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When Rodimus was seven, he had finally persuaded Rung to start teaching him chemistry. It had taken a lot of persuading, because Rung remembered everything Rodimus had ever said to him including when he was five years old begging for a flamethrower, and Rung knew exactly what Rodimus wanted with combustible materials. Lesson one had been an extensive review of lab safety and a laminated map of every fire extinguisher in the palace.
So when Rung had gone out on some kind of update for the waste servers and Drift had been substituting for Kup, Rodimus had gone for the less obvious option and he and Drift had broken into the kitchens to borrow water and soap and hydrogen peroxide and made a foam explosion in the center of the distal wing.
Megatron had been out with Rung. He had come back just as Rodimus had finished explaining to Optimus how the process had worked with a demonstration that used up the rest of the supplies and created a second even more enormous explosion on top of the first.
“Why,” Megatron had said, from within the depths of despair and also foam.
Rodimus had been seven. He hadn’t had an answer to that. If he’d had to speak in his own defense, he’d have pointed out that at least he hadn’t set anything on fire.
Megatron had been asking Optimus anyways, who’d said, “It seemed fun.”
Generally, Rodimus tried not to model his behavior on Optimus. He didn’t need people thinking they were the same, or worse, expecting Rodimus to be responsible, blech. But ‘it seemed like fun’ had still always seemed like a pretty good guiding principle.
Which was why Rodimus was currently sneaking out of the Palace, looping the hallway cameras as he went. Megatron and Optimus had been pulling back-to-back shifts dealing with some kind of crisis virus that meant Rung was also rebooting his systems. Rodimus was never going to get a better chance. He’d even waited until he knew Optimus was the one awake, because Optimus knew he’d been sneaking out into the city since he turned sixteen. They had an unspoken deal to keep it quiet. At least, Rodimus assumed they had an unspoken deal, because that was probably what Optimus meant by not ever mentioning the time he’d caught Rodimus hard rewiring a camera at the service entrance. And not ever fixing that camera. Which, considering it had been over a year now, meant Rodimus was pretty sure Rung also knew and Megatron didn’t.
Rodimus figured he had half a day, maybe more, before Optimus realized he wasn’t coming back this time. He’d need that time to get ahead of Drift and the twins.
It was always crazy to get outside the Palace and realize how close together and up and down everything was. Rodimus’s implant said after he’d been climbing and jumping for half an hour that he’d gone the width of the Palace itself, but it already felt like he had passed through two different worlds into a third.
Rodimus had grown up with thick cement walls, heavy and looming and never more than a couple of stories off the ground. Here the walls were smooth, metal and ceramic fitting together into slippery surfaces broken only by the occasional acid-pitted surfaces, paned windows, or fire escapes.
Rodimus knew enough from previous trips where he’d gone to the edge of this sector that fire escapes tended to be electrified if you tried to climb them. Those who traveled this part of the city stayed on the ground.
Or below it.
Rodimus liked access tunnels. They reminded him of the time he had spent when he was younger following around Rung, who was always pleased to see him and never yelled. And of Drift giving him lessons in the ones under the Palace in how to be stealthy, with the promise that he use at least some of them to sneak up on Ratchet.
Rodimus was still pretty stealthy, if he did say so himself.
There were other people using the service tunnels, just going about their normal, ordinary lives. Rodimus emulated them, sneaking casually along with his hands shoved in his pockets. Optimus wore a facemask in most public appearances, and Rodimus had broken his nose hoverboarding down the central Palace steps and begged Ratchet not to reset it straight. He had also gotten an eyebrow ring from Sunstreaker last week. Not only did he not ping facial recognition as Optimus anymore, he also looked cool enough that no one with any sense would mix them up.
Rodimus occasionally pinged the geolocation chips at intersections, hiding his own cyberprint in the anonymity of a public key. Rung could crunch anything given enough time. It was better not to leave any traces behind if he could. He still needed to have at least some idea of where he had been.
Not of where he was going, necessarily. Anywhere was fine, as long as it was away from the Palace, for now. Waiting would be the key. Once he’d waited long enough, everyone would have calmed down a bit and he could start his search without having to be so stealthy.
Kup had been gone for a month already. Rodimus had to believe he was still fine, or there was no point to any of this.
The tunnels ticked away, steam vents and electrical boxes and private alley restaurants or hangouts with noise and light spilling out passing one by one. Rodimus kept moving until his feet started to hurt and the smells drifting out of some of the alleyways had gotten awfully tempting. He had some hard credits on him. He’d snuck out of the Palace loads of times before, he knew how the world worked.
One quick swap later, he was scarfing a couple of slices of pizza and sitting on a crate, keeping an eye on the traffic in the access tunnels. He could feel the thrumming of the restaurant’s systems behind him—probably taking in orders. Maybe doing something else. He almost poked it to find out and had to stop himself. Computers didn’t understand ‘incognito’. Unless they were systems set up specifically to serve as anonymous access points, like the direction grid, they usually liked him too much to understand that he didn’t want them to remember him. It had taken him eight months to figure out that the algorithm for his favorite soda shop near the palace had interpreted his request not to retain his accesses in its public cache by forming a special folder right next to its maintenance log, right where anyone looking for him would check first, listing off every time he’d been there and for how long. Shameless hoarder.
When he’d finished his pizza, he set off again, changing directions to move into a little less residential of a district. It was getting quieter. Must be the off-shift for this particular area.
Someone cursing on a street up ahead caught his attention, and he slowed down, not wanting to run into a fight. When everything seemed to indicate it was just one person, though, he forged ahead, slowly.
“What’s your damage, man?” he asked, finding a stranger shaking a gadget and cursing it.
“Can’t get this slagged locator to work,” the stranger snapped. “Lost a drone down here, at least I think that’s where it went, but this piece of junk isn’t responding.”
“Can I take a look?” Rodimus offered. He had to relax his shoulders to reach out, which was easier now that the guy wasn’t shouting anymore.
“Why the hell not,” the stranger grumbled, passing it over. “Knock yourself out.”
Rodimus held it up, slotting the connector ring on his left pinky finger into the direct linkup slot on the device. This wasn’t like a public access point. The stranger would be moving on with his machine long before Rung could get here. Rodimus could just drop entirely into the code.
Weird. Nothing in here seemed to be broken...as far as he could tell. It didn’t actually seem to have a point? There wasn’t any kind of geolocational software, just tiny junk bundles that tied into each other that Rodimus poked at one by one before moving to the next. One of them was much larger than the others. Maybe that was where the problem was? He tried to get it open, but first he had to go through a command loop—and then another—and then—
He was so distracted trying to untangle the weird recursive loops that he didn’t even see the guy slipping behind him until the proximity virus locking onto his cortex implants used the uplink established by his connector ring to jump his firewalls and shut down his entire conscious brain function like a faulty light.
Rodimus woke up slowly and painfully, his head hurting in a way that meant his cortex implants had been working overtime while he was out of it. Oof. What had gotten past his firewalls this time?
“—don’t currently need more subjects, Swindle. Our deal is not satisfied. You will have to unload your merchandise somewhere else.”
Hm. Was he in a box? Why was he in a box?
Finding which way was up took him a moment, and once he whacked his head off the top of the box and had to slump back to the floor again, groaning. He barely had enough space to lift a hand and rub his skull.
“What was that?” Another voice. Kind of whiny.
“Clearly, the quality of your delivery is slipping as well. The virus must have failed.” Voice one again. Not whiny, kind of rattly. Rodimus tried to shove the top of the box off with no success.
“Hey! Lemme outta here!”
Both voices ignored him. “No, it’s the same one I always use. You made it. You know it’s good.”
“Hm...hm.” Rodimus continued feeling around the box with the very limited leverage he had. No signals in or out. No weak points. “Well. I retract my statement. You may have brought me an extremely interesting opportunity to experiment.”
“Frag you!” Rodimus shouted. “I’m no one’s experiment.”
“Let me remove him and then we can...renegotiate. Ostaros!”
Rodimus didn’t catch the next part of the conversation, being too preoccupied with banging on the crate. If he made himself annoying enough they’d have to let him out, right? Then he could use some of the other things he’d learned from Drift to try and escape.
He felt the crate start to shift, and braced to jump out as the lid rattled. The light hurt, and he squeezed his eyes shut but lunged anyways.
Something he couldn’t see, hard and metal and many-jointed, shoved him back down into the box, and a pain flared up on his exposed neck before the metal whatever retreated and the box shut again. It wobbled like someone was lifting it, and then started jostling rhythmically, knocking his newly sensitive neck against the side.
“Ow,” Rodimus complained to the empty box, and resumed banging on it.
“Will you knock that off?” someone complained. “I’ll let you out in a minute, quit jostling everything.”
“Let me out now,” Rodimus said, emphasizing it with another thump.
“We’re almost there, calm down.”
Rodimus considered, and then kicked the box again, because he could.
“Quit it or I’ll shake you.”
Rodimus made a face at the inside of the lid and settled down, crossing his arms and trying not to jostle his neck too much. What had that been, anyways? Felt like...oh, some kind of tracker. He let his cortex implants start running one of Rung’s jailbreak programs while he was waiting to be let out. It made his firewalls twinge, after having already had to chew through the virus that knocked him out, but he told them to suck it up. They could handle it.
After some turns and what sounded like a door opening, the crate set down.
“Promise not to hit me if I let you out?”
“Sure,” Rodimus said.
“I think he’s lying,” another voice said.
“Of course I’m lying!” Rodimus snapped. “Now let me out so I can hit you.”
“You’re just going to hurt yourself,” the first voice said, but the lid came off.
Rodimus sat up, blinking in the light and at the very large person setting down the lid of what looked like a food storage crate.
Rodimus hit him. Lightly. The large person blinked at him.
“That’s for threatening to shake me,” Rodimus said. “Who are you?”
“I’m Springer,” the big guy said. He gestured across the room at a guy scowling at Rodimus. “That’s Arcee. She’s a she.”
“A she?” Rodimus asked. You could do that?
“Yeah,” she said, still scowling. “You don’t look modded enough for Mesothalus to want you, so what are you? A clone? A tweak?”
Rodimus opened his mouth. Closed it again. Everyone at the palace knew he was a clone, but no one ever said. Certainly not right out like that. “Clone,” he said, finally. “What about you?”
“None of your business,” she said, primly. Springer sighed.
“Be nice, Arcee, he just got here.”
“Yeah, and I’m not sticking around here, either.” Rodimus tried to scramble out of the crate and tripped. Springer caught him with one hand, effortlessly, and pushed him back up to his feet. “Ooh, nice. You wanna come too?”
“There’s no point running away.” Arcee had stopped scowling at him, and returned to scowling at the tool in her hands. “Mesothalus has this place locked down.”
“And he put a tracker in you already,” Springer said, watching as Rodimus started poking around. This room looked like it was an old lab—lotta tables, but they had empty wrappers and fidgets and data chips scattered all over them in a way that would make Perceptor scold. “His trackers always work. Blurr tried to run away a bunch of times, until the old man got sick of having to hunt him down and—sent him somewhere else.”
“Yeah, well, his trackers never met me before.” Rodimus made a beeline for a closed cabinet with all sorts of exciting symbols on it.
“You can’t drink any of that,” Arcee said. “And you don’t want to touch most of it, either. It burns.”
“I know,” Rodimus complained. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t know how to introduce yourself, clone,” she said. Rodimus looked up from his rummaging to glare at her. She was glaring right back. “What? If you don’t want me to call you that, tell me your name.”
“Roddddd—” Rodimus cut himself off from finishing that. Even if he was getting out of here, he didn’t want either of the creepy guys who’d brought him here to know what kind of genetic material they had on hand. Someone could break into the city’s systems with that, if they knew what they were doing. “Hot Rod,” he said, instead, going for a nickname Kup had given him.
“Nice to meet you, Rod-Hot-Rod,” Springer said. He was watching with a lot more curiosity than Arcee. “What are you doing?”
“Well, since I broke my tracker already—” a slight exaggeration, but it would be done in like, two more minutes—“I’m just going to use these to blow off every door between me and the exit and get out of here.”
They didn’t respond. He looked up to find them both staring at him, wide-eyed.
“You can do that?”
“Yeah? It’s crazy easy to make TNT. All the stuff for it is right here.” And enough of it that he was pretty confident he could make good on his words even if there were a lot of doors.
“No, I mean, you can break your tracker?” Arcee was leaning forward. “Could you—my implants are locked. Could you get that off?”
“Probably.” Rung’s hacking software was really good. He’d had centuries to practice. Rodimus wasn’t that good yet, but he knew how to talk a lot of computers into doing what he wanted.
Arcee looked at Springer. “Springer. C’mon.” Springer looked at the door. “If he can get us out, and I can get my bike, we can be gone. You know we can. What’s here for you, anyways?”
“He’s my creator,” Springer said, reluctant.
“Creators are overrated,” Rodimus said, standing up with his arms full of the ingredients he needed. “Especially if they won’t let you leave. You deserve your own life.”
Springer looked at him, dubiously, but Rodimus knew what he was talking about.
“Besides,” he said, stealing something Optimus had told him once. “If you don’t like it out there, you can always come back.”
Springer hesitated only a little bit longer before nodding. “We should probably go quick, before he finishes arguing with Swindle.”
“Fuck yes,” Arcee said, doing a fistpump. “We just need to get to my bike. I can handle the rest from there.”
Rodimus wasn’t so sure of that, but Springer nodded agreement. “Her bike is really good.”
“Okay!” Rodimus said. “Whatever, what do I know, I’m just the guy with the explosives.”
So maybe there were a few hitches in their plan. Maybe Rodimus made a little more fire than he’d been expecting and Springer had to literally scoop him and Arcee up, one under each arm, and run for the exit. Maybe Rodimus almost fell off the bike when they were getting away because Arcee literally plugged in a set of ports on her knuckles and then drove like an insane person. It was fine! They made it out! Springer didn’t drop him.
“You’re sure they’re not broken,” Springer said, anxiously, prodding at Rodimus’s very bruised ribs. “You have to tell me if they’re broken. It’s my fault.”
“They’re fine!” Rodimus said, smiling through the pain. He’d never had broken ribs before, but he was pretty sure his were mostly fine. Just twinging a bit.
“So,” Arcee said, from where she’d been lovingly checking over every inch of her bike. “What next?”
“Where do you wanna go?” Rodimus asked, dropping his shirt and pulling his denim vest back on.
Neither of them looked prepared for that question.
“I just don’t want to go back,” Arcee said. “Not to Mesothalus, and not to…” she trailed off. “Well. Anyone. Where are you going?”
“Dunno,” Springer said. “Somewhere I can help people, I guess. Maybe I’ll join the guard.”
“Oh!” Rodimus could help with that. “I know where you can do that.”
There were guard posts in every sector of the city. Even not knowing where he was, it was pretty easy to follow the pings and stop a block away from where security and techs in palace uniforms were moving in and out.
“Go there and tell them you want to talk to Rung,” Rodimus said. “That’ll get you to the Palace. You can tell them you ran away from a lab and they’ll help you with whatever you need.” Springer and Arcee were both giving him very skeptical looks. “I promise! There’s tons of people who got out of labs working there.” The Twins. Maybe Drift, he’d never given Rodimus a straight answer. First Aid and his brothers. Sort of Mirage? Wheeljack, but whether or not he got included seemed to depend on how everyone else was feeling about him.
“Then why aren’t you coming?” Springer asked.
“I can’t go to the palace,” Rodimus said. “I have to find someone. He went missing. I’m going to bring him back.” Megatron said he was looking, everyone said they were looking, but then there had been one crisis, and then another, and Rodimus knew that there would keep being crisises. Everyone else had too much to do. Rodimus would have to find Kup himself. “I promise you’ll be safe there, though. Good luck. Nice meeting you.” He waved and started walking away, grabbing a geolocation ping to reset his chronometer after the virus had shut it down.
Rodimus hadn’t made it more than two blocks away before Arcee’s weirdly quiet engine came up behind him.
“We’re coming with you,” Arcee announced. Springer climbed off the bike to stand next to him.
“What, seriously?”
“You helped us. Why can’t we help you?” Springer asked. “Besides. You seem like a pretty interesting guy, Rod-Hot-Rod.”
Rodimus groaned. “Hot Rod. It’s just Hot Rod.”
“Okay, just-Hot-Rod,” Arcee said, bumping his leg with her bike. “Where are we going?”
Rodimus looked around at the streets around them, and picked the direction that went towards a sector he’d never been to. “Let’s go that way. It seems like fun.”