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Firestar was smiling at me when I came back to my senses. "You feel it, don't you?" she asked simply.

"I'm not quite sure exactly what I feel," I told her. "But-" I looked up. "Thank you for bringing me here, Firestar."

I turned, and lay against the netting. (The wind was warm at my back.) I thought about those pumping veins of energon. And suddenly, a new panic assailed me.

"I drank the planet's blood this morning!"

Firestar sat down beside me. "Yes you did."

"But- but isn't that... horrible?"

"It's how we were made. It's how we've always been."

"Won't we run out though, one day?" I asked Firestar. "Won't we kill Cybertron, if we keep on drinking its energon?"

Firestar smiled. "No, Rainbow. We won't run out. Our planet is... it's whole now. It's healed. As long as we don't go back to killing each other, I think Cybertron could sustain itself indefinitely." She pointed to a gray-green complex built into the cliff-face a little below the surface to my right. "We help some," she explained. "That's a recycling refinery. But mostly…" Her voice faded, her optics grew wistful. "Mostly, the planet just takes care of us. That energon you're seeing down there – I can't say it so that it makes sense, but trust me, Rainbow; it's Cybertron's gift of life to us. We are its children." Firestar's whole body sagged against the net. "I can't tell you how wonderful it is to not be scraping out a living on a near-corpse any more."

I thought about this for a while. "Firestar?" I hesitated. "Why is it not a near-corpse any more?"

She turned away from me. She looked down at the chasm reaching into the heart of our world, alive with light. And when she spoke, it was with unaccustomed heaviness.

"I can only tell you what the oldest stories said. That Primus was the force of Creation. That Unicron was the force of chaos - or destruction, depending on who was telling the story. Understand, Rainbowsparkles, I never paid much attention. No one did." She sighed. "The legends say Primus and Unicron were once parts of one being. They say there was a schism. They say that Primus hid himself in - or maybe as – our planet Cybertron, so that his other half couldn't find and destroy him. Destroy us." She looked at me, her optics dark. "But we brought the Destroyer with us, little one."

Firestar hung slack against the netting, staring dully up into the empty sky.

"No one remembers how we all came online back at the beginning. But we were too busy fighting to ask questions." She smiled wanly. "Were the Decepticons born as warriors, and the Autobots created peaceful? Some say so. I don't know. Are any of Megatron's propaganda stories about Autobot oppression based in fact? I hope not. But I don't remember very well so far back. New memories supplant old ones, until the deep past is lost in an overwritten mass of stories that we've told ourselves until they all feel true. You get a lot of messed-up stuff inside your head when you fight in a civil war that lasts millions of years. We had this vague assumption we were special - we were the only non-organic lifeforms in the known universe, and we lived on a metallic planet. But in the war I think we stopped seeing the other side as - well, transformers. They became monsters, not brothers and sisters. We dared not admit our commonality. We were good, they were evil, and anything we did to protect ourselves was justified by their atrocities. I imagine the Decepticons thought the exact same thing.

"And that's what made the Great War go on for so long past sanity. We were insane. We could not forgive ourselves for what we'd done, let alone try to forgive all our enemies' atrocities. It took more than a ceasefire to end it. It took a restart for our entire species. Optimus Prime convinced Megatron to-" She broke off, glanced at me, then shook her head. "I'll explain later. But they formed a kind of pact. And then they ordered their armies to stop fighting." She shrugged. "They were united. But the rest of us were still as fractured as we'd always been. Every day we had to decide if we'd keep the fighting stopped. I wonder sometimes if the peace would still have crumbled despite all our leaders sacrificed, if Unicron hadn't shown up.

"The chaos guy," I said, to show I'd been paying attention.

"The chaos god," Firestar corrected me.

"What is a god?" I asked.

Firestar shook her head and looked away. "Even now, I'm not sure I know. Even after I've seen them."

I waited. This was getting interesting.

"When Primus started giving sparks to the first newling femmes we made, Unicron sniffed out the creative energy," Firestar continued. "He came after our planet: horned and orange and massive and very, very, very hungry." She rolled, and pointed to the world beneath us. "Imagine that wanting to eat you," she suggested.

I shuddered.

She looked straight at me. "Primus didn't run."

I glanced down at the planet, full of sudden admiration. I felt like Firestar and I were specks again. "What did you do?" I whispered, totally enthralled.

"We fled." She said it with the same dark loathing reserved for acts of meanest cowardice. "We left him to face Unicron alone."

I waited for her to go on. And waited. She said nothing. "How could you?" I gasped out finally.

She shook her head, eyes dark again. "It was apocalypse. We were terrified. But I think Command had some idea of what was coming, because they'd prepared ships full of supplies for just such a global emergency. Not one of us was lost." She paused. "Our god was lost instead."

"What happened?" I whispered.

Firestar shut down her optics completely. "Primus grabbed onto Unicron, and wouldn't let him go." She shuddered. "We could hear Primus screaming as Unicron ripped him open. But he still held on. It was… the hardest thing I've ever had to watch. After a while, we couldn't even tell which one was which – and somehow, that was worst of all." She fell silent for a long time. The wind rumbled up around us, hot and alive and not a little dangerous.

Firestar pulled herself back to the present. "When the fight was finally over, all we saw was this huge, dreadful world of ash. No colors left. All molten gray. And lifeless. Our planet and our gods were dead, and we had watched it happen. Still, none of us could stand to leave. After a time, we sent down explorers. And, well…" Firestar looked at me flatly. "They weren't dead. Primus. Unicron. They're still alive. Somehow they're... reunited. Cybertron is twice as big as it once was."

"It was dead, though, you said. How-?"

Firestar sighed. "Once Jetfire's exploration team and the Constructicons set foot on the planet, it... rebooted. Started producing energon like crazy. There was a massive earthquake – scared the exploration team silly, let me tell you – and the whole planet transformed from a lump of ash into – well, into the Cybertron you live on today. Minus the major cities, of course – they'd been mostly melted in the fight between the gods. So there was lots of rebuilding to do. But maybe all that work's exactly what we needed."

Firestar shut her mouth tight, and looked away from me. I didn't need to read her spark to know that story had been hard for her to tell.

"Thank you for helping me to understand," I said. I wanted to reach out and comfort her, but that seemed too presumptuous. I was only a newling. She was warborn. So we stared together down into the chasm, our thoughts separate as the torus-states the crack divided.

Firestar shivered, and spoke almost to herself. "They say you can go down and speak to him. To them. To Primacron. But I don't… I don't want to know. Can you understand that? I don't want the responsibility of really knowing all of this for sure. And from what I saw of Primus… well, he's a lot more like you than he's like me."

The wind whistled up between us, but it wasn't a comfort. I was struck by a horrible thought. "What about me? Sunstreaker and Thundercracker made me, not Cybertron. Am I still-?" I bit my lip, afraid of the answer, needing to know. "Am I the same thing as you are, or something different?" (Am I just a cheap knockoff? was what I meant but couldn't say.)

Firestar looked at me, head cocked to one side. "That chamber you woke up in - do you remember it at all?"

I nodded.

"That's the place where people go to talk to Primacron," she said. She shrugged. "All I know is you got your spark from somewhere, Rainbowsparkles. And it wasn't from those two confused old soldiers."

I remembered the first Voice I'd heard, in my first instant online. It had not been Sunstreaker or Thundercracker. It had been something – Someone – well, bigger. I looked sideways at Firestar, and hesitated. "I think – I think Primacron spoke to me. When I was made. He wasn't – they weren't… It didn't sound very godlike." I was still mad that my creator-god had let me choose a ridiculous name without giving me any word of warning. I decided I did not trust this Primacron much.

Firestar looked back at me. "I don't think Primacron is much more than a bigger version of us, Rainbow," she said, sounding wistful.

A sudden question burst out of me. "Why don't I have any brothers?"

"Do you see any other femmes around?"

I shook my head. "So far, just my sisters and you. Oh – and I met Chromia one time."

"That's why," she said bluntly.

"But then what am I? What is a femme for? And how did they know if they made me right, when there were so few others to compare?"

Firestar's gaze went all distant again. "Oh, there used to be hundreds of femmes. Thousands. A whole third faction." Suddenly Firestar seemed so sad it hurt to look at her. (And I'm not even talking about what was in her spark. I peeked, worried, and it was almost dark.) "They all left, Rainbow. Left, were killed, or…" She shrugged. "The femmes hated that the mechs insisted on fighting, that they stopped trying to work out a peaceful solution. So… They left." She looked away from me. "I stayed."

I wanted to know why she'd stayed. I wanted to know all about it, about her entire life, everything. She was a femme – not like me, maybe, but a femme. I wanted to ask. But if you had seen her face that day, you would have shut up too. I didn't peek into her spark again. I was too scared to try it.

After a long silence that only I seemed to notice, Firestar did this little shoulder-roll-stretch, and like she was crawling out from under the previous conversation. "I think it's time to move along," she said. "Let's save the rest of your questions for Iacon."

I was more than ready to leave this place. I'd come out here hoping to put some miles on my wheels and see more of my home-planet, and instead we'd so far spent a long time hanging on a net under a bridge!

Firestar climbed to the edge of the net, leaped up, and grabbed the roadway's edge on her first try. She turned around, never once losing grip, lifted her legs, and somersaulted back onto the bridge. Let me emphasize this point: She made that whole thing look easy.

I stared, shaking my head, until she reached down for me. Then I cheated – I used my rockets to help me get back up there. We transformed, and drove down the long, thin archway onto the Iacon torus-state. And all the way there, neither of us said another word.

The sun was high by the time we sighted the outermost rings of Iacon. We'd passed five cities, and crossed over two more inter-torus bridges on the way, but had not stopped. Only midday, but I was feeling tired already. This day was much more full than I had known how to prepare for.

Firestar's demeanor changed as we passed through a heavy, engraved archway which proclaimed, "Iacon: Original Pre-Cataclysm Site. Here Let It Stand Until The Last Star's Light Winks Out!" That was odd; none of the other cities seemed to care much about 'original location.' Firestar drove distractedly, like she was staring hungrily at everything. Which meant that for the first time in my life, I wasn't the only one amazed by normal, boring things.

Iacon was very different from home. I'm sure you know this, but I'll write it anyway: Tessarus is laid out in neatly cross-quartered concentric rings. So were the other rebuilt cities we had passed. But Iacon's a helter-skelter pile of fractal circles. There's no sense of planning or organization. The architecture's different, too. Instead of towers rising toward the center, Iacon's all humpbacked domes. There's very little chrome or polished metal anywhere. It's all brushed bronze and etched nickel. Sorry, but Iacon is dull. It's got no flash at all. But it's got presence. It's got history.

"What a mess!" I blurted out, as we negotiated a seven-way intersection choked with ground-based mechs.

"Iacon was never much for order," replied Firestar in a strange voice. "But it is home. All through the War, we never stopped defending it."

The city was old. I could tell by the way everyone moved – carefully, as if this place were somehow holy ground. I could read age in the worn glyphs and pictographs that decorated many of the structures here. (Age was all I could read of them - they weren't written in any language I'd studied.) Iacon was more ancient than I could fathom. At just a few months old, I felt painfully out of place.

But all the other bots we passed seemed to have Iacon's energy flowing through their very sparks. At least, the red-badge Autobot ones did. Perhaps I should have felt more connection, more reverence – after all, one of my makers was an Autobot. But I only felt shut out.

"We're here." Firestar pulled off the roadway and parked beside the low slopes of a massive multi-dome complex. She transformed, smiled, and introduced the building like it was a well-loved friend. "The Archives of Old Iacon. All the collected knowledge of our race."

I transformed, and looked at it doubtfully. The low, brown building looked more like an armored bunker than a library. The only thing denoting its importance was its location at the very center of the city. (A fact I only recognized because I still had Firestar's map on my inner-display.) I looked at my mentor and raised an eyebrow.

"This is the place?"

"Trust me," said Firestar. "You'll love it." She braced herself, and hauled open a dark, rivet-studded door. (It creaked on massive, ornate hinges, and deepened a curved drag-mark on the ground.)

The floor within sloped steeply downward from the moment we entered. The air smelled a bit musty, and seemed denser than the air outside, like it had been compressed somehow. (Or maybe the Archives' atmosphere just weighed heavily on me.) Deep silence made our footfalls seem obscene. The only things that moved were motes of dust that parted, swirling, as we passed.

"What are you hoping to find out here?" Firestar asked. "Please tell me that it's something small. You've had more than enough heavy knowledge dumped on you for one day."

I felt my face give away my embarrassment. I knew just the question, but did I dare admit it to her? "Um. It's silly…" I prefaced.

She snorted. "Good! The sillier the better."

I gulped twice, and went for broke. "There's this big mech. I've seen him twice. At first I thought he was a newling like me, but Sunstreaker and Thundercracker – and now even you - say there aren't any mech newlings. I'm curious, though, because all the other warborns are so plain-" I caught myself and backpedaled. "I mean - sorry! - your build is quite nice! It's just this mech had a headsculpt even more flamboyant than Windchaser's! And he carried it off like it was nothing. I just want to know who he is. That's all."

"Why?"

Firestar's question stopped me cold. Why did I still care so much about a mech I had seen twice? Why did he matter? (Why had he looked back at me the day we'd met so disappointingly?) I braced myself for honesty.

"I guess... I just want to be like him. I want to know how he does it - moving through a crowd of bots who all look up at him like he's- like he's the walking sun, or something. And he just takes it in his stride. I want to be able to do that. Mechs look at me all day like I'm the first energon they've seen in a month. I want to stop being scared by that – to stand out but not be overwhelmed. You know?" I faded to a stop. This was a lot to admit out loud to a stranger.

Firestar smirked. "I might understand you better than you think," she said. "And it's the perfect kind of question to bring into the Archives. Have fun, Rainbow. I'll be back in about an hour."

"You're leaving?" I squeaked, surprised. (And – since I'm being honest here – a little bit unsettled. Remember, I was used to being hyper-supervised by my worried creators. Some part of me felt Firestar was being irresponsible.)

"I have some other errands in the city," Firestar said. "This was my home, remember."

I would not ask her to stay with me, would not prove myself dependent. But my makers' talk of kidnappings had woven insidious tendrils through my spark. I admit it - I was afraid to be left alone. I looked for an excuse to keep Firestar there with me. "How will I find anything in this place without someone to show me how it works?" I demanded.

"Ask one of the librarians," she said. "It's what they're here for, after all." And with that, she turned around and walked back briskly up the hall and out the door.

I listened as the massive door groaned shut behind her. I may have even jumped a little, when its bolt clicked into place. I cycled a steadying ventilation through my systems. Then I turned, and faced the Hall of Records.