wasn’t yet sure how much she should know.

“I understand.” This time when Orion spoke, there wasn’t an ounce of pity that Starscream could sense. “I’m sorry that the Arcanimus doesn’t have records of Vos for you to reference.”

“I won’t need any.”

“I’m sure you won’t. But I’m still sorry that the burden of such knowledge lies solely upon you.”

Orion left without another word, and this time Starscream let him go. Only a fragging Pax could make him feel even more sorry for himself.

The burden of knowledge. He had to wonder how much of a burden he’d placed on Windblade. If she’d ever forgive him, once she knew everything else he hadn’t told her. 

If he ever could bring himself to tell her.

 

✧✦✧

 

Quickstrike’s body was found in the empty cell-block, but Rattrap had him dragged back over to his murder site before he summoned his subordinates. The security room was cramped with them all gathered around the damp corpse, but the sight of the guard’s body wasn’t what Rattrap wanted them to focus on. It was there to make a point, true, but he wanted their optics on the security footage that was looping on one of the monitors.

Quickstrike’s final moments, just before Ironhide blasted his head across the room. The molten scraps from his processor were still lying sticky on some of the screens. Waspinator had started cleaning it up when he arrived, but Rattrap stopped him. Let the mess remain. Let it show them all of what could happen to them.

“Well? Would anyone care to explain?” Rattrap stood between the corpse and the monitor, forcing his audience to glance at both if they tried to address him.

“Oh! Oh! I know this one!” His left head giggled through gnashing teeth. “Quickstrike was too slow! Gahahaha!”

For once, Rattrap didn’t silence it with a palm across the jaw. Let him have his laugh. Let the others think that a betrayal of this magnitude was something to joke about. Let them make it easy for him to weed them out.

“It was… unfortunate timing, Chancellor.” Monopoly was the first to try and save himself, rapidly blinking his remaining eye as he anxiously preened his feathers. “The guards had to be redirected to capture the Camiens reported in Nova Cronum. Rampage and his mate were attending an appointment with Tarantulas. Other than Ironhide and Quickstrike, the only staff on hand were the drones.”

He was going to say more, but Airachnid was right next to him and she pounced on the opportunity like a true predator. “I believe the blame lies on you then, Monopoly. Your drones are clearly not equipped to deal with the threats they were designed to face.”

She rubbed salt into his wound with a claw that could have easily sliced through his feathers with a flick of her wrist, but she contented herself with only pressing it into his chest, before he grabbed her hand and threw it away from him.

“They have never faced threats like this before, Airachnid,” Monopoly hissed. “And what’s your excuse? This is the second time you’ve let a Camien make a weakling out of you. What’s the point of having all those legs if you don’t know how to use them?”

“Enough.” Rattrap was not tall enough to physically force the two of them apart, but the weary rage in his voice was enough to make them separate. Everything was falling apart around him when he was so close to finishing his work, and these pitiful creatures were still only thinking of their own pride. 

It was bad enough that Rhinox, one of his most tenured if not trustworthy officers, was now detained for his suspected involvement with his so-called daughter Airazor’s crime. He’d gained two Camiens but now had four more of them running loose, and Primus only knew what damage Ironhide could do before he could be executed with the rest of them. He knew too much about Technotropolis, all the ways in and out of the city.

But he didn’t know everything, at least. None of Rattrap’s Elites did, even if they thought otherwise. 

“Airachnid.” He turned all three heads towards her. “You allowed yourself to be overpowered. Again.”

“It was four against one this time, Chancellor.”

Rattrap ignored her muttered defence. “Monopoly. Your drones were as useful as wings on a fragging Titan.”

The disfigured mech let a shudder show through his feathers, but didn’t bother trying to argue. Losing an eye had apparently taught him when to stay quiet.

“And the rest of you.” Rattrap advanced on the remaining three mechs, who had elected to linger back and stay silent until now. “By the time you arrived on the scene, the Camiens were already out the door. What was the hold-up, hm? Stuck in traffic? More important things to attend to?”

Dinobot, Inferno, and Waspinator stood in a line that made them look like imminent victims of a firing squad. One looked guilty, the other kept his head down, and the last of them still couldn’t stop his fragging vocaliser from humming (Rattrap hadn’t even intended to summon him, but apparently Waspinator had been close enough to Ferromax during the breakout that he felt like he deserved some of the blame).

“Wazzzzpinator wazzz victim of anotherrrr cruel prank.” The spindly arms of his alt-mode kept rubbing together, as if trying to scrub themselves clean of any consequences. “Got zzztuck in ventzzz.”

Then Waspinator looked to Dinobot, who glared back with a sigh.

“I was helping him get out of the vent,” Dinobot confessed.

So that only left Inferno. Rattrap waited for his excuse while he kept staring at his feet.

“I was… on my lunch break.” He tried to cover it up with a clack of his jaws, but the grating sound only made Rattrap all the more furious.

If any trace of guilt had threatened to infect him over the centuries of finalising his plan, it was now impossible for him to even sense it. He’d be glad to leave behind some of these beasts. And he’d be gladder still to ensure that they got what they deserved.

(Save perhaps Dinobot. There was a kindred spirit in that mech, of someone who was forced to be around those who could never hope to reach his level. Though, of course, that didn’t mean that Dinobot himself was comparable to Rattrap. An exceptional beast was still a beast.)

“It is... a fragging miracle… that this entire city hasn’t been levelled by now.” Rattrap couldn’t even bear to look at them anymore, pressing his hand to his head to soothe the ache in the metal. “All my efforts, all my centuries of generosity that have allowed you to eke out a living, one that actually allows you to live… and this is how you choose to repay me?”

“Oh, Chancellor?” Airachnid’s sudden lilt interrupted his venting, and he didn’t appreciate it.

“What?! What is it?!” Rattrap whirled on her, heedless of how disorienting two dizzied heads could be. She’d apparently decided to occupy herself by combing through the other recent security records, as she stood near another bank of monitors waiting for his attention.

“I’ve found something you’ll want to see. Or rather, something you’ll want to hear.” Airachnid kept her hands folded behind her back as the razor-tips of her legs handled the playback controls. She let a greyscale scene starring the escaped Camiens play out, with the volume amplified loud enough to fill the whole room.

“...North of Cybertron,” the smallest one said; the delicate femme who made Rattrap think of Windblade, only with far less anger attached. “That’s where we need to go.”

It was almost too good to be true. But these were Camiens, and only they would be stupid enough to talk before they were free.

“North…” Dinobot echoed the place that would soon be a graveyard. “Are they going to try and sabotage another Titan?”

“I didn’t even know the one up there was still alive,” Inferno muttered.

“Ti-Ti-Titan? Wazzzpinator thinkzz they going to try and hide!”

“It doesn’t matter what they’re going to try.” Rattrap silenced them all with a single raised hand, his optics still locked onto the screen and all its little secrets. “What matters is that we know where they’re going.”

“He said there’s people waiting for us up there,” that foolish little Camien revealed, with no idea that she’d just sealed the doom of whoever was coming to save her. Autobots, traitors, the resurrected Thirteen, it made no matter. They wouldn’t be expecting an ambush. They wouldn’t be expecting this day on Technotron to be their last. 

“Good work, Airachnid.” It was one of the very few sincere compliments Rattrap had ever given in this life. “Your sire will be pleased to know that I won’t have to fire you. Go off and find him for me.”

“Yes, sir.” Airachnid waited until she was out of the room to shift into her faster (albeit far more disturbing) multi-legged stride. Tarantulas liked to turn his comm unit off when he was at work in his lab, so his daughter was the only reliable means to summon him sometimes. That was another reason to keep her around, if all others failed.

“Dinobot.” Rattrap addressed the only mech left he could now stomach looking at. “Effective immediately, I’m promoting you to the rank of Elite Guard. You’ll take Quickstrike’s place.”

Dinobot hid his surprise well— or, more likely, he wasn’t surprised at all. He shouldn’t have been, not when he knew he was the most qualified of anyone on the planet. “Thank you for this honour, Chancellor. I won’t let you down.”

“So far, you’re the only one who hasn’t let me down.”

“Sir, if I may…” Monopoly dared to tap Rattrap’s shoulder, fanning out his feathers with a grin. “We’ll need someone to replace Ironhide, as well.”

Rattrap almost had to respect how thin his transparency was— far more than he respected the mech himself, at least. He knew that Monopoly could never betray him, simply because if he didn’t have someone to worship and coddle then he would surely shut down and be reduced to spare parts.

“Hm? Oh, right.” Rattrap made a show of looking Monopoly up and down. “I suppose… Waspinator. You’ll do.”

“What?!” Monopoly squawked loud enough to make Dinobot wince, while Waspinator suddenly shifted into his alt-mode from shock.

“Bzzzt? Wazzzzpinator is an Elite Guard?!” His translucent wings blew a cold draught all over Rattrap as they fluttered too fast to be seen.

“You can’t possibly do a worse job than your predecessor,” Rattrap told him, “so go make yourself useful. Finish cleaning up this mess, for starters.”

“Yezzzz, zzzir Rattrap. Wazzzpinator be very very uzzzzeful, yezzz!” Waspinator’s T Cog shifted once more, then back again, then one last time before he finally landed on his two feet. He busied himself cleaning up Quickstrike’s remains with diligent haste, and Rattrap was assured that mindless obedience was the best kind.

“And that goes for the rest of you!” He gestured to Inferno and the still-despondent Monopoly. “I want the entire city locked down, no-one in or out under any circumstances!”

They left with hurried affirmations, though Dinobot didn’t go with them. His teeth could be seen through the gap in his mouth, wicked rows that could have easily torn Rattrap limb-to-limb. Not that he ever would.

“Chancellor, sir. As your Elite Guard, there’s something that you should be aware of—”

“Is it relevant to the current task?” Rattrap looked up at him, measuring his hesitation. If it truly was important, then Dinobot wouldn’t have heeded the interruption. And Rattrap didn’t need any other what-ifs and if-elses to distract him, not unless they meant the difference between life and death. If they didn’t, then they weren’t important.

“Well…” Dinobot looked away. “Not immediately so, but—”

“Then it can wait. Focus on what’s at hand.” Rattrap would have grabbed his shoulder if he had the height, but he could only reach Dinobot’s wrist. He patted it once, ensuring his full attention. “Right now, you are my most valuable asset, but only if you do as you’re told. Understand?”

Dinobot wasn’t used to being touched. It seemed to take him a moment to register the phenomenon.

“...Very well, sir.” He left in the same direction as the other two mechs. Waspinator buzzed to himself as he played janitor, and Rattrap left the security room from the other side. 

“Did you get all that, Ratbat?” He spoke into his comm unit when there was no-one around to overhear him. The Senator, if he’d been doing what he was told to do, should have heard everything that Rattrap’s audios had captured.

“Loud and clear, Chancellor. Is it as bad as we think?” 

“It might turn out to be,” Rattrap admitted, only because he knew how dangerous confidence could be. “But I think if we play our cards right, we could kill two birds with one stone.”

That was a phrase he’d heard somewhere, a long time ago. Several lifetimes, several universes ago. It was hard to measure his own time in comparison to a mortal’s.

“It might be time to let Devastator off his leash now,” Ratbat advised.

“We’ll need more than that, old friend.”

But it was tempting. It was so, so tempting. Seeing Devastator earn his namesake five hundred years ago, him and his artificial siblings, how Rattrap yearned to see such carnage again. It wasn’t enough to simply massacre the dissident behind closed doors. You had to destroy their homes, their streets and havens. You had to show them that they had nowhere to go, nowhere but the slaughterhouse.

And what a magnificent slaughterhouse Metroplex would turn out to be. Rattrap didn’t have to hide his grin as he gave Ratbat his orders.

“Assign the Constructicons back to Metroplex. Tell them to carry on with what they were doing. Assemble our fighters near the Fortress Maximus ruins.” 

There was a hiss on Rattrap’s left, a tell-tale scape of metal that he’d learned to anticipate. The left head was usually inactive. Usually. Sometimes it would summon enough strength to lash out, desperate to end itself as well as the creature controlling the rest of the body. 

But after five centuries, it hadn’t learned how to be subtle about it. Rattrap clamped his hand tight around the misbehaving maw, just before it could pierce his throat with its teeth. There was a brief and pathetic struggle before, once again, it gave up and slumped limp on his shoulder for another few decades. Rattrap wasn’t even out of breath as he relayed his final, and favourite, command.

“And send the Terrorcons with them.”

He could hear Ratbat’s own smile through the line. “Right away, sir.”  

Caminus, to put it bluntly to any outsider, was a giant. Larger than Metroplex, though not quite as huge as Primus was while clad in Cybertron’s shell. It would take someone at least a decacycle to traverse his whole body on foot, and some of his children (still a word that Winbdlade was getting used to, though she did like its sound) had certainly tried to do so. Hot Shot had wanted to be one of them, thinking it would help leave a legacy for him on the colony, but he hadn’t even made it out of his quadrant before Maxima found him collapsed on the street from his engines overheating.

According to Windblade’s chronometer, it had only been two cycles since she’d left the Arcanimus with her Autobot escort, but she already felt like she’d done a circuit around her colony and back again. Roads through the cities weren’t an option for anyone; to reach Cybertron’s north, they had to circle around the major hubs through the metallic ruins and graveyards of scrap that bordered them. The sheer chaos of the mess they had to hike through helped to mask their journey from any overheard scouts, who weren’t brave enough to even fly over the worst of the wastelands, but Windblade had never wanted to be anything other than a Seeker so badly before in her life. She couldn’t risk being spotted by taking to the skies, so her alt mode was all but useless. 

If she had wheels like Afterburner, or even a hover engine like Nautica, she could have at least let her T Cog give her peds a rest. But then the ground became a gallery of craters and jagged hills, forcing everyone on their bare legs, and her fellow Camiens were just as exhausted as her by the end of the second day.

The Autobots, meanwhile, were hardly flagging at all— even Frenzy, with the disadvantage of his short legs and his role as scout forcing him to run ahead of everyone else, seemed tireless. He always had enough energy to watch the Camiens, at least. If he wasn’t staring at Windblade, when he apparently thought she wouldn’t notice, he would look to Nautica or Afterburner instead. Windblade realised early on that Frenzy wasn’t here because he wanted to help the Camiens, but because he didn’t want to let any of them out of his sight.

At least he wasn’t Megatronus, which made him somewhat easy to ignore. When it was time to recharge for the evening, he transformed into something that definitely wasn’t a vehicle; instead he squished himself into a flat rectangle that was somehow smaller than his bipedal frame, small enough to even fit inside Ariel’s subspace. 

Frenzy was safe in there while everyone else had to hide themselves by cramming into leftover wreckage or assuming their alt-modes under cover. Skids had taken to bunkering down near Nautica, waiting for her to choose a spot first and conveniently finding himself close by, but everyone else seemed to huddle in a loose circle with no particular order. Windblade usually slept standing up, leaning against whatever she could find; rust-melted foundations, or the branches of a strange stiff-boarded structure that she couldn’t recognise in the dark. It wasn’t at all comfortable, which at least stopped her hard drives from doing their playback repairs. No dreams or nightmares tonight, though she could no longer tell the difference between the two.

There was a sensation near her cheek as she slept that night, something brushing past her face. It felt like Starscream’s claws, delicately painting her heritage for her, letting her know he was near. But when she opened her optics, he wasn’t there. Instead she found herself surrounded by pink petals that must have bloomed somewhere overnight; floating down on an invisible wind, the skeletal thing that she’d sheltered in now infested with sweet-smelling color. She jumped down out of its branches, and the rest of the skeleton’s offerings showered down on her. The floor at her feet was no longer Primus’ bare skin, but a carpet of soft pink shavings that were already dissolving under her steps. She had the feeling that they’d all be gone by the time everyone was ready to leave.

Starting the day was a quick routine now; Ariel was always the first awake (Windblade wondered if she even recharged at all), and she’d do a headcount with Frenzy before setting everyone on their course. According to her they were getting close to the pole, but without innate knowledge of Cybertron it was impossible for the Camiens to know how close. Just as it was impossible for them to know if their message had reached anyone, and if anyone would be waiting for them so far away. 

Windblade had been willing to suspend her disbelief out of desperation; even Nautica had seemed optimistic when they’d left, despite her grim calculations. But knowing now how treacherous the path up north was, even with experienced Autobots guiding the way, Windblade’s hope that there was any point to this journey had been whittled away to the barest sliver— but even that sliver was razor-sharp, and capable of stabbing right through her spark if she wasn’t careful with it.

Staying behind would never have been an option for her. But maybe she should have done more to convince Starscream to come along. He would have known right away if there was anything good waiting for them at the end. He would have known the truth when it was staring him in the face, and wouldn’t have sugar-coated it for her. That was how he showed he cared.

And even if he never said a word to her, just having him at her side would have been a comfort. It wasn’t that Windblade didn’t trust the Autobots… she just trusted Starscream more. So far, he was the only one on Cybertron who hadn’t tried to feed her some kind of lie.

She liked to think that she’d gotten very good at recognising lies now. Her whole life on Caminus had apparently been one. If that wasn’t enough experience to help her wise up, then there was really no hope for her.

There was hope for everyone else, at least. Just that sliver in her spark. She held onto it as an anchor, as she picked her way through Cybertron’s landscape that was quickly, and literally, becoming a jungle. Out in the open plains the sun had been a blinding beacon, but now it was masked behind a canopy of bizarre green fans that cast down Titan-like shadows.

“Woah… Windblade, check this out!” Nautica called over to her— Windblade couldn’t see how far ahead she was, but her voice was muffled over the distance and sounded like it was coming from beside the path Ariel was leading everyone down. There was no-one behind her, and Afterburner must have been further ahead with Skids and the others, so Windblade took a cautious detour to try and track her overly curious friend.

“What is it?” She found Nautica through a tangle of damp green, standing before a rough-veined tower with twisted branches that, surprisingly, held blooming pink growths like energon buds, like the very same ones she’d found herself nestled within that same morning.

Nautica looked over at Windblade, just for a second to show her grin, before she shrugged. “No idea. It’s pretty, though.”

Windblade was stunned more by Nautica’s confession than anything else she’d witnessed that day. “Seriously? The great Nautica doesn’t have a classification for something right in front of her?”

“Even a quantum clock can be wrong twice a day, you know,” Nautica argued, looking up in thought even as she pouted. “Actually, it has to be wrong twice a day. Assuming its anchors are based on chronal distance rather than spatial…”

Before Windblade could give herself a headache trying to decipher what the Pit Nautica was talking about, she sensed a third presence approaching. But it wasn’t Afterburner like she was expecting.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Hound, the green Autobot, craned his neck up just as the Camiens did, bracing his hands on his hips as he did so. “They started sprouting up after the Gestalt Massacre. Trees, flowers, grass. They can’t talk, but they live and breathe just like we do.”

He wanted to say more, and Windblade wanted to hear more, but a scoff from behind cut him off.

“They’re still organic, Hound.” The yellow mech, Bumblebee, must have been following Hound from how quickly he materialised. “No friends of ours. If they could move, they’d be trying to throttle us with their vines.”

“You don’t know that, Bee.” Hound turned around to prod Bumblebee in the chest with a scowl. “We can’t just assume everything organic is a threat to us. That’s exactly how the TOs treat us.”

Bumblebee visibly baulked, as the nub-like horns on his head twitched, but just as he opened his mouth a pink limb appeared to pull him back from Hound.

“If we’re done sightseeing,” Ariel lectured, “we still have a lot of ground to cover. We should be there by sundown if we push on.”

That assurance was enough for the two mechs to drop the argument. They followed Ariel back to the path with heads bowed low, and Windblade and Nautica were close behind.

“So these things around us are… trees?” Windblade caught up to Hound, waiting until Bumblebee was further ahead to ask. The green mech perked his head back up, and the light in his optics fought back the canopy shadows that were drowning the rest of him in shade.

“Plants, they’re also called,” he explained, and he picked up his pace with a newfound vigour. “They help feed organics. Growing fruit and flowers. That another thing you haven’t heard of?”

“I have!” Nautica stumbled as she trotted up to make herself known. “Never seen a tree myself, though. They just started growing out of nowhere?”

“Pretty much.” Hound pulled on a vine that reached down like a rope from the sky, letting it go with a snap and a flurry of leaves from the branch overhead. “They would have taken over the planet by now, I bet, but the Council keeps them back from the cities with diligent gardening. Outside the populated areas, they’re just left to grow like this.”

He craned his neck up again, losing himself in the green mask stretched over Cybertron’s sky. “It’s incredible. I could see the trees out here all the way from the base. Imagine the view, if you managed to climb to the top of one…"

Windblade and Nautica both followed his gaze, though Windblade didn’t need to imagine the view at all. She had seen it for herself, in that too-brief moment of flying alongside Airazor.

“That’s why you tagged along, right, Hound?” A slim hand clapped the mech on the back, and a grin of fangs appeared over his shoulder as Flamewar dragged him back to solid ground. “Admiring the scenery? You’ve been begging for vorns to be allowed out this far.”

Hound shook his head, rubbing at the bruise on his back as he trailed after the femme. “What about you, Flamewar? What’s your excuse?”

“Someone’s gotta keep Arcee out of trouble,” she explained over her shoulder with a shrug. “And since Blackarachnia got rejected, there was a perfect me-shaped slot left on the team.”

“Blackarachnia?” Windblade called over Hound’s head at Flamewar, prompting the other femme to start walking backwards so she could face who she was talking to.

“She wanted to come,” Flamewar said, “but we can’t afford to let her too far from the base. She’s our only mole. Easier to use an actual TO than trying to disguise a person as one. I did it once and, lemme tell you, I did not make a pretty organic.”

“You don’t make a pretty machine, either,” Hound muttered, earning a burning glare from Flamewar.

“Says the guy who’s only interested in fragging a tree,” she fired back.

“So no-one knows Blackarachnia’s an Autobot?” Windblade jumped ahead of Hound, eager to change the subject before a war broke out. Flamewar still showed a scowl, but it faded when she put her eyes on Windblade.

“Well, Skyfire knew she was… but we can only assume he either didn’t tell anyone, or that whoever he told didn’t care much. She tends to avoid Technotropolis when she can, anyway. Last thing she wants is to run into Tarantulas. Pretty awkward if she did.”

“Doesn’t he know she’s working for the other team?” Nautica skipped over the ferns and fallen leaves to catch up to Windblade’s side, and her question made Flamewar pace pause.

“It’s… complicated. And the lady herself won’t give us details, of course. But safe to say, he either doesn’t know or would never tell anyone that he does.”

“No point in casting suspicion on him and their daughter, after all,” Hound added, and their mutual agreement seemed to dissolve whatever animosity was still simmering between the two of them.

“Hurry up back there!” Frenzy’s voice was as powerful as his legs when it needed to be, and it echoed through the tree trunks from somewhere up ahead. “Ariel’s got something to tell us.”

Whatever it was, it must have been important if it was from Ariel. Windblade ignored her curiosities as she followed the other Autobots, and Nautica kept her observations to herself for now. Ariel was waiting for them at the edge of a sheer cliff— they must have been up some distance from the ground, because below were the crowns of more trees massed together like giant herds of green animals. On one side of the horizon was a colossal construction of steel, like a spaceport with two huge runways reaching out like arms through the overgrowth around it. On the other side was an abandoned highway, the only surface that the plants were not strong enough to break through. Between them was the neglect of the mechanical, consumed by roots and vines and flowers, Primus’ skin buried beneath organic infestation. 

“Everyone still in one piece?” Ariel watched everyone gathered before her, waiting for nods or grunts of assent. Afterburner patted  both Nautica and Windblade on the shoulder when he saw them, silently asking them the same question with a smile.

“We’re past the worst of the wildlife now,” Ariel announced. “So we’ll take a short break here while we still have cover. Roulette, you’re sure you recognise this place?” She turned to one of the two sisters, who was sitting on the floor by her side.

“Positive.” Roulette’s left optic had been altered to form a sniper’s scope, while her sister Shadow Striker had the same modification on the right side. There was a whirr as the optic bulged out of the socket, zooming in at some point in the distance where Roulette looked towards. She pointed to the spaceport on the left side of the cliff. “That’s Fort Max. What’s left of him, at least. So if we follow the road next to him, we’ll be right on target.”

Ariel nodded, and everyone else seemed satisfied as they dispersed to rest for a while. But, as usual, Windblade just couldn’t help herself.

“Fort Max?” She looked over at it, at him, as she asked. The building didn’t have the sheer city size that Metroplex did, but anyone that huge had to have been a Titan. Cybertron only ever had one, though.

“You can talk to Titans, right?” Shadow Striker asked, with the same amount of confusion that Windblade was feeling herself. “Surprised you don’t know him.”

“I can only talk to a specific Titan,” Windblade corrected. “But I thought Metroplex was the only conscious one left on Cybertron?”

There were others on Cybertron, of course, the flagships of the other Thirteen Primes. But they had all gone silent eons ago. Metroplex was the only one left to speak for the rest of them.

“Not quite.” Roulette joined her sister’s side, and without their mirrored optic scopes it would have been impossible to tell them apart. “He’s got two brothers. There’s good old Fortress Maximus over there” —She pointed him out again on the horizon— “and there’s Scorponok down near Kolkular. Those two were built during the Age of Wrath, so they’re a hell of a lot younger than Metro.”

“Hold up, hold up.” Nautica must have been listening in, as she was good at doing, because now she pushed herself in front of Windblade to interrogate the sisters herself. “They were built ?”

Roulette and Shadow Striker shared a look— they were both clearly amused. “I see you’re needing another history lesson,” Roulette said.

“I can do it!” There was a curse and a thud as the mech who offered must have stumbled in his haste. When he recovered, still pulling himself up to the femmes, Windblade saw that it was Skids. “I mean, I know about it. I can tell them.”

Shadow Striker bit back a laugh, only because Roulette elbowed her as she clapped the mech on the shoulder. “Knock yourself out, Skids.”

The two of them left Skids to do just that. He looked at Nautica, then Windblade, then turned to look over the treacherous cliff drop— Windblade worried that he’d fall again and she’d have to fly in to save him). But he thankfully knew how to keep a healthy distance between himself and certain death. Nautica and Windblade took their seats on the dusty ground while he prepared his lesson.

“So,” he rubbed his hands together, sweeping his optics over each Camien, “the Age of Wrath was when the Quintessons were in charge. Bad time for everyone, from what Ratchet’s told us, and it got a whole lot worse when the Quintessons tried to build their own Metrotitan. That Titan turned out to be Scorponok. He was supposed to be an enforcer, the first in a line of Quintesson flagships so they could expand their empire.”

Skids liked to talk with his hands. It made him hard to tune out, which was good, though he was also obsessed with making sure his audience was listening. He clearly just wanted to keep his eyes on Nautica, but they kept darting over to Windblade just for the courtesy of acknowledging she was also standing there next to her. 

“But then good ol’ Sentinel Prime— you know about him, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Well anyway, back when he was Sentinel Zeta he was feeling brilliantly suicidal one day. Him and a few others, they somehow got a hold of the blueprints. Scorponok was the final product, but there was a prototype that’d been built by the slaves before. He just needed a spark of life, and Sentinel gave him that spark from the Matrix.”

“How did Sentinel get a hold of the Matrix?” Nautica raised her hand as she asked, like she was right back in one of Caminus’ academies. The ways engineering and Cityspeaking were taught were apparently very similar to each other.

“Oh, well, one of the last surviving Thirteen gave it to him. Alpha Prime, I think.” Then Skids shook his head, as if dismissing the chances of him being wrong. “But anyway. The thing about manufactured Titans is that they can’t go into hibernation, like your Metroplex can.” He acknowledged Windblade with just a glance. “If they shut down, that’s it. They’re done for. Their engines rely on kinetic energy. That’s probably why you can’t hear him, Windblade. He’s been conscious this whole time, but the auxiliary systems have all shut down to keep his core modules going. If anything important stops moving, it can’t start itself up again.” 

He left the two of them with that horrifying image while he rubbed the back of his head. “That was my hypothesis way back when, at least... I only got a close look at Max before the whole planet went to scrap.”

“Were you a mechanic?” Nautica tilted her head as she asked, and Windblade didn’t have to see her face to know how her optics must have been glittering.

“Theoretician, actually.” Skids kept his hand clamped on the back of his head, as if he was embarrassed.

“What’s that?” Nautica leaned forward with her arms crossed over her chest.

“It’s, uh… someone who…. comes up… with theories. You know. About how things work. I read what I can, and anything I can’t read I try to make sense of.”

“Oh, like a scientist!” Nautica sprang to her feet with speed that must have defied her beloved laws of physics. “What’d you specialise in? I got my start in chemistry with the usual Alchemist Prime books, but I always fell asleep when he talked about distilling energon. Then I read Vector Prime’s manuscripts about the chronosphere; you know, about how the flow of time is on a three-axis system? And then I learned all about quantum mechanics, and I wrote my best thesis on a proposal for sparks being super-dense conduits to the Allspark-”

Nautica’s rambling became faint as she walked along the cliff with Skids, overwhelming him with centuries of textbook knowledge that she must have kept bottled up until now. Windblade couldn’t help but smile as she watched them walk together, and though she felt someone kneel beside her she didn’t turn towards him. She recognised Drift’s EM field before she heard his voice.

“I think poor Skids is in love with your mechanic.” 

“Poor Skids, indeed,” she echoed. There was a crunch in the dust as Drift straightened up, and Windblade pivoted her hips to follow suit. She missed Starscream most of all, but it had also been some days since she’d last spoken with the strange mech that was Drift. He helped her feel somewhat normal on Cybertron.

“Most of his theories are wrong, of course,” he told her, as he sat on a fallen tree that he shared with Afterburner. “I’ve never had the spark to tell him which ones, though. If he wants to know the truth one day, he just has to look in the Arcanimus’ database to find it.”

Windblade stood opposite him, leaning on a young tree that fought back against her weight. “But he never will look, because he doesn’t know there’s proof out there that says he’s wrong.”

It was a somewhat-educated guess, but Drift looked very pleased with it. “Exactly. Typical Nova Prime behaviour, I call it. Thirteen voices in his head, thirteen others outside it all telling him their own truths. No wonder he went insane. Actually; Windblade, Afterburner, did you know Nova was the one who let the Quintessons through the Space Bridges? Apparently he thought Quintus Prime was telling him to let them pass, and then he believed the Quintus representative trying to talk sense into him was an alien shapeshifter-”

Windblade had escaped Nautica only to be trapped with someone else exactly like her. But luckily Afterburner wasn’t shy about interrupting.

“Not that I don’t trust you, Drift…” From how he trailed off, it was clear that Afterburner did not trust him at all, “but how do you apparently know so much about Cybertron that far back? You weren’t there to see it yourself.”

Drift didn’t look as offended as he probably should have, to be accused by something so obvious. Everything seemed to just flow right over him, like he was a stone worn smooth by a relentless stream. 

“You’re right, I wasn’t. But Dai Atlas was there. He was my mentor. And, in turn, he was the student of Star Saber himself. When the Empire fell billions of years ago, Star Saber gave him one half of a relic known as the Golden Disk. It was an encoding of everything the Empire had discovered, essentially the entire library of Cybertronian knowledge up until that point.” His perennial smile faltered for the first time. “Or, half of it, at least. No one knows what happened to the other half. But the one we do have tells us enough.”

“So if Dai Atlas is gone,” Afterburner asked after a moment, “what happened to his half of the disk?”

“Well, I’m the only one left of the Circle of Light. So the disk passed to me. And when I joined the Autobots, I let them take it into the Arcanimus library. No use in keeping the knowledge to myself.”

Windblade listened, but her mind latched onto just one sentence. Starscream was the last citizen of Vos, and Drift was the last of the Circle of Light. Cybertron really was an oasis of extinction.

“Did Rattrap destroy the Circle?” she asked, because she had to, even though she knew Drift would likely flinch at the question. 

He didn’t, though he closed his optics and didn’t open them for a long klick. “What was left of it. But it was Devastator who took Dai Atlas to the Allspark.”

It took a combiner to destroy a living relic of a mech. That must have been testament to how strong Dai Atlas had been; and how could he have not been, with billions of years to build that strength? Winblade wished she could have known him as Drift had. But she hadn’t even been born when he was annihilated. 

“Afterburner,” she turned to her fellow Camien with a sudden idea, “do you think the Mistress of Flame might have the other half of the disk?”

Afterburner likely didn’t know about the Mistress’ supposed bond with Star Saber, but he looked intrigued as he cupped his chin. “That would explain where Caminus’ archives came from. Why they’re incomplete.”

Drift, meanwhile, gave Windblade a smile that was slightly wider than his usual expression. “Starscream’s been telling you stories as well, has he, sister?”

So he knew about the Mistress and Saber as well. Of course he did, he apparently knew everything.

“He said he doesn’t know how many of them are true,” Windblade answered, and Drift scoffed with a well-intentioned shake of his head.

“He likely knows more than most still alive today.”

“He wondered why you never told me Star Saber was a Seeker.” And, now that she’d said it out loud, Windblade wondered the same. She hoped it didn’t sound like an accusation, though Drift seemed utterly incapable of being offended by anything.

“I felt it was better for another Seeker to tell you about it,” he told her. “It’s not my story to tell.”

Windblade nodded, and since Drift was a font of answers she decided to press on. “He also said Seekers don’t like people from the Circle of Light. I don’t understand why, though.”

“Most are just upset that it’s not a Seeker-only club anymore.” He’d started to laugh, but it died quickly when he realised he’d mixed up his tenses. “That it… wasn’t one, I mean.”

Windblade couldn’t stop herself from seeing Starscream in the mech’s bowed face. They were really so alike, both burdened with trauma she’d never be able to understand. They just had very different ways of dealing with it. So why did Starscream dislike Drift so much?

“He specifically had it out for you,” Windblade revealed, “for some reason. And he thinks you feel the same towards him.”

Drift looked away for a moment. “Can’t say that I do. Can’t think of any reason why I would. I’ve done worse than Starscream. Worse, because I wasn’t forced to do it.”

“Like what?” Afterburner pressed, though Drift didn’t answer for a moment. Instead he pulled the Great Sword from his back, laid it flat across his thigh so he could run something soft and clean across its blade. It was already spotless, showing Windblade’s distorted and refreshed reflection back at her, but Drift looked like he just wanted to keep his hands busy.

“Before the Circle found me,” he began, still watching his sword, “I was Deadlock. A bounty hunter. And I was good at it. I caught technorganics. Sold them to the authorities. I didn’t care what happened to them. Didn’t care if they were even guilty of anything. So long as I was paid.”

He couldn’t keep up the act. His hands went still, and he would have dropped his precious blade into the dirt if not for one hand stopping so fortunately close to the hilt. 

“Not many Autobots realise that the organics have a right to hate some of us,” he said, keeping his dry optics on his own reflection. “Hatred like that doesn’t just grow overnight.”

At his side, Afterburner scoffed. “Doesn’t justify trying to kill us all, though.”

Drift turned his face towards him, and somehow summoned the strength to smile again. “Right again, brother. But what was my justification for rounding them up like vermin? I needed money, sure. But there were other ways I could have earned it.”

There was a flash of grey, and Afterburner flinched. But Drift was only setting the sword back into its sheath on his back, and he stood with such purpose that it was easy to believe his whole spark really did rest within that sword. 

“They didn’t deserve being treated like that, back then,” he said, to both of them. “They weren’t hurting anyone by existing. But now they are hurting people. And who’s to blame for that?”

He left the two of them amidst the trees with that question. Windblade knew what her answer would have been, but it wasn’t one she wanted to voice out loud.

“He talks a lot,” Afterburner stated, carefully concealing all emotion by keeping it to a simple fact.

“Still don’t trust him, then?” Windblade asked.

“Right now, I don’t trust anyone who’s not from Caminus.” Afterburner stretched out his limbs, either oblivious to or carefully ignoring the fact that he’d just completely missed the point of Drift’s confession. Then he shifted closer to her, lowering his vocaliser with shifty optics. 

“Listen, Windblade… why don’t we just head off ourselves? We know where to go. The others will be waiting for us , not a bunch of well-armed strangers. And we can get there faster if it’s just the three of us.”

Windblade thought he was joking at first, but there was no humour in those optics looking up at her so expectedly.

“And it’ll be three of us against Primus-knows whatever is waiting out there,” she pointed out, and Afterburner pulled back with creased eyebrows.

“You think I can’t keep you safe? It’s my job, you know.”

“You think I and Nautica still need protection?” Windblade bit back with more force than she’d first intended. But after fending for herself the last few days, she’d thought she’d finally proved that not all Cityspeakers needed bodyguards every hour of the day. 

“Well.” Afterburner shrugged with some reluctance. “Maybe not anymore…”

“You can do whatever your spark desires, Afterburner,” Windblade sighed, brushing leaf-litter from her shoulders as she prepared to walk away. “But I’m sticking with numbers. Even if we found the others waiting for us out there all by ourselves, we’d still need to get them back safely.”

“Where’re you going?” Afterburner stayed seated as he craned his neck after her.

“To find Nautica,” she called back. “In case she got the same dumb idea as you.”

She wouldn’t have, of course, but Windblade still wanted to know where she and Skids had gone off to. It was tempting to jump off the cliff edge and glide over the trees until she spotted purple plating somewhere, or until she got her fill of fresh wind. Primus, it must have been a decacycle since she’d last used her wings. It was a wonder that they hadn’t cramped up with rust by now. 

She didn’t feel like she had a right to complain, though. At least her wings would still work, when she was allowed to use them. Starscream no longer had that luxury. 

Her peds quickly reminded her of how long she’d spent walking on them that day, forcing her to throw her frame down on flat ground so she could recover. With trees came roots and the dirt they burst through, which would be a nightmare to clean out of her armor seams. But even though it made her itch, it was soft enough to sit on.

And someone else must have thought so too. She could feel their EM field crackling nearby, though she didn’t recognise it like Drift’s. A giant leaf sprouting from the ground was twitched aside in front of her, revealing Ariel sitting behind it. She seemed glad to have company.

“How are you finding it, Windblade?” she asked. “Must be strange, not being able to fly.”

Windblade shrugged as she stretched her legs, bending her arms at the elbows. “I’m used to it by now. Aching joints means we’re getting somewhere, at least.”

“Have you fueled up today?”

“At sunrise, yeah.” First Aid had been very diligent in making sure everyone had just enough energon to keep their engines going.

Ariel nodded, and she stood up to sit closer to the other femme. “I only ask because Orion was always the same with me. Worrying too much about everyone around him, not enough about himself.” 

She mirrored Windblade’s position, and her bulkier plates creaked as she crossed them over her chest. Ariel sighed as she lay back, staring up at the dappled canopy overhead. It was easy to relax when the one in charge of everything was perfectly at ease.

“You’re both spark-bonded, right?” Windblade asked. Windblade couldn’t remember if First Aid told her how long Ariel and Orion had been bonded, or if she’d asked. It must have been longer than five centuries, though. 

Ariel dipped her head into the hollow of her chest with her optics eased shut, a lazy and content nod.

“Did it just before everything went to slag,” she sighed. “Somehow both perfect and horrible timing. We both worked in Iacon, back when it existed. He was a peacekeeper, I was on the Low Council. He’d always wait outside my building with fresh energon for me. I thought he was a stalker, at first. Or a very poorly-trained assassin. Then I thought he was trying to slowly poison me. I just couldn’t figure out why he wanted to spend so much time with me. Turns out he was just in love. Took me longer to believe it than it did for me to feel the same way.”

Windblade hummed in response. It was interesting, hearing about a life that was so far out of her grasp in more ways than one. She could imagine it, the courtship between these two bots who were so much older and wiser than her. She just couldn’t imagine such a thing ever happening to her.

“What do you think will happen to Starscream, Ariel?” It was supposed to be an unrelated question, something to take Windblade’s mind off of the empty space in her spark, but really she knew that Starscream was everything to do with it.

Ariel must have known it too, but she was kind enough not to notice as she lay there in the sun. “Hard for me to say. The Autobots will help him. Well, most of us will. The real question is whether or not he wants our help.”

Windblade sighed. “He is stubborn like that.”

“All the Seekers I knew were the same,” Ariel chuckled. “And you as well, Windblade.”

Windblade had started to lie down, but she sat up bolt-straight again with a scowl. “I’m not stubborn , I’m… determined.”  

She didn’t know what the difference between them was, but she just didn’t like how the other one sounded. Ariel just shrugged herself into the leaves around her.

“You worry about him when he’s not around. How long have you been together?”

It was a question that could have meant a hundred different things. Windblade chose to think it was the least complicated one. “Since my trial. I was supposed to die that same night.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. I think you Camiens are exactly what we’ve been waiting for.”

Windblade wanted to believe her, but she shook her head. “I don’t think we can be much help.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Windblade.” Ariel pulled herself up on her elbows, and though they were both sitting she was easily several heads taller than the Camien. “You represent a whole new world, one without technorganics all out for our sparks. You’re proof that we’re not the only children of Primus left in the universe. And that might just be enough to push us to the end.”

She pressed a digit into Windblade’s chest as she spoke, emphasising her faith. And though Windblade still didn’t quite believe her, she was at least flattered by the effort to try and make her believe.

“For Solus’ sake, First Aid, I’m fine !” Another femme’s voice cracked through the air, close enough that Windblade could point her head to where it was coming from. “Can I go one day without you manhandling me?”

“I have to check regularly, Arcee.” First Aid sounded sheepish, but mostly just weary. “All this stress isn't good for your energon temperature.”

“The only thing giving me stress right now is you.”

“Is it a medical problem?” A new voice, unmistakably Nautica’s, now joined in. “I can help, I think. Velocity told me all about energon efficiency when I was pulling all-nighters.”

“So that’s where she is.” Windblade groaned with the effort it took to stand up. “Nautica!”

She could catch glimpses of purple through the trees and vein-like branches, and she quickly found her friend standing in a clearing with Arcee and First Aid. The Autobots both sat on a sturdy log, with Arcee frowning down at the Minicon kneeling next to her.

“Oh hey, Wind.” Nautica waved to her with two fingers. “How long have you been there?”

“How long have you been walking around in circles for?” Windblade asked back. “And where’s Skids?”

“Oh, he tripped and fell down the cliff.” Nautica pointed over her shoulder with her thumb, to indicate where she’d left him. “I said I’d go and get First Aid, but he seemed determined to just climb back up.”

First Aid’s frame shuddered from the force of his groan. “I swear, there’s something wrong with his gyroscope. Let me just finish here, and I’ll go find him-”

“There’s nothing here to finish , First Aid.” Arcee swatted his hand away from her frame. “You’re wasting your time.”

“What’s the problem?” Windblade asked, just as Ariel appeared at the edge of the clearing. She looked panicked now, not at all calm and collected like before.

“It’s actually a… private matter, for Arcee,” Ariel said. “We should leave her and First Aid to it-”

“It’s okay, Ariel.” Arcee rolled her optics, motioning for her to stop. “The whole team will know soon enough. Might as well just tell them.” 

Ariel seemed uncertain on her behalf, but there was nothing else for her to do but leave. Once she was gone Arcee turned to the Camiens, no longer trying to push First Aid away.

“I’m carrying. Prowl’s the sire.” Her optics drifted in their sockets, forcing her gaze to remain averted. “That’s why he didn’t want me coming along. Hell, he doesn’t want me going out at all. Him and Ratchet and Orion… mechs tend to think we’ll fall apart at the seams if there’s a newspark in us. They get so paranoid. It would be sweet, if it wasn’t so annoying.”

“You’ll thank me when this sparkling comes out in one piece. Just let me make sure the pulse is regular,” First Aid lectured, and he pressed the side of his face against her left chestplate. After a few moments he nodded, and hopped off the log.

“Skids is that way, right?” he asked Nautica, pointing in the same direction her thumb had been. She nodded, and off he went. Arcee looked glad to see him go, and she patted her chest as if making sure it was still firmly attached to her frame. Unlike mech frames, femmes tended to have concave chests that then swelled out around the hollow. Arcee’s had certainly swelled, and there were signs of pressure on the plates that were stretched over the protoform underneath.

Windblade had so much she wanted to ask her. Nautica must have too, from how she fidgeted. It was one thing to hear about sparklings, and carrying, and what both of their bodies could do. Seeing it in front of them was still surreal, even if neither were sure exactly what they were supposed to be looking at.

 Arcee didn’t seem to mind their presence, at least, as she kept examining the plates around her chest. Windblade decided to take the first step in breaking the ice.

“So… are you and Prowl bonded?” she asked, and Arcee laughed as she shook her head.

“No, no. Not spark bonded. We just… found company in each other. And it led to this.” She patted her breastplates again, her hand favoring the left-most side.

“Sounds like when Hot Shot and Lightbright would sneak off together,” Nautica muttered in Windblade’s audial, making her shudder. She was the one who had to listen to those moments when they happened in their shared dorms during Cityspeaker training.

“We had our firewalls up every time,” Arcee went on, standing up now as she forced her hands still by her sides. “But they’re not foolproof. He asked if I wanted to get rid of it, when I told him. It would have made sense. But then you’re just letting people like the rat win. We can’t be too scared to live our lives. Especially when there’s so few of us left to live them.”

She started walking as she talked, letting the Camiens follow behind.

“You’re very brave, Arcee,” Windblade told her, as the trees started to thin out around them.

“More stupid than brave,” Arcee scoffed over her shoulder. “But thanks. Means a lot from the one who risked her life to talk to a Titan.”

There was a rustle in the undergrowth nearby, but not enough greenery to mask Flamewar’s approach as she crept up to ambush Arcee.

“At this rate, your chest’ll be as big as mine’s, Cee!” She cackled as she grabbed Arcee from behind, planting both hands on the other femme’s breastplates while Arcee just rolled her optics again.

“How exciting.” She pried Flamewar’s hands away by the digits, and Flamewar spirited herself away with a devilish wink. Windblade wondered if they were sisters as well, or if they’d just known each other long enough that they might as well have been related. 

“If it’s alright, Arcee,” Nautica started to ask, “could I… is it alright if I…?” She made vague motions that hovered around Arcee’s breastplates, not touching them without permission. Of course the scientist wanted to observe the new phenomena for herself. 

Arcee looked surprised by her asking, but nodded. “Go ahead. Just don’t squeeze them.”

“I would never!” Nautica stretched her fingers out, as cautious as if she was handling explosives in her lab, as she placed each palm over the buds of Arcee’s chest. Whatever she could feel growing inside, it made her more comfortable with holding on. 

“The baby is on this side?” Nautica spoke softly as her right hand fell, leaving only Arcee’s left breast covered.

“It tends to move between them. But it’s usually on the left.” Arcee seemed amused rather than annoyed by all the fuss she was getting, and she let Nautica indulge her curiosity as she looked over at Windblade. “You want to feel it too?”

“Oh, I… well, if you don’t mind…” Windblade hadn’t wanted to ask as well, even if Arcee didn’t mind, but being invited was something she couldn’t turn down. Arcee insisted with a nod, and Windblade was just as careful as Nautica as she reached her hand out to place it next to her friend’s.

The plating was warm at her palm, but not just from engine heat.  Beneath the hard armor, she could feel how supple the protoform was as it resisted her touch. Most of all, she could feel something casting out waves of electrical charge that prickled along her fingertips. The waves of it were as steady as a sparkpulse, and unmistakably alive.

“Wow.” It was all Windblade could think to say, as her mouth stretched wide on its own. 

“What’s the other one for?” Nautica dipped her head towards Arcee’s other breastplate, which had swelled as large as the other but with no growing spark to house inside it.

“Energon reservoir,” Arcee answered, and Windblade could feel her voice echo through her frame under her palm. “Or space for a second one, if you’ve got twins. They all start in the chamber, then slowly migrate to one or the other.”

“How do you know when it’s first growing?” Windblade asked.

“It’s like a tickle of electricity. You feel it now and again, as the spark buds off from your core. Your energon gets warmer. By the time it’s made itself at home, you start noticing the extra weight.” Arcee laughed as she held each breast up from the bottom, miming the effort it took to lift them up. And if she said anything else, Windblade didn't hear it.

She had the same realisation that Nautica did, maybe just a few seconds behind since Nautica’s mind worked so much faster. Their hands both fell at the same time, as they both turned to look at each other. They didn’t need to speak. The horror reflected in each other's optics said more than words ever could.

“Is… something wrong?” Arcee jolted them both with her genuine concern, and they each shook their heads to desperately assume normality once again.

“No, n-no, we… I-I just need to talk to Windblade,” Nautica insisted, already pulling the other femme to somewhere far away. The greenery had died back around here, leaving patches of Cybertron bare to shine through the roots growing over the planet.

“Spark parasites.” Nautica spoke first, while Windblade shook her head.

“They’re not parasites.”

“We had… they were sparklings. They were sparklings all along.” Nautica’s vents were ragged like a rust-choked exhaust. “That’s why only femmes were ever infected.”

“Did she know? What they were, all along?” Windblade didn’t say her name. She didn’t need to.

“She knew how to remove them,” Nautica reasoned. “I think… she must have known.”

Population control. That’s what Starscream said the Mistress wanted. Spark bonding was a secret kept from Camien’s own bodies, but there were other ways to make sparklings. Ways that she couldn’t prevent so easily. Not unless she took matters into her own hands, and made them all think their children were killing them.

“What are we supposed to do?” Windblade collapsed next to Nautica, and they leaned into each other.

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” Nautica whispered. “Not right now, at least.”

“You said Maxima had one before, right?”

“Afterburner said she had- oh Solus, it was their child. They had a child together…” Nautica covered her face with her hands, muffling anything else that she had to say.

How many more victims were there on Caminus? Windblade and Nautica herself were only spared because they were so damn socially awkward. But everyone else, who indulged with friends and lovers every other night — First Aid had said the odds of interface alone sparking a pregnancy were minimal, but if you took into account an entire colony’s population… the odds suddenly skyrocketed.

How many Camiens had the Mistress purged? And would anyone had let her do it, if they really knew what was growing in their chambers?

“Windblade-!”

She thought it was Nautica keening at first, but the femme next to her was still silent with her hands masking her face. There was a crash as someone appeared — Shadow Striker, covered in leaves that were glued to her with coolant.

“They know we’re here,” she panted. “They’ve got us surrounded. We need to group up.”

“What?” Windblade stood, tugging Nautica up with her, but Shadow Striker was already running back the way she’d come from. The other two were expected to catch up. 

“Who’s surrounded us?” Windblade called after. “Where are they?”

Shadow Striker didn’t answer, or simply couldn’t answer because of all the exertion she was putting into her legs. She led the way back to the edge of the cliff, where everyone else was already gathered again. They all stared at the same point on the horizon, the same garish-colored building towering over the trees —

But it wasn’t a building. It was walking towards them.

“What the hell is that thing…?” Afterburner hissed as he backed away from the edge.

“No… no, Primus, anyone but him-!” Skids cowered behind First Aid, no longer concerned with impressing Nautica.

“Is that… is that who I…” Bumblebee gulped as he tugged on Ariel’s hand. She faced the shambling beast in front, and though she was the only one whose frame was not shaking around its rivets, it was clear when she spoke that she was just as terrified as everyone around her.

“It is.” She breathed in deep, before she turned to face her people. “He’s let Abominus out of his cage.”

And though they were too far away for Windblade to pick out any details of Abominus, she could see something very clearly. The only part of the beast that wasn’t splashed in neon was the weapon in his hands, a bloated slug of a cannon that was awash in a bright pink glow. 

Then the glow disappeared, as its payload came flying towards its target.

The target would have been Windblade, if Afterburner hadn’t thrown her out of the way in time. 

“Get under cover! Don’t let it see you!” Ariel’s voice was somehow able to rise above the crunch of ground and air being ripped asunder. Everyone fled in different directions; some shoved to safety like Windblade, others pulled aside or diving for the forest. It was impossible to tell who would make it out in one piece.

When Cybertron stopped shaking, only then did Windblade dare to raise her head from the pit of her chest. What had been an overgrown plateau was now a charred chasm, torn apart by the sheer mass of the bullet which carved right through it. The trees still left standing around the new abyss were crackling with fire. Afterburner held onto her, arms around her waist, and she could hear him gasping as his fans struggled to churn through the thick singed air all around them. 

Windblade rolled over out of his grip, but didn’t have the strength yet to stand. There were others lying on the slope of the ruin, scattered bodies that were thankfully not yet cold and still. 

Nautica was closest, being sheltered by both First Aid and Skids. Roulette and Shadow Striker propped each other up, one dusting off the other, with Bumblebee held between them. The only others that Windblade could see were Ariel, Flamewar and Hound. That left Drift, Arcee, Frenzy and Hound unaccounted for. 

“Windblade, I need you to go up.” Ariel had managed to limp over, clutching charred pink plating on one arm. “Scan the area. Tell us if there’s any reinforcements coming. If there’s any of our people trapped.”

Windblade was already nodding before Ariel finished, hearing her T Cog grind with anticipation within her chassis. “Got it.”

“Afterburner, what’s your status?” Ariel turned to the bodyguard, offering him a hand to stand up. “Can you move fast?”

Afterburner shook the debris from his processor, letting Ariel pull him up. “I’ll move as fast as you need me to.”

“Good. We need to distract Abominus. That ugly fragger over there.” Ariel pointed to the bloated beast on the horizon, as if he wasn’t the only thing anyone still conscious could look at. He wasn’t as huge as Windblade imagined Metroplex would be in his sentinel mode, but that was like saying a planet wasn’t that large when compared to the star it was orbiting.

Other than his sheer size, the most significant thing about his frame was how cobbled-together it was. Clashing colors, different degrees of filth and wear, mouths and jagged teeth on his elbows and knees with not a single uniform slice of plating in sight. 

It was like he’d been welded and hammered into a vaguely-Cybertronian shape out of scrap… or, more aptly, like he was several different people glued together.

“He’s a combiner, isn’t he?” Windblade asked, trying not to gulp— after hearing all about combiners, reading stories of Victorion back home and comparing them to the nightmares she was starting to have on Cybertron, this wasn’t how she’d wanted to first meet one. “How do we fight him?”

“We can’t,” Ariel said bluntly, though she still pulled a heavy hand-cannon from her subspace as if she was going to try anyway. “We can only keep him occupied til we get everyone out of here. Follow the twins, Afterburner. You too, Skids. Nautica, you sweep the area. Be our eyes on the ground.”

Everyone had their orders, including Windblade. She was the only one who could fly, and every second she spent on the ground was another second that could end in her being squashed by another gestalt attack. Abominus didn’t look like he had anything new ready to throw at them yet, but there was no knowing how long they’d have until the next bullet came. 

Windblade jumped as her T Cog activated, shifting into her jet form just as she started falling back down. Then her thrusters kicked in a second later, and the ground melted away beneath her. The last voice she heard below was Flamewar’s, a confused and frantic plea that was utterly unlike anything else she’d seen from the femme before.

“Ariel, where’s Arcee? She… She was right next to me, and then…”

Windblade didn’t have time to comfort her, just as she didn’t have time to feel relief at being in her alt-mode again after so long stuck on her peds. She especially didn’t have time to feel sorry for Starscream again, for how he would never again know such a feeling for himself.

(But she still wished he was here with her. There was, apparently, always enough time for that.)

She started from afar, keeping as much distance between herself and Abominus as possible. The scene he was making was even more horrific from above; the gestalt was clearing whole swathes of forest with just his footsteps, and mountains were dissolving into rockslides from the sheer impacts. People must have been able to hear it all over Cybertron, maybe even down at the very south pole. 

Rattrap must have, somehow, known for certain that both Camiens and Autobots would be easy targets this far out, which meant he must not have been concerned about keeping things quiet for the sake of his citizens anymore, which meant he was desperate…

Which meant someone was probably going to die today. So Windblade would just have to try and make sure it wasn’t anyone she cared about.

In a fresh clearing made by Abominus’ assault, she managed to catch sight of Hound, which was nothing short of a miracle with how well his green plating camouflaged him in the undergrowth. She angled to land next to him, but Hound waved her away with the butt of his weapon. He didn’t need help, but there were others who might. Windblade understood immediately. 

Seeing Hound armed, even though he wasn’t trying to hit Abominus, also gave her a grim realisation. The gestalt wouldn’t be the only weapon Rattrap would send out, if he knew for sure that he could wipe out most of his opposition in one go. There’d be soldiers lurking in the shrubs— drones, officers, people both dispensable and indispensable. Which only made it more vital that everyone was accounted for. 

Frenzy, Drift and Arcee… not to mention the Camiens that they were supposed to be finally reuniting with. Windblade scoured the ground, grazing the tree tops as her scanners strained to see any hint of a familiar color scheme in the green. She saw glimpses of Nautica doing the same under the canopies, but they were both just going in fruitless circles. 

Then Windblade flew up at just the right time, cresting the bare skies of Cybertron as she banked left. She saw someone on the plains, just outside the choke of the jungle— a dust cloud marked their position but didn’t mask the red-yellow plating within, because the cloud simply couldn’t keep up with the speed of the driver. It wasn’t a colour combination she was expecting to see, because it wasn’t a person she was expecting to see— not here, perhaps not ever again.

“Dragstrip?!” Windblade came to a dead-stop in the air, hovering in place as her turbines squealed, as the driver turned sharply and transformed just as she braked, using the speed from her engines to carry her forwards.

“Thanks for remembering me.” Dragstrip ended up in a crouch as she grinned up at Windblade. “You look a lot better this time.”

“What—? How did you get here?!” Windblade transformed as well, landing much less gracefully than Dragstrip managed to.

“How d’you think I got here? I raced. It’s what I’m best at.” She patted away the dust from her servos as she nodded towards the giant statue in the distance. “Combiner attack is all over the news. They say he’s been deployed to ‘wipe out the Camien menace once and for all’. Even this far out, it’s hard to hide a big fragger like Abominus. Soon as I saw it for myself, I started driving out.”

As grateful as she was to see a friendly face, Windblade still had a thousand questions that needed answered. “But… what about Knockout? What about—?”

Dragstrip silenced her with a dust-laden hand on her shoulder. “I’m here for the same reason he helped you in the first place, Windblade. It was a good reason. I was just too much of a coward to know it at the time.” 

Dragstrip looked away, though the guilt in her eyes was impossible to hide. She shook it away the best she could. “So. What can I do to help?”

So it was as simple as that. She was here, and she wanted to help. Windblade tried to think of what Ariel would tell her to do.

“We all got scattered the first time Abominus attacked,” she explained. “There’s others trying to distract him. Autobots. I’m flying around trying to find stragglers. There’s probably others in the forest looking for us.”

“Right.” Dragstrip nodded along. “I’ll keep an eye out—”

But then she cut herself off, looking at something over Windblade’s shoulder. “What the hell is that guy doing…?”

Windblade followed her puzzled gaze, and saw exactly what had left her eyes so wide. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was someone climbing up Abominus, and if she wasn’t mistaken she recognised exactly who was doing such a monumentally stupid and badass thing from the giant sword strapped to his back.

“That’s Drift.” Windblade couldn’t help but smile as she said it. “I guess he’s doing what he’s best at.”

“Well, slag.” Dragstrip seemed impressed even as she cursed. “Wish I’d joined the Autobots when they first offered.”

She was already peeling away on her tires before Windblade could ask her to elaborate on that. There was something else that caught her attention anyway, a sound that was at first muffled by the sound of Dragstrip’s overclocked engine but now rang out clear as the dark sky overhead.

“Help! Please… can someone hear me?!”

It was Frenzy, she was sure. How he managed to end up this far away, she couldn’t imagine, but that was secondary to the fact that he was in trouble. She followed his voice and found him at the bottom of a sheer drop, trapped under a fallen tree. He squinted up at her, only able to move one arm with the rest of his frame caged in the mangled roots.

“Windblade… I’m stuck. I… I got lost. Tried working my pistons. Caught myself in a landslide.” He groaned as she worked her way down to him, and she quickly assessed the damage. The tree must have fallen on top of him, and he couldn’t engage the pistons on his servos because there wasn’t enough space.  

“Stay still,” she said. “I’m gonna get you out.”

The tree itself was far too heavy for her to shift, and she didn’t have anything that could cut through it. But she’d figure something out.

“Well, well, what do we have here?”

An unfamiliar voice made her freeze, and she looked up at the shadow that had fallen over her.

“You’re not the ones we’re looking for, but you’ll do just fine anyway.” A femme stood at the top of the slope, obviously technorganic with strange webbed wings sprouting from her back. The sight of them almost distracted Windblade from the blaster held in her claws.

“A Camien and an Autobot… step aside, lady,” she ordered, tilting her head down at Frenzy with a predatory grin. “Small thing like you, least it’ll be easy to keep you locked up.”

“Might even make up for those prisoners that slipped away, huh, Nightscream?” A mech stood beside her and joined in, but she glared at him with a scowl.

“And who’s fault was that?” she snapped. “When the pod crashed, you should have made sure the doors were still locked!”

Windblade didn’t know what they were talking about, but she didn’t need to. While they were distracted, she tore her optics from them and leaned down close to Frenzy.

“On my count,” she hissed, “grab my wheels.”

Frenzy blinked, his wide optics flitting between captors and saviour. “Your… what?”

“On my alt mode. Hold on tight.” She didn’t have time to explain any further. “Three, two, one—!”

She locked eyes with Nightscream just as the femme looked over, just as her T Cog whirred and her plates slid into their most useful places. Windblade usually didn’t engage her landing gear when she was flying, but she kept it out and hovered in place just long enough, just close enough for Frenzy to grab…

She felt his hand on her, and that had to be good enough. Her turbines propelled her straight up, and the force of her engines should have been powerful enough to pull him free of the roots. She felt a jolt, a protest from her engines, but nothing stalled her ascent. Then came the sound of blaster fire whizzing past her, and she had to shoot forward before she got hit.

There was no way for her to see if Frenzy was actually holding on, and he was so light that she couldn’t feel him weighing her down. All she could do was barrel on blindly, hoping she was fast enough to lose the technorganics—

A screech ripped out from behind her, and something tore into the side of her fuselage. She was knocked off-kilter, and her thrusters failed under the new weight that was dragging her down. 

“Not getting away that easy, airhead!” It was Nightscream, her taunting cackle filling Windblade’s audials. Because she had wings as well, of course, and claws and fangs to go with them. She was raking them along Windblade’s chassis, scrabbling to reach Frenzy clinging to her underside. Windblade couldn’t knock her off, couldn’t go any faster with the stress her engines were under…

She had an idea, but it relied on Frenzy. All she could do was scream over the sound of the wind all around them, and hope that he heard her.

“Frenzy, hang on! I’m gonna roll over! Do what you have to do!”

Then she banked sharply, flipping her entire world upside down. Now Frenzy was on top, with Nightscream hanging below. It was enough to confuse the other femme for a moment, and whether or not he was acting on instinct or desperation, Frenzy knew what to do to shove her off.

An earthquake wrecked through Windblade, as Frenzy slammed his one working piston against her undercarriage. She gritted her denta through it, squeezed her sensors, forced her gyros to behave, until she finally felt the extra weight drop away with another screech that dissolved into the roaring wind. 

She stayed upside down, for Frenzy’s benefit, and didn’t dare land until she was clear on the other side of the wrecked trees. She transformed, landing heavy on her feet, and held her arms out to catch Frenzy before he hit the ground. 

He was a mess of shallow vents; his arm bore a heavy dent, and he cradled it with the other. Having to hang on wouldn’t have been easy, and especially not with a faulty servo. Windblade set him down gently.

“Hey. You okay?” She knew the answer was no, but she had to see what Frenzy thought of the damage himself. He gulped, shuddered when she touched his intact shoulder, but nodded despite the glaze over his eyes.

“Yeah… y-yeah, I think so. I…thank you.” He started to choke, then hid his face from her view. If he really thought he’d been about to die, Windblade didn’t blame him for being upset.

“We’re still too close to those bots for my liking,” she said, just before she transformed once again. This time she didn’t take off immediately, instead flipping her passenger window open for Frenzy to board. “Climb in. I’ll get us somewhere safe.”

She’d never actually had someone flying inside her before (truth be told, she’d always wondered what the point of her cabin was when she didn’t know anyone small enough to fit inside it), and Frenzy was just as hesitant to let himself in. But there was no other option for either of them, so he pulled himself up and toppled inside.

He was silent for the whole ride, and Windblade couldn’t think of anything to say herself. Still in shock, she supposed, over how quickly everything had gone wrong. 

First Aid wasn’t hard to find— he’d set up camp with Hound and Bumblebee at the edge of where grass turned to metal, far away from Abominus’ reach but close enough for the distraction team to reach them in less than a klick. Windblade circled overhead before landing, letting First Aid carry Frenzy out of her cabin before she shifted to her bipedal form.

“There’s more TOs in the forest,” she warned. “They’re looking for us. Still no sign of Arcee, or any Camien I know. I’m gonna keep looking.”

    First Aid was grim as he checked over Frenzy’s frame. “Ariel will hold out as long as she can. But if we can’t find everyone…”

He was about to shrug, but even that seemed like too much effort for him. Windblade recalled the promise she made to Starscream just before she left, to stay alive no matter what, because what she wanted to do went directly against that promise. 

    “Then I’ll stay behind until we do.” Windblade turned away to take flight again, but Bumblebee reached out and caught hold of her shoulder first.

    “Before you go, Windblade. Take this.” He held out a chip, something that she recognised would slot into her com unit. 

“Short-range comm transmitter,” he explained. “Red Alert’s idea. He doesn’t like us using built-in comms, in case of eavesdropping. Afterburner and Ariel have one. Should be able to talk to either of them from the air.”

    Windblade nodded as she installed it. And in the distance, Abominus kept coming. He was a slow walker, but that didn’t matter when you could clear a half-mile with a single step. Windblade had to stop herself from looking over at him, but turning in the air forced her sensors to take in the one-mech-battlefield anyway. 

The distraction tactics seemed to be working, only so far as Abominus hadn’t yet had a chance to fire his cannon again. She couldn’t see Afterburner or Skids, but Ariel was a pink blur in the dust. Flamewar seemed to have teamed up with Dragstrip; two wheels complementing four, each of them pushing the other to go faster as they ducked Abominus’ attention. 

But the real show was put on by Shadow Striker and Roulette; they weaved together in perfect sync, one catching the gestalt’s eye while the other drove into his heels to try and knock him off-balance. It didn’t work, of course, but it was enough to piss Abominus off. 

Drift was probably doing more towards that than anyone else though; Windblade saw him perched on the gestalt’s shoulder, dragging his sword across the neck as he launched himself across to the other. One had to wonder if Abominus really was welded together permanently, and that was why he didn’t just collapse into his components and give himself a much easier fight. Or maybe he was just stupid.

 Windblade hoped it was the latter, and banked on the assumption when she dared to fly over the gestalt’s shoulder to catch Drift. She could hear five engines stacked on top of each other, five EM fields fizzing in protest, five minds screaming in frustration—

“Huh? What the frag was that?!”

“What is that thing?! Is that a fly? Get it off, get it away! Swat it, Ripper!”

“It’s on your side, Sinnertwin! You get rid of it!”

“I don’t wanna touch it! You know how I feel about tiny things! Get it off, get it off!”

“Grab it! Snatch it! Put in our mouth! I’m fraggin’ hungry!!!”

— And they all echoed behind her as she soared past, letting Drift grab her wing to pull him out of the immediate danger. Her trajectory sagged from his weight, but that was all part of the plan; once she was close enough to the ground, he let go and rolled to break his landing. She saw him wave up at her as she climbed back up the airstream.

‘So where the hell are you, Arcee…?’ 

Even in the wasteland left behind by Abominus’ approach, there was no sign of her. Windblade only saw other signs, and shapes on the horizon. Vehicles. People. Not technorganics.

One of them was flying. There was only one other person on Cybertron at that moment who could fly like her.

‘Maxima…?’ 

And below her, kicking up dust behind them, must have been the others. Chromia, Vertex, Lightbright… there was no sign of Velocity or Hot Shot, but at that moment Windblade was just grateful to see at least some familiar faces after so long among strangers. She almost crash-landed as her frantic brain brought up Afterburner’s frequency. 

“Afterburner! Burn, can you hear me? They’re here! Behind Abominus, I can see Maxima and Chromia!”

Afterburner’s voice came through after a moment of static-cracked disbelief. “A-Are Lightbright and Vertex there too?!”

“Yes… can’t see Hot Shot or Velocity though—”

“You wouldn’t,” Afterburner said with a laugh, “cause they’re here with me and Nautica.”

“What?!” Windblade’s sensors blinked, blinding her for a moment in her shock.

“Look to the south,” Afterburner said, and she did as she was told. There wasn’t anything obvious that she could see; smoke, fire, toppled trees and quaking mountains, to her it all just looked like the usual wreckage that a gestalt left behind in its rage.

“See that plume of smoke?,” Afterburner pressed. “ It’s from a derailed transport pod. Abominus wrecked the track coming after us. Hot Shot and Lottie were on their way to Ferromax, if you can believe it. There’s someone else here too, says she knows you… Airazor?”

That was yet another face that Windblade hadn’t expected to see again, and certainly not out here. But that wasn’t a complaint from her. 

“I do. I do know her. Can she fly over and meet me?”

“She’s already on her way.”

Windblade assumed that Airazor was the speck amongst the smoke in the sky, and sure enough the speck quickly became a silhouette and then a warm feathered body flying alongside her.

“So much for staying out of trouble, huh, Windblade?” Airazor had to shout over the wind currents, which made her sorrowful laughter all the more obvious.

“What the hell are you doing here, Airazor?”

“Long story. Let’s just say we’re both fugitives now.”

Windblade would get the full story out of her later, when they didn’t have to worry about dodging bullets from the ground. “Are Hot Shot and Velocity okay?”

“We all got banged up from the crash, but nothing a few stitches can’t fix. The ones guarding us were in worse shape. They just ran off as soon as they saw… well, that. ” Airazor looked behind her towards Abominus, who was starting to slow down. But that didn’t make his attacks any less deadly— now he was far more deliberate, watching the patterns of his enemies, waiting for the right moment to strike. 

The Autobots knew better than to stick to one plan for too long, Windblade hoped. Or, at least, they wouldn’t let themselves get sloppy from fatigue. The sooner everyone was rounded up and accounted for, the sooner everyone could get out in one piece…. 

And the sooner Windblade could get back to safety. To home. To Starscream.

    She could see the others approaching in full detail now, the unmistakable shapes of their alt modes alongside one that she didn’t recognise. She put all of her fuel reserves into her thrusters, leaving Airazor to catch up with her. 

“Chromia!” She almost slammed right into her bodyguard as they both transformed in sync, both femmes holding on tight with an unspoken promise to never lose each other again. With all the times Windblade had wished she could fend for herself, wanting to be free of a bodyguard’s gaze for just one full day, she hadn’t expected to miss Chromia as much as she really did. But she was just glad that her guard, her friend , was still alive.

“I can’t take you anywhere, huh, Wind?” Chromia hid her tears behind sarcasm, burying them in Windblade’s shoulder. She was glad to see that, despite her absence, Mia hadn’t changed at all.

“You Cityspeakers are nothing but trouble, you know,” Maxima sighed, from somewhere that Windblade couldn’t see. “That paint on your face might as well be a beacon for it.” 

The other bodyguard didn’t wait for Chromia to let go before she almost crushed both femmes in a mighty hug. Windblade spluttered even after she was released, and then another weight eclipsed her as Lightbright surged forward to engulf her shoulders with her own stick-thin arms. 

“I’m sorry, Windblade,” the other speaker pleaded, “for what I said, for yelling at you, I’m sorry!”

Windblade didn’t even know what she was apologising for, not at first. It all seemed so inconsequential now, everything that had happened before she was brought to Starscream.

“Don’t worry about it, Light.” She gingerly patted her shoulders as she hugged Lightbright back, and the other femme’s helm tassels tickled her painted cheeks. “We’ve got bigger problems than that right now.”

“I’m still sorry. I—” Lightbright’s arms sagged, and then she jumped back from Windblade as if she was electrified. “What the hell is that thing?”

It was obvious where she was looking with those giant optics, because it was the same place that Maxima and Chromia were looking with just as much shock, but Windblade turned around anyway. In the distance, Abominus’ razor-lined helm could be seen stark over the treelines that were still left standing.

“Abominus,” she answered. “That’s our bigger problem.”

But closer than the gestalt, and far less worrying to look at, was the feathered shadow in the sky flying down towards them, transforming into a more familiar form just before she hit the ground.

“And this is Airazor,” Windblade introduced. “Our friend.”

Airazor’s feathers ruffled on their ends, as she inclined her beak to everyone staring at her. “Nice to see you all again.”

Whether or not anyone recognised her from their first arrival on Cybertron, so long ago, there was no sign of suspicion or unease. As Maxima took Airazor’s hand to greet her, swallowing every thin digit in her wide palm, Windblade heard a mech’s voice behind her.

“Easy does it. I got you.”

“I’ll be fine,” Vertex’s voice, sculpted from cycles of having to be heard across concert halls, was unmistakable even when it was plagued with groans. “I can stand. Just… doing anything else is what hurts.”

She was leaning against the red mech, the alt-mode that Windblade hadn’t recognised from afar. It looked like she’d been lying in the bed of his cargo-bay, and now was pulling herself out to try and stand under her own strength. 

But she looked awful, worse than when she had back-to-back plays during Exodus Day. She took one step and almost collapsed, and everyone including Windblade started forward to catch her. The red mech was closest, though. He shifted just in time to loop a servo around her middle, saving her from the harsh ground.

And Windblade recognised him now. Her spark seized before her processor even caught up with what her optics were seeing. 

“...You’re Ironhide, right?” Airazor was the one who asked, just as Ironhide was draping one of Vertex’s arms around his shoulder. “One of Rattrap’s Elites.”

It was an accusation, of course. How could it not be? Ironhide looked appropriately guilty, but only for a moment before the most unlikely person came to his defence.

“Ironhide saved us.” Chromia stood in front of him, as if shielding him from Airazor and Windblade. “He got us out of Ferromax. We can trust him.”

Vertex nodded behind her, though the action made her wince with pain. Ironhide still looked like a petrorabbit caught in headlights. 

“I didn’t know they were going to hurt any of you.” His optics burned holes at his feet, and his voice sounded so small for a mech of his size. “I’m sorry. I’m not with the Council anymore. Never should’ve been with them in the first place…”

And despite everything, despite all that Starscream had taught her and what she’d seen and learned for herself, Windblade had to believe him. It was enough that Chromia of all people was vouching for him, but there was also the fact that it made no sense for him to be lying. Rattrap had already shown his hand, not just to the Camiens but to the rest of Cybertron. There was no more need for tricks or subterfuge now, not when it was so much easier to just flatten them all under a gestalt’s foot.

In any case, both Camiens and Autobots needed all the help they could get. 

“There’s a group of mechs not far from here.” Windblade turned to the other three, Maxima and Lightbright and Airazor, as she spoke. “Look for First Aid. He’ll fix Vertex up. The others should meet you there.”

Airazor nodded even though her feathers were still standing sentinel across her frame, betraying her anxiety. Windblade still had to wonder how the techorganic had gotten dragged into all this… though she didn’t wonder much, since she was sure it was all her fault like everything else that was happening that day.

“I spotted them on the way over. Just follow me.” Airazor shifted in a flurry of chestnut-down plating, and took to the wind. Vertex fought against Chromia trying to put her back on Ironhide’s cargo bed.

“What about you, Wind?” Lightbright asked. Some of her gold tassels were glued to her cheeks, where coolant still lay damp on her face, and her Cityspeaker markings were cracked and peeling away.

“There’s still one person missing,” Windblade told her. “Not one of us. But I still need to find her.”

    “You need any help?” Maxima stopped herself from flying after Airazor, though her wings were twitching in anticipation. 

    “I’ll be fine, Max. You just stay with the others. Hot Shot’ll be worried if he doesn’t see you with them. Afterburner, too.”

    Maxima blinked, and her wings fluttered enough to almost lift her right off the ground. “They’re here…? They’re both alright?”

    Windblade nodded, and that was all the push that Maxima needed. She followed Airazor’s path overhead, and Lightbright and Ironhide followed in turn. Chromia lingered only to fulfil her duty as a bodyguard, to make sure that she wasn’t needed as one.

    “Don’t you dare get lost again.” She gave her Cityspeaker one last proud embrace before she went on her way, leaving Windblade to go on hers.

    Arcee should have theoretically been easy to spot— from what Windblade had seen, pink didn’t show up very often in Cybertron’s natural landscape. But in practice, Autobots didn’t live long if they were easily seen. 

In the end it wasn’t a sight that led Windblade to Arcee, but a sound. A cry of pain, unmistakably feminine. Windblade sourced it from somewhere in the forest, what little of it that was still spared from Abominus’ onslaught, and she only managed to finally see Arcee because she was lying still in the ragged green ruin around her.

    And she wasn’t alone. Windblade saw the shape coming from behind her, the jagged arms swatting thick creeping branches aside like they were nothing more than thin strands of filament. Technorganic, but not a mere soldier or disposable drone.

“There’s no low that you Autobots won’t stoop to, is there?” Rampage’s voice was a snarl that boomed even over the whine of Windblade’s engines. She forced herself to land away from the scene, close enough that she could at least still hear what was said. If she went too close too soon, she could get both herself and Arcee killed.

“Forcing mothers to fight as well. Disgusting.” Rampage spat out the word, turning his face away from Arcee as if to spare her from flecks of fluid that burst out of his maw. She didn’t appreciate the small courtesy, because she spat right back at him anyway.

“No-one forced me to be here. I’m here cause I’m fighting for what I believe in. Same as you. So don’t you dare go easy on me.”

She was still on the ground— Windblade could see a bright patch of blue on her knee, and the energon dripped thick down the rest of her leg. Rampage looked down at her, as she panted and scowled and refused to crawl away. 

If he wanted to kill her, he could have done it before she’d even realise she was dead. But he only sighed, which sounded like a mighty metal machine grinding to a stop.

“Then you’re an idiot. Go home. Go back to the sire of that child, before you get three sparks killed for nothing.”

    He turned away as he spoke, not even looking back at her as he disappeared. And Arcee screamed, hurling insults and curses, but had to cut herself off with another hiss of pain when she tried to pull herself after him.

“Arcee.” Windblade went to her, holding her still by her shoulders. She shouldn’t have been moving at all, not when she was losing so much energon through her leg. The fluid was much more vibrant than any Windblade had ever seen before, almost like a beacon. It wasn’t just the freshness of the wound, or Cybertronian biology having its own quirks. She knew right away that this was energon that had to keep more than one body alive.

    “Did you see all that?” Arcee was still angry, but she didn’t fight against Windblade as she tried to clear the site of her wound. Handfuls of torn grass did little to mop up the energon, so she resorted to pressing her hand against it to try and stem the flow.

    “I didn’t know what to do,” Windblade said, defensive and tired. “He could have killed us both if…”

    She trailed off, feeling pathetic as she did so. And Arcee sighed, a warm vent that carried the last dregs of her anger away on the wind.

    “Right. It’s good you didn’t interfere.” Arcee groaned as she straightened, letting Windblade pick her up like a pallet of energon cubes. “Just get us the hell out of here.”

    Windblade didn’t have to be told twice, and it wasn’t like she had much choice in sticking around when one of Abominus’s arms— and the cannon it was holding— fell out of the sky and landed right next to her.

“Blot?!”

The gestalt’s voice, all four layers of it, was like a tornado siren, but she almost didn’t hear it over the overwhelming stench that came from the severed limb. It twitched and flopped around in a growing pool of energon, trying and failing to transform before finally lying still. And it looked so small, now that it was severed from the rest of Abominus. While stifling her olfactories, Windblade had to wonder how the gestalt had lost his arm in the first place, if it hadn’t just decided to rot off.

But she couldn’t wonder for long, not when Abominus decided to remind everyone in a five-mile radius of what he was capable of. 

    “ We’ve had it up to here with you Autoants! If you won’t stay still, we’ll just have to come after you! One by one!”

There was an earthquake that almost knocked Windblade clean off her peds, as one of Abominus’ own slammed down just a few inches away from where she was standing with Arcee in her arms. 

Abominus was angry, and bleeding, and running. So Windblade would just have to try and run faster. 

After indulging in the freedom of the skies, she felt clumsy on her feet even without the combined weight of Arcee and her sparkling pulling down on her joints. She tried to look for Airazor or Maxima overhead, but it was impossible to see anything past the shadow of Abominus. She had to try and remember where she’d found First Aid, while also carrying Arcee and keeping her footing amidst the tremors of the gestalt’s blind pursuit. 

She forced herself to not look back, despite the temptation, despite how close Abominus sounded to be. There was nothing good to be found behind her. 

    “Turn left.” Arcee coughed, but she pounded on Windblade’s left arm to make sure she had her attention. “I can hear them… engines. They’re nearby.”

    Windblade couldn’t hear anything at all over the sound of her own roaring energon, but she trusted Arcee’s instincts. Branches and leaves slapped them both as they barrelled past, and Abominus’ shadow threatened to pin them down. Windblade tried to tuck her wings in, streamlining her frame as much as possible as she pivoted over a fallen log—

    And almost fell right on top of Hot Shot.

    “Windblade!” He didn’t seem to mind being crushed under her and Arcee’s combined weight, not from how his markings warped around his smile. Someone took Arcee from Windblade’s arms while she was wrapping them around her fellow Cityspeaker, and she realised that someone was Velocity when the other femme’s helm bumped against her own.

Velocity and Hot Shot. The final two. Windblade couldn’t stop herself from crying out as she collapsed against them both.

    “Is that everyone accounted for?” Ariel’s voice sounded far away, even after Windblade pulled herself free from her friends. It looked like everyone was gathered under the fleeting shade of the last few standing trees; Flamewar sat with Arcee, watching First Aid clean and seal her wound, though Flamewar looked in bad shape herself. Vertex was covered in gleaming fresh solder, propped up between Ironhide and Chromia. Maxima and Afterburner were still embracing, blind to anyone else around them, while Nautica and Skids worked together as they looked over Hound’s injuries. Lightbright sat anxious and twitching next to Bumblebee and Frenzy, who were almost dual mirrors of her. Airazor and Dragstrip, meanwhile, seemed to make a point of staying separate from the Autobots. 

    The most worrying sight was Shadow Striker, though. Her optics were closed as she lay still in her twin’s lap, and Roulette couldn’t stop rubbing her hand across her cheek as if to make sure it was still warm. 

“I can’t see Drift,” Nautica said, doing the same quick count a little bit faster than everyone else managed to. “Does anyone know where he is?”

    “He was on Abominus’ shoulder,” Bumblebee muttered, “last time I saw…”

    “He’ll have to make his own way back.” Ariel didn’t sound at all happy to say it, but hers was a tone that offered no room for argument. “Dragstrip, help Roulette carry Shadow Striker. Bee, you let Frenzy ride in your passenger seat. Stick together in pairs—”

    Windblade tuned her orders out, peeling herself free of the group. She was breaking her promise again, and she knew it. But this was something that Starscream would just have to forgive her for, whether or not she came back from it.

    “Windblade? Where’re you going?” Hot Shot was the first to notice her turning away, heading back into the dense jungle where Abominus’ gaze was waiting. But everyone was staring at her, Camiens and Autobots and neither-ors alike. She wanted to scream at them to just ignore her, to leave her to do what she had to do. But she wasn’t angry at them for wanting to leave. She was only angry at herself, for causing all of this carnage, for coming to Cybertron at all. So it was up to her to fix what she could. 

    “Most of you don’t know Drift,” she spoke only to her friends, “but he’s our brother. So I’m not leaving him behind. Go on without me.”

    She was in the air before anyone could try and make her stay. She could only hope that they listened to her as she left them all behind. 

    ‘Where the hell did you go, Drift?’ Windblade sought out the last place she’d seen him, but it was hard to tell where anything was with Abominus rearranging the landscape with every step he took. 

Even missing an arm, the gestalt was still the biggest threat to the entire hemisphere of Cybertron. His bleeding energon was painting the ground blue, yet all the fuel he was losing didn’t seem to slow him down at all. He simply seemed too stupid and stubborn to die.

    Windblade tried to stay behind him as she flew, avoiding the spotlight of his glare. And then she saw it, the huge sword sticking out of the ground, its hilt blinking a silent signal at her. Its wielder lay close by in the shade, hidden completely except for the arm that he reached out towards her when she landed.

    “Drift…” Windblade knew he was in bad shape without having to see his body. But it wasn’t until she saw it that she realised just how bad it was.

    He must have been the one who severed Abominus’ arm. And to get close enough to do that, his chassis had paid a heavy price. His paint was completely masked under the energon that gushed from the gouge in his waist. As if he had been torn in half. 

    “You shouldn’t be here, sister.” Drift groaned as he bled out in the cool shade. “No reason for us both to die out here.”

    “No-one is dying today.” Windblade was on autopilot, preparing to lift Drift into her arms, but he stopped her with a heavy shake of his head and an energon-soaked hand on her shoulder.

    “I’m afraid it’s not up to you, Windblade. I’m done for. No coming back. Even if you get me back in time… my spark is spent. I’m no good to anyone now.”

    He had the nerve to laugh as he spoke, half-formed wheezes, as if his death would be funny. 

“Don’t talk like that, Drift.”

He stopped laughing when he saw her tears. As she felt them drip off her chin, she dimly hoped they wouldn’t wash away Starscream’s handiwork.

“Leave me, sister,” Drift told her, letting his hand fall from her shoulder. “Leave me, and listen. Abominus has to die. Rattrap won’t hide him again. If we don’t take him out now, he’ll just keep coming back.” 

His head lolled as he forced it to nod, gesturing to the weapon abandoned behind her.

“Take my sword. Remember what I taught you. I’ve got one last spark burst in me… don’t let it go to waste.”

Windblade didn’t want to look away from Drift, not in what might be his final moments, but the sword called her. If what he’d told her was true, and she had no reason to doubt anything he’d told her, then that sword was linked to his spark. It was his duty to carry it, to use it. Whether it channelled the spark’s energy or amplified it, the sword was the key to taking down a beast like Abominus. How much power had it taken to cut just one limb away from him? Enough to almost kill him.

“I shouldn’t.” Windblade shook her head, turning away from the weapon in shame. “I can’t—”

“You have to.” Drift found her hand, his grip weak and slick and warm with his own fuel. “You’ve got something to prove, don’t you? So prove it. Show everyone what I see in you. What Starscream… sees…”

His fingers lay open, unable to hold anything anymore. One by one, his components were shutting down. His spark would be the last thing to go. 

And he was right. Sitting here with him, watching him slip away, wasn’t what Drift wanted from Windblade. That was a waste. He had one wish, one command, and even if she didn’t feel worthy of it she was the only one who could carry it out for him.

She went to the Great Sword, placing her energon-stained hand on its glowing hilt. This was nothing like holding it before— there was a crackle of electricity between her fingers, travelling up her spine right to her own spark. There was a ghost on her shoulders that was unmistakably Drift, and he gave the last of his strength over to her as she hefted the sword in her arms. Where before she struggled to hold it up, it was now as light as her namesake wind whistling around her.

“One last… one last thing, Windblade.” Drift’s voice sounded so close in her audios, though he still lay dying behind her. “Tell Starscream. Tell him I know what he’s done. Tell him I forgive him. For Wing.”

She nodded, closing her optics against a new surge of coolant.

“Does it have to be this way?” She faced him over her shoulder as she asked, knowing there was no point in asking, knowing she had to anyway. Drift smiled at her with a mouth full of energon.

“I don’t want to leave you so soon, sister. But don’t be sad for me. There’s people waiting on the other side. This world doesn’t need me anymore. Not when… not when it has…”

He sighed once, and that was it. That was all he could give her. His spark hummed in her grip, high-pitched and impatient, knowing it couldn’t hold on for much longer. 

“Thank you, brother. For everything.” Windblade locked the sight of his body in her mind, and everything around it. She wouldn’t forget where he died, where the Circle of Light died with him. She wouldn’t leave him here to be forgotten, when it was all over.

    Her fingers ached around the sword’s hilt as she turned away from him. The view stretched out before her was a wasteland, and its tyrant towered over all that he had wrought as if he was waiting just for her. He’d recovered his cannon, holding it limp in his remaining arm, and it would have levelled the mountains again if he hadn’t seen her before he could fired.

Abominus saw her, alright. And she would be the last thing he ever saw. She waited for him to come to her. She heard Drift’s last whispers in her mind, between her fingers. She remembered what he’d taught her.

    Then she ran. And leapt. And, with Drift’s last gasp of light erupting along the keen edge of the sword, she sliced through Abominus from helm to codpiece. Like a laser through glass, or a dancer cutting across a stage. He simply fell apart in a fountain of blue.

She was sure Drift would have appreciated it, if he could have seen it. The sword was heavy again in her hands. She had to let go, for she couldn’t hold it with such shaking arms. 

    The gestalt’s two halves hit the ground with enough force to form twin craters. His remaining limbs were crushed under the force, if they were even still alive. Windblade watched the fall numbly from a distance. 

She’d just killed a combiner. She recognised that, not as an achievement or boast but as a simple fact. Abominus was dead. He wouldn’t hurt anyone anymore. He wouldn’t kill anymore.

People gathered around her. She could see them approaching, cautiously. She knew them all as Camiens, as friends, but their faces were blurry when she tried to look at them.

    “Windblade, that was amazing! How did you—?” Someone tried to hold her, but she flinched away from them. Her fingers ached, still damp with Drift’s last energon. She found it hard to stay standing.

“Where’s Drift…?”

It was Nautica who asked the fateful question, the one Windblade had been waiting for. She wanted to take them to his grave, but her legs finally failed her. She collapsed, and though hands reached out to save her from the hard floor she just wanted them to let her go. They should have been going to Drift instead. They should have been there for him.

Chromia and Afterburner carried her away between them both. Lightbright and Hot Shot carried the sword across four hands. And it was Maxima who carried Drift’s body. She’d never known him, but she still held his ruined frame in her arms like that of a dear friend, and that was all that Windblade could take solace in.

    She should have been happy. She’d found her friends, safe and alive. She’d found her family. But all she could think of was the brother who she never had the chance to know. 

It couldn’t be for Windblade. Maybe for one of her friends, if Primus wanted to be especially cruel. But not her. She’d promised him she would come back alive. She had so much still to do, and he had so much still to tell her. He’d been writing for hours, yet had only barely scratched the surface of his Vosian memories. It was far easier writing them down than saying them out loud— this way, he could pretend that someone else was saying them, that he wasn’t truly the only one left.

He was scared to ask Ratchet for the truth. But, eventually, he put down his stylus and forced himself to.

“Who is it? Who won’t be coming back?”

Ratchet froze as if startled, like Starscream was a piece of scenery that had suddenly come to life. He gulped, and for the worst nanoklick of his life Starscream steeled himself for the news.

“Two of them.” Ratchet’s vocal cords rang hollow, and his gaze was elsewhere. “Drift and Shadow Striker.”

Starscream held in his sigh of relief, though relief was all that he could feel. “How?”

“Abominus ambushed them.”

Abominus.

The Terrorcons.

A twisted, feral gestalt family that was born the same day Starscream’s family died. Rattrap had smashed them all together with the Enigma of Combination into a mangled mess of a team, and in return he’d asked them to burn down Vos. Starscream had been taken away before he could see the ashes.

Rampage had once been one of them, before he’d been sent to Cybertron’s depths to destroy the Well of Allsparks. He’d missed out on the Enigma’s gift. From what Starscream had heard in comatose whispers over the last five centuries, he was the only one of the Terrorcons who was still sane.

Ratchet finished gathering his tools, snapping the carry-case shut with fumbling fingers, and that snap was what brought Starscream floating back to the present.

“What about Windblade?” He pressed as the medic was leaving. “Is she alright?”

Ratchet paused at the privacy curtains, looked out past them only for a moment, and then grunted. “See for yourself.”

And Starscream did. He stood up, took Ratchet’s place, and saw a throng of frames gathered outside. Some new and unfamiliar faces among them, though he sought out only one in the fray. She spotted him first.

“Starscream?” The red markings under her eyes were smudged again. She must have been crying. When she said his name, many of the unfamiliar faces turned towards her, but she was already running towards him. He stayed put, becoming a wall that she could crash into with all of her might, taking her into his arms with such happiness that he hadn’t thought he was capable of anymore. 

The strangers were watching, but he didn’t care. One of them had wings. He still didn’t care.

“You found them?” He whispered to her as he silently appraised the Camiens, and she nodded into the angle of his neck.

“We did it. We found everyone. But… but Drift…”

Her voice broke like a dam, and his hold around her became a desperate vice.

“Let’s go. Too many eyes out here.” He guided her into the privacy of the med-bay, holding onto her until she was ready to let go. She sank like a brick onto the edge of one of the slabs, and there was just enough space for him to sit next to her.

“Tell me what happened.” He held her hand, loosely at first, but then she fused their fingers together with a spasm.

“Rattrap knew we’d be there. All of us.” Windblade’s voice was numb, exhausted, utterly drained. Yet it still trembled. “He sent out Abominus. We killed him. I… Drift told me to use his sword. It killed them both. Then Shadow Striker died on the way back.”

Starscream wanted to tell her that he was glad she was safe, but it would be in poor taste. Even if he was no longer a prince, he still knew etiquette. So he stayed silent, which was another lesson from his time as a prince; it was better to listen than speak when there was nothing to say.

“I broke my promise, Starscream.” Windblade squeezed his hand, but wouldn’t look at him. “I almost died out there, too. More than once.”

Starscream’s vents hitched, catching on some piece of rust rattling inside him. Even though she was safe and whole, sitting right next to him, chained to him with her hand, he still feared losing her. It would be so easy to, after all. 

“Do you really value your life so little?” he asked her, squeezing her hand back, matching the strength of her digits with his own.

“No. I just value others more.”

He let go of her hand before he damaged her fingers, turning his head away. “I shouldn’t have expected you to be as selfish as I am.”

“Why do you think you’re selfish?”

“Because you’re the only one I care about.” He could feel her looking at him. How badly he wanted to turn towards her, but he couldn’t face her and say what he had to say at the same time. 

He’d rehearsed it, over and over, even tried to write it out in between paragraphs of Vos’ history and court procedures. Trying to arrange each word in the perfect order, saying just enough while also not saying so much that he would scare her away.

(Then again, after everything she’d seen and everything he’d done, she was still sitting right next to him. Maybe that was just one thing he didn’t need to worry about.)

He had to tell her, though. In case he never again had the chance to.

“When I first saw you, Windblade—” he had to speak around a sudden burning lump of energon in his throat, “—I thought you were the last one. Two of us, the last of our kind. And even though there are others like you on Caminus, people who look like us, I still feel that way. I feel… that we truly are the last of an extinct species. Not Vosians, or Seekers. We are something else that doesn’t have a name. Does that make sense?”

Primus’ sake, how pathetic he must have sounded to her. Even after so much rehearsal and repetition, he couldn’t possibly frame his thoughts to her in any kind of convincing way. He even had to beg her to try and understand what he was really saying.

He should have just stayed quiet. Everything was already complicated enough for her, and she was still grieving. He hadn’t even considered that. He shouldn’t have been confusing her any further, being selfish again as he always was and always would be—

“I think so.”

Starscream looked at her, an involuntary snap of his head. The look on her face was not confusion or even hesitation. He didn’t know what it really was, because he was simply amazed to see that she wasn’t lying.

“I understand what you’re saying, Starscream. But I don’t think we’re as rare as you might think. On Caminus…” 

Windblade stretched her fingers before folding one hand over the other. 

“On Caminus, everyone else around me felt different. Even people I’ve known my whole life. Everyone was too different to relate to, and though some like Nautica knew how that felt, they still don’t know me . You’re not like that. I trust you because you listen to me, and for all the times you called me a fool, I don’t feel stupid around you.”

‘You’re not stupid, Windblade,’ Starscream thought to himself. ‘Not at all. I’m sorry if anyone ever made you feel that way.’ He was still kicking himself over how he’d treated her, when he was so sure that she would leave him to rot anyway. When he didn’t know that there was anything worth staying alive for.

“Not even other Cityspeakers knew what to make of me,” Windblade went on, as Starscream listened in attentive silence. “We’re the only people on Caminus who aren’t encouraged to make friends. Our only friend is our Titan. Then I came here, and everything changed… I met you. I met the Autobots. I met Drift. And even though he’s gone…” 

Her breath caught on a clump of static in her throat, and her eyes drifted as she squeezed them shut for a moment. Her cheeks were pale under the remains of red paint.

“He said something to me. His last words. He said you saw something in me. Something that I had to prove to everyone else. But I don’t have to prove anything to you. I feel like you understand me, Starscream. Whether it’s a Seeker thing or not, I know that it’s true. And… I hope that I can understand you in turn.”

Her hand found his again. He didn't know what to say, so he just held her in his palm. 

The screaming voice of Vos, left utterly speechless. If only his brothers could see him now.

“He also said that he forgives you,” Windblade said softly. “For Wing.”

So Drift had known all along who his friend’s killer was, and it hadn’t changed him at all. If only Starscream had known the same. If only he could have apologised for it.

A long moment passed. Starscream nodded at the tailend of it, only when he was sure he could hold back a surge of tears that threatened to break through his optics.

“I have something for you.” He stood up and turned away, saving Windblade from the sight of him starting to break down. She’d seen him in far worse states, but he had standards to maintain. And she’d been forced to see enough horrors for one day.

“It’s not finished yet.” He handed her the datapad that had been sitting on the opposite slab, standing with his trembling hands behind his back. “But… it may answer some of your questions. About Vos. What it was like, before all of this.”

Windblade took it as if it was something precious, like a sparkling or holy relic of the Thirteen. She looked down, carefully scrolling down the screen. “You wrote all of this by hand?”

As if it was some miraculous feat, when he had nothing else to do with himself. Yet he still felt some pride at having his effort acknowledged.

“Just as Drift passed on what he knew of the Empire, I have a duty to pass on what I know of Vos. No-one else alive today can do it. It’s difficult for me to talk about. But writing it down is easier.”

Windblade was silent as she read through his scrawled hand, his best attempts to be legible after so long spent with paralysed limbs. When she looked up at him, her eyes were too flooded for her to possibly see through them. “Thank you, Starscream.”

She set the datapad down to hug him, forcing him to bend down as she wrapped her arms around his neck. He didn’t mind. He would have freefell from the stars if he had to, if she was waiting for him on the ground.

    “We’ll have to go back out there,” he warned her. “Your friends will be worried.”

She breathed in deeply, and her vents were warm on his neck. Then she nodded before she released him. 

“I’m ready.”

   

✧✦✧

 

    Windblade had said that, but she didn’t really feel it. She didn’t want to leave Starscream’s side. More than anyone else, even Chromia and Maxima and the others she was glad to know were still alive, she wanted to stay with him. 

He was all she could think about, on the way back from the site of Drift and Shadow Striker’s deaths. When they had to stop so that First Aid and Velocity could stabilise Skids and Flamewar, when Lightbright broke down in Afterburner’s embrace, Windblade found comfort in remembering him, knowing he was waiting for her. Hearing his voice helped keep her mind off of Drift, and off of everything else that would come next.

When they both finally emerged from the med-bay, she saw that she was right to not go out alone. Her familiar friends, Dragstrip and Airazor among them, clumped together tightly on one side of the Arcanimus. The other side was packed by bristling scowls, all of them flanking Megatronus. Windblade recognised Roulette right behind him, her face still stained and crumpled.

“We lost two of our own today, Orion. Good soldiers. Good people. And for what? So you can stand there, say a few words, shed a few tears and feel good about yourself?!”

Megatronus was different. Windblade had never seen him so incensed before, not even when the Skyfire drone had been shot in front of him. Even Orion seemed unsure of how to deal with him, and he was supposed to be his closest friend. Ariel stood by his side, a two-bot vanguard against the bristling army before them. Everyone else could only watch from the sidelines.

“There’s no need for this, Megatronus.” Orion’s arms were outstretched, still welcoming against the hostilities. “What do you hope to accomplish by splitting us apart? We all have the same goal here. You’re only making it harder for us to reach it.”

“My goal is nothing like yours.” Megatronus clearly wanted to spit, but was holding himself back. “I want our deaths to mean something. How long have we been at this now? How many lives have we lost? And for all of that, all of our energon and grief, are we any closer to taking down Rattrap?”

“And you think this is going to help?” Ariel was the opposite of her sparkmate, confronting Megatronus with no heed to how small she looked in his shadow. “Splitting us all apart, making it all the more easier for the rat to pick you off one by one? If you thought you could survive on your own, Megatronus, you would have left long ago.”

“So you admit that you knew this was coming all along.” Megatronus laughed down at her, but it was a cruel and mocking sound. “Look at yourselves, Ariel. Orion. You risk your own people for such fleeting victories. You’re so desperate to save lives that don’t deserve to be spared. First you take in the Sparkcracker —”

He acknowledged Starscream’s presence with an arm flung in his direction, the same arm that weighed heavy with a cannon bolted onto the plating. Windblade clung tighter to Starscream, holding him back as well as showing he was protected.

“And then, as if you could sink any lower, you take in one of Rattrap’s pets ?” Megatronus pointed his weapon at Ironhide this time. The only people who went anywhere near him were Chromia and the other Camiens he’d helped free from jail. Everyone else, even Autobots on Orion’s side of the Arcanimus, looked at him like he was a plague carrier. And Ironhide could only look down at the floor.

“There’s mercy, and then there’s foolishness.” Megatronus shook his head, as if he was a disappointed teacher, but he did not lower his weapon. “Our enemies cannot help us. And even if they could, I would not insult our dead brethren by accepting it.”

Whether or not he knew he was in danger, Ironhide was able to look up now, facing the barrel of the cannon head-on. There was a steel-edge in his optics, harder than even Chromia’s hardest glare. He was daring Megatronus to fire at him, to write out his conviction in spilled energon.

Megatronus snarled, disgusted at the challenge. He swept his arm down before he decisively turned away. “You walk your path, Orion, and we will walk ours. See who dies out first.”

And he must have given out some kind of secret signal, because the others behind him started to lead an exodus. They were all turning their backs on the Autobots.

“Megatronus, we can talk this through.” Ariel surged forward to grab the mech’s unburdened arm. “Just let us honor Drift and Shadow Striker first, and we can—”

People were surging past her, others deciding to throw their lot in with Megatronus. Only one of them, Impactor, stopped to address her. 

“ We will honor them on our way out, if you hand over their bodies. We’ll give them a proper funeral.” 

Ariel blinked up at him, as if trying to decide if he was joking. “Absolutely not.”

“We are asking nicely, Ariel.” Megatronus was clearly not joking. His followers kept streaming past him like he was a star throwing his planets out of orbit. “We will not have Camiens and your Tripredacus puppets tainting their send-off. They are the reason they’re both dead .”

 Someone else had stopped as well, only to listen. Roulette’s face was still wet with the tears shed over her sister.

“The answer is no.” Ariel shrugged off Orion’s hand that he placed on her shoulder. “Shadow Striker and Drift knew what they signed up for. They gave their sparks freely and willingly, and for your sake I hope to Primus they’re not watching us from the Allspark right now. You should be ashamed of yourself for even asking.”

She pointed the scold at both Impactor and Megatronus. If she saw Roulette hanging back, the scowl at being told what her dead sister allegedly would have wanted was ignored. One mech simply shrugged as he left, while the other laughed at her again.

“Have it your way. Throw a funeral with their killers, while you sit here and wait to join them in the Allspark. We won’t be staying for it.” 

Megatronus pulled Roulette away with him, whispering something that made her stop glaring back at everyone still left. And then they were gone. 

It was a hell of a way to make an exit. Though he was the leader of the leavers, he was among the last of them to actually leave. 

As soon as he was out of sight, Windblade felt Starscream relax next to her. That was the only good thing to come out of Megatronus abandoning his so-called friends. He had just decimated the Autobot population far more efficiently than Rattrap could ever hope to.

    The Arcanimus was hollow with silence, not only because there were now so few people in it to make noise but because there was nothing for anyone left to say. In that deafening silence, the whispers of the undecided were as loud as gunshots.

“Do you want to stay, Arcee?” Prowl was sitting across from her, both of them next to where Flamewar was lying prone with more solder-patches than armor on her body. “I’ll go wherever you go. Wherever you want.”

They held each other’s hands. Arcee was the first to let go. 

“Thank you, Prowl. But it’s not about what I want.” She stood up, and Prowl mirrored her after a second of confusion. Flamewar looked up at them both, powerless and helpless, as they wordlessly made their decision.

“Arcee?”

“I’m not only fighting for myself, Flamewar.” Arcee didn’t look down at the other femme. “I can’t afford to be selfish anymore.” 

She took to the path of the others who chose to leave, and Prowl kept his promise. He followed his sparkmate out of the Arcanimus.

“I’m sorry, Ariel,” was all Arcee said in farewell. “We’ll see you again someday.”

Ariel nodded, and though her eyes were sad she made no move to stop them. “Look after yourselves.”

Flamewar, meanwhile, was trying to crawl off of her recovery slab. The hurt written on her face had nothing to do with her injuries.

“Arcee… Prowl, please… please don’t go!” She was reaching after them, even when First Aid ran to her side to pull her back into position. And more were staring after the two of them; some in disbelief, some in anger.

“Arcee, do you really know what you’re doing?” A green mech, Springer, called after her. She didn’t answer him.

“They’re going to get themselves all killed,” First Aid sighed as he pushed the plunger of a sedative syringe into Flamewar’s shoulder. “They don’t even have a medic…”

And as he said it, he too was staring after them. Not with anger or sorrow. Ratchet was by his side, watching his student’s face. He knew more than anyone still left what he was thinking.

“So they’ll need one. Go ahead.” Ratchet patted him on the shoulder, a gentle blessing. “Go get what you need, and join them. And good luck.”

    First Aid looked like he would argue with him— only for a second, only to keep up appearances— before he nodded and ran off towards the med-bay. Even those who didn’t want to leave felt like they had to.

    And then there were those who were being held back. Rumble was tugging Frenzy’s arm, trying to pull his unmoving brother along.

“Frenzy, what are you waiting for? We won’t be able to catch up. There’s nothing for us here.”

Frenzy tore his limb free from his brother’s grasp. “For you , maybe not. But Windblade saved me out there. She almost died for it. For me. I owe her.”

Windblade felt her face burn, glad that neither mech was looking over at her.

“Frenzy, we can’t stay here. With him .” Though Rumble’s short stature meant he could have been looking anywhere, it was clear he was glaring at Ironhide. “What about Soundwave?”

“Don’t say his name. Don’t act like you know what he’d want any better than I do.” Frenzy planted himself flat on the foot of a pillar that held up the Arcanimus’ ceiling. He was so small, so still, that he looked like part of the decorative moulding.

“What do you think he’d want, then?” Rumble refused to sit next to him, instead standing with his arms crossed in defiance.

“He wouldn’t want us fighting ourselves. So I’m staying here. Do what you want, but I’m not coming with you. I’m not gonna watch you die for nothing.”

Frenzy turned away from his brother. Rumble twitched, stomped his peds, looked back and forth between Frenzy and the last trickles of Megatronus’ exile. Then he let out a groan that should not have been able to fit in his frame as he threw himself down next to the other mech.

    “Micronus’ sake, Frenzy… fine. Fine. We’ll stay. Fragging idiot.”

    Rumble kept scowling, even when Frenzy pulled his arms around him, even when he hugged his brother back.

Compared to how active it used to be, the Arcanimus was now deserted. From what Windblade could see, the only people she could recognised who stayed were Bumblebee, Hound, Skids (though, like Flamewar, he was too injured to really have a choice in whether or not he stayed), Springer, Blackarachnia, Vibes and Blaster. Only a handful of others whose names she couldn’t remember lingered about.

    “What just happened?” Nautica had floated over to Windblade’s side, and if she didn’t know the answer to something then it was unlikely anyone else would know.

    “The Autobots just split up.” Starscream was the one to answer her, without a hint of mockery or cynicism. He just sounded tired, as tired as Orion Pax looked. The mech sat with his helm in his hands, and Ariel mirrored his pose while standing.

“Blackarachnia.” Orion didn’t raise his head when he addressed her. “How many of us are left?”

    The spider was hanging down from the ceiling in her alt-mode, which gave her the perfect vantage point to answer that question. “Over half of the Arcanimus’ population went with him. I don’t think you want to hear the exact number.”

    Orion nodded numbly. Windblade didn’t know what to do with herself. Starscream chose to just sit on the floor, with his back to one of the support pillars. Nautica, and then Afterburner, ended up joining him on either side.

“Is this… our fault?” Lightbright and the others, the jailbreak Camiens that so much fuss was caused over, stayed together in a tight circle, and the Cityspeaker’s voice was a guilty squeak.

    “No-one is at fault.” Orion forced himself to his feet, levelling his gaze at Lightbright. “Megatronus has always been… impatient. And impulsive. I fear that this outcome was always inevitable. I had just hoped so many others would not leave with him.”

    “I was the last straw.” Ironhide averted his eyes from everyone, only accepting company from Chromia. “If he wanted me out, he could’ve just said so. I can take a hint.”

    “You’re one of us now, Ironhide,” Ariel decreed. “That is not up for argument. You risked your life today, just as any Autobot would.”

    “I never had any choice, you know.” Ironhide shook his head. “When I was pulled from the Well, I was told to behave. Respect my masters. I never knew of anything else. I didn’t think…”

    “We know.” Blackarachnia had descended from the ceiling, shifting onto two legs to place a handful of claws on Ironhide’s shoulder. “We know. You’re not the first one to break free. Hopefully, you won’t be the last.”

    For someone who looked so intimidating, Blackarachnia still managed to be comforting. Maybe she’d learnt how to compensate for her appearance. Ironhide actually managed a smile, which then spread to Chromia like an infection that she tried to stifle.

    “Okay, so we’ve just lost a whole army of people. Whatever.” Skids’ voice was a surprising one to hear— he must not have been as sedated as heavily as Flamewar was. He forced himself upright, fighting off both Ratchet and Velocity’s attempts to get him to lie flat again.

“They weren’t gonna be much good to us anyway. No offence, Orion, but I never liked Megatronus in the first place. I say good riddance. So now we gotta prove that bastard wrong. That’s all there is to— don’t poke that thing in me! I’m fine, I don’t need to sleep!” 

Though his words were slurred, Skids forced his vocal chords to carry them as far as they would go. Nautica’s head perked up with a hard-won smile at how blunt he was being, and she nodded silently towards him. It was the last thing he would have seen before Velocity finally got the syringe in his neck and put him into well-deserved rest.

    “We need to make Drift and Shadow Striker’s deaths mean something too,” Afterburner added, still sitting next to Nautica. “The bastard was right about that, at least.”

    “Not just their deaths.” Bumblebee spoke up now— though he was the youngest one out of everyone gathered, he sounded far older than some of them. “Soundwave, Kup, Lancer, Seaspray—”

    “Strika and Lugnut,” Hound interrupted solemnly.

    “Gears and Tracks.” Red Alert— Windblade only just remembered his name— added to the funeral chorus. And everyone else took turns, adding in friends and family who now only existed in names and memories.

    “Ultra Magnus.” Orion’s voice was a baritone resonance of grief, forming a solid foundation for all others.

    “Beachcomber, Brainstorm. Flareup.”

    “Smokescreen and Bluestreak.”

    “Guzzle. Lifeline.”

    “Skywarp. Thundercracker. Skyfire and Slipstream.” Starscream joined in with a whisper. Windblade only heard it because she was always attuned to the sound of his voice.

    “They all died to bring us this far.” Orion ended the eulogy once everyone had fallen silent once more. “You’re right, Afterburner. Their deaths must mean something.”

    A shape emerged from the clump of Camiens. 

“So. Tell us how we can do that.” Maxima stood before Orion, towering though she was half a head shorter than him with her arms crossed over her chest. Starscream twitched at the sight of her, and her outstretched wings. Windblade wished she could have introduced the two of them under better circumstances.

    “We should deal with the bodies,” Ariel said. “Then we rest and recover.”

    But Maxima was already shaking her head. “No. No rest. We’ve been locked up sitting on our asses for the last decacycle. We need to do something . There’s enough of us here that we can make ourselves useful.”

    “There’s nothing out there to do,” Ariel insisted. “Whatever happens next, we have to be very careful. We can’t afford any more casualties.”

    “We can’t afford to wait, either,” Maxima argued, now addressing everyone around her. “We’ve shown Rattrap that he’s not invincible. We took down a gestalt, for Solus’ sake!”

    “And look at what it cost us!” Springer stood up to confront her, and now he was the one towering. “If it wasn’t for Drift’s sacrifice…”

    He looked over at Drift’s sword, which now lay propped against the edge of the Arcanimus’ central tower. Without its rightful owner’s spark to power it, it was nothing more than a slab of chipped metal.

    “But we can do it.” Airazor spoke up, for the very first time since she was left speechless by the sight of the Arcanimus. “We’ve shown everyone that it’s possible. Yes, we lost people this time—”

    “The Autobots lost people,” Rumble interrupted. “You and the Camiens didn’t lose anything.”

    “Rumble, stop it. We’re all on the same side.” Frenzy punched his brother in the shoulder. Airazor’s feathers stood up, making her frame look twice as large as it really was, and a glaze of anger passed over her eyes just for a second. Then, in the time it took for her feathers to lie flat once more, it was gone.

    “We lost people this time, yes.” Her words were now clipped and forceful. “But we shouldn’t have. We now know what does and doesn’t work against those things. We can do better next time.”

    “Next time?” Hound wasn’t the only one confused.

    “If the gestalts are what’s standing between us and Rattrap,” Maxima declared, “then we have to take them out. That’s what you should have been doing this whole time.”

    She addressed Springer with that last jab, and even Chromia, who was never lauded for her diplomacy skills, winced at how her fellow bodyguard was handling the discussion. Springer looked Maxima up and down as if he thought she was another drone like Skyfire, sent to cause nothing but chaos and confusion, before he exploded.

    “You think we’ve just been lying on our asses the last five hundred years?!” Springer stepped back, so blown away by Maxima’s ignorance that he couldn’t stand anywhere near her. Windblade could hardly blame him— she knew better than anyone gathered around her what it took to destroy Abominus. The small victory wasn’t worth the price of the sparks lost.

“Slag like Abominus,” Springer went on, “that’s just one of Rattrap’s gestalts. He has Devastator, Piranacon, Sky Lynx, Computron, Toxitron, and those are just the ones walking around on Cybertron right now. He has Volcanicus buried somewhere in the Red Sea, Primus-only-knows-what stashed on Luna 1, Bruticus and Menasor in deep freeze—”

    “No, he doesn’t.”

    Dragstrip was the one to interrupt. Like Airazor, she had chosen to stay silent for the whole time she’d been among the Autobots. Now that she’d summoned everyone’s attention, she didn’t seem ready to know what to do with it. Like Ironhide, she shrank away from it.

“Motormaster is dead,” she explained. “Menasor can’t form without him. Onslaught is probably the same, so no Bruticus.”

    “And how do you know that?” Springer pressed, after a moment of contemplating silence.

    “Because I watched one of the Terrorcons bite Motormaster’s head off,” Dragstrip told him. “Because I was Menasor’s left arm.”

    And now the silence was not just contemplative. It was ruminating, brooding, borderline despondent. It took Windblade longer than she would have liked for it to click in her mind, that Dragstrip had just admitted she was a gestalt all along.

    “Dragstrip, right?” Rumble was the first to recognise her. “You did stunt shows at Hydrax. I watched you. You were good. Where the hell have you been all this time?”

    Dragstrip shrugged at the compliment. “Trying to stay alive. Same as the rest of you.”

    Someone else bubbled up from the small remaining crowd of Autobots, a mech who was looking at Dragstrip like she was a ghost. Windblade had seen him before, but his name escaped her for the moment.

    “It’s really you. One of the Stunticons…” His mouth hung open, and though all his nerves were twitching he rooted himself to the floor, as if fighting the urge to retreat back into the crowd. “You won’t remember me, but… I’m Swindle. I was Bruticus’ right leg.”

    Dragstrip’s optics dilated, letting in more light so that she could see Swindle better. As if trying to remember him, if he was really who he said he was. The Autobots’ reaction was far less forgiving.

    “You never told us that before…” Ariel eyed Swindle as if he’d just started growing fur all over his plating.

    “When you took me in, the bodies from the Gestalt Massacre were still warm,” Swindle snapped. “Like hell was I gonna admit to being a combiner, not when Rattrap had more than half of the surviving teams in his pocket. I just wanted to be safe. Like everyone else here…” 

His disposition shrank as he trailed off.

    “How did you survive?” Bumblebee was the one to ask, though he sounded far more awed than angry. “When Rattrap came for the gestalts, he rounded them all up. How did you two get out?”

    Swindle and Dragstrip shared a look, silently wondering who should go first. While Dragstrip hid her face again, Swindle took the chance to explain himself.

“My team wanted to give in to Rattrap. Like the Constructicons did. They thought we were getting a good deal. But it wasn’t a deal at all. More like slavery . I was the only one who saw that. Out of all of them, I was the only one who refused Rattrap’s lead. Then he did something to me. I… I couldn’t combine anymore. Could hardly work my T-Cog at all.”

Swindle hovered near Dragstrip, only sitting down when she shifted to make room for him. His shoulders were heavy as he cupped his hands.

    “Someone else replaced me. Next time Bruticus was deployed, they got themselves all killed. Rattrap kept it hushed up. He might have gotten more replacements for them, but… as far as I’m concerned, Bruticus is dead.”

    It should have been comforting, the possibility that there was one less gestalt to face-off against. But no-one was smiling.

    “What about you, Dragstrip?” Bumblebee asked, sounding like he was regretting asking at all. “What’s your story?”

    At first it looked like Dragstrip was just going to ignore him, but eventually she sighed.

    “Motormaster gave us the chance to escape. His death was a distraction. I was always the fastest, out of all of us… the others still got caught. I just got lucky. I don’t even know if the rest are still alive.”

    Then, before her head sank down onto her knees, her back straightened like a rod and her head whipped around with her mouth set in a firm line. 

“And before any of you say anything,” she snapped, “I know I don’t have a right to be here. One of you, some Autobot who never gave me his name, asked me to join once. A long time ago. I said no, because I was scared. I still am, but I’m here now. Better late than never.”

Then she shrugged, intending to leave it at that. But then Orion approached her.

    “The mech who asked you to join us would have been me. I remember you, Dragstrip. I’m Orion. I’ve changed since then, just as you have. And I’m glad you’re with us now. As I am glad to have you, Swindle.”

He offered her his hand, and after some hesitation she took it limp in her own. Swindle did the same.

    “And you.” Dragstrip turned her head to Springer. “What was your name?”

    He hesitated at first, darting his optics between the two surviving combiners before he answered. “Springer.”

    Dragstrip nodded, as if approving his suspicion. “You’re right. It all comes down to the gestalts. I know how powerful just one is, from the winning side. We can’t win against so many of them, no matter how simple you apparently think it would be.” 

She looked over at Maxima, who could only frown at the accusation.

“Caminus has a gestalt of its own, you know,” she informed Dragstrip. “I know how powerful they are. But we’re not weak. We’re especially not as weak as Rattrap thinks we are. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

“It took everything we had just to take down one of them.” Hound shook his head, rejecting Maxima’s optimism. “If Rattrap ever thought we were any kind of serious threat, he could pool them all together and wipe us out in one hit.”

    “So why doesn’t he?” Afterburner accused. He was still sitting with Starscream and Nautica, observing alongside Windblade. Of course the bodyguards would be the first ones forefront in any battle plans.

    “Too much collateral damage,” Ariel sighed. “We need to be worth the trouble. Until now, the fact that our tactics aren’t so effective has actually worked to our advantage.”

    “Wouldn’t it be worth it?” Chromia asked, though for the first time in all the time Windblade had known her, she sounded hesitant. “If we had to, I mean. Mutually assured destruction.”

    She was suggesting that, even if they all perished, it would be a worthy sacrifice if Rattrap went with them. Windblade might have agreed with her, once upon a time. Before she’d met Starscream.

    “Not every technorganic out there is as monstrous as Rattrap,” Airazor pointed out, obviously speaking from experience. “They just don’t know what’s really going on. They believe what they’re told. They don’t deserve to die for being ignorant.”

    Blackarachnia said nothing, though she watched Airazor carefully out of the corner of her optics.

    “There’s other Cybertronians, too,” Dragstrip added. “People just trying to keep their heads down. They’d die too.”

    Of course. They had to remember that it wasn’t just Autobots versus Rattrap. There was a whole planet of people, innocent people, to consider.

    “Rattrap doesn’t want us all dead, anyway,” Bumblebee said. “If he knew about the Arcanimus, he wouldn’t want it burned to the ground. He’d steal everything in the archives, stash it away in his vaults.” He paused for a moment. “ Then he’d burn it to the ground.”

“I bet Victorion could help us,” Hot Shot piped up, and he sounded so proud of himself for suggesting it. “Caminus’ gestalt. If we could just get in contact with the Mistress—”

Windblade hated that she had to squash any hope of a rescue for him. “We can’t rely on the Mistress to save us, Hot Shot.”

He blinked at her. The patchwork remains of his Cityspeaker markings almost seemed to vibrate. “W…why not?”

He had no idea what was really going on. Windblade herself only had half of an idea of what the Mistress had in store for Cybertron and everyone on it. All she knew for certain was that their leader, the voice of Primus and the Thirteen, could not be trusted. Even if the Mistress and the Torchbearers could swoop down and save them, Windblade no longer wanted them to. 

‘It’s been two decacyles,’ Windblade thought to herself. ‘If she was going to come for us, we would have known by now.’

How was she supposed to explain that to Hot Shot, to Lightbright and Vertex and Chromia and Velocity? They were just daring to be hopeful, after the one-in-a-million chance of them all being reunited. Windblade had been drip-fed the horrible truth, Nautica had uncovered it on her own over the course of her whole life, and Afterburner had the privilege of keeping himself deaf to it. There was no easy way to tell the others what they needed to hear.

Luckily, Nautica managed to come up with a much more palatable answer for now.

“We have no way to reach her. And we don’t have time or resources to figure out a means of communication. We have to assume that we’re on our own.”

It had the same effect of dejection on Hot Shot, but at least it was easy for him and the others to accept. 

    “So we can’t take them on directly,” Maxima groaned, “we can’t ask our home for help, and we can’t overwhelm Rattrap without getting millions of people slaughtered in the process. What the hell are we supposed to do?”

“The Enigma of Combination.”

Everyone looked at Ironhide now, as his revelation came out in a weary sigh. 

“That’s what lets Rattrap control the gestalts. How he took over Cybertron in the first place. That’s what you need to take away from him.”

The relic that Rattrap had been holding, after Vos was destroyed. Windblade remembered Starscream telling her about it, though only briefly.

“Do you know where it’s kept?” Ariel asked Ironhide.

“The council vaults,” Vertex cut in. “We saw it ourselves, when we first arrived. It’s locked up tight.”

“So… we need to break in and steal it?” Hot Shot wagered, wanting to be part of the conversation even if his idea was impossible. Springer was the first one to scoff at the suggestion.

“As if that’s even an option…” Then a change rippled over his face. “...Is it?”

    Before anyone could answer him, there was a summons from the other side of the Arcanimus chamber.

    “Hate to interrupt this productive war session of yours, guys, but… ” Vibes called over from her and Blaster’s shared workstation, still attentive and busy despite half of their friends having just abandoned them. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

    “What is it?” Orion was the first to reach them, with everyone else following closely behind.

    “Something other than whatever cover-up they’re putting out for the Abominus fight. Just started airing a klick ago.” Blaster pressed some keys, then turned the screen towards the crowd. “See for yourself.”

    “Maxima, I can’t see! What’s going on!?” Hot Shot was jumping up and down, trying to watch the screen over the sea of frames. Maxima picked him up and held him over her shoulders, giving him the best view out of everyone. Rumble and Frenzy climbed up onto the table to see, but there wasn’t room for anyone else to join them.

Windblade was a straggler, alongside Starscream and Nautica. She could vaguely see the screen from the very back, but she was far more interested in what she was hearing— a femme’s voice, a newscaster she remembered hearing once before. 

“In the wake of the shocking Abominus sighting less than two cycles ago, it has now been confirmed that the Mistress of Flame, religious matriarch of Caminus, has finally agreed to an audience with Chancellor Rattrap. It is unclear yet what her terms will be, but our dear Chancellor remains positive for the hope of a peaceful outcome for everyone.”

    The scene changed, and even from the distance Windblade could recognise Rattrap’s distinctive three-headed shape. The sight of him made her freeze.

“This is an audience that we’ve been trying to secure for many cycles now,” the Chancellor said in a clearly and carefully rehearsed tone, “ ever since the envoy of terrorists was uncovered. Their Mistress was either not aware of their actions or, because their plan ultimately failed, she was not interested in negotiating the terms of their release. Abominus was deployed in advance of this meeting as a show of strength, and as a response to a reported sighting of the escaped terrorist Windblade.”

“And Windblade has been successfully recaptured?” the newscaster asked him from offscreen, 

“As I’ve said before —” As much as Rattrap had slathered on his persona for the camera, he was clearly annoyed at having to repeat himself, ”— yes, she has been detained. And it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our watchful citizens!”

Windblade, who was most certainly not detained, bristled while her head buzzed— what was the point of having news broadcasts when they were all lies?

“Do you believe that the Mistress was the true mastermind behind all of this, Chancellor?” the newscaster pressed. “If so, how can we possibly have peace with creatures who greet us with such hatred?”

“Speak for yourself, glitch,” Chromia grumbled under her vents, while Rattrap addressed the question in the way only a well-seasoned liar, a true politician, could pull off.

“The same question was asked of me five centuries ago, when I first took office. They asked me how I could possibly find peace with Cybertronians, when they hated us so much. Look at how far we’ve come since then. Look at how those who refuse to stand with us have been driven underground, like the rodents and insects they always claimed us to be. I assure you, peace with Caminus is not only possible, it is essential.” 

There was a heavy pause, as the gathered Autobots simmered, as four pairs of the Chancellor’s eyes quickly darted to one side.

“Of course,” he said uneasily, “it all depends on why the Mistress has only now agreed to speak with us. If she insists on fighting us, then… we will have no choice but to retaliate in kind.”

“That’s exactly what he wants.” Starscream was growling next to Windblade, voicing her own thoughts exactly as she heard them in her head. “He wants to start a war.”

“It’s what they both want.” Even though she’d been warned, even though she knew what was coming, Windblade felt like she was going to purge any energon still in her tanks. “The Mistress and Rattrap, this is what they’ve both been preparing for. And they don’t even know it. They each think they’ll have an advantage over the other.”

“Wait, wait, Windblade, slow down.” Afterburner had turned around, holding out his hands as if trying to calm an angry beast. “The Mistress would never go to war with Cybertron. Rattrap is talking out his aft again, there was never any ‘plan’ to exterminate his kind. And he knows it! We didn’t even know about them until we came here!”

“That was why she sent you here,” Starscream told him. “So she would know what she’s up against. You were never a diplomatic envoy. You were bait.”

Afterburner stuttered, as he looked the Seeker over with what Windblade could only describe as disgust. The screen had been turned off, and now everyone was spectating the spat between the two mechs.

    “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Starscream. You don’t know her. You’ve been locked up for five centuries, how could you possibly understand what she’s thinking?”

    Afterburner had always been loyal to the Mistress, protective as a bodyguard was supposed to be. Windblade knew that it was just his hardwired loyalties to Caminus talking for him. But it was still hard to hear him speak like that to Starscream, who had spent those five centuries drenched in other people’s sparks and final moments. He must have seen every possible combination of personality, memories, life experiences and dreams. Even if he didn’t know the Mistress of Flame personally, Windblade trusted him to know what kind of person she really was.

    “I’ve seen it happen before, Afterburner.” Starscream did not let any emotion show. He kept a tight lid on it, as if to show Afterburner how he really should have been acting. “There’s no such thing as a benevolent leader. They’ll take any excuse for a war with people they hate. And if they can’t find an excuse, they’ll just make one up.”

“Afterburner, listen to us.” Windblade stepped in only because she was afraid her friend was about to start throwing his hands out. “I know this is hard to hear, but you have to accept it. The Mistress has been lying to us our whole lives—”

“Not you too, Windblade…” Afterburner’s anger dissolved into disappointment, and then Hot Shot jumped down from Maxima’s shoulders to run up to Windblade with brimming blue optics.

“That’s not true! That can’t be true! Why would you say such a thing, Windblade?!” Hot Shot’s confusion was making him sound hysterical. “Things are bad enough, why do you have to go and make them worse?”

“Hot Shot, calm down.” Maxima held him back while also trying to comfort him with her presence. “I’m sure there’s an explanation for all of this.”

“Windblade…” Chromia seemed most confused of all, looking at her Cityspeaker as if for the very first time. “What happened to you while I was gone?”

Windblade didn’t know how to answer that. She didn’t know how to answer anything, not in a way that the people she loved could truly understand.

“Nautica.” She turned to her friend, the only other person who knew the truth that she was trying to break. “Tell them what you found out. What we realised.”

Nautica seemed caught off-guard, though she must have known she couldn’t keep it  all to herself for much longer. She gulped.

“...Spark parasites. They’re sparklings. Newborns. Children of Primus, just like all of us. The Mistress never wanted us to know what they really were. She didn’t want us to know that we can make new life on our own.”

Nautica had a hard-earned reputation for being logical, fair, and honest to an excruciating fault. That was why she was the only one who could make them listen. She had no reason to lie. She was the best person to make them believe her, but not the best for delivering the news gently. Only one mattered at that moment, which made Windblade ache for any other moment in time.

“Wh… why? Why would she…?” Out of all the Camiens, who showed shock and horror and disbelief in their own ways, it was Afterburner whose mind was visibly crumbling. Windblade wished she could comfort him, but he’d been lied to for so long that anything less than the truth wouldn’t be fair.

“Population control.” Nautica shrugged, as if the reason why didn’t matter. “With the Caminus hotspot she can control how many sparks emerge, and what they end up becoming. She can make sure Caminus has exactly what it needs, no more or less.”

It made perfect, horrifying sense. Starscream didn’t argue with her. No-one did. Not even Afterburner. He was too busy looking behind him at Maxima, while she was clutching her chest. 

There was a great pain blooming there for her, as Windblade remembered that, according to Afterburner himself, Maxima had been affected by a parasite once. The fact that he’d known she was infected, and what the parasite really was all along, told Windblade the whole sorry story.

It was strange, how one could yearn for something you hadn’t even known existed until just a moment ago. But Windblade knew it was possible. She’d felt that same engulfing emptiness, when she’d learned what her body was capable of, what kind of gift Primus and Solus had given her. She didn’t really want a child, especially not while she was so far from home. But it was the possibility of having one, one day, another little Seeker that she chose to bring into the universe, someone like her, that consumed her with such painful longing.

Something like that was hard enough to accept for someone who had never felt the life growing in their spark before. But for Maxima…

She pushed everyone out of the way, running away somewhere where she could be alone.

“Maxima! Wait, please wait—!” Afterburner chased after her, but Maxima had shifted to her alt-mode to reach the highest balconies of the Arcanimus. He’d have to climb a long way to reach her, if he could even find her at all.

“...Will they be okay?” Lightbright stood by Hot Shot, who was numb like a statue with shock. They had each witnessed their bodyguards in states of never-before-seen weakness, and vulnerability. Bodyguards weren’t supposed to be weak or vulnerable. 

“I hope so.” Chromia was the only one left to give them any solace. She held each of their shoulders, and though they each took her hands in their own they still watched the shadows that had swallowed up Afterburner and Maxima. There was no knowing when they’d come back.

With Maxima and Afterburner still missing, and the de-facto leaders Orion and Ariel nowhere to be seen, Chromia took it upon herself to lead the mission planning. It was something she was somewhat familiar with as a bodyguard, something to tether herself to while the rest of her mind flailed blindly. Even so, her eyes kept darting to the shadows in anticipation of Maxima and Afterburner returning to take over from her, or to run up and tell her the last two decacycles were just a test, or a prank, or a horrible dream she could now wake up from. 

That didn’t happen, of course. It couldn’t, and it wouldn’t. She had to let go of stupid hopes like that, for the sake of the Cityspeakers who were just as lost as she was.

Well, except for Windblade. She seemed to be the only one who knew anything for sure on this nightmare of a planet. Even now, as she sat with her fellow Speakers, she was the only one of them who wasn’t hovering on the edge of tears. 

Everyone was gathered on one of the Arcanimus’ upper balconies, the last place that had been searched for the two bodyguards. There was no longer an even split between Autobots and Camiens, now they mingled together in their shared burdens of sorrow. Even Dragstrip and Airazor, the mysterious femmes who didn’t belong to Autobots or Camiens, were welcomed without another word against them. Ironhide still refused to look at anyone.

“So.” Chromia exhaled, forcing her voice to fill the empty space of the chamber. “We have to break into a heavily guarded vault,” she counted off each task on her digits, “inside an even more heavily guarded council building, to steal a mythical relic of Nexus Prime, while our respective leaders are trying to figure out the best way to kill us all right above our heads. How’s everyone feeling about that?”

The Autobots, the comparative few that were still left, looked at her in mute melancholy. They knew better than anyone what kind of suicide mission lay ahead. It was the same mission they’d been fighting for the last five centuries, and sitting in that chamber were all the remaining survivors who hadn’t given up or given into despair. Or maybe they were just too exhausted to truly argue against throwing their lives away for yet another hopeless cause.

“I think we have nothing better to do.” Springer didn’t have the strength to look up, though even when he was slumped on the floor he managed to impose his shadow over everyone else.

“I think Megatronus can get fragged.” Skids must have been feeling better— he was still more solder than metal, but he was conscious, able to speak without slurring, and Ratchet wasn’t trying to hold him down for his own good. The medic had taken it upon himself to wheel his and Flamewar’s slabs up to the top of the Arcanimus, when he saw that everyone else had congregated there. Flamewar was still lying in stasis with how the departure of the one Autobot couple had torn her, that was probably for the best.

Those were the people Chromia had become most familiar with, on the journey back from Cybertron's crown. With Afterburner's help she'd learned everyone else's names quickly enough. The only names she didn’t know belonged to people who weren’t Autobots anymore, so in a sad way the exodus had worked in her favour.

"We've picked a Pit of a time to do it." A scarred white-plated mech— Chromia thought she'd heard someone call him Wheeljack— grumbled as he scratched his shoulder. "What with Rattrap talking to Caminus so soon, the whole building is gonna be on lockdown. Couldn't have picked a worse time if we tried." He gave Ironhide a glare at that last part, as if he thought the mech was just trying to bait them into a fool's errand that would get them all killed.

"I'm not so sure the security will be as tight as you think, Wheeljack." Red Alert, who Chromia had first met as a twitching mess in  the corner, now suddenly had the confidence of a Torchbearer. "Think about it, with how shady both Rattrap and the Mistress are, they won't risk any eavesdropping on the inside. I think he'll want the whole place cleared. Er, I know I would, at least…" He trailed off as he went right back to how Chromia assumed he usually was— staring right at the ground, nervous and scared.

"Can't we wait until after, just in case?" Hot Shot was still raw from the revelation that the Mistress of Flame was the same breed of creature as Rattrap, assuming he could even make himself believe it. "I mean… even if he and the Mistress declare war on each other right there and then….Caminus is light years away. We'll have time before anyone has to get hurt, won't we?"

Chromia’s spark ached for him. It was hard to be angry at someone, especially one of her Cityspeakers, for being so naive.

"People have already been hurt," Velocity told him— not unkindly, in spite of how exhausted she sounded. "And war or no war, they'll keep getting hurt if we don't do something."

And with that, Hot Shot’s hopeful grin died on his face as soon as it dared to be born.

"We can't wait, in any case.” Chromia regained control, trying to distract Hot Shot from his spiral of despair. “If what you say is true, Red Alert, this could be our best and only chance to get in there."

"And we have no idea what else the Mistress might do, if we wait,” Windblade added. “If she really planned all this… if she really wants a war with Cybertron… Caminus could be on his way here already."

"What?” Vertex didn’t quite laugh, but she clearly wanted to. “You really think she's gonna move the whole Titan into Cybertron's orbit?" It was an offhand comment, meant to be a joke. But Windblade’s face pulled itself taut beneath the smears of her paint, a fresh portrait of horror. As if she was seeing Caminus’ arrival right before her eyes.

"...I don't know what to think anymore,” she said quietly. “But I know we can't just sit back and see what happens next."

“I’d feel a lot better if we reviewed our options,” Hound said, raising his voice to give Windblade a break from everyone else’s attention. “If we’re seriously considering doing this.”

It was as if he’d flipped a switch, spurring everyone to realise that this was not a eulogy or time to mourn what they’d all lost.

“There are ways into the council halls that don’t go through the front door.” Blackarachnia said— she was more than a little unnerving to look at, but the fact that she hadn’t left with the others told Chromia all she needed to know about her. “Assuming Rattrap hasn’t bricked them up… I’d volunteer, but though I’m not a fugitive my presence would be as suspicious as it would be unwelcome.”

“And I am a fugitive now,” Airazor, who was sitting across from the spider, sighed. Chromia vaguely recognised her from when the Camiens had first arrived on Cybertron, but that now felt like it had happened a lifetime ago. “They’d spot me a mile away, even if I was airborne.”

“I can do it.” Ironhide, who just a moment ago had been trying to transform into the scenery, now stood up and marched through the huddled mass of people to stand before Chromia. “I know my way around the building. And they haven’t publicly announced any changes to the Elite Guard. Some people inside might still let me pass through.

He didn’t look confident at all in his assumption, but that didn’t show in his voice. 

 “Besides,“ he added, now addressing the rest of the room, “I’m the one who suggested stealing the Enigma. It’s only fair that I take the risk.”

Everyone listening to him volunteer would know that he was putting his life on the line to make up for old crimes, for something that only might give them an edge against Rattrap. Chromia had to admire how determined he was to get himself killed just to prove people wrong. 

“Ironhide,” she put a hand on his shoulder as her voice went soft, “you’ll be the most wanted mech in the city right now. They won’t let you anywhere near the vault before they just shoot you on sight.”

He must have known that, but he wanted to put himself forward anyway. He gave her a sorry shrug. 

“Maybe we could disguise ourselves as drones?” Bumblebee suggested, while nervously rubbing at the yellow nubs on his head. “I’m the right size for it.”

“Or I could go alone.” One of the small mechs, either Rumble or Frenzy (Chromia hadn’t yet learned to tell the two of them apart), piped up. “I can hide behind things. They’ll never see me coming.”

“If you’re gonna do something that dumb, then I’m coming with you!” The other red mech ran over to his side to protest. “We can stand on each other's shoulders, if we need to reach something!”

“You idiot, Rumble, one of us needs to stay behind!” The other one, who must have been Frenzy, smacked his brother on the back of the head. “Who’s gonna look after Ravage if we’re both dead!?”

“What we need is a distraction,” Blaster declared. “Just send me out there and I’ll blow them away with my mixtape!”

And soon everyone was offering their sparks up, with some lame justification stapled on to their sacrifice. Chromia would have laughed if it wasn’t so tragic. It was as if the Autobots truly were suicidal, or so desperate to prove themselves useful that they didn’t care if they died so long as it accomplished something for everyone else who got to keep living.

“I suppose I could do it,” Vertex put forth hesitantly, “if you’re willing to wait until I can walk again. It’s easy to get into places you shouldn’t be if you just act like you belong there.”

‘Not you too, Vertex…’ As much as the actor got on Chromia’s every last nerve node, she didn’t want to go back home without her, or without any Camien. It was scary enough seeing the state of Vertex after Airachnid’s interrogation, she didn’t want to imagine what an entire building of incensed technorganics could do to one of them…

“Windblade should go.”

The suggestion came from Lightbright, and the mere sound of it was as surprising as the fact that it was not a whisper or hurried, nervous squeak. Even when everyone looked at the Cityspeaker, her eyes were glowing bright above her smudged facepaint, and she was smiling through the cracks. Only Hot Shot and especially Windblade looked stunned.

“Wh… Why me?” Windblade asked her, looking down at her fellow Speaker as if she'd just sprouted wings to match her own.

‘Yeah, ’ Chromia repeated in her head, ‘ why her?’

Ever since they’d left Caminus, the universe had seemed to set its sights solely on her Cityspeaker. Windblade was the whole reason they were on Cybertron in the first place, but the way Primus seemed to be playing with her and only her was almost frightening— no, it was frightening, because Chromia was supposed to be protecting her. It was her one job, what she was made for… and as soon as she’d let Windblade out of her sight, she’d failed it. 

“Fortress Maximus said so.” Lightbright beamed her answer up at Windblade, as if that was all the answer that was needed, before she swiftly turned away. “Ironhide, could you draw up a map of the council halls? Nothing special, just enough so she knows where to go.”

Ironhide seemed blindsided at being addressed like an equal, as if he and Lightbright had been friends for years and not sworn enemies not just a few days ago.  

“Sure… yeah, sure," he ventured. "There’s blueprints available on the datanet. I can whip something up from them. Someone could program it into a plugin chip.”

“And you still have that chip in your comm unit, right Windblade?" Lightbright asked. "So you can talk to people far away? If we can boost the signal of it, someone could give you directions while you’re inside."

“Lightbright, wait, slow down.” Windblade was moving her hands in front of the other Speaker, as if she could physically restrain her, and while the Autobots drifted around her she herded Lightbright to a corner where she could lower her voice. “Fortress Maximus told you? How can you hear him from all the way over here? How can you hear him at all ?” 

And there was the other unspoken, more desperate question from her, “Why the hell is he dragging me into this?” Chromia and Hot Shot were the only others gathered around Lightbright, but she looked like a stagehand hit with a sudden spotlight.

“Fort Max is my Titan.” She seemed a little flushed, as if she didn’t quite believe what she was saying. “I can’t hear him right now, but he talked to me while we were locked up in Ferromax. He told me where you’d be, you and the Autobots. He’s been waiting for someone who can hear him. He’s Metroplex’s brother.”

"You have a Titan…?” Hot Shot took Lightbright by the shoulders, and from the wet look that glimmered in his eyes Chromia worried that he might start sobbing. He was now the only Speaker without a Titan of his own, and he would be feeling… jealous? Angry? Only Maxima would have known what he was really thinking at that moment.

A tense moment passed as Hot Shot gulped. “What… what does he sound like?"

And he didn’t sound jealous, or angry. He whispered, as if he was asking Lightbright to reveal a most precious secret. Or as if he was awestruck.

“He was… scary, at first,” Lightbright told him. “I thought I was going crazy, because he’d only whisper to me to start with. Then, when he could tell I was listening, he told me everything he knew. He sounds like… how I always imagined Caminus would sound, if he was awake.”

She turned to Windblade once more, and Hot Shot followed her gaze.

“Fort Max told me the truth about Metroplex is in Iacon, Windblade. In the council building. You’ll know how to find it, when you’re near. You need to find it. It’ll tell us what Rattrap is going to do to him. That’s all he told me. But I believe him.”

Windblade’s mouth was agape. It was a reasonable reaction, all things considered. Chromia couldn’t imagine how else she would take the news that she was lined up for a suicide mission on the secondhand word of a Titan (hell, slag like that was exactly why they where all in this situation in the first place). But considering this was the same Titan who had steered them to safety once before…

“I believe him, too.” Chromia’s support drew a look of surprise from Lightbright. “But just cause there’s something in there for Windblade to find doesn’t mean she has to go alone.”

Windblade looked to her bodyguard, her mouth still hanging open, but the voice that everyone heard next was not her own.

“Lightbright?”

The Speaker’s head whipped towards Afterburner, who was navigating the crowd of Autobots towards her. There was no dramatic reunion this time, but Afterburner still brought his Speaker into his arms as the other Camiens collected around him. Maxima, however, was still nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Maxima?” Hot Shot asked the question before Chromia or anyone else could.

“She’s okay.” Afterburner released Lightbright and gave a reassuring nod to Nautica, who must have been feeling guilty about scaring Maxima off in the first place. “She just needs to be alone, for now. She’ll find us when she’s ready. What did I miss?”

“We’ve been trying to figure out the best way to steal a precious relic from a heavily guarded vault,” Chromia said.

“Oh. So business as usual, then.”

“Are you sure Maxima is okay?” Nautica fidgeted with her hands as she asked Afterburner. “I could talk to her. I mean, I could explain better the whole… sparkling thing, if that would help—”

“It’s alright, Nautica.” Afterburner dismissed her with an open palm. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You just told us the truth. Thank you for that.”

Nautica hid a smile as her face flushed blue. “...And thank you for believing me this time.”

While the mechanic and the bodyguard spoke, Lightbright grabbed Windblade by the shoulder again.

"There’s one other thing, Windblade. Fort Max wanted you to know that, even though you were too late to help… Metroplex still loves you. He… he knows how lonely you’ve been. How long you’ve spent listening to him, even when he had nothing to say."

Then Lightbright exhaled, as if passing on the information was a great effort for her.

“That’s why you always spent so long at your station, huh?” She asked Windblade quietly, though Chromia could still hear her. “Cause you were lonely?”

Windblade clearly didn’t know how to answer. Her eyes darted, and for one brief moment she seemed to look to Chromia for guidance, before her shoulders sank as her eyes eased shut.

“I never really noticed, at the time,” she said. “But… yeah. I guess I was. You’ve always been a good friend, Lightbright. You and Hot Shot. But I—”

Windblade reached out to hold Lightbright’s shoulder, but the other femme shook her head with a sad smile as her white-plated fingers folded over Windblade’s black ones.

“You don’t have to explain. I understand. I probably wouldn’t have before, but… it all makes sense to me now. Our home was never on Caminus to begin with. It was here, on Cybertron. With our Titans. With Primus.”

Then Afterburner called Lightbright over, and she left Windblade with nothing but that assurance, and Chromia nearby.

“You never told me you were lonely, Windblade.” Chromia tried not to sound offended, but her head was so full with new revelations that any kind of niceties were forced to take a backseat in her priorities. Windblade shrugged.

“It was the kind of loneliness that people can’t cure… I never told anyone. I didn’t want anyone to worry. Especially not you. It was bad enough that you had to keep me out of trouble, you didn’t have to keep me happy as well.”

And now, at the implication that Windblade was a burden, Chromia was offended. “I’m not just a bodyguard. I’m your friend, too.”

They were friends, weren't they? Even if Chromia wasn’t Windblade’s bodyguard, she would still care for her. She’d just assumed that Windblade had always known that.

“You are!” Windblade nodded furiously as she grabbed Chromia’s arm—she could sense how the bodyguard really felt, despite all of Chromia’s attempts to hide it. “Of course you are… but my point still stands. My happiness is no-one else’s responsibility.”

Chromia wanted to argue. She knew better than anyone how important it was to rely on yourself, but that was a rule for bodyguards, for people like her. Cityspeakers were different. They were fragile, and priceless. A Cityspeaker couldn’t be trained like a simple bodyguard could. They had to be protected at all costs… 

But without Chromia around to keep her safe, Windblade had had to adapt. She’d had to change to stay alive on Cybertron, to the point that Chromia almost didn’t recognise her anymore. 

Or maybe she’d just never known her that well to begin with.

“Windblade.” Springer had somehow managed to sneak up on them both, and now his shadow was smothering them. “You’re sure you’re up for this?”

Windblade blinked, as if she’d forgotten she was to be the Autobots’ secret weapon for getting inside the relic vault. “I… guess that depends on exactly how we’re gonna pull this off.”

“We could disguise you,” Vertex suggested, now limping over to Windblade’s side with the help of a crutch. “I’ve made stage costumes out of nothing but scrap metal before, you know. But in this case, we could just change your paint-scheme, rearrange your wings so they’re not as obvious…”

While Vertex fussed and muttered over Windblade’s frame, Springer’s eyes glowed with a new idea.

“Blackarachnia,” he called to the spider. “Think you could cover her wings with silk?”

Blackarachnia squinted at Windblade, then over to Springer. “You… want to make her look like an Insecticon?” 

“Tarantulas still uses them for some of his experiments, doesn’t he?” Springer asked, “We could smuggle her in on that pretence.”

“Hey, that could actually work,” Hound added, standing next to Blackarachnia. “From what you’ve told us, no-one checks what goes in and out of his lab.”

Blackarachnia’s fangs were hidden by the straight line of her mouth. “I can make her look the part. But… someone would need to walk her through. I’m the only one who could get that close.”

“If you’re worried about running into Tarantulas in there—” Springer started to speak, but Blackarachnia shook her head.

“No. I’ll do it. Cover the glass of her optics too, to be safe. Rattrap won’t be looking for a red-eyed Insecticon.” Then she went off on her own, to do whatever it was that spiders did when there was silk to be made.

“What’s an Insecticon?” Windblade asked, sounding none too thrilled about being turned into one.

“Creations of old Senator Shockwave that got loose after the Gestalt Massacre,” Hound explained. “Some say they’re technorganics that have gone feral. They mostly stay underground, guarding Cybertron’s core and attacking anyone who goes too deep.”

“If they were technorganics,” Springer scoffed, “Rattrap wouldn’t be exterminating them every other year. They’re more like mutated wildlife, or drones with claws.”

“I’m just saying what I’ve heard others say about them,” Hound said with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter what they are anyway, without Shockwave here to tell us who’s wrong.”

“Look, whatever they are,” Windblade decreed with a sigh, “just do what you need to to get me inside the building. I’ll take care of the rest."

“I’m coming too.” Frenzy gave both Chromia and Windblade a fright as he spoke up, looking up at them both with a stubborn glare.

“And me!” Rumble added, linking his arm around the other mech’s.

“Well, I… appreciate the help,” Windblade told them, obviously hiding a laugh, “but how are we gonna get you two inside as well?”

“You’ve never seen our alt-modes, have you?” Rumble asked, and then they both grinned. Without separating, the two mechs jumped and shifted in mid-air. When they hit the ground, they were two slim cassettes that were barely larger than Windblade’s palm.

“Impressive, huh?” The voice from the blue cassette was muffled, but unmistakably Frenzy.

“Just carry us in your cockpit!” Rumble insisted, and he seemed to twitch as Windblade picked him and Frenzy up with two hands. 

“Suppose I can’t argue with that.” She couldn’t hold back her laugh this time, and even Chromia had to smile. An alt-mode that you couldn’t move in would have been a laughing stock on Caminus, but the size more than made up for the lack of locomotion— with the right hiding place Rumble and Frenzy would be the perfect spies, able to eavesdrop on any conversation. More than a few people on Caminus would have wanted to be born Minicons just for the gossip they could overhear.

“Just like you said, Chromia,” Windblade said as Rumble and Frenzy leapt out of her hands, now landing on each of their feet. “I don’t have to go in alone.”

“Yeah…” Chromia nodded as her smile quickly faded. “But I’d rather you didn’t have to go in at all.”

“So this is where we’re all camping out?” Ariel’s voice was a whiplash, but not a shout or bellow— she didn’t even have to try to make herself heard by everyone. Chromia hadn’t really registered that she and Orion had been missing until now, but now they both stood at the stairs that led down to the Arcanimus floor.

“We’ve got a plan for getting hold of the Enigma!” Skids called out to them from his slab. “Kind of a plan. An idea, at least. Where were you?”

“Outside,” Orion answered. “No sign of Maxima or— oh. You’re back.” Orion started as he noticed Afterburner, who was still conversing with Lightbright and Nautica.

“I’m sorry if we made anyone worry,” the bodyguard said. “Maxima just needs some time alone.”

Orion nodded. “That’s understandable. As for why we were gone so long, myself and Ariel thought, while we were outside… we should start building the pyres for Shadow Striker and Drift.”

At the sound of the two names, the Autobots all went quiet at once. Then there was a chorus of guilty muttering.

“Almost forgot…”

“Of course.”

“We’ll tell you about our plan after.”

They all trickled out after Ariel and Orion— only Ratchet stayed put, probably to watch over the injured Skids and Vertex and unconscious Flamewar. The Camiens, including Chromia, were of course completely lost, but they followed the others out anyway.

“Pyres?” Chromia asked as she caught up to Hound. “What are those?”

“Funeral pyre,” he explained as he walked. “We burn bodies, when they’re empty. The flames become a beacon to the stars, and their ashes become cosmic dust. Their sparks return to Primus, and their bodies return to the rest of the universe.”

“And it stops Rattrap getting his paws on their shells,” Wheeljack added with a growl. “Enough damn drones around as it is.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Nautica asked. “Won’t other people see the smoke?”

“They do,” Hound said with a smile. “That’s the whole point. Other Cybertronians see them, and know what they are. They can join us in mourning from miles around. We’re always gone before guards come.”

There was a pause, then he asked, “What are funerals like on Caminus?”

“We don’t have them,” Chromia told him. “People don’t die on Caminus.”

Hound’s eyes went wide, and more than a few people who overheard turned around with similarly curious looks. “Sounds like a good place to live forever.”

Chromia said nothing. WIth what she now knew of Caminus, of the person who had raised her, she knew that immortality was not a blessing in that place.

“Wait…” Windblade stopped in her tracks at the bottom of the Arcanimus, and her head darted left and right. “Has anyone seen Starscream?”

That was another absence that Chromia hadn’t noticed. Which was strange, because Starscream was the most curious of everyone she’d met in the last two days. Windblade had called him a friend, when she spoke of him on the two-day journey back to the Arcanimus. A friend, a Seeker, a prince… yet Chromia knew almost nothing else about him. Just as she apparently knew nothing about Windblade.

There was a long pause before someone, in this case Bumblebee, answered Windblade’s question. “Lost track of him during the search. Think he was on the second layer, last I saw him?”

“I’ll go find him.” Chromia made the decision instantly. “Windblade, you stay here and help out.”

She didn’t wait for a response before she headed back up the stairs. She needed to speak with him. She needed to know what he was, and what he had done to Windblade.

✧✦✧

Starscream knew that Maxima wouldn’t be found. Almost every Seeker was good at hiding, though they’d always had the advantage of being able to reach places non-Seekers could never get to. In this case, however, it wasn’t a matter of her having wings, rather it was her not wanting to be found. If she heard anyone coming near, she would simply flee. 

Unlike everyone else, he hadn’t been trying to find her. His strategy was to let her come to him, if she wished to. He found a dark nook for himself in the Arcanimus, somewhere easily overlooked. It might have once been a place for studying, in better days. Starscream thought he could make it his quarters, if he decided to stay here. If they would let him stay.

“Starscream?

Maxima had seen him before he’d seen her, which he hadn’t expected. He didn’t jump, but his surprise was betrayed by how quickly he turned towards her voice. She was only half visible, one wing hanging low.

“That’s your name, right?” She was cautious, and Starscream imagined it was only partly because of his haggard appearance. “Windblade talked about you, on the way back from…”

She trailed off as she came into full-view. Now being allowed a closer look at her frame, Starscream could tell what kind of flyer she was. Not fast, her plating was too bulky to be streamlined, but she’d be a powerful force in the air. Her engines would have to be efficient to lift herself as well as any cargo, so she could fly for hours without needing to rest. It was as if Daedalus had designed her from the ground-up to be a carrier, in more ways than one. Which made what happened to her, as well as countless other Camien femmes, all the more devastating.

“Maxima.” Starscream addressed her with his eyes on the ground. “I’ve been wanting to speak with you.”

“Oh?” The shadow cast by Maxima’s wings twitched on the floor.

“But that can wait. You clearly have something to speak with me about. Let’s deal with that first.”

Maxima lingered in the doorway, swaying lightly on her heel, as if she wanted to run back into the darkness.

“...I don’t know if you’re the right person to ask this,” she started. “I know… you’re Cybertronian. You knew everything about Cybertron, from before Rattrap took over. You told Windblade so much. How different this place is to Caminus. I… I can't ask anyone who knows me. Especially not Afterburner. It's… it's embarrassing."

Starscream closed his eyes, pitying her. "I understand."

"Afterburner told me all about sparkbonding. How it works.” Maxima pushed herself forwards, forcing herself to enter the study and commit to being present. “And though I didn't want to believe him, it all made too much sense for me to ignore. But even before he explained, before I even knew the gravity of what Nautica was telling us, I felt… agony. In my spark. As if it knew more than I ever could."

She sank like she was in water, sitting next to him on the bench as she pressed a hand to her chest. Starscream could only assume that the pain she’d felt was the same as what he’d felt when his family died. Though, in his case, it had been magnified many times over, each death compounding into a single one endless ache.

"You're speaking metaphorically,” he told her. “But that is indeed the case."

He mirrored her position, placing his own clawed hand over his chest.

"A spark is more than a source of energy for the frame. It holds instructions. Ancient, unforgettable instructions for how a Cybertronian should live.” He spoke as if reading from a reference file. That was intentional, for Maxima’s sake. “Your spark always knew it could carry life. And when your mind knew as well, you were overwhelmed by centuries of yearning for something once unnamed."

There was no scientific basis for what he was saying, of course. No-one in Cybertron’s past had ever thought to test what would happen if a femme was kept ignorant of her own body all her life, allowed to become pregnant only to have the bud torn from her chamber, and then informed that she’d just had a child terminated. Starscream could only assume that he knew what she was feeling. He knew the yearning well enough; for freedom, for Vos, for his own kind. Even now, knowing that they had survived on Caminus, he knew that it was not the same as having Cybertron’s skies filled with his friends and family. It would never be the same.

“...Right.” Maxima stared down at her hands. “I guess… if that’s what happened, then that answers my question.”

Then she was looking away, towards the door, as if planning her escape. But her slumped frame was bolted to the bench. This was not a proud Seeker or a fierce Camien, nor someone in between. This was someone confused, and lost, and frightened. Like a sparkling born only to be abandoned.

"If I may make an observation…” Starscream almost regretted saying anything as soon as he opened his mouth, but now that he’d started he had to finish. “You may take offence to it, but it is only an observation. Not a judgement on you or other Camiens."

Maxima turned towards him. With her mouth hidden behind the battle mask, it was hard to tell what she was thinking. “Okay.”

Starscream straightened his back. "From what I’ve seen, bodyguards like you are strong, robust— but only on the outside. Inside, your sparks are weak."

He tripped over the last word. He didn’t want it to be an insult, even though it certainly was to most people. To him, it was just a statement of fact; Camien bodyguards were not equipped to be resilient outside of battle, because they didn’t need to be.

Maxima’s reaction was delayed. For that moment of nothing, Starscream worried that she’d be angry. But then she laughed, hiding her face again as it threatened to spill over. Starscream recognised the sound— she only laughed so that she wouldn’t cry instead.

“You might be right.” Maxima breathed in deeply. “I’m not good at dealing with emotions. I’m better at it than Chromia, but only cause I tend to get drunk instead of lashing out.”

Starscream blinked, and suddenly he was seeing Skywarp sitting next to him. He was gone a second later, replaced by Maxima once more..

“What about Afterburner?” Starscream was hesitant to say the other's name. “How does he deal with his emotions?”

Maxima shook her head, as if shaking Skywarp’s ghost free from her. “He doesn’t drink like me, no matter how many times I’ve tried to get him to relax. But he doesn’t get angry, either… I guess he bottles it up. Probably only lets it out when no-one can see him.”

She sat back, forcing her spine straight as her head turned to the ceiling..

“Bodyguards aren’t expected to be smart, or calm,” she said. “We’re trained to protect our Cityspeakers, and that’s it. I’ve always told myself, as long as Hot Shot is safe and happy… nothing else matters. But now I know that’s not true. Because my whole life, my whole purpose, was just an excuse for someone to start a war.”

Starscream wished he could tell her otherwise. But, despite her claim that bodyguards were not smart, she was far too intelligent to believe any lies he might try to feed her. The next-best thing to comfort was distraction, which was all he could offer her.

"You love Hot Shot as if he was your child,” he said. “And you love Afterburner as if he was your Amora."

“Amora?” Maxima blinked away stray tears as she looked towards him. Starscream chose the word exactly because he knew she would be curious about it. Sometimes he wished he couldn't manipulate people so well.

“Sanctum Amora,” he told her. “Otherwise known as a sparkmate. The latter was far more common in most parts of Cybertron. I suppose the proper term was too old-fashioned for most people.”

There was a difference between the two only in the way people said them. A sociology lecturer in Praxus would say sparkmate as a clinical term, a mere descriptor of what some people on Cybertron might become one day. A wife or husband would describe their Amora as the centre of their world. Though it was purely personal preference whichever one would win out over the other.

“I like the old-fashioned one more,” Maxima decided.

“So do I,” Starscream said, offering her all the smile he could muster. “There’s another term related to it, which was used even more rarely. Sanctum Eterna.”

Maxima seemed to turn the new phrase around in her head. “And what does that mean?”

The words were there in his vocaliser, a whole textbook definition ready, but he blinked again and suddenly there was not Maxima or Skywarp sitting next to him, but Windblade. She was watching him with bright blue eyes, one leg crossed over the other, a patient smile basking him in its warmth and instantly drying out his tongue. 

When she was gone, when Maxima was once more all he could see, he found a better way to explain what he was thinking to her.

“...Imagine that you’ve just met someone new for the very first time. But, as you talk to them, you get the sense that you’ve known each other all your lives.” Starscream went back through all his oldest memories, of bedtime stories and fairy tales in the Skyspire nursery. “Perhaps you’ve known them in a past life, when your spark was in a different body. Perhaps you’ve known them in every single life your spark has witnessed. And perhaps, no matter what body you find yourselves in, or what kind of place this universe becomes, you will always find each other again.”

If he closed his eyes, he could see his mother smiling at him. He hoped she’d be proud that he had inherited her flair for storytelling. “That is the myth of a Sanctum Eterna.”

Maxima was silent for a long minute.

“It’s someone that you’re forever connected to,” she ventured. “That’s what you’re saying?”

Starscream nodded. “More or less. Your friend Nautica might liken it to quantum entanglement.” 

Then he laughed to himself, because he was surely only complicating the matter further. In the time that he’d become familiar with them, Starscream had seen that Camiens were fiercely romantic people, only in the sense that they enjoyed aesthetics and poetics over hard science. Yet the idea of two sparks forever linked would not make much sense to either the most creative poet or the most analytical genius of the colony. It did not need to make sense to either of them, though. There was only one Camien whose understanding he needed so desperately. 

“You know one of the laws of the universe,” he asked, “that energy cannot be created or destroyed? There’s a theory that the same logic applies to sparks. A spark cannot be created from nothing, or vanish into nothing. When one returns to the Well, it will be reborn again. If that’s true, we’ve probably already met every Cybertronian in history at least once.”

Maxima’s head went sideways. He had her attention, if not her comprehension, but only one was necessary for what he had to tell her.

“So if you find yourself mourning the child you’ve lost,” he imparted, “just tell yourself that. Tell yourself that they weren’t killed. They were sent back to Primus for safekeeping. Right now, this world isn’t one that anyone should be born into.”

It would not ease her pain, or help her forget the agony. But he hoped it would at least help her in the years to come, no matter where she found herself or what became of Caminus when she returned. Maxima smiled even as she shook her head. 

“It’s a nice story,” she sighed. “But it doesn’t work for Camiens. Our hotspot isn’t connected to the Well.”

“Is that what you think?” Starscream wanted to scoff, but he held back. “Maxima, your hotspot is the Well. A small part of it, at least.”

He knew that it was not just a theory— Seekers had once been born from the Well, like any other frame type. And then Caminus had left, and suddenly there were no more. A shard of the Well had been carried off with him, which had gone on to birth every single Camien in the last few million years.

He didn’t explain those details to Maxima, but he didn’t need to. Even if she didn’t know the why of it, she knew that it made sense.

“....Oh.” That was all she could say. Then again, what else was there to say?

“Is that really such a shock to you?” Starscream asked.

“I’m numb to shock at this point.” There was no emotion as Maxima said it, but her eyes were still bulging from their sockets.

“What did you think the hotspot was, all this time?”

“A parting gift from Primus. Caminus spark.” She barked out a laugh as she shrugged. “I don’t know. The Mistress of Flame never told us.”

That seemed to be the answer for everything that was wrong with Caminus. Though now Starscream had started to wonder, if the Mistress had thought that hiding the truth from her people was some sort of kindness.

“From now on,” he said gently, “I’d say it’s safe to assume that anything the Mistress has told you is a lie.”

There was a knock on the study’s doorway, interrupting whatever mute answer Maxima was about to give. Starscream found Chromia blocking the way out, though he wasn’t surprised. He’d felt her EM field lingering nearby for at least five klicks now. For whatever reason, she’d decided that now was the time to show herself.

“Maxima.” Chromia nodded with relief to her fellow bodyguard. “We were worried about you.”

Maxima looked stunned at being discovered, like a petrorabbit dragged out of hibernation. “I… I’m sorry for that. I just didn’t want to be around anyone.”

“You don’t have to go back just now,” Chromia told her, “if you’re not ready. But I’d like to talk to Starscream, if that’s alright.”

“Oh. Sure. Of course.” Maxima stood up, with one last silent look at Starscream. He  could tell that she wanted to thank him, even without the words coming to her mouth, so he waved her away. Then she squeezed past Chromia and left them both alone.

Once Maxima was out of sight, Chromia’s face did not change even though her EM field prickled. So this was the one who had a problem with her temper.

“Starscream. I’m Chromia.”

“You’ve been standing out there for a while”, Starscream said, despite what little preservation instinct he had left screaming at him to keep his mouth shut. “Do you often eavesdrop before introducing yourself?”

Chromia only frowned, though a harsh spike in her EM field betrayed her true reaction. “In case you didn’t know, “ she stated, “I’m Windblade’s bodyguard.”

Starscream nodded, and in that one sentence he knew everything about her opinion of Windblade and why she was here. “And of course you’re suspicious of someone who has become close to her.”

Chromia blinked, surprised that he was getting to the point before she had a chance to build up to it. “Well… to put it lightly, yeah, I am.”

“I was blind for five centuries,” he told her. “Then, when I have my eyes back, the very first thing I see is Windblade. Someone like me, when I’d thought that everyone like me was dead. It’s only natural that I would become attached to her.”

Chromia bristled. “Attached. What does that mean?”

“I helped her come this far. Just as she has helped me.”

Starscream sighed. When he was a younger mech with everything still to lose, he would have enjoyed playing mind games and the back-and-forth of pointless bickering. Now he was just tired. He wanted it to be over and done with..

“There’s no reason for us to be at odds with each other, Chromia. Whatever happens next, I am on your side. I just want Windblade to stay safe. The same as you. You can choose to believe it or not, but it is the truth as I know it.”

He laid his hands flat on his knees, gripping them with all the strength he didn’t have. She could take it or leave it. If her temper refused to let her trust him, then there was nothing he could do about that.

Chromia didn’t move at all for a few seconds. And then, slowly, she approached him like he was some kind of starving beast. She took Maxima’s spot next to him on the bench.

“What you said, about the Mistress wanting a war…” She gulped. “Is that true?”

Her EM field was a tense minefield of static. Not because she was angry, or aggressive. The two of them sitting together on the bench were like patients in a clinic; one was waiting for life-changing test results, while the other already knew their illness was terminal.

“I wish it wasn’t,” Starscream muttered. “But I’ve seen this cycle time and time again. The Mistress of Flame wants Cybertron. She believes she’ll be saving it.”

Chromia’s neck went limp, as if it was on a timed hinge. She’d been expecting the bad news, of course. “Windblade’s going to steal the Enigma. Everyone’s counting on her to do it.”

Starscream somehow knew that Windblade would be chosen for the task— either she would volunteer to make up for the deaths of Drift and Shadow Striker in her mind, or someone else would offer her up and she wouldn’t think of saying no.

“You sound sad about that,” he said.

“I’m scared .” Chromia’s head whipped up like a gun from its holster. “All this slag that’s happened to her, getting caught and locked up and almost executed, and then seeing someone die in front of her… at first, I blamed her for it. I thought, if she’d just did as she was told and stayed put, none of this would have happened. I thought she was bringing all the bad onto herself. But now, it’s like the rest of the universe is happening to her. Like she’s a magnet for misfortune.”

Starscream was impressed at how well Chromia described the phenomena. It was one he’d noticed as well, though at first he’d thought that he was just biased towards Windblade being the centre of the universe. But it wasn’t just a metaphor, she really was the locus for Cybertron’s future. There were only a few cases of such people existing in Cybertron’s sprawling history… and they were all Primes.

“When the Matrix was still around,” he told Chromia, “it was said to choose its holder. It sought out one who was worthy of being a Prime. The Matrix does not come to you— it happens to you. I think something similar is happening to Windblade. Someone or something, whether it be a Prime or Unicron or some agent of destiny itself, has decided that she is worthy. That is why she’s carrying so much burden. Because she’s stronger than you let yourself think she is.”

He met Chromia’s eyes, daring her to say otherwise. Her eyes pulsed at him just before she laughed. It was not angry, or mocking or sad. She was genuinely amused.

“You know,” she said, “when you talk, it’s like I’m sitting in on one of Vertex’s rehearsals. How the hell do you do that?”

Starscream remembered that Vertex was the actor, and from that he realised that Chromia was calling him a melodramatic show-off. He could only shrug. 

“Five centuries is a long time, even for a Cybertronian. I couldn’t see, or speak, or move. I only had my own mind to occupy myself. Turns out, if you talk to yourself for long enough, you quickly learn what sounds good to other people.”

“Plenty of practice, then.”

“That’s a more concise way to put it, yes.”

 He’d found many different parts of himself in those centuries— Starscream the spoiled prince, the beloved older brother, the favorite son, the coveted bachelor, the racer, the singer, the future of Vos— each of them eventually dismantled and cowed buried deep by his own disgust until all that was left was who he was now. They’d all take turns berating and blaming each other for what had happened, like a twisted gladiator tournament, until only one was still standing. 

One shall stand, all shall fall. That was probably a line from an old story, but he couldn’t remember anything else about it. Maybe he’d killed the rest of that memory.

“I want to ask you a question, Starscream.” Chromia was still next to him, but she was no longer laughing. “And I need an honest answer.”

That was the one thing the Starscream who survived could always provide. He waited for it to come, as Chromia reached into his eyes with her own.

“Do you love Windblade?”

…And that was the one question the Starscream who survived couldn’t answer.

‘Of course I love her. How could I not? How could anyone not?’ It screamed inside of his spark, screamed so loud that it gave reason to his very name. But it didn’t reach his vocaliser. If it dared to leave his spark, it withered and died before it ever got so far. Like he would not have survived beyond the Sparkcracker chamber without Windblade and like she would not have survived without him, his confession would not survive being brought into the open. It would be safe inside him, safe and unknown. He couldn’t risk it being broken, when it was the only thing he had left that was whole.

“I love her as much as you do,” he told Chromia through a throat that was burning beneath the surface with smothered lies. “As much as your Mistress of Flame does.”

“What does she have to do with this?” Chromia must have known that Starscream was hiding his true answer, but the distraction was all he had left to play. The Mistress of Flame lied too, out of kindness. Because she truly did love the children of Caminus. Because she thought the truth would doom them.

“Mothers can be protective of their children. They do it out of love, of course. But there is such a thing as too much love.” Then Starscream shook his head. "But you, Chromia… you don't love Windblade as a mother loves her child. You love her as a sister. Because you know she is your equal. And you should treat her as such."

Chromia seemed confused, which was to be expected. But he hoped the point he was trying to make managed to bleed through his frenzied cobbled-together speech. 

“...What about you?” Chromia pressed, still undeterred from getting an answer. “What do you love her as?”

Starscream gulped, because he loved her not as a friend, or as a sibling. He loved her as one loves the sunlight after a cold night of winter snow. 

“...I’m scared to say,” he confessed.

“Why?”

Why, indeed. Starscream was only grateful that Windblade herself was not around to see him in such a state.

“I think,” he offered, after a long moment of silent stalling, “that the love I feel for her does not exist on Caminus. I don’t know how to describe it. And I’m worried that, if I try to, I will only push her away.”

Chromia now looked at him with something new dancing in her eyes— not amusement, or curiosity. It was as if he’d flipped a light switch in her head, and now it was illuminated. He had the sense that, in that moment, she knew exactly what he was thinking not because she could see into his mind, but because she felt the same in her own way.

“You should tell her what you told Maxima,” she said. “About sparks being entangled, finding each other no matter the distance. I think she’ll understand you.“

Starscream wished he could. Windblade would love the story of Sanctum Eternas, the fairy tale of them. He had written it down for her, in the datapad of Vos’ history, specifically because he knew he couldn’t tell her. It would give too much away, to have him recite any of it out loud. 

“So you were eavesdropping,” Starscream said to Chromia.

“Of course I was.” She rocked her frame onto its feet. “And for your information, that love does exist on Caminus. We just never had a word for it, until now.”

Starscream was expecting her to leave, only grateful that she wasn't torturing him with more thoughts of Windblade. But she hovered in the doorway.

“They’re going to hold a funeral for Drift and Shadow Striker soon,” she informed him. “Are you coming?”

There had been no funeral for Starscream’s family, or for Vos. Deaths were so common on Cybertron now that he was almost surprised people bothered to mark them. Surprised, but grateful..

“Yes,” he said. “We owe them both that much.”

The two of them walked in mutual silence, until they reached the bottom floor and the sound of voices outside came up to them. Starscream could see Windblade in the distance, helping to build a pile of oil-soaked rags and spears of scrap metal. The bodies would be interred within the heap. Even while smeared with grease and coolant, she still looked beautiful. Starscream only pulled his eyes away from her to address Chromia by his side.

“Thank you for trusting me, Chromia.”

The bodyguard nodded, though her EM field was a cold wind. “I can tell you really love her. That’s the only reason why I can trust you at all.”

And that was all they said, before Windblade caught sight of them and beckoned them over, with so little idea of how much she was truly loved.

Other than the crackle of flames and singing of molten dead metal, the funeral was a silent affair. Drift and Shadow Striker were given separate pyres next to each other, and the Autobots gathered in a circle around them as the fires roared, hands interlocked with their neighbours. Before Megatronus had taken so many of them away, the sight of them all gathered in one place would have been like an audience packed before a sombre stage. But now it was easy to see just how few of them were left.

Windblade, like every other Camien present, had never attended a funeral before. Death simply didn’t happen to anyone on Caminus outside of the most dramatic stage-plays, though that didn’t mean Camiens were immortal— in the past, before the clampdown on fuel, there would be expeditions every other decacycle to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and some ships simply never returned home. It was assumed that any ship gone for too long was lost forever, but there was no mourning or official declaration of death for its crew. People simply moved on, with more important and present things to worry about. 

For most of the population, the reality of death was simply ignored. They had no idea what it looked or smelled like. They didn’t know the lurch of feeling someone’s EM field tearing itself free of your own, leaving behind barbs of agony from their dying spark before it winked out forever.

And if the Mistress of Flame really wanted to turn the entire colony into an army, that was exactly what she would want of them.

         Windblade shut her eyes. The people standing next to her were Velocity and Starscream— the Seeker had said nothing as he’d taken her hand. Chromia stood by his side, surprisingly amicable, and she held Ironhide’s hand to her right. The Cybertronian held onto Lightbright, who in turn held onto Afterburner. Hot Shot flanked him, and he gave his hand to Nautica, who allowed Skids to lean on her while Vertex limply held his wrist. Dragstrip and Airazor stood opposite Windblade, on the other side of Drift’s pyre, and though they were still the odd ones out they seemed at peace among the few Autobots who they could call friends.

         Now that she could see how many people she’d gathered in her time on Cybertron, all the friends she’d made and saved in the worst two decacycles of her life, Windblade couldn’t help but smile at them. It felt strange to be smiling at a funeral. But though she hadn’t known Drift for very long, not nearly as long as she would have liked, she thought that he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to be sad at his death. He’d said so himself— his time on Cybertron was done, and he was ready to reunite with everyone he’d lost. She would meet him again, one day, in the Allspark. 

         But then there was Shadow Striker, who had left behind a sparkbroken sister and split the Autobots in half with her passing. What would she think of this, the strangers that she’d died for and the people she’d died fighting against all joining hands around her burning body? Flamewar, now conscious but sitting rather than standing, flanked Shadow Striker’s pyre with a downcast look that could only be described as anger. Was she angry at Primus, or Rattrap… or the Camiens themselves, for taking so many friends from her in a single day?

There was a tight pressure around Windblade’s wrist that pulled her attention away from the flame-streaked femme— Velocity was crushing her hand, and the arm it was attached to was shaking like a ship stuck in a solar storm.

“Velocity.” Windblade whispered low under the hiss of the fires in front of them. “Are you okay?”

The medic seemed to jolt back to the present— her optics fiercely dilated as she dropped Windblade’s hand, and she looked at the Cityspeaker as if she’d just electrocuted her. She nodded, frantic dips of her chin that weren’t convincing in the slightest, and her eyes turned right back to the fire with nothing in them.

As if to make up for Velocity’s sudden absence, Starscream squeezed her other hand tighter. Skids’ painkillers must have worn off now, because the irreverent mech was shedding tears in Nautica’s embrace. Similar scenes played out all around the pyres as the bodies within crumbled into smoke, and then finally dust. 

“We’ve been out here long enough.” Ariel struggled to raise her voice under the weight of her own grief. “Better get going before someone finds us.”

The Autobots were reluctant to turn their backs on the puttering fires of their friends, but they knew it was time to leave. The funeral site was far enough away from any entrances to the Arcanimus, but the smoke left its mark for miles around. 

They’d arrived from the east, and now they left from the west. Everyone split into small splinter groups, disappearing into tunnels and trenches, with only the Camiens sticking together as a mass. Orion led the way forward for them, with Blackarachnia at his flank.

“Windblade.” Dragstrip tapped her shoulder with an ash-streaked frown, slowing down next to her until they were both brought to a stop. “I gotta head back to the clinic. Knockout will be thinking the worst if I don’t check in.”

Windblade had been wondering about the other medic, though she hadn’t had a chance to ask Dragstrip if he was alright. “Will you be back?”

“I’ll try to be. But…” Dragstrip sighed, and seemed to wait until the others had gone on a little more ahead before she went on. “Without the other Stunticons, Knockout is all I have left. And I think I’m all he’s got too. It hurt him enough just letting me go for a few days.”

Windblade knew the feeling far too well at this point. “Why doesn’t he come join you?”

Dragstrip looked like she wanted to laugh. She didn’t. “Cause he’s scared. Like me. He’s just a lot better at hiding it.”

Then she patted Windblade’s shoulder again. “You can keep that armour, by the way. Suits you better than it did me. When I see it again, I’ll know it’s you from a mile away.”

Before Windblade could even blink, Dragstrip activated her T Cog and back-flipped into her alt-mode, reversing back down the tunnel and into the warm open air left behind by the pyres.

Not ‘if’ I see you again, but when . Windblade hoped that was a good sign.

“What about you, Airazor?” She addressed the technorganic first, who seemed to be lagging behind specifically so Windblade could catch up. “You said you’re a fugitive now…”

“Yeah. So if they’ll let me, I’ll stay here.” Airazor shrugged. “Nowhere else for me to go, I guess. I just hope Tigatron and Rhinox are okay. With me on the run, they might bring them in for an interrogation.”

“They won’t.” Ironhide stopped up ahead to call over his shoulder. “Rattrap has more important things to deal with. Right now, anything that ain’t about Caminus is out of his focus.”

“Oh.” Airazor’s feathers stood up, though there was no wind in the tunnel to blow against them. “Well… that’s something, at least.”

“They both love you, you know,” Ironhide told her. “Anytime I was near either of them, you were all they’d talk about.”

“Oh...” Airazor’s feathers suddenly framed her face like a halo, though Ironhide didn’t see her reaction with his back turned. Most of the others moved on, but she was rooted to the ground by her taloned peds. Velocity and Hot Shot both hung back with concern in their eyes.

“Who’s Tigatron?” Windblade asked Airazor. She gulped before her answer came out as a shaky whisper.

“Someone I can’t afford to lose.”

“Could he keep you hidden?” Hot Shot was the one who asked. Airazor’s loose feathers fell in a soft snowfall as she shook her head.

“I wouldn’t want him to. I’ve put him in enough trouble already. He helped me sneak onto your ship, and then he helped you and Velocity escape... all because I asked him to. Cause I wanted to be a hero.”

Windblade had heard how Airazor had ended up in a transport pod with the Cityspeaker and medic, but not the details of their escape. From how she spoke of Tigatron, she didn’t need to know any more than what Airazor had just told her.

“Sounds like he can’t afford to lose you, either,” Windblade said. Airazor didn’t nod or speak, or even look at the Camien who had dragged her into this mess in the first place. She shielded her face before she hurried on ahead, as if she didn’t anyone to see her expression.

“Wish I had someone like that.” Hot Shot probably spoke just to break the silence, but there was unmistakable yearning there all the same.

“You already do, Hot Shot,” Velocity said. “Her name’s Maxima.”

         Hot Shot blinked, before he laughed and shook his head. “Nah, I’m too much trouble. She was probably glad to get locked up, just to get a break from me.”

         His deprecating laugh quickly died off, leaving him looking up at the medic with indecipherable silence.

         “...You really think so?” he asked.

         “Absolutely.” Velocity nodded. “She put herself on the line for both of us. But, mostly for you.”

         Hot Shot’s cheeks flushed blue, glowing in the dark of the tunnel. “You think she’ll be alright? I mean, when she ran off...”

         “She’s the strongest of all of us. I wouldn’t worry about her. Hell, she’s probably waiting for us with the other Autobots.”

         “Really?” That was all the encouragement Hot Shot needed to go running ahead, bowling past everyone else in his way like a tiny bullet. That left only Velocity herself with Windblade, and the medic’s face crumpled as soon as Hot Shot was out of sight. It was like she no longer had the strength to control any of her metal muscles.

         “Velocity.” Windblade touched her shoulder, and it was she’d given her another electric shock. “What’s up with you?”

         She’d only ever seen Velocity this nervous just before she was due to take her Medicia Proficium, the final exam that stood between any trainee medic and their doctorate (and she’d failed it twice.)

         The medic shook her head, avoiding Windblade’s eyes as they walked together. “I’m just... worried about Maxima, is all. The kind of shock she must be feeling.”

         There was a burst of static from Velocity’s throat— Windblade didn’t believe that that was all there was to say, and she said nothing while the medic wrestled with her own vocaliser.

“That, and...” Velocity gulped. “Us medics are taught a little about spark parasites. Not a lot. Just enough to know what they look like, when they’re... growing.”

Windblade suddenly felt very stupid. Velocity had been raised to be a healer, someone who saved sparks, and just like everyone else she’d been told that the parasites were deadly. She would have known how to diagnose them, and she would have been expected to refer all who had one to the Mistress herself, so they could be safely removed. Just like Maxima, she was still coming to terms with the fact that she was expected to let young Camiens die.

         “Did you ever have to deal with any?” Windblade asked. “When you were training, or...?”

         She trailed off to give Velocity a chance to answer. The medic’s eyes drifted, and she rolled her lip between her teeth. She had something else to say, something she probably didn’t want to say, but a sudden light dawning up ahead gave her the chance to avoid it for now.

         “Come on, quick.” Springer stood between them and the Arcanimus, and his headlights dazzled them as he ushered them both past. “We need to get this door sealed up.”

Just as Velocity predicted, Maxima was indeed waiting for them. The bodyguard was patting Hot Shot on the shoulder while he embraced her leg, and she gave Windblade a reassuring nod while she soothed her own Cityspeaker. Orion was also waiting– he beckoned Windblade over, bowing his head to the Cityspeaker as he pulled her aside so they could speak privately. 

“Ariel tells me you found Drift’s body,” he said. “You heard his last words.”

Windblade blinked, and she nodded while trying not to remember the sight of him. “I did. He knew he was dying. He... he wouldn’t let me try to save him.”

Orion nodded solemnly. “Drift was a rare mech who feared nothing, least of all death.”

“And with him gone,” Windblade muttered, “the Circle of Light is dead as well.”

This time, Orion shook his head at her. “People die, Windblade. But ideals and dreams are not so mortal. With that said, I believe Drift would want you to have this.”

With her downcast eyes, Windblade didn’t notice what Orion was offering to her at first, though the sheer size of it filled her vision as she looked up. It was a dull plane of metal, chipped and cracked and scarred with centuries of battle damage– Drift’s Great Sword.

No, it was more than just a sword. It was the vessel for Drift’s spark. It was a responsibility that was, in so many ways, far too great for Windblade to carry.

“Thank you, Orion.” Windblade was already pushing the blade away from herself in rejection. “But I can’t accept it. I still have my own sword to get back.”

It was all she could think to say– she’d already seen Drift’s spark flicker out and die in front of her, she couldn’t usurp the one place where a tiny ember of it might still be lingering. She couldn’t even wield the thing without his help. No, her spark was the sword that had accompanied her from her Cityspeaker graduation on Caminus all the way to Cybertron. It was forged from the metallico of Caminus’ own spark chamber, which allowed it to capture the resonance from his spark that bathed his streets and cities, at the cost of making it far too fragile to be useful as a weapon. 

Even if the Mistress of Flame was a liar and manipulator, Caminus himself was still her home… her Father. She had to steal back her connection to him before all was said and done here on Cybertron.

“Keep it in the Arcanimus,” Windblade told Orion, when he looked like he would try to convince her otherwise. “Like the Golden Disk. It should be kept safe.”

That was something he couldn’t argue against. Orion dipped his head in defeat. “Very well. It will be waiting here, when you’re ready for it.”

She nodded, though she knew she never would be ready. Orion retreated, still holding the sword in two hands, and Blackarachnia swooped in to fill the space he left. 

“So what now?” Windblade asked her, eyeing the armful of mysterious metal plates the spider was holding.

“Now we get you ready for your big performance.” Blackarachnia let the plates fall at Windblade’s peds– she could see that they looked thicker than they actually were, and faintly iridescent like pools of spilled oil. 

“Uh… what are those?”

“Insecticon carapaces. They molt as they grow.” Blackarachnia knelt down to hold one in her hands, letting it catch the dull light of the Arcanimus’ halogen torches. “They’re usually fiercely territorial, but they don’t seem to care if you scavenge their shells.”

“Of course,” Ratchet said, materialising behind the spider, “Blackarachnia is the only one who could get close enough to them to find that out.”

Blackarachnia allowed herself a proud smile as her eyes glittered, giving her face the same iridescent sheen as the Insecticon plates. Orion hovered between Winblade and the spider, and his expression was less-than-optimistic.

“I must admit,” he said to Blackarachnia, “I’d thought you were joking about the Insecticon disguise part.”

“I assure you, Orion, I have never been more serious in my entire life. I can carry the disguise with me,” she told Windblade, “and we’ll get it on you when we reach Iacon. Ratchet, show her how to secure everything.”

The medic scoffed. “You’re the one who came up with all this, why do I have to show her?” 

But even while he complained he was dutifully demonstrating how to attach the hard plates to Windblade’s own chassis. Blackarachnia had fashioned straps from her own webbing that stuck to the shells and would wrap around Windblade’s own body– it would allow her to shed everything once they were inside the council building. More webbing was wrapped tight around her wings, making them useless for flight while hiding their obvious shape. Orion shook his head, though he couldn’t help a smile as he told Windblade, “Good luck”.

The second part of the disguise was much more simple– Ratchet produced a collection of red filters that would fit over the glass of Windblade’s own optics. Two of them slid neatly over her eyes, casting her vision in crimson, while the others were soldered onto the Insecticon shell that would hide her face. The effect was surprisingly effective– if they could blink, they would have been indistinguishable from real eyes. 

Bumblebee had rolled over a cracked mirror for Windblade to see the final result. She didn’t know what a real Insecticon looked like, but if they were anything like what she now resembled, she hoped to never meet one.

“We don’t have much time left to get going,” Blackarachnia warned as she admired her handiwork. “You sure you’re up for this, Windblade?”

The Cityspeaker took one more look at herself in the mirror, barely recognising herself under the layers and layers of some creature’s dead skin. Behind her, she saw her friends looking on from a distance. Lightbright and Hot Shot, Afterburner and Maxima, Vertex and Velocity and Nautica, Airazor and Ironhide, and finally Chromia and Starscream. They didn’t look scared, or even nervous. Not even Chromia. They looked on at her with pride and love, and she faced their reflections with the very same.

“It’s our only chance to try and pull this off,” Windblade said, pulling the disguise off– it was much easier to remove than put on. “I’d rather try and fail than back out now.”

When she turned towards Blackarachnia, the spider was grinning. She was proud too.

“Don’t forget your back-up.” She nodded over Windblade’s shoulder, and she turned just in time to catch Rumble and Frenzy as they threw themselves at her mid-transformation. Then, with her hands already full, Ravage almost bowled her over as he lunged at her chest before he too transformed– he was the same kind of cassette as the Minicons, only slightly longer in size.

“We’ll be quiet!” Frenzy swore, muffled in her left hand.

“You’ll never even know we’re here!” Rumble promised in her right. And Ravage purred, which she could only guess was him agreeing to the same. She couldn’t hold back a laugh as she tucked the three of them into her cockpit. 

“Here’s your commlink.” Wheeljack appeared next to Windblade with no further warning, slotting something into her left audial. “Your friend said she’ll guide you through it.”

“And when you’re inside,” Ratchet told her, “swap the red lenses with these. They’ll augment your HUD with directions around the council building, and we’ll be able to see what you see.” He offered her something that she almost didn’t see– these two lenses were clear, almost invisible. They were held in a simple case, and Windblade carefully stashed it in her subspace. 

It only occurred to her at that moment that Blackarachnia and Ratchet, as well as Wheeljack and a few others, had been missing during the funeral. They must have been working away on the disguise and the gadgets in the background, giving up the chance to say goodbye to their fellow Autobots in favour of giving Windblade a better chance of success. If the Enigma of Combination was truly the key to defeating Rattrap, then this would be their best and only chance to secure it. They had to do everything and anything to make it work.

“We’ll be with you every step of the way, Windblade.” Lightbright must have been the friend Wheeljack had referred to– she had a device lodged into her own audial, sticking out of the side of her head. Ironhide was next to her, a mirror image with the commlink on the right side. Chromia blindsided Windblade before she could say anything, almost crushing her in a farewell embrace.

“You won’t need it, Wind,” her bodyguard said, “but good luck anyway.”

Windblade nodded into her shoulder, only separating from Chromia when she felt Hot Shot wrap his arms around her waist.

“You’ll be great out there,” he told her, bolstered by Maxima standing behind him. “You’ll kick all their afts!”

Maxima rolled her eyes at her Cityspeaker’s outburst, but she too embraced Windblade–  whileHot Shot was too short to reach her shoulders, his bodyguard was too tall to hug her without bending down.

“Stay safe, okay?” Afterburner said to her. “Just come back in one piece.”

“Fake it til you make it, Windblade,” Vertex advised, able to stand with some struts held under her shoulders. “That was my secret all along.”

Velocity and Nautica and Airazor’s goodbyes were brief, but just as heartfelt as the rest. Windblade had so much she wanted to say to all of them– thanking Airazor for being a hero for her friends, reminding Nautica that being odd on Caminus was a good thing, giving Velocity the chance to finish what she was going to say before she’d stopped herself.. but Blackarachnia was already beckoning her away. They had to get to Iacon before Rattrap’s audience with Caminus was scheduled for, and they’d have to walk the whole way there to avoid being seen.

  So soon after being reunited with them all, Windblade was being split apart from them again. But they would be fine without her, and she would be fine without them… 

Well, without most of them. She raised a single finger to Blackarachnia, asking for just one more minute. It wasn’t nearly enough time for a proper goodbye, but it was all she could ask for. When that much was granted, she went over to Starscream. He had separated himself from everyone else, wanting to say goodbye away from them. Windblade was grateful for that. 

“Remember your promise to me, Windblade,” he told her before he embraced her. She nodded, though like before she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to keep it.

“I will. In return, I want to ask you for something.” She pulled back, still holding Starscream’s tense shoulders. “If I don’t come back.. don’t have my body burned here. I still want to go back to Caminus. That’s all I really want to ask for.”

It wasn’t only so that her body would be somewhere familiar– she wanted the rest of Caminus to know that she was dead, what death looked like, what she’d died for. She didn’t want to be another one of the Mistress’ cover-ups.

Her hands fell from Starscream as he raised his shoulders. 

“You will come back,” he insisted, a brief pyre burning for her in his optics. “But, if you don’t… I promise you’ll see Caminus again.”

“Thank you.” She had to leave now. More than a minute had passed, she was sure. She could tell him the rest when she returned. And if she didn’t…

“There’s one more thing, Windblade.” Starscream reached after her as she turned away, a sudden frenzy leaping into his voice. “Before you go. Something I have to tell you–”

“I know, Starscream.” She cut him off before he could torture himself any further. Then she put her hand on his left cheek, while the right met her mouth. She kissed him there for only a second, for all that she could spare in the moment, and then said to him what she couldn’t afford to leave unsaid.

“I love you, too.”

Starscream was frozen. She didn’t have time to wait for him to thaw out before Blackarachnia marched over and started dragging her away. The spider was murmuring apologies, but Windblade couldn’t hear them. Starscream pressed his fingers to the right side of his face, where she’d kissed him, and that was all she saw of him before she was back in one of the Autobots’ secret tunnels.

“Took you long enough to finally tell him!” a voice scolded from her cockpit. “Rumble, you owe me three of your cubes.”

“Dammit… you couldn’t have waited til we got back, Windblade? I was betting you two would keep dancing around it for another decacycle.”

They’d had a bet on how long it would take for her to spill her spark to Starscream?! The audacity of it almost made Windblade pop her pit open and leave the two of them to walk like herself and Blackarachnia. But it was also ever so slightly reassuring, that she hadn’t just blurted it out of nowhere. That it wasn’t just her seeing things that weren’t really there…

Because she did love Starscream. If it was that obvious to everyone else, and to herself… surely it was obvious to him, as well. She really hoped that was what he was going to say to her. 

If not, she’d probably just ruined her whole life. The only cold comfort was that, depending on how the next few hours went, she might not have much of a life left to live.

 

✧✦✧

 

The vaults beneath Technotropolis had, as of late, become a sanctuary of sorts for Rattrap. The council plaza was full of too many worried faces, and his office was a magnet for questions from people he would have had slaughtered centuries ago— in those better, more turbulent times. There was nowhere else on Technotron that a mech could go to get some fragging peace .

It was also an opportunity for him to appraise the prize jewel of his collection; the Enigma of Combination. It was by no means a beautiful relic— if you had no idea what it was, your eyes would have simply glazed over it without another thought. Rattrap sometimes wondered if that was a part of its functionality, the ability to blend in so seamlessly to its surroundings. 

(Then again, the original Rattrap would never have found the thing, if that was the case. He didn’t have the brains to look for something that wasn’t shining a beacon right in his face.)

If this planet ever unlocked the secret of beyond-interstellar travel through the transwarp, they would know the true purpose of the Enigma, why it was so vital to compress passengers into a single vessel. Why else had Nexus Prime enjoyed hopping between dimensions so much? Because it was what he was made for. He never had to worry about losing parts of himself along the way.

That was why it was better to travel alone….then again, that kind of logic was how the Chancellor ended up in this three-headed mess to begin with.

He hadn’t touched the relic since the day of the Massacre. He hadn’t needed to. His combiners knew to obey him. They’d seen what had happened to others who had tried to fight or run. But they were so… disappointing nowadays. If they weren’t too reckless to deploy, they were too stupid to know what to do without direct orders. It wasn’t enough to simply be loyal, they had to be useful as well.

Perhaps he could remind them of what was at stake. Offer up a sacrifice to the Well, to Nexus Prime…

Rattrap heard the scrape of clawed and heavy feet against the tiles behind him. His thin, twitching fingers remained set by his side.

“Ah, Dinobot. You know, if you trimmed those claws more often, you’d be much harder to hear approaching. Something to keep in mind, if you want to sneak up on someone.”

He didn’t need to turn any heads around to acknowledge his most recently appointed elite guard. Dinobot almost made a point of being predictable— if you couldn’t see him coming from a mile away, rest assured that you could always hear him.

“Noted.” It was hard to tell how far away Dinobot was— the EM fields of technorganics were far less sensitive than that of normal Cybertronians. ”Are you preoccupied, sir?”

“Not presently, no.” The chancellor turned away from the temptation of the Enigma, putting it behind him for now. “But my audience with Caminus is within the hour.”

Caminus, and its people, and their dear Mistress of Flame. He’d been so patient, waiting for her to contact first. He had almost been getting desperate, and worried for himself. The Mistress would surely never abandon her people to whatever fate they’d found for themselves. Unless the Mistress of this world was not at all like the one he’d once known.

“About that, sir…” Dinobot grimaced, though he tried to hide it. “I must admit that I’m confused.”

“Hm? How so?” Rattrap kept his tone as amicable as he could allow, yet Dinobot still winced from his own unwavering loyalty. Usually Rattrap enjoyed seeing that his people were so obediently trained, but it did get annoying when they wouldn’t just spit out whatever was on their minds.

“I… was under the impression that you were already in contact with the Mistress of Flame,” Dinobot eventually revealed. “Two decacycles ago, you’d told me yourself that you were in the middle of negotiations for the release of the prisoners. But now you say this is the first time you will be speaking with her.”

Rattrap felt a giggle scratch at the back of his mind, an unwelcome spectator laughing at him for losing track of all his lies. Things were accelerating so quickly now that he’d forgotten to keep his leashes tight. People would believe most of whatever he told them, but there was only so far he could push them… especially people with actual intelligence, like Dinobot. 

It was that intelligence that made him so useful in the first place— Rattrap had hoped it wouldn’t eventually doom him as well. There was no affection towards the beastly soldier; Dinobot was simply a well-worn tool that the Chancellor had become fond of for being so reliable. He’d be difficult to replace… but, if all went well, Rattrap wouldn’t have need for people for much longer.

“I don’t recall ever saying that.” Rattrap affected genuine confusion to mirror Dinobot’s own. “Unless… ah, I see the issue. You thought I was talking to the lady herself, when I was in fact referring to Caminus as a whole. I was only liaising with her officers until now. This is indeed the first time the Mistress herself has agreed to speak directly.”

“She don’t like us very much, nope nope!” his erratic head piped up, shaking itself vigorously. “Thinks she’s too good for us!”

Though the jerky movements of the Chancellor’s other conscious head always unnerved people, Dinobot immediately deflated— he must have been relieved to have his doubts proven wrong. 

“I see… forgive me for my presumption, Chancellor.”

Though there was still no affection, nothing even close to such a wasteful feeling, Rattrap had to feel sorry for this particular tool. Dinobot so badly wanted to ignore what his eyes were seeing right in front of him, but he couldn’t do it without someone else telling him there was nothing there.

“That attention to detail is what earned you a promotion in the first place.” Rattrap approached Dinobot— due to the difference in size, he could only reach the other mech’s wrist with his hand. “A promotion usually means better pay for less work. I’m telling you to do less work, Dinobot. That brain of yours has been in overdrive for so long, it’s getting confused. It’ll be good for you. Go home for the day. You’ve earned a break.”

Dinobot looked down at the small, spindly fingers patting his hand as if they were alien. As if he knew they truly were.

“Will you not require assistance for the audience?” he asked as he cautiously stepped back, not wanting to leave without putting up some kind of resistance.

“Not from my guards. Senator Ratbat is handling all the necessary arrangements.”

When Ratbat’s name was mentioned, Dinobot’s scowl twitched. He wanted to say something, a new doubt that had planted its claws in his malleable mind. His fangs parted and his gaze darted, but ultimately he just nodded and turned away.

“Very well… good luck with your audience, Chancellor.”

         The scrape of talons on polished tiles faded, but Rattrap was not yet left alone. There was another approach from the opposite direction, from an entrance that very few still alive on Technotron were aware of.

“Don’t tell me you were waiting in that elevator all this time for Dinobot to leave.” Rattrap rolled his eyes at Ratbat as the old senator scurried up to his side. He looked like he’d been running himself ragged towards all corners of the building (which he should have been doing, what with all the work there was to be done).

“It’s bad news, Chancellor... we’ve recovered all the pieces of Abominus. He’s out of commission.” Ratbat had prepared a damage report, and he held it limply towards the Chancellor as he tried to catch his breath. Rattrap glanced at it with disinterest— if Abominus had been taken down by Camiens and Autobots, then he didn’t deserve much sympathy for his injuries.

“Unfortunate.” Rattrap dismissed Ratbat with a swat of his hand, ready to return to the surface. “Wait a while before you put him back together.”

But Ratbat lingered, and his wings rubbed their leather membranes together with a disconcerting creak. “Well, sir… we can’t. The damage is too great. Hun-Gurr has been sliced in half. Sinnertwin has lost his twin. The other two are barely alive as it is.”

In that moment, Rattrap was forced to stop and reconsider. Abominus had not only been defeated, but killed ? Even if he replaced the dead bodies, the end result would not be Abominus anymore.

The sacrifice to Nexus Prime had been fulfilled, then. But Rattrap was bitter, because he had not been given the choice of who to give up.

“...What a shame.”  His voice was numb, only from shock. The Terrorcons had been good berserkers, reliable clean-up crews for troublesome gangs and protesters in the days following the Gestalt Massacre. He would not mourn them, though he would miss them. Rattrap had always felt a kinship to Hun-Gurr especially. Even if he’d only had two heads in his alt-mode, they were still both freaks of cruel nature. Worse still for Hun-Gurr, for he had been simply born that way. 

“I made Abominus myself, you know.” Rattrap turned towards the Enigma of Combination again. “Hand-picked. Born of this very relic.” 

“I do know, sir. I was there when he was born, remember?”

“What a busy day that was.” Rattrap found his reflection in the surface of the relic, and in turn he could see that of the senator standing behind him. Despite the unfortunate news of Abominus’ destruction, the death knell he held in his hand, Ratbat dared to smile as he remembered his finest moments of subterfuge. Everything he’d helped build for Rattrap over the last five centuries would never compare to that one moment when he’d thought he would be holding Cybertron wholly and solely in his grasp.

“Do you regret it, Ratbat?”

“Regret what?” The senator seemed to lurch on the spot, as he was jolted out of the past.

“Not taking me out while you had the chance,” Rattrap elaborated. “That was what you were planning all along, after all. You and Tarantulas. After I’d outlived my usefulness, you were going to dispose of me. Isn’t that right?”

It was a rhetorical question, of course. The feud over Cybertron’s future was never meant to include Rattrap at its helm— he was just one of many pawns. Rattrap had even known it at the time, but he couldn’t see any other path forward for himself. He’d bought into the propaganda that his kind were being driven to extinction, that the old world had to die before the new one could be brought in kicking and screaming over its grave. It was only sheer dumb cosmic luck that saw the Tripredacus Council existing at all.

Tarantulas and Ratbat had never been friends, even before they became rivals, but they both felt the sting of being usurped by a bit player. Rattrap had never doubted they’d planned potential assassinations together, or ways to steal the Enigma for themselves. He’d never let his guard down around either of them, even when they both seemed satisfied with the assurance of their lofty positions in the new world. Perhaps they knew that they were only allowed into the Chancellor’s inner circle so that it would be that much easier to keep all his eyes on them.

Ratbat was at least smart enough to know that there was no point in denying any of it. 

“I think it all worked out as it was supposed to, Chancellor.” The senator did his best to not panic— he’d clearly rehearsed what to say on the day he was found out. “Even if it was not what we originally intended… myself and Tarantulas are happy to serve you. We all got what we wanted, in the end. Technotron prospers under your rule, in a way that it never could have under ours.”

His modesty was surprising to Rattrap. He turned so that one pair of eyes were on the Senator. “And why do you say that?”

“We were greedy. Short-sighted. We had ambition, but our emotions got in the way. Sentinel Prime’s execution was proof enough of that.”

Ratbat visibly cringed at that last part. He still regretted being so impulsive in that moment, when Sentinel confessed in front of the entire planet that the Matrix had been lost for centuries and that he’d been a fraud for just as long. Sky Lynx had only crushed him on Ratbat’s orders, and to this day he still complained of having Sentinel guts stuck in his gears.

It was a rather good idea that Ratbat had, though. So good that Rattrap had to steal it for himself.

“Indeed.” Rattrap tucked his knowing smile away, in case it managed to leak through his voice. “Though I don’t think keeping him alive would have done you any good. If he knew where the Matrix was, he would have made himself a real Prime.”

“I don’t think the Matrix works like that, Chancellor.” Ratbat was happy to question Rattrap’s logic if it meant changing the subject away from his old mistakes. “Just possessing it does not make one a Prime.”

“Then why did you want it so badly?” Rattrap asked. 

“Insurance. Why did you?”

Rattrap was caught unawares for a moment. He’d almost forgotten about his own ill-fated searches for the Matrix following the Massacre, when his optimism was at its peak and when he didn’t know that this universe was doomed. 

“There’s an empty pedestal in this room that would fit it just nicely,” he said.

“So you had no designs on becoming the next Onyx Prime?” Ratbat pressed, only half-joking.

Rattrap scoffed, grinding his front teeth together. “I’m not interested in being overshadowed by an ancient ghost, or pretending to be something I’m not if I don’t have to. Technotron is already still so infested with fakes and imposters.” 

Then a thought flickered in one of Rattrap’s minds. It almost made him laugh. No matter where it came from, he had to appreciate it.

“Take Metroplex, for instance.”

“Metroplex?” Ratbat couldn’t hide the genuine confusion that struck him. So not even a Senator had been trusted with the knowledge of Metroplex’s true nature. Rattrap almost felt sorry for him, because his confusion was about to get so much worse.

“He’s not one of the Prime Titans,” the Chancellor revealed. “Never was. You never knew?”

“I… no. No, I did not.”

Rattrap had to swallow his teeth to stop himself from grinning. It was so hard to keep everything he knew to himself, even after so many years of practice. Being the smartest one in any room was a curse.

“The Metroplex we know is male,” he explained to poor, ignorant Ratbat. “Manufactured, just like his brothers Fortress Maximus and Scorponok. Another one of Sentinel’s old ploys. He thought unveiling a long lost Titan would help mend Cybertron’s deepest fractures. But, before he could ever hold his grand opening, we came along.”

“We crashed his party! Rained on his parade! Tied his noose! Left him up slag creek without a—!” 

Rattrap silenced the interruption with his hands around the snout of the other head, until it stopped struggling and fell quiet once more. 

“The original Titan, however,” he continued, “the vessel of Megatronus Prime, was female. Just as Devisiun and Tempo were, and Prion and Chela and Navitas and… well, you know the rest. Caminus was the only male of them all.”

Rattrap was very good at delivering the most obscure information as if it was common knowledge. An old habit from his old life, but one that only one person in this world would recognise. The same person he would finally speak face-to-face with so very soon.

His theory, the one that so many of his machinations hinged upon, had been that the Mistress of Flame would know that this male Metroplex on Cybertron was not the same one who had ferried Megatronus Prime and his imperial representatives between the stars, the same one she had once known. Her curiosity and confusion would be too much for her to ignore. She would have to investigate. She would come to Cybertron, eventually. 

“The Titans… they were an inversion of the Thirteen?” Ratbat’s voice wavered. He wanted to whisper, but he refused to sound shocked or weak.

“You must be wondering whatever happened to the original Metroplex,” Rattrap said, studying the senator’s face for his truest reaction, baiting him.

“I must admit,” Ratbat said carefully, knowing he was under examination, “I am curious.”

“So am I. But there’s only so much knowledge one can hold, even with three heads to share the burden.” Rattrap shrugged, basking in Ratbat’s barely-masked disappointment. That was all he wanted from him, one final let-down shine from his furrowed eyes. The last time Rattrap had seen such a thing from him was during the last day of Vos, when he and Tarantulas realised that neither of them were the victors of the coup they had so carefully crafted. 

“I have a task for you, Senator.” Rattrap rubbed his paws together, promptly scrubbing himself of the earth-shattering revelations he’d just dumped on Ratbat’s shoulders. “During my audience with the Mistress, I want you to watch the storerooms.”

Ratbat blinked numbly, as if the mundanity of such a job had just violently obliterated any lingering secrets of the Imperial age from his mind. Or maybe he was thinking of a future where he wouldn’t be taking orders anymore. “Yes… yes, sir.” 

He turned to leave, but froze on the spin of his heel. 

“...May I ask why?”

Like Dinobot, he would question Rattrap’s choice to take his audience with the Mistress alone. He had things to say to her that weren’t fit for anyone else’s ears. No-one was worthy enough to listen in.

“We have thieves in our midst,” Rattrap told him. “They will think I’m distracted with my diplomatic duties. While you’re down there, you can make sure everything is accounted for. With all the chaos caused by these Camiens and Autobots, people are panicking. They think they won’t be able to fuel themselves. We have a duty to help them, if it does come to that. We need to know exactly what we can spare to offer them.”

Technorganics needed energon just as any Cybertronian did. They could, however, also digest organic materials… but the only source of that on Cybertron was the technorganics themselves. Ratbat would know the true implications of a fuel crisis on a technorganic world better than anyone, if the rumours about his struggles to stay alive on Cybertron’s streets before the Senate rescued him were true.

(Funnily enough, if it was true, that was something he would have in common with Tarantulas.)

“Understood, sir.” Ratbat needed no further encouragement. The Chancellor watched him leave the same way as Dinobot, though Dinobot would be out of the building by now. If everyone had listened to Rattrap’s instructions, they too would be safe at home or at posts in other cities. Other than the Chancellor himself, Ratbat was now the only one left inside.

Rattrap did not know if he would miss the Senator. He at least knew that, like Abominus, he would not mourn him.

 

✧✦✧

 

         “You alright in there, Windblade?” Blackarachnia whispered as she pulled Windblade along the deserted council plaza on a thick leash of chain. The Cityspeaker had to shuffle on all fours, her hands and peds clad in thick claws, to sell the lie that she was a feral creature being brought in for experimentation.

         “Walking like this is a pain in the aft,” she hissed back. “But I’m fine.” 

         “Just make some growling noises and act like you’re upset. I’ll do the talking.”

  Windblade wouldn’t even have to fake that last part, and Ravage would help provide the ambience from her cockpit. Frenzy and Rumble had complained that they were starting to cramp up in their alt-modes, but they only let that known when Windblade was already sealed into the Insecticon plates, so they had to suck it up for another few minutes as she shambled along. It was more difficult to see through the red optic-filters than she expected, but all she had to do was follow behind Blackarachnia. The spider had once worked here with her husband, after all. She knew how to look like she belonged.

         “Blackarachnia…?” A mech noticed her approaching and even saluted at her before he suddenly stopped himself. He was yellow and short, much like Hot Shot, though his endoskeleton was covered in black-spotted fur.

         “Hello, Cheetor.” Blackarachnia made herself sound bored as she stopped before him. “Is Tarantulas in today? I have something to drop off.”

She rattled the chain, and Windblade took the cue to act agitated. The Insecticon shell rattled around her, and Cheetor must have bought it from how he flinched away.

         “I… well, er… the Chancellor has ordered the building to remain empty,” he said. and he actually sounded regretful for just doing his job. “For his audience with Caminus. You know about that happening, right?”

         “Of course I know,” Blackarachnia growled impatiently. “Don’t insult my intelligence.”

         “Right, sorry, of course, sorry…” It was hard not to feel sorry for poor Cheetor. “Well… cause of the chancellor’s orders, I… I’m afraid I can’t let you in.”

Blackarachnia hummed with disappointment. “And what do you suppose I do with a plague-carrying Insecticon in the meantime?”

         “P-p-plague?!” Cheetor shifted into his alt-mode in a blur of yellow, and before Windblade could even blink he was standing on all fours half a mile away, his fur on end and his hackles sky-high. 

         “Relax, she’s not contagious,” Blackarachnia called over to him. “She’s a test subject. Tarantulas wants to see if her eggs are infected as well.”

Cheetor’s growl could be heard over the distance, and this time he didn’t run to get back to his post.

         “Since when have you two been working together?” he asked Blackarachnia as his T Cog clicked, leaving him standing on two legs. “Again, I mean?”

         “We’re not. He asked for an Insecticon, and I’m here to provide. That’s all.” Blackarachnia crossed her arms over her chest, leaving the chain limp in her hand. Cheetor frowned as he squinted at Windblade, but as he got close she took advantage of the slack in the leash to lunge at him with a convincing snarl courtesy of Ravage. Blackarachnia made a show of barely being able to regain control of her, and that was enough for Cheetor to risk his duties over.

         “You can drop her off at his lab,” he said to her, still panting from the shock of almost being mauled. “Just… be quick.”

         “You just said it’s an empty building, Cheetor,” Blackarachnia smirked. “Who’s going to see me?”

  Past the door and the corridor beyond, Windblade recognised this part of the council building. It was the waiting room from so long ago, where she’d managed to slip out into the plaza, where she’d met Airazor, when she’d doomed herself by deciding to go to Metroplex no matter what. 

         “This is as far as I go.” Blackarachnia helped Windblade shed her bulky disguise, and pulled open her cockpit to let the cassettes out. “Can you take it from here?”

         “Leave it to us.” Rumble made a sign of confidence with his twin, and Ravage stretched out with a yawn as if he’d just woken from a luxurious nap. They went on ahead to wait while Windblade slotted the clear lenses from her subspace over her optics.

         “Before you go, Windblade,” Blackrachnia said, suddenly very different from the confident spider she’d always made herself known as, “I have a favour to ask. I don’t have any right to ask for it, but… if you see Airachnid, I ask that you leave her be.” 

She looked away, worrying her lip with her fangs, and Windblade thought she was waiting for an answer. But before she could give one, Blackarachnia continued on as if it pained her to even ask.

“I know she hurt you, and your friends. You’ve no reason not to do the same to her. But she’s still my daughter. She wasn’t always the same kind of creature that Tarantulas is. He was born that way… but she was made. And I believe she can be unmade, one day.”

There was an unspoken admission of responsibility in Blackarachnia’s request, which explained why she was ashamed to speak.  ‘ My daughter was made that way,’ she was saying. ‘I could have stopped it. I could have saved her, some time long ago, but I didn’t.’ She was asking Windblade for forgiveness as much as she was asking for mercy.

         “If I see her, I’ll run away,” Windblade answered. “But I can’t promise I won’t defend myself if I have to.”

         Blackarachnia nodded, and she smiled even though she’d cut into her lip with her fangs. “I’d expect nothing less. You’re not the same femme I saw on trial here, two decacycles ago. That’s a compliment.” 

She left Windblade with a squeeze of sharp claws on her shoulder. She’d likely make her way out thorugh the main entrance, where Cheetor wouldn’t see her. Other than the casettes waiting for her up ahead, Windblade was now officially on her own,

“Can you hear me, Lightbright?” She tapped the unit on the side of her helm– it was similar to the one that allowed her to talk with the Autobots over the sounds of Abominus’ attack, but this one could function over a greater distance thanks to its bulkier transmitter. 

         “We’ve got you.” Lightbright’s voice was a lifeline. “Right now, you’re in the service halls. They’re corridors that drones use to get around the place without being seen.”

As if on cue, Windblade’s HUD was populated with a faint overlay of building schematics. She could see her own position, and that of the cassettes, as tiny blinking dots. The relic vault was buried deep, but once she got close enough she trusted that she could remember where to go.

“Cheetor might be right about the place being empty,” Ironhide warned, “but keep your guard up. Don’t go off on your own.”

“So what’re we waiting for?” Frenzy asked, bashing his fists together in anticipation. “Where to first?”

Windblade allowed them to scout ahead as she gave them directions. Ravage would sniff the air now and again, and his tail would lash as if in warning, but there really didn’t seem to be anyone else around. Not even drones. Windblade was suspicious at how easily they were able to make their way through Rattrap’s own stronghold, but she couldn’t place anything out of sorts…

Until they were near the basement. Through the walls, she heard a single tone, a resonance calling to her. She’d almost completely forgotten what the sound was.

“What’s up?” Rumble noticed her searching around for the source. “You hear something?”

Windblade only nodded as she slinked ahead, following the sound with her spark. It could only be one thing… unless it was a trap. Regardless, she had to see what it really was.

“Ironhide, what’s outside this door?” She was around a corner, standing outside where the sound was almost deafening. The room ahead wasn’t on her schematics, so it must have been recently added.

“Let’s see… auxiliary armoury,“ Ironhide answered. “ More like a utility closet, really.”

A place to store weapons. The most likely place that her sword could have been tossed into. She opened the door in a hurry–

“Bzzt!”

And immediately darted back around the corner she’d come from. Someone was already inside… and they’d definitely noticed her.

“Who goezzzz there?” the mech bellowed, and he’d likely be coming towards her. There was nowhere for her to hide, and the corridor was too long for her to run away.

“Slag, that’s Waspinator,” Ironhide groaned. “One of Rattrap’s most loyal soldiers… but definitely ain’t his brightest. You might be able to trick him.”

“How?” Windblade hissed, calculating how much airtime she could get if she just switched her T Cog and flew through the halls until she crashed into something. But at her feet, the cassettes were nodding to each other.

“Leave it to us,” Frenzy whispered. “Ravage, put your speaker on.”

Thr cirkitten purred quietly before he darted out across the corner, brandishing himself on all fours.

“You!” Rumble bellowed, though the sound of his voice seemed to be coming from Ravage instead of his own throat. “Identify yourself!”

Waspinator was out of sight, but Windblade could imagine him fumbling from the sound of his frame scuffing the floor. He must have been reaching for a weapon to obliterate Ravage… but the sound of a blaster shot never came. All Windblade heard was Waspinator’s own guilty voice.

“I am Wazzzpinator! Chanzzzellor Rattrap’zzz Elite Guard!”

“Is that so?” Rumble’s voice continued to boom out of Ravage, making it seem like the cirkitten was the one talking. “Are you aware that the Chancellor has ordered the entire building be evacuated?”

“I… yezzz, but I… Wazzzpinator wazzzz leaving, but–”

“Bu you thought you’d steal from one of the supply closets while no-one was around, did you?”

Windblade had to smile as she realised what was going on– Ravage could easily be mistaken for a technorganic at first glance, especially if who he was talking to was panicking and not paying close attention. These three had either done this trick before, or they were geniuses.

“Not zzztealing! Wazzzpinator needs new weapon! Everyone elzzzze takes the good onezzz!”

“You can wait until after the Chancellor’s audience,” Rumble ordered as Ravage lashed his tail, “when you’re no longer a security risk. You don’t want to be a security risk, do you, Waspinator?”

Waspinator hissed and growled and gnashed unseen teeth, but Ironhide was right about him not being very bright.

“Wazzzpinator will leave now. But I call dibzzz on the sword! It’s mine! You can’t have it!”

“Duly noted. Leave it where you found it, and go . Beyond here is off-limits.” Ravage kept blocking the way with his lithe frame and swishing tail until Waspinator was assumedly out of sight, and then he immediately relaxed. Frenzy peeked around the corner to make sure, and then he and Rumble were high-fiving each other.

“Easy as.” Frenzy looked especially proud of himself.

“You caught Wasp so off-guard,” Ironhide chuckled, loud enough for everyone to hear him, “you made him completely forget he could pull rank on you. Nicely done.”

“I think he’s just used to taking orders from anyone,” Rumble argued. Windblade still shook her head in amazement.

“Consider your debt paid, Frenzy,” she told him as she confirmed her suspicion– the sword that Waspinator had been trying to make off with was indeed her own. Either it had lost its luster in the weeks she’d been separated from it, or it had never been particularly pretty to begin with. But it was hers, and her spark sang to be reunited with it. 

Inside the deserted armory, Windblade found the rest of the confiscated weapons– Lighbright and Hot Shot’s own blades, Chromia’s blaster, Maxima and Afterburner’s identical cannons… she’d been expecting to find the weapons locked up in the vault, or sealed in a hermetic chamber for later study. The fact that they’d just been thrown away into a corner and forgotten about… it was more than a little insulting. She could only carry a few of them, so she prioritised the other Cityspeaker swords, slotting them at either side of her spinal strut in a fragile hold with her wing joints. 

“Thanks for finding it, Wind,” Lightbright told her, and she could hear the smile in her voice. “Hopefully none of us will have to use them.”

With one minor goal dealt with, Windblade couldn’t let herself rest. Getting her sword back was a bonus, but the main reason for coming here still lay ahead.

According to the schematics, the vault was directly below them. But where there should have been a staircase to deliver them right to the door, there was only a solid wall– a dead end. This route must have been blocked off on purpose at some point long ago.

“Scrap…” Windblade pounded her fist against the wall, but it was as solid as it looked. “Ironhide, you wouldn’t know of any secret ways into the vault?”

“Can’t say I do, sorry… but if they’re right beneath you, there’ll be vents leading into it. That far down, you need plenty of air circulation. Maybe Rumble or Frenzy could fit in them?” 

Windblade looked around for something conspicious in the walls, but the cassettes were two steps ahead of her– they’d already found the grate close to the floor, and they were doing rock-circuit-scissors to see who would go in.

“Once we’re inside, we can open the door from the other side for you,” Rumble offered as he put his hand forward flat for circuit, but Windblade’s attention was elsewhere. She had her sword, but she could still hear the resonance from nearby, the pull on her spark. It wasn’t beyond the dead end, but behind her, from somewhere she hadn’t gone yet. 

         “Windblade?” Frenzy pulled her mind back– he was holding the hatch open for Rumble, who must have lost the game. The vent was just wide enough for him to be able to crawl inside it, and Ravage was encouraging him with a nuzzle. They were the only ones who could get any further, but Windblade still didn’t like having to leave them.

         “You three go on without me,” she said. “You should fall right into the vault. I need to find… something.” 

“What are you doing, Windblade?” Lightbright was in her ear as she turned away, but it wasn’t an accusation. She was curious, though she likely already knew.

“What you told me to do,” Windblade told her. “Finding the truth about Metroplex. I’ll know it when I see it, right?” 

She followed her spark and the schematics, linking them together until she ended up in front of a door framed with warning and hazard signs, but the door itself was wide open. She could see a dimly lit lab beyond, covered in glass and grisly green neon.

“That room is the biomechanic lab…” Ironhide sounded as confused as he was terrified. “That’s Tarantulas’ personal workshop. It should be locked down tight, no-one’s allowed in except him and his daughter.”

“Well, one of them must have left the door open.” Windblade turned her vocaliser down as she stepped inside, softening her peds as she scanned the room. It was a large space, but the sheer amount of instruments and the low ceiling made her feel claustrophobic. The only light came from the equipment panels, the green tubes around the ceiling, and one of the many tall tubes arranged against the farthest wall. The others were all empty, but the oneat the front that was alight was bleeding like a star. It was a corona of energy, surrounded by such a tangled network of wires and cables that it choked out most of the light, but even then it was so bright that Windblade couldn’t look directly at it. All she could see was that its core was red, with afterflashes of teal and purple that tinged her vision when she had to look away. 

It looked like a spark that was pulled out of its body. Knowing what Tarantulas was capable of, Windblade was almost certain that that was the case. Now she didn’t want to look at it. She didn’t even want to be here, but there was still something buried here for her to find. She turned her attention to the consoles, each one with its own array of screens. She didn’t want to risk touching any buttons, but as she nudged a cursor the screens awoke into blinding life. Tarantulas was apparently so confident of the security on the door that he didn’t even bother to put a password on his systems.

The desktop was cluttered, filled with folders and shortcuts to notes that Windblade couldn’t even read the titles of. Ironhide, the only one who could understand the written Cybertronian language, did his best to advise her on where to look, but they didn’t find anything worthwhile. Windblade tried looking through the programs that were already open, the work that Tarantulas must have been in the middle of, but still she couldn’t understand any of it. Luckily, he kept all his images and diagrams in a single place that she managed to stumble across. She quickly found something she recognised,... and then immediately wished she hadn’t.

The blueprints for the Sparkcracker. No, this was just a proof-of-concept for a sparkcracker. It was the next blueprint that was tailored specifically to Starscream, as if Tarantulas had been planning this gruesome design long before he’d found the right test subject. In intricate detail, Windblade could see exactly what was cut away from Starscream; the grade of materials they’d filled him with, the ratio of energon needed to keep him barely alive… and the instructions for how to remove his spark from its chamber, and then put it back in again.

The diagram showed another spark being swapped into Starscream’s chamber. Windblade looked back over to the array of tubes on her left, at the captive spark trapped in the maze of wires keeping it glowing. She quickly put two and two together.

“Windblade, look at the computer again,” Lightbright told her, though Windblade struggled to focus on anything that wasn’t the spark. “Can you zoom in on the upper right? Ratchet needs to see–”

She was cut off as Ratchet must have seized the commlink from her. Windblade did as she was told, too numb to even share the medic’s shock when it came.

“Dear Primus… that’s how they did it.” Ratchet’s whisper was horrified and disgusted in equal measure. “That’s how he killed mechs. They swapped his spark out with a femme’s.”

Windblade prayed that Starscream wasn’t nearby, that he wasn’t watching her. She flew through the rest of the images with the cursor, but the story only got worse. She saw what was done with the aftermath of a Sparkcracker execution– the empty shell was passed off to Monopoly. He cleaned it, retrofitted it, made it fit for drone duty. 

And then there was a later revision of the process, one for Rattrap’s enemies who were also fellow technorganics. Their sparks were not cracked, but amputated from their frames. From there the process of converting them into drones was the same, but with the added horror of holding onto their sentience. For betraying their kind, technorganics faced a fate even worse than death.

Windblade’s mind was thrown back to her first night on Cybertron– the drone she’d bumped into. The one who had warned her that her hosts were not Cybertronians at all. They must have been a technorganic. Someone who’d tried to change things, now trying to warn anyone else against it. 

“Windblade, is there a memory stick nearby?” Nautica’s voice was a shock to hear– she was the only one who wasn’t hushed and petrified. “If you can get those documents saved, we can look at them back here. We could leak them, expose what Rattrap is really doing to his people.”

Windblade felt herself nodding, but before she could search the cluttered lab further she heard the unmistakable swish of another door opening. This was one she hadn’t even noticed in the gloom and clutter of the lab, but she immediately recognised the mech who emerged from the wall.

“Dinobot?” Her sword was in her hand by instinct– even though she knew it was more likely to bend in half than cause any damage, Dinobot likely didn’t know that. So long as she looked threatening, he wouldn’t immediately attack her.

“Camien…” He held a gun in his hand, but the fact that he wasn’t immediately firing upon her was proof that her ploy, for now, was working. “How did you get in here?”

Windblade gulped, steadying her sword hand at the wrist. “I could ask you the same question. Only Tarantulas and Airachnid are allowed in.”

“Airachnid provided me with a key. I– nevermind that.” Dinobot growled, clearly annoyed at instinctively defending himself from accusation. “Lower your weapon. You are under arrest by the authority of the Tripredacus–” 

He started to approach her, but Windblade held her sword diagonally across her body, as if preparing to slash, and he stopped.

“I’m not here to fight you, Dinobot.” She spoke slowly, enunciating her intent. “You’re here for the same reason as me, right? Cause you know things aren’t right around here.”

“You’re only here to cause trouble,” he snarled.

“I’m here to find out what the hell is going on.” She tried to decipher Dinobot’s angle– he’d hated her and every other Camien from the moment they’d arrived, but he wasn’t taking the chance to kill her. He wanted to arrest her, which meant he wasn’t aware that she was supposed to be dead. He was yet another victim of Rattrap’s lies.

“Why do you think Airachnid gave you that key?” she pressed. “Probably cause she wanted you to find out for yourself.”

Then she did something very stupid. With one hand still on her sword, she removed the commlink from her audial. Then she set her sword down and, with her thumb and forefinger, she plucked out the lenses from her optics. Dinobot was so stunned that he didn’t move in to apprehend her.

“I’m not here to fight you,” she repeated, once she was completely cut off from outside help. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to know the truth.”

Dinobot scoffed, though he lowered his weapon by a bare inch. “What do you know of the truth, Cityspeaker?”

Windblade gulped. She knew more now than even her worst nightmares could have fathomed to decacycles ago. She knew that she was lucky to have been kept in ignorance for so long, that the rest of Caminus was blessed to stay ignorant. She knew that the truth came with a price, one that she and her friends had paid ten times over for. And she knew that Starscream had been preparing her all along for how horrible the truth would be, so that when she was faced with it she would have no choice to know what it was when it was right in front of her.

“I know that the Chancellor is a liar,” Windblade said, numb and tired and barely still holding herself together. “And so is our Mistress of Flame. She’s lied to us for millions of years. She… she made us think that the Caminus’ hotspot was our only source of life. We never knew we could… make life ourselves. She told us they were parasites. If they started growing, she tore them out of us.” 

That was only the surface of the Mistress’ lies, but it was most easily summarised, its insidiousness easily understood even by someone who would call himself her enemy. Dinobot blinked at her, his grip on his weapon starting to falter. He was speechless. 

“Do you know about the Sparkcracker, Dinobot?” she asked, seizing the chance to show him the worst truth of his own home.

“A sparkling story.” He curled his lip under his fangs, but still he nodded at her. “Yes, I’m aware.”

Windblade shook her head as she stepped aside. “Not just a story.”

She brought the screen behind her to life again where it had left off– the guide to making efficient drones out of dissident technorganic civillians. She stepped back, and watched as Dinobot flicked through the blueprints, the meticulous notes that, unlike her, he could actually read and understand. 

“What is this…?” The hiss of his voice was barely audible in the whisper.

“I can’t read the notes,” Windblade said. “But pictures tell a thousand words.

  He looked through them all, his face crumpling and caving in as his eyes darted across the screen. These weren’t records that could be faked. He looked like he wanted to be sick.

“This can’t be right. This… what is this?” He landed on the Sparkcracker diagrams, and what he saw made him stumble back from the console. He could hardly breathe as he doubled over, shaking his head with his clawed hands braced on his knees. 

“Dinobot, I know you’re in shock.” Windblade knelt in front of him, trying to meet his eyes. “I was too. But was there anything about Metroplex in there? Any mention, or reference to a Titan?”

That was the one part of the nightmare puzzle still missing, and it was what she was most terrified to discover when what she’d already found out was terrible enough.

Dinobot squeezed his eyes shut with a labored breath. When he straightened, his movements were that of a mech in pain as he pulled himself back to the console. His claws were clumsy as they typed in a single command, and a window opened showing a single file. He opened it for her.

This was another document full of text that Windblade couldn’t read, but as she scrolled down she quickly found familiar blueprints and designs. 

“Metroplex is referred to here as ‘Manufactura Three’,” Dinobot narrated. “A lot of it has been redacted. I assume these are modified archives from the old Senate… I can’t read the rest.”

“But I can.” Windblade was stunned when half-way down the screen the notes suddenly became legible. They were written in the ancient Imperial alphabet, which Caminus had kept preserved for millions of years for its own records. Tarantulas hadn’t authored these notes, but whoever had written them didn’t matter. They told her everything she needed to know. Everything she hadn’t wanted to know. Everything she’d feared.

What was done to Starscream was only a trial run. Rattrap wanted to do the same to Metroplex– turning his spark chamber into a thresher, where dissidents would be fed in like animals on a conveyer belt to a slaughterhouse. The energy released from the sparks would be harvested, the frames recycled into raw materials. 

“He’s going to do it again.” Windblade struggled to speak around the lump of steel in her throat. “To Metroplex. He won’t just be a Sparkcracker… he’ll be a City cracker.”

“You weren’t trying to sabotage Metroplex.” Dinobot was sitting on the floor with his back to the console, unable to even lift his head.“You were trying to save him.”

“I didn’t know this was happening.” Windblade sank next to him. “I knew something was wrong, but I… I didn’t think… I didn’t think it would be this .”

Dinobot shook his head. “Nobody could think of something like this. Nobody, except…”

He pushed himself onto his peds, and in the sickly green light Windblade almost thought that his face was melting.

“I’m sorry, Windblade.” He blinked as tears flooded his eyes anew. “Everything that was done to you. No matter the history between our kind, I… I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”

He pulled back the claws on one hand and offered it to her. She let him pull her up, an suddenly strength flooded back into her spark. 

“...But we can stop it,” she said. Rattrap had been spending the last five centuries trying to fulfill his dream for Metroplex. He must have been close after all this time, but there was one thing still missing from his plan. 

She found it again in the document, the part that she’d glazed over in her shock– he needed another spark to fuel Metroplex’s own. One even more powerful than a Titan’s, with ten times the amount of energy and mass… and, crucially, it had to be the opposite polarity to Metroplex’s own. Rattrap needed a female spark that outclassed that of a Titan, and where the hell was he going to find one of those any time soon? 

Windblade found a memory drive next to the keyboard, and it was simple enough to move all the evidence onto it. If she was wrong, someone smarter than her would be able to tell her when she got back to the Autobots.

“We have time.” She dared to let out a sigh of relief as she faced Dinobot again. “If we can get rid of Rattrap, we can stop this from happening.”

“And how do you suppose we do that?” He wanted to believe her, but optimism was already in short supply for a mech like him. Hell, Windblade had been running low on it for a long while now.

“Where is he right now?” She didn’t have to say his name.

“In the justice hall,” Dinobot answered. “Holding his private audience with your Mistress of Flame.”

So it was already happening. Windblade could only hope that the cassettes had managed to reach the vault… or she could catch up with them.

“I need to get to the relic vault,” she said. “Where the Enigma is being kept. Do you know the way?”

         Dinobot growled, and his claws reappeared as he scratched his chin. “There are two routes. But they both go through the main chamber, where the Chancellor is.”

The implication was clear. There was no way they’d be able to cross the chamber while Rattrap was there without being seen, so they’d have to wait by until he and the Mistress were done. At the same ime… they’d be able to hear what they said to each other.

“How do you feel about eavesdropping, Dinobot?” she asked.

“Lately, I’ve become accustomed to its benefits.” Dinobot was glaring at the screen, but when he pulled his eyes away it was like he’d been replaced by someone else. In that moment, he was no longer Windblade’s enemy. “Follow me.” 

He knew exactly where he was going, and knew that time was crucial. Windblade didn’t ask him to slow down, and her haste was rewarded– she recognised where he was taking her. This was where she and Afterburner had been dragged through on the way to her trial. Only now did Dinobot take his time, probing the air with his senses before he shuffled forwards. He made a sign for Windblade to be quiet, and they crouched together in the shadows in silence.

Then there was a hum of a transmitter through the wall, quickly drowned out by the amplified voice of the Mistress of Flame.

“Chancellor Rattrap. We finally meet.”

Windblade had to stop herself from gasping. It was really her. After so long away from Caminus, hearing the voice of his speaker was like being doused in ice. Windblade would have been relieved, once upon a time not so long ago. Now, she almost flinched from the sound.

         “You say that as if you’re not happy for it to be so.” Rattrap was not affected by the Mistress’ steel-edge vocaliser. He sounded amused, as if they were old friends finally catching up after centuries apart.

         “I am not happy, Chancellor.” The Mistress inhaled, and the force of her vents could have carved paths through moons. “I am confused and displeased. It has been over a decacycle since Caminus has last heard from our delegation. We have sent several requests for information in that time, and they have all been ignored until now. So here I am, patiently waiting for an explanation.”

Dinobot nudged Windblade’s shoulder, motioning for her to follow him further down the dark hall. At the end of it he cracked the door open, only enough so that they could both see what they were hearing. From this point, Rattrap could be seen from the side and the Mistress was projected onto the wall in front of him. Even though her visage literally towered over him, Rattrap was not cowering.

“Let’s not beat around the bush, then.” Rattrap sighed, as if he was bored, while he dropped into his chair. “Two decacycles ago, your people were caught attempting to assassinate myself and my entire council.”

The Mistress was not phased. If it wasn’t for what she now knew, Windblade would have been impressed at her composure. “They were doing no such thing. Where is the proof of these accusations?”

“The Cityspeaker Windblade was found within Metroplex’s core,” Rattrap shrugged, “after she was warned that he is off-limits. For the last few centuries, he has been filling himself with gas that is fatal to us technorganics— who, for your information, now make up over eighty percent of Cybertron’s population. When we captured Windblade, we found canisters of the gas in her possession, enough to fill the air of the council chamber. Her intent was clear.”

The Mistress blinked as she absorbed the Chancellor’s story, and then something happened that Windblade had never witnessed before in her life– she laughed. It was not a cheerful or hopeful sound, it was one of mockery and disbelief. It was a sound that any child would dread to hear.

“Your theory is flawed from its very foundation, Chancellor. If I truly wanted you dead, I would not have left my team of assassins to find the means of doing so for themselves on Cybertron. There are much more efficient ways to kill someone. I would have told them to simply cut your heads off.”

Rattrap nodded all of those heads, as if he approved of her idea. “And then you would have left them to be swiftly torn apart by my adoring public?”

The Mistress did not shrug, but she might as well have. “They would have known the risks.”

Rattrap giggled– he was enjoying the show, as if the Mistress of Flame was everthing he’d hoped she’d be and more. 

“It’s just the two of us here, dear Mistress of Flame. We can speak freely, as leaders. As friends, perhaps. So be honest; if there was no assassination in the cards, then why did you send your people here?”

For the first time that evening, perhaps the first time for billions of years, the Mistress was caught off-guard, and she responded by raising her barriers ever higher. She eyed Rattrap as if he was poison drops suspended in high-grade.

“Metroplex had something to say to his Cityspeaker,” she answered– but Rattrap shook his head with a wag of a ragged claw.

“No, no, no, that’s not going to cut it with me,” he tutted. “Because you and I both know that the Metroplex currently on Cybertron is not Metroplex at all.”

‘Metroplex is… what?’ Windblade thought her audials had glitched out, but Dinobot looked just as confused. Only the Mistress herself seemed to perfectly understand what Rattrap had just said. In fact, she seemed bemused by the fact presented to her.

“Indeed,” she said. “Your Metroplex is an imposter. I’m very aware of that. Yet, I was still curious. A Titan, bearing the name of Megatronus Prime’s long lost vessel, reaching out their voice for a Camien ear. I assigned someone to him as soon as I was aware of his signal.”

That ‘someone’ had been Windblade, of course, but she barely even registered that. Metroplex wasn’t Metroplex at all? It must have been something to do with what was redacted on Tarantulas’ record… but she couldn’t afford to think about it at that moment, not when the Mistress and Chancellor were still talking,

“And what did he have to say?” Rattrap asked.

“That is none of your concern. Where are my people?” 

“You can have them back when you tell me what you have in store for Cybertron.”

  “Do not try my patience any further than you already have, Chancellor. Answer my question, or cease wasting my time.”

Rattrap giggled again, a sinister noise whistling through his teeth. He gnashed them together as if he was not in full control of them.

“It must sting,” he mused, “to see Esmeral’s children all over Primus’ body. Infesting it. Bad enough that you see her face on your Cityspeakers. Tell me, why keep the paint? When it surely causes you so much pain? Why not tell them one more white lie, so you don’t have to see it ever again?”

The mention of Esmeral did something to the Mistress’ face. it transformed within seconds, becoming the same expression that she’d greeted Cybertron with, the same one that had made her unrecognisable with the depth of its disgust and loathing. And then, as suddenly as it appeared, it was gone again. 

“I have never told a lie, Chancellor,” the Mistress pledged. “Certainly not to my own people.”

The Chancellor shook his head, hdiding a smile behind his hand. “And there’s another one. All you know how to do anymore is lie. You used to be much better at it, dear Solaris. I’m disappointed.”

Rattrap was still shaking his head in disappointment, but the Mistress was no longer looking at him. This time Windblade could not hold back a gasp, if what she’d just heard from Rattrap was true. The Mistress of Flame had once been a femme like Windblade herself, countless millennia ago. According to Drift, she had been born during the Tribal Age. She’d once had parents, who gave her a name. 

Rattrap had called her Solaris.

“...How do you know that name?” The Mistress did not hide her shock nearly as well as her contempt.

“Am I still wasting your time?” Rattrap asked, still hiding his mouth from her.

“Answer my question.” 

The Chancellor pulled his hand to his chin, then adopted a quizzical look. “...Which one was it again?” 

The Mistress’ face was no longer visible. Her camera feed was a blur, the amplified microphone choked with static, and when the feed was clear again the Mistress was no longer calm or composed. She held the camera, whatever or whoever was holding it, by the stem or throat, as if she hoped she could reach through to Cybertron itself to throttle the Chancellor within his chamber. 

“Do not toy with me, rat .” The Mistress– Solaris– snarled as if she was a beast herself, and her eyes would have put solar flares from Cavea to shame. “If you know that name, then you know who I am. You know what I’m capable of. You know what I will do.”

“All too well.” Rattrap did not betray any fear. His own eyes sparkled with pride. “So I’ll tell you everything, in return for your answer to my question. What do you plan for Cybertron?”

The Mistress inhaled again, and her answer was a deadly whisper. “I will save it from the likes of you.”

“So you want to undo all my hard work,” Rattrap stated. His opponent deflated, but not from defeat. She was consciously letting go of her anger, even releasing the camera so that it returned to its previous position, casting her in indomitable dignity once more.

“I will make this offer only once,” she told the Chancellor. “Deliver my people safely, and we will forget this sorry business ever happened.” 

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Even with all his mind-games and nerve-twisting, Rattrap somehow managed to sound genuine. “So, it seems we are left at a stalemate.”

“Not quite.” The corner of the Mistress’ mouth twitched, so subtle that it was easily missed. “Did you really expect me to hand over my people without a contingency plan?”

“Oh, I was more than expecting some tricks up your sleeve, Solaris.”

“Do not call me that. That is not your name to use. I am the Mistress of Flame , and I speak for Caminus and Primus and His Holy Thirteen.” 

Rattrap grinned at her anger. “And what are they telling you, pray tell?”

And the Mistress did not grin back, but she certainly did smile. “They’re telling me I was right to send bombs over.”

Rattrap registered the threat just as Windblade and Dinobot did, just as the Chancellor was knocked out of his seat by the explosions that began to shake the walls of the entire chamber. 

“When we next meet, Chancellor,” the Mistress of Flame told him, raising her voice to be heard over the sounds of stone and metal tearing asunder, “it will be face-to-face. When the entire colony of Caminus is in your orbit. When we are hanging right above your heads. When I have all three of them by the throat. Until then… goodbye.”

Windblade didn’t see the end of the transmission before Dinobot pulled her away. 

“We have to get out. Now. ” He almost stumbled as another explosion shattered through the air. Windblade was amazed at how calm he was as much as she was terrified by what was going on. The Mistress had smuggled bombs over on their ship? The goodwill gifts… 

“Dinobot, where did you take the cargo we brought?” she asked in a frenzy, trying to keep up with him. “The gifts?”

“They were taken to the storeroom…” He skidded to a stop, just as the ceiling in front of them collapsed in a shower of sharp rubble and blocked the way ahead. “It’s in the lower levels. The whole building will collapse!”

“There’s people in the vaults.” Windblade was already trying to get back towards the justice chamber, dreading the worst for the cassettes she’d left behind. “ I have to help them–!”

“You’ll get yourself killed down there!” Dinobot snarled, but there was nowhere else for them to go.

“If we don’t get the Enigma,” Windblade shouted, “we’ll all be dead anyway!” 

They didn’t have much time left to argue. The floor fell out from under Windblade as she ran, and Dinobot barely managed to pull her over him so that his bulkier frame cushioned her impact. Thanks to him, when she rebooted some klicks later, she was merely dazed rather than dead. She looked up at the hole where the floor had once been and realised they must have fallen through at least three levels of ceiling. The explosions were distant now, but Windblade still felt them in her head.

“The vault… need to get there.” She rolled over, wincing at the ringing in her spinal strut. Dinobot was still lying prone in the rubble, groaning with his eyes sealed shut. “Are you okay?”

Dinobot suddenly snapped upright, as if to scare Windblade or just prove that he was hard to kill. “I’ve been worse… now let go of my hand.”

“That’s not me.” Windblade saw what it was at the same time as Dinobot– a muzzle at his claws, twitching whiskers and red optics. Ravage had not only somehow survived the chaos, he’d even managed to sniff them out through the wreckage. 

“A cirkitten…” Dinobot seemed more confused than offended by the animal licking his palm. ”You’re supposed to be extinct.”

“Are Rumble and Frenzy okay?” Windblade caught Ravage’s attention with her question. “Can you take us to them?”

Ravage closed his eyes as the the hole above them was flooded with more of the crumbling metalwork, blocking out all light other than the cirkitten’s own optics when they re-opened. The maze of the council wreckage kept shifting as the exposion’s aftershocks rippled through the foundations, but Ravage didn’t falter once as he lead the way.

“Frenzy? Rumble!” Windblade kept calling out for them, and it wasn’t until the third time that she received an answer. 

“We’re here… in one piece. Mostly.” 

The two of them were huddled together in a tiny space, illuminated by the ethereal light of what they were guarding.

“You got it…” Windblade almost didn’t believe it even though it was right in front of her. “The Enigma.”

“Is that really it?” Dinobot, who had been silent for the whole harrowing journey, couldn’t hide his own awe. “The… the Enigma of Combination?”

“It’s what we came here for,” Frenzy chuckled, and then squinted at the stranger in his midst. “By the way, who the hell are you?”

“He’s Dinobot,” Windblade introduced. “He’s a friend. Right?”

Dinobot made a sound of utter noncommitment, which was good enough for the dire circumstances they’d all found themselves in.

“So. Mission accomplished.” Rumble sighed as if he was trying to propel himself into the sky with nothing but his vents. “Now how the hell do we get out of here?”

Windblade’s only thought was to start digging, or just curl up and sleep and hope to wake up from her horrible nightmare. Dinobot looked like he was about to take part in the latter as he pressed his head into his hand. Ravage sniffed the air rapidly, sensing more shifts in their new jagged world. Then he started walking in circles, clawing at the wreckage closing in around them. Another cave-in shuddered through and Windblade braced herself, but this one didn’t bury them. The debris wasn’t moving on its own anymore. 

The sounds of digging were distant though, too far away to give her any hope. She just wanted to rest for a while. Hitting the ground from so high up, as well as everything she’d just witnessed before the collapse, had taken far more out of her than she’d first thought. She was too dizzy to stay awake, the space too small and dark… the building that had fallen all around them was too big. They’d never be found. Or, worse still, they’d be found by a technorganic rescue team and shot on sight. Windblade didn’t want to be awake for that. If she just closed her eyes…

There was a burst of light, immediately dazzling her. It came from a newly carved hold in the debris. Someone had managed to dig all the way down. Good for them. Now if she could just sleep–

“Starscream?” Rumble’s voice was filtered through the daze. “How did you–?”

“I followed you here.” That was… Starscream. It really was him. "Others will be here soon. Can you all walk?”

“Windblade might have some trouble.” She couldn’t tell who was talking anymore. It was too much effort to keep her eyes open. Someone pulled her up, and then someone else was carrying her. She recognised his arms, the thrum of his spark and the fizz of his EM field against hers. She’d recognise it even on the verge of death.

“I kept my promise, Starscream,” she breathed, the only thing left that she could muster for him.

“So you did.” 

His voice, the proud smirk that it was cocooned in, followed Windblade into stasis. She would need the company now more than ever in her life.