Chapter Text
Captain William Lennox had learned a long time ago that truly bad days rarely had the decency to announce themselves.
They started normally.
That was the part that stayed with you.
The heat in Qatar had been vicious even before sunrise, the kind that seemed to climb up out of the sand as much as it pressed down from the sky. By midmorning it had worked through Lennox's fatigues, glued the back of his shirt to his skin and left a thin film of grit on every strip of exposed flesh. The base smelled of hot concrete, diesel, dust and the faint metallic tang that always seemed to hang around machinery that had been baking in the sun too long.
Nothing about it felt important.
Men complained about the heat. Someone had misplaced a socket set. A generator had developed an ugly rattle that three different people had promised to look at. Radios hissed with routine traffic. An aircraft moved somewhere high overhead, too distant to see. Lennox had spent most of the morning moving from one check to another, answering questions he had already answered twice and pretending not to listen while his men argued over who had stolen the last cold bottle of water from the refrigerator.
Sergeant Robert Epps was leaning against a vehicle with his helmet tucked beneath one arm when Lennox walked past. He held an empty plastic bottle between two fingers and shook it accusingly.
"Cap."
Lennox kept walking for another step before glancing over. "What?"
Epps lifted the bottle as if presenting evidence before a court-martial. "You're seriously going to pretend you didn't take the last cold one?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
Epps's eyes dropped pointedly toward Lennox's left sleeve.
Lennox followed the look.
A damp patch darkened the cuff where condensation had dripped from the bottle he had finished ten minutes earlier.
Epps slowly looked back up.
"Circumstantial," Lennox said.
For half a second Epps just stared at him. Then a laugh broke out of him, loud enough that two of the men nearby looked over.
"That is cold, Cap. Literally."
"You want cold water, get faster next time."
"Leadership through dehydration. Good to know."
Lennox's mouth twitched, but he did not give Epps the satisfaction of a proper grin. "Builds character."
"I've got enough character."
"Debatable."
It was ordinary. Stupid, even.
Later, Lennox would remember that conversation with a clarity that made no sense. He would remember the bottle crinkling in Epps's hand and the white line of salt drying along the shoulder of his uniform. He would remember a mechanic cursing under the open hood of a Humvee. He would remember the exact way sunlight flashed off a watch face across the yard.
Because less than ten minutes later, men who had been arguing about bottled water were running for their lives.
The helicopter appeared on approach from the north.
At first, nobody paid much attention.
There was no reason to.
Aircraft came and went. The base existed on routines, procedures and identification checks designed specifically to make ordinary arrivals boring. Lennox heard the distant thump of rotors and barely lifted his head.
Then a voice snapped over the radio.
The identification did not match.
Lennox stopped walking.
Across the yard, Epps straightened at almost the same instant.
The change that moved through the base was immediate. Conversations died. Men who had been slouching in the heat came upright. Weapons came off slings. A vehicle door slammed. Someone shouted for confirmation from the tower.
The helicopter kept coming.
"What's the word?" Epps asked, already reaching for his helmet.
Lennox watched the aircraft settle toward the landing area. Something prickled at the back of his neck.
"We don't have one yet."
That was the problem.
The helicopter landed.
For one strange second, nothing happened.
Rotor wash threw dust outward in a broad cloud. Men positioned around the landing zone raised weapons. The aircraft sat in the centre of it all, dark and heavy and familiar enough that Lennox's brain kept insisting there had to be an explanation.
Then the machine moved.
Not like an aircraft.
Like something unfolding.
Panels separated. Metal twisted with a shriek that cut through the rotor noise. The body of the helicopter split apart and rose, sections rotating and locking into positions that should have been impossible. What had been a fuselage became a chest. Landing gear shifted into legs. Arms unfolded where no arms had any right to exist.
Lennox stared for one heartbeat too long.
The thing stood taller than the buildings around it.
Someone near him whispered, "What the hell?"
The first blast hit.
The world became light, pressure and noise.
Lennox hit the ground hard enough to lose the breath from his lungs. Dust swallowed everything. His ears rang. For a second he could not tell which direction was up.
Training took over because thought was too slow.
He rolled, found his rifle by touch and got one knee underneath him.
"Move! Move!"
He had no idea whether the voice was his until his throat hurt from shouting.
Men scattered through smoke and flying debris. A second blast tore through a structure across the yard. Concrete burst outward. Something heavy struck the ground behind Lennox with a clang. He turned and saw one of his men down in the open, dazed and trying to crawl.
Lennox ran back.
Rounds or fragments snapped against the ground around him. He caught the man's vest at the shoulder and dragged him hard enough that his boots carved twin lines through the dust.
"Come on. Come on. Stay with me."
They reached a concrete barrier just as another wave of force punched across the base. Lennox dropped behind it, shoved the wounded man lower and looked over the top.
The rifle in his hands suddenly felt absurd.
The machine walked through their perimeter as if the fortifications had been built from cardboard. Weapons fire sparked against its armour without seeming to slow it. Its head turned with quick, deliberate movements. Not random. Not mechanical in the way Lennox understood machinery.
It was looking.
Choosing.
Thinking.
"Epps!"
"Here!"
Lennox saw him twenty metres away, crouched behind a wrecked vehicle with two others.
"Get them east! Use the maintenance line!"
Epps nodded once and started moving.
Another building collapsed.
The ground jumped beneath Lennox's boots. A wall of dust rolled through the yard. He fired because there was nothing else to do, because standing still meant dying, because every rule he had ever learned about combat assumed the enemy was made of flesh and blood and this one very clearly was not.
They fell back by instinct and training, covering one another, dragging the injured, shouting names into smoke thick enough to turn men into silhouettes.
At one point Lennox found himself pressed against the side of a half-destroyed structure with Epps beside him, both breathing too hard.
"Tell me you saw that thing turn from a helicopter into a giant robot," Epps said.
Lennox checked the corridor ahead. "Not now."
"Because if you didn't, I need to know exactly how hard I hit my head."
A blast shook dust from the ceiling.
"Move."
They moved.
Hours later, after the base had been reduced to smoke, fire and broken concrete, Lennox would remember the explosions less clearly than the spaces between them.
Those brief, impossible pockets of stillness.
His own breathing.
The loose strap on his vest tapping against his chest.
Epps calling another man's name somewhere in the dark.
The scrape of boots through sand as the survivors put distance between themselves and the ruins.
And the moment the machine's head had turned toward him.
Not scanned him.
Looked at him.
Lennox had spent his adult life learning how to read danger in human beings. He knew the difference between panic and calculation. He knew what intent looked like.
The machine had possessed intent.
It had been intelligent.
And hostile.
Whatever it was, humanity was no longer alone.
And somewhere thousands of miles away, Samantha Witwicky was having an argument with her father about a used car.
Neither of them knew their lives were already on a collision course.
• • •
Sam Witwicky had exactly three requirements for her first car.
It had to move.
It had to possess functioning air conditioning.
And preferably, it should not make her look like she had stolen it from somebody's grandfather.
Her father appeared to consider all three unreasonable.
"You need something with character," Ron said as they walked between two crooked rows of used vehicles.
Sam pushed her sunglasses up onto her head and stared at him. Heat rolled off the asphalt hard enough to make the far edge of the lot shimmer. The backs of her knees were already sweating, and they had been there less than fifteen minutes.
"I need something that doesn't break down between here and college."
"That's not an attitude that's going to get you a good deal."
"Dad, you suggested a car with a missing bumper."
"It was cosmetic."
"The bumper was in the back seat."
Ron gestured vaguely toward another row, as if the physical location of the bumper proved nothing. "You're too focused on details."
Sam stopped walking.
"A bumper is not a detail. It is literally a named part of the car."
"See? Negative thinking."
She stared at him.
At nineteen, Samantha Witwicky was technically an adult. She worked. She had saved. She had contributed more money toward the car than her father seemed willing to acknowledge whenever he slipped into one of his paternal-life-lesson moods.
Unfortunately, legal adulthood and personal savings had not made her immune to Ron Witwicky's belief that buying a first car should involve character building, bargaining and at least one vehicle that smelled faintly of wet carpet.
Behind them, the salesman continued talking with the bright persistence of a man who had identified Ron as both stubborn and potentially profitable.
Sam let them drift several steps ahead.
She was already mentally calculating how much longer she could survive without air conditioning when something yellow caught her attention near the far end of the lot.
An old Camaro sat half a row away from everything else.
Black racing stripes.
Faded yellow paint.
A few dents.
The driver's seat looked worn, one headlight seemed slightly clouded, and the whole thing had the vaguely neglected appearance of a dog at the pound trying very hard not to look hopeful.
Sam slowed.
The sensible part of her immediately produced a list of objections.
Old.
Probably terrible mileage.
Absolutely no guarantee the air conditioning worked.
Not subtle.
She kept walking toward it anyway.
Something about the car tugged at her attention with a strange, irrational insistence. Not beauty exactly. It was too battered for that. But it looked different from the other cars surrounding it. Awake, somehow, though she would have laughed at herself if anyone had suggested the word out loud.
She walked around the front.
"What are you?" she murmured.
The Camaro, being a car, did not answer.
Sam rested her fingertips lightly against the hood. The metal was almost hot enough to hurt.
Nothing happened.
No click from the locks. No flicker from the dash. No mysterious burst of life from beneath the hood.
It was simply hot metal beneath her hand.
Sam let out a quiet breath she had not realised she was holding.
Behind her, Ron called, "Sam? You actually looking at one?"
"Maybe."
That single word brought him over immediately.
Ron stopped beside her and looked the Camaro up and down with the exaggerated seriousness of a man inspecting a racehorse. "Now this has character."
"It has rust."
"Surface rust."
"You do not know that."
"I can feel it."
Sam looked at him. "That is not how rust works."
The salesman reached them a few seconds later, still talking before he was fully within earshot. Then he saw which car Sam was standing beside and his stride faltered.
"That one?"
Sam glanced at him. "Is that a problem?"
"No. No problem." He looked toward the office, then back at the Camaro, frowning as though trying to remember when it had been moved there. "Just thought it was parked somewhere else."
Ron immediately noticed the uncertainty. "How much?"
The salesman recovered fast. "Five thousand."
Ron laughed once. "Four."
"Five."
"It is old enough to vote."
"Classic styling."
"Faded paint."
"Patina."
Sam stopped listening as the two of them settled happily into battle.
She opened the driver's door and slid behind the wheel.
The seat gave a soft squeak beneath her. The interior smelled of warm vinyl, old upholstery and dust baked by years of sun. The steering wheel was worn smooth in places beneath her palms.
It should have felt like every other old car Ron had made her look at that afternoon.
It did not.
There was no logical reason for it. The Camaro had more cosmetic damage than half the cars she had already rejected, and she had not even confirmed whether the air conditioning worked. But sitting behind the wheel felt strangely natural, as though she had climbed into a space that had already been measured for her.
Sam frowned at herself.
"You are not getting attached to a car because it looks sad," she muttered.
The Camaro remained, very sensibly, a Camaro.
The salesman eventually produced a key and passed it through the open window.
"Go on," Ron said. "See if it starts."
Sam slid the key into the ignition and turned it.
The engine caught after one rough cough, settling into a low, uneven rumble that vibrated through the steering wheel and into her hands.
Nothing supernatural about it.
Nothing even particularly impressive.
Still, Sam smiled.
Ron saw it immediately. "Oh, no."
She looked at him through the open window. "What?"
"That face."
"I do not have a face."
"You have picked the car."
"I am considering the car."
"Same face."
Sam rolled her eyes, but she did not get out.
Ron turned back to the salesman with renewed purpose. "Four thousand."
The salesman made an offended noise.
Sam leaned back in the seat while they argued over numbers beside the hood. Her fingers rested loosely on the wheel. The engine idled beneath her, steady now.
For reasons she could not have explained, she had the peculiar feeling that the Camaro was waiting.
Not watching her. Not speaking to her. Nothing so absurd.
Just waiting.
She dismissed the thought almost immediately.
It was a car.
And, unlike almost everything else Ron had shown her that afternoon, she actually wanted it.
Years later, that moment would return to her at strange times.
She would wonder what might have happened if she had chosen something else.
If Bumblebee had been forced to follow her in another form.
If the glasses had remained packed away among her father's family junk.
If Mission City had never happened.
If she had never touched the AllSpark.
If William Lennox had never learned her name.
But some things only looked inevitable after they had already happened.
Bumblebee had chosen her.
And from the moment Sam drove that battered Camaro off the lot, the shape of her life began to change.
At first, the changes were small enough to explain away.
The radio had opinions.
That was the first problem.
It developed a habit of changing stations at moments Sam found suspiciously convenient. If she complained about traffic, a song about patience appeared. If she muttered that she was tired, something loud and aggressively cheerful blasted from the speakers. If she insulted the Camaro's paint, the radio went dead for the rest of the drive.
"You cannot be offended," Sam told the dashboard one afternoon. "You're a machine."
The driver's window rolled itself down.
"That's not an argument."
The window rolled back up.
Sam stared ahead for several seconds.
"I'm not doing this with you."
The radio played a triumphant burst of music.
She should have been frightened earlier than she was.
Instead, she adapted.
That was something Sam would eventually learn about herself. Her first response to impossible things was usually not denial. It was irritation that the impossible thing had created a practical problem she now had to solve.
The practical problem arrived the night Bumblebee left without her.
Sam woke to the sound of the Camaro's engine starting outside.
For several seconds she lay still in bed, staring at the dark ceiling.
Then her eyes widened.
"Oh, no."
She threw off the covers and reached the window in time to see her car rolling away from the house.
Not being stolen.
Rolling away.
By itself.
Sam did not waste time trying to make that make sense.
She yanked on shoes, grabbed the nearest hoodie and went out after it.
By the time she caught sight of the Camaro again, Mikaela Banes was with her and Sam had already exhausted every remotely reasonable explanation.
"Cars don't drive themselves," Mikaela said.
"I am aware."
"You keep saying that like it helps."
"It helps me."
They followed at a distance, moving through an industrial stretch of road where warehouses sat dark behind fences and sodium lights painted everything the colour of old bruises.
The Camaro stopped.
Sam and Mikaela ducked behind a concrete barrier.
"This is a terrible idea," Mikaela whispered.
"I know."
"I just want it on record that I know."
"Noted."
The Camaro's driver's door opened by itself.
Sam's stomach dropped.
Then the car began to change.
There was no clean way for her brain to process it.
Panels slid apart. Wheels rotated. The chassis lifted. Metal folded over metal with a rapid sequence of clicks, snaps and deep mechanical shifts that Sam felt through the soles of her shoes. The Camaro rose higher and higher until the shape standing where her car had been was unmistakably humanoid.
Yellow armour.
Black sections between plates.
Hands.
A face.
Blue light where eyes should have been.
Sam forgot how to breathe.
Beside her, Mikaela's fingers closed painfully around her wrist.
"Sam."
Sam did not answer.
The robot crouched slightly, lowering himself without ever becoming anything less than enormous. His head tilted. The blue optics settled directly on Sam.
He looked—
Concerned.
Which was ridiculous.
A giant alien robot had just unfolded out of her first car and Sam's first coherent thought was that he looked concerned.
Her second was that he looked familiar.
Not his face. His manner.
The radio's stubborn silences. The way the windows seemed to have opinions of their own. The impossible sense she'd had in the car yard that the Camaro had been waiting for her.
"You," Sam whispered.
The robot's head tilted the other way.
"You've been doing all of that."
A soft electronic tone came from somewhere in his chest.
Sam pointed at him despite the fact that her hand was shaking. "You could have found a less horrifying way to tell me."
His shoulders lowered a fraction.
Mikaela leaned closer to Sam without taking her eyes off him. "Are you arguing with it?"
"Apparently."
"Do you know it?"
"It was my car five seconds ago, so I don't know what answer you want."
The robot made another low electronic sound.
Then his entire posture changed.
His head snapped toward the road behind them.
One arm came up sharply, pointing.
Sam heard the engine before she saw the lights.
A police cruiser came around the corner too fast.
For one brief, absurd second relief hit her. Police. Normal. Human. Someone who could deal with a car turning into a robot.
Then the cruiser did not slow down.
Its lights washed blue and red across the walls.
The yellow robot moved between Sam and the road.
"Sam," Mikaela said again, voice thinner now. "Should we run?"
The police cruiser transformed.
Sam's decision became significantly easier.
"Run."
They ran.
Metal crashed behind them.
The sound was enormous. Not like a car accident. Like a building tearing itself apart. Sam heard the yellow robot hit something hard enough to shake the ground.
She did not look back until Mikaela grabbed her arm and dragged her around a stack of concrete pipe.
The police-machine was taller than the yellow one and darker, all sharp angles and predatory movement. Its eyes glowed an angry red. The front of the cruiser was no longer a front. The doors had become sections of armour. Something that looked like a weapon unfolded from one arm.
Sam's body went cold.
"That's not with yours, is it?" Mikaela asked.
"I don't have a yours."
The yellow robot slammed into the darker one before it could turn toward them.
They collided with enough force to buckle a metal barrier.
Sam flinched.
The yellow robot fought differently from the other one. The police-machine attacked to destroy. Bumblebee—though Sam did not know his name yet—kept trying to place his own body between the threat and the two girls.
Protecting them.
Protecting her.
The realisation landed strangely.
This thing had been sleeping in her driveway.
This thing had carried her to work.
This thing had played ridiculous songs through the radio just to annoy her.
And now he was taking hits from something that looked built specifically to kill him because she was standing behind him.
"We need to help," Sam said.
Mikaela looked at her as if she had finally lost her mind. "With what? Strong language?"
Sam's gaze swept the industrial yard.
"There has to be something."
There wasn't.
Not anything human-sized.
So they moved when the yellow robot directed them to move, ducked when he threw an arm across them and tried very hard not to die while two alien machines turned the yard into wreckage.
By the time it was over, Sam's palms were scraped, her lungs burned and every assumption she had possessed about the universe had been torn apart.
The yellow robot came back to her.
Not to Mikaela.
To her.
He lowered one hand, palm up.
Sam stared at it.
"This is insane."
Mikaela gave a breathless laugh from beside her. "That's where you're drawing the line?"
Sam stepped onto the metal palm.
The robot lifted her carefully.
Carefully.
That mattered.
He could have crushed her without noticing. Instead every movement slowed when she was near him.
"Okay," Sam said, looking up toward his face. "If we're doing this, I need a name."
The radio unit built into him crackled.
A sequence of clipped voices and fragments came through—old recordings, broadcasts, bits and pieces stitched together until the meaning was clear enough.
Bumblebee.
Sam blinked.
"Bumblebee?"
His optics brightened.
"Really?"
A slightly offended noise came from him.
"No. It's fine. It's... actually kind of cute."
He straightened immediately.
Mikaela covered her mouth, unsuccessfully hiding a laugh.
Sam pointed at her. "Do not encourage him."
Bumblebee's radio played something pleased with itself.
That was the beginning.
After that, reality reorganised itself at speed.
Autobots.
Decepticons.
Cybertron.
Optimus Prime.
A war older than humanity.
The glasses that had belonged to Sam's great-great-grandfather and the strange markings burned into their lenses.
The AllSpark.
A cube of impossible power hidden somewhere on Earth.
Sam sat beneath the night sky and listened to Optimus explain pieces of a history so enormous that her mind kept stumbling over the scale of it. Around her, machines that should not have been alive shifted and spoke like people. Bumblebee stayed close enough that she could feel the faint vibration of his movements through the ground.
She kept looking at him.
Every time she did, he was already watching her.
That was the part Sam adapted to fastest.
Bumblebee had started as her car.
Then he became the impossible thing in her driveway.
Then the impossible thing that stood between her and danger.
Somewhere between the ridiculous radio messages, the fights, the explanations and crouching outside her house while she tried to keep her parents from noticing several tonnes of alien machinery near the property, he became something else entirely.
Family.
Not a pet.
Not property.
Family.
He teased her through radio clips. He sulked when she insulted his paint. He hovered when she was hurt. He seemed to understand what she meant before she finished speaking, and when she was frightened he had a way of dropping his head lower until those bright blue optics were closer to her level.
Sam trusted him.
Completely.
That was why the highway changed everything.
The black SUVs came in hard and fast.
Sam noticed the first one in the mirror and immediately felt something was wrong.
Bumblebee did too.
The engine note changed under her feet.
"Bee?"
The radio cut to static.
Mikaela twisted in her seat. "We've got company."
Another SUV appeared behind the first.
Then another.
They boxed the Camaro in with practised precision.
Sam's pulse kicked hard.
"Those aren't cops."
Bumblebee surged forward.
The first vehicle moved to block him.
He swerved, tyres screaming.
For several seconds the road became nothing but speed, engines and the hard snap of decisions made too quickly to think through. Sam braced one hand against the dash and the other against the door.
"Bee, get us out of here."
He tried.
The agents were ready for him.
The road ahead filled with vehicles.
Men in dark tactical gear spilled out with weapons Sam had never seen before.
Bumblebee braked so violently the belt locked across her chest.
"What are those?"
The first freezing blast struck the hood.
White vapour exploded across the windshield.
Bumblebee jerked.
Sam felt the impact through the entire frame of the car.
"Bee!"
The doors flew open.
Not opened.
Flew.
Bumblebee transformed around them with frantic speed, throwing both girls clear of the shifting panels before rising between them and the agents.
Weapons fired again.
The freezing substance spread across yellow armour in branching white sheets. Bumblebee staggered. Servos shrieked. One knee slammed into the asphalt hard enough to crack it.
Sam's fear lasted exactly until she understood what the men were doing.
Then fury swallowed it.
"Stop!"
She ran toward him.
An agent intercepted her.
"Get back!"
"He's not attacking you!"
The agent caught her around the upper arms.
Sam drove her elbow backward.
He grunted.
She twisted hard, wrenching one arm free and made two running steps before someone else seized the back of her hoodie.
"Let go of me!"
Bumblebee turned toward the sound of her voice.
That cost him.
Another blast struck his shoulder.
He dropped lower.
"Bee, don't! Look at them!"
He did not.
His optics stayed on her.
Even with half his armour frosting over, even with cables being fired across his limbs and men swarming around him, he was watching Sam.
Making sure she was still there.
"He's with me!" Sam shouted. "He was protecting us!"
Nobody listened.
Plastic restraints closed around her wrists.
She yanked against them hard enough that the edge bit immediately into skin.
"You don't understand what you're doing."
"Ma'am, stop resisting."
"Don't call me ma'am while you're shooting my friend!"
Mikaela was shouting somewhere to the side. Sam could not make out the words over the hiss of the freezing weapons and the scrape of metal against asphalt.
Bumblebee tried to rise.
The cables snapped tight.
His arm slammed back down.
A sound tore out of him—not speech, not exactly, but pain had a language all its own.
Sam went still for half a heartbeat.
Then she fought harder.
"Stop it!"
The agent behind her tightened his grip.
"Move her."
"No!"
Through the bodies surrounding her, Sam caught one final clear glimpse of Bumblebee.
Yellow armour pinned beneath cables and frost.
One hand clawed against the road.
Blue optics fixed on her.
"Bee!"
A black-clad shoulder blocked her view.
Sam was hauled backward toward one of the SUVs, twisting violently enough that two agents were eventually needed to get her inside.
"Where are you taking him?"
No answer.
"Where are you taking Bumblebee?"
The door slammed.
She kicked the back of the front seat.
"Answer me!"
The vehicle started moving.
Sam turned in the seat, fighting the restraints so she could see through the rear window.
For a few seconds she saw the scene shrinking behind them—flashing lights, white vapour, dark uniforms, the enormous yellow shape forced down against the road.
Then the convoy turned.
Bumblebee disappeared from view.
That was the last time Sam saw him.
The drive was long enough for fear to burn itself down into anger.
At first she demanded answers every few minutes.
Where were they going?
Who were these people?
What had they done with Bumblebee?
Was Mikaela in another vehicle?
Did they have the other Autobots?
The agents gave her almost nothing.
The man across from her told her to stay calm exactly once.
Sam stared at him. "You froze a sentient alien into the pavement and kidnapped me off a highway. Calm is not available to you right now."
He stopped trying to make conversation after that.
The restraints scraped the same places on her wrists every time the vehicle turned. Sam kept worrying at them anyway. By the time the convoy finally descended into the hidden complex beneath Hoover Dam, the skin underneath was red and raw.
She noticed the dam only in fragments.
Concrete.
Security doors.
Elevators descending farther than seemed reasonable.
Men with badges.
Men with weapons.
Corridors built to make ordinary people feel very small and very watched.
Every door that opened made Sam look for yellow armour.
Every distant metallic sound made her head turn.
Every radio crackle made her listen for Bumblebee's broken, borrowed voice.
There was nothing.
That frightened her more than the highway had.
On the highway, she had been able to see him.
Here, Sector Seven had swallowed him whole.
"Where is he?" Sam asked again as an agent marched her down another corridor.
No answer.
"You've had me in a vehicle for hours. I've answered your questions. You know my name. You know where I live. You apparently know more about my family history than I do. So where is Bumblebee?"
The agent kept walking.
Sam stopped.
The hand on her arm tightened.
"Move."
"No."
"Miss Witwicky—"
"Where is he?"
"Move."
"You want information from me, then start giving me some."
The agent pulled her forward.
Sam planted her heels.
"He saved my life. Twice. He hasn't hurt anyone unless they were trying to kill me. You attacked him, you dragged me away from him, and now nobody will even tell me if he's alive."
"You don't know what that thing is."
Sam's expression changed.
"I know exactly what he is. His name is Bumblebee."
The agent's mouth tightened.
"And you are going to stop calling him a thing."
A door ahead opened.
Voices carried from the room beyond.
Military voices.
Different from the clipped, secretive tone Sector Seven seemed to favour. Tired. Angry. Direct.
Sam barely noticed.
"Where is he?" she demanded again, louder now. "Where did you take him?"
The agent tugged at her arm.
Sam jerked away.
"Don't touch me."
"Miss Witwicky—"
"No. You people came after us. You shot first. You took my friend, and I swear to God if you've hurt him—"
Inside the room beyond the doorway, Captain William Lennox looked up.
He had been listening to Sector Seven explain impossible things with the exhausted patience of a man who had already watched one impossible thing destroy his base.
Then he heard the girl's voice in the corridor.
Young.
Furious.
Not frightened enough to be sensible.
"—I am not telling you anything else until somebody tells me where Bumblebee is."
Lennox's attention shifted fully toward the door.
Epps, standing beside him, glanced over too.
"Who's that?" Epps murmured.
Lennox did not answer.
A second later Sam Witwicky appeared in the doorway between two Sector Seven agents, wrists bound in front of her, hair half out of place, raw red marks visible beneath the plastic restraints and murder in her eyes.
She was still arguing.
"Take these off."
"Keep moving."
"I am moving. I'm moving toward the person who is going to tell me where my car is."
One of the agents gave a humourless laugh. "Your car?"
Sam rounded on him.
"His name is Bumblebee."
Lennox watched her for two seconds.
That was all it took to understand three things.
Sector Seven had badly underestimated her.
Whatever Bumblebee was, she genuinely believed he was on their side.
And this nineteen-year-old civilian was somehow standing at the centre of the same impossible war that had reached across the world and destroyed Lennox's base.
Sam finally noticed the soldiers in the room.
Her gaze moved over uniforms, weapons and unfamiliar faces before landing on Lennox.
For the first time since entering the corridor, she stopped talking.
Lennox had no idea yet how important that moment would become.
Neither did she.