Don't Sing Me No More Blues

by Desdemona Kakalose

Jazz, accidental thief of the planet's most priceless artifact; Officer Prowl, Iacon's most capable pursuit unit: two strangers who will have to confront their own deficiencies in the face of a truth bigger than either of them. Who is Jazz really, and what is he hiding? jazz/prowl, TFP inspired, enemies to lovers

Ao3 crosspost. Started during Prowl Week in April 2020 and ended seven months later, haha.

Contains mentions of casual sex work, some criticism of law enforcement, and on-screen depictions of a superior pressuring a subordinate into sexual favors.

---

PARTY TRICK

NOW:

"Lay one on me, barkeep," Jazz said, sliding a credit chip across the counter. "You would not believe the week I've had."

The bar was full of middle class couriers and clerks, moderate hedonism, delicate drink mixes that fizzed and bubbled. Wherever Jazz went, Jazz was at home—but it was, he'd give you, a bit easier to disappear in a crowd like this. The zitar player up in the alcove gave a whoop as the percussionist started in on what must have been a familiar beat round these parts.

"What's your poison, mister?" the bartender said. He was a small one, with an ID tag that had more assorted glyphs for smiling faces than actual letters.

"Somethin' smooth and sweet," Jazz said, flipping up his visor for the express purpose of winking at the little bartender, whose lights flushed a gratifying blue.

"Just like you, huh," the bartender, whose ID immediately switched to a series of winking glyphs. Trying a little hard, but cute all the same. Jazz favored him with a grin.

"You know it, mech," Jazz said. He took back the credit chip and pocketed it. "Haven't been to Rodion in a while. What's good fun for a crowd like this?"

Swerve hesitated. "You're not a cop," he said, "right? Because if you are, you have to tell me."

Jazz laughed. "No, mech, not me."

"Alright, well," Swerve said, biting his lip. "You didn't hear it from me," Swerve said, leaning over the bar top, "but there's a red party up on the rooftop level a couple units down, if you can get in. Talk about a smooth crowd. Of course I couldn't make it, too bad, my work ethic wouldn't let me disappoint so many thirsty patrons. But you could probably slip in."

"You're a regular Prime of the people," Jazz said, "I'm sure the public thanks ya with every sip."

He watched the bartender pulling down a glowing purple liqueur and, before the smaller mech could recover from the compliment, added, "Less of an adventurer, myself, though. Anything a little mellower you could point me at? Red's all well 'n good for the price, but I like to savor a night."

The bartender gave a thoughtful noise as the liqueur coiled down into the bottom of a clear square glass. "I can name you six different data class clerks who are gonna leave here and immediately throw a bolt rattler in the basement of some sublease, but if you're looking for mellow, you're not gonna have much luck around here. These young bots want a party, and they want it straight to the processor."

Jazz quirked a smile. "You're not so old yourself," he said, "or I miss my guess."

The bartender waved him off with a distinctly mollified air. "Seems like everybody these days wants to get smashed fast," he said. "Not that I'm complaining! Keeps shanix in my coffers, I'm pouring 'em hand over bottle here."

"Fast times," Jazz agreed.

"Seems like it's harder to get your daily fuel than a hard drink these days," the bartender said. He set down his drink and slid it across the bar top into Jazz's waiting hands. "You know, I heard this political type—you know political types—talking about engex and circuses, and what I wanna know is, what else are you supposed to do with the dregs of your paycheck once the rent gets paid?"

"I'll drink to that," Jazz said. But just as he'd begun to tip back his drink in honor of bad nights and worse mornings, the bar chatter was rent open by the deafening whoop of sirens, patrons scattering and clamping hands to their audials. There was a bang as the exit of the bar flew open.

Jazz turned in his seat, cube at his lips, just in time to spot the white pursuit vehicle steaming and panting in the doorway. The enforcer pointed a shaking finger at Jazz.

"Jazz of Staniz," the enforcer shouted, "surrender the matrix and come quietly!"

The enforcer reached for his gun, red lights flaring to life down the length of the barrel. Jazz knocked back his drink. "Well!" he said to the open-mouthed bartender, "time to split!"

Jazz flipped down his visor, washing the world in a cool, clear blue.

THEN:

Rewind a week.

One hour before the meeting that would change his life, Jazz of Staniz lay half reclined on a fallen chair, breathing smoke. A song pulsed from the speakers mounted inside his chassis, cool blue music, a lazy slide. He'd swallowed a packet of dross a little earlier, which was slowly melting into his engex-warmed tanks, and the smoke billowed up through his intake into glittering clouds in the dimness.

He liked those kindsa moments, in that quiet place before a party roused itself from the stupor of the night before, the cool and the blue, the pleasant lingering ache. Of course he'd already bid his guests goodnight earlier in the morning, watching them stagger down to the street and off to their homes in the soft glow of the strip lighting along the gutters. Now the strip lighting down below was all dark, and here in the moderately nice part of civilization, black strips of solar paneling were angling themselves hopefully towards the rising sun.

The door swung open, and the yellow hallway light illuminated the skinny glowering frame of Orion Pax, arms crossed over his chest.

"You're the worst roommate I've ever had," said Orion, looking adorably grim.

"Just had a couple friends over, my mech, no worries," Jazz said, stretching luxuriously. "You know I'll get it all cleaned up for you before you get back from shift. I just needa savor it a minute."

"That's not an option," Orion said. His eyebrows pulled together tight. "You do know what day it is, don't you, Jazz?"

Jazz rolled his head and gave the ceiling a thoughtful squint. "Mmmm... sixth of Grune?"

"Not even the right orbital cycle," Orion said, mouth twitching as he forced himself not to smile. "Jazz, the senate meeting is today. I told you this was coming weeks ago."

Jazz scrunched up his face. "You 'n the sharkticon still wanna play that game? Ya'll know the House always wins."

"We may never get another opportunity like this again," Orion said. He bent down and started scooping up trash and wayward belongings from the floor, never quite able to ignore a mess. "They don't know what we're capable of. The senate—"

"Don't pick that up, mech, come on, I got it—"

"—they might think they're giving us a chance to embarrass ourselves in front of an audience, but we're already well prepared for what we'll say when the matrix doesn't choose Megatronus. Megatron. Sorry, I'm still getting used to the new name. The important part is the platform, the people we can reach like this with the message—"

"Yeah? You think Meggy's on the same page as you and your crew?"

"Of course he is," Orion said, folding up a tarp against his chest. "We've already been over the speech twelve times since I last revised it."

Jazz blew a cloud of glittering smoke. "You don't think maybe Megatron's got more'n a turbofox in the fight, looking at the Primacy?"

Orion looked up, optics whirring and resetting. "If you're worried about the outcome, you could always come help me—"

"Nah, nah," Jazz cut him off. "Politics ain't my scene."

"It's your world too," Orion said sharply. "Jazz you're one of the cleverest people I know, you'd be able to make such a difference if you would just—"

"Baby please," Jazz said, slumping down into the overturned chair, "not tonight, I got a headache."

Orion gave a frustrated sigh and dumped his arm full of odds and ends over Jazz's helm. Several of them bounced; Jazz winced.

"Bad news for you," Orion said, "because you're not staying here while I'm gone."

Jazz reached up and pushed the edge of a tarp up off his helm. "Whaddaya mean, I'm not staying?"

"I mean, if this all goes to hell, I'm a known quantity. There's a good chance they'll raid my apartment while I'm in custody. And you," he said, "are not supposed to be here."

Jazz grimaced. He wasn't on the lease, that was true. What had started with a week of spontaneous couch crashing had ended up with several years of off and on cohabitation. Jazz even living on this side of town without a data-class waiver was a second tier misdemeanor—if you wanted to get technical, Jazz living anywhere was some probably kind of misdemeanor. But the less said about that the better.

With Orion was the longest that Jazz had spent in one place since he split from Staniz. He was planning on leaving any cycle now, of course. Just waiting for the right time.

He wasn't sure why he hadn't yet, tell you the truth. They were nice digs, nothing fancy, plenty roomy though. Him and Orion just clicked, right from day one. They had a good rhythm going. Even Jazz's little bumper-knockers didn't bother Orion much, so long as Jazz picked up afterward and didn't let nobody get handsy with Orion's private stuff.

Jazz looked up at his friend, remembering to put on a smile a second too late. "Hey, now, I don't wanna getcha in trouble. You need me to hit the road, my mech?"

Orion tsked. "I'm not banishing you to the wasteland, Jazz."

Jazz gave a half-meaningful shrug. "I'd hate to wear out a welcome."

Orion checked his chronometer readout, the glyphs flashing blue on his wrist before disappearing into his plating again. "Look, just come with me for the day. There's going to be a whole retinue of volunteers from the movement, you'll blend right in."

"OP…" Jazz whined.

"No politics," Orion promised. "Just keep me company for a few hours and I'll buy you a drink at Maccadam's. It's just better if you're with me throughout this. I don't really know what's coming. But if something goes wrong while you're with me, I can advocate for you."

Jazz hesitated. He couldn't quite bring himself to admit how spooked the idea of going into a government building made him, not with Orion already hip deep in a two-vorn campaign that was probably going to end with his flat being put under permanent surveillance.

Jazz summoned up a reassuring grin. Maybe he really would hit the road for good, after this. He'd been too long in one place, anyways.

"Alright, OP," he said. "As your sexiest friend—"

"You are not my sexiest friend," Orion snorted.

"—It's my duty to make sure you look as good as possible when you're getting your ass whooped in front of half the government." He gave a deep, luxurious stretch, feeling cables pop and snap into their correct place. "Anyway," he added, "might as well see what wild slag it is you do on weekends."

NOW:

Jazz dove for cover at the same moment that the enforcer opened fire. A drinking cube shattered above him, and then a sleeper slug embedded itself in the wall behind the bar, crackling and sending up sparks. Yikes. Any kind of contact with a slug like that would knock him offline, no matter how far from his processor it hit.

With a hand on the bar top, Jazz flipped himself up, heels over head, and sank out of sight behind the bar where the small-framed bartender was crouching, arms tucked over his head.

"Sorry for the trouble!" Jazz said, flipping up a credit chip in his fingers. "Hang tight! First round is on me!"

The bartender fumbled the chip and then, looking it over, said, "Whoa! This is crypto!"

"Never know when you'll need it!"

Glasses shattered, patrons shrieked and ducked behind their tables; Jazz skated across the bar top and leapt onto a nearby table, dancing across the length of the room from table top to table top. The enforcer was a good shot, but Jazz was too quick and smooth for him. He caught hold of a support pillar and spun himself tight around it, fast enough that the incoming slugs whistled past his optics.

Frames streamed past the enforcer; light enough on his feet, he spun to avoid colliding with them as they passed. By the time he got his rifle back up, Jazz was across the room.

The band up in the alcove of the bar, having just clanged and bashed their way to an unexpected halt at the sound of sirens, gave a whoop of appreciation and then launched into a classic bar-brawl jive. Jazz paused in the midst of scrambling up the pillar to give the zitar player a laugh and a salute.

Without any sign of frustration, the enforcer checked the magazine of sleeper slugs and finding it empty, holstered his gun with one easy motion.

"Runnin low?" Jazz called, hooking a thigh around the pillar. "Gonna hafta get a little closer, baby!"

There was a set of second tier dais, for small parties, and the partiers up there whistled and beeped for him as he jumped from the pillar to the stairwell of the dais and swung himself up over the railing.

"Alright," Jazz said, rubbing his hands together. "Let's get it on."

The enforcer, his black racing stripes glinting on his thighs, ran for the stairwell of a nearer dais and took the stairs two at a time, scattering partiers at the top as he flipped into alt and came racing across the level. At the edge of the platform, without hesitation, he launched himself to the next nearest dais.

"That's the spirit!" Jazz laughed. And then he yelped and ducked to avoid getting a chest full of airborn pursuit vehicle.

Tables and seating went crashing to the ground; Jazz went low and the enforcer went high, a heel missed its mark and sent a bench flying.

"You're good at this!" Jazz said, "What's your name, officer?"

The enforcer, yellow optics narrowed in concentration, flipped open a hip compartment and pulled out a buzzing set of stasis cuffs.

"Aw, don't be like that," Jazz said, "you know my name, doncha? Let's have a little reciprocity!"

"Return the matrix," the enforcer said. "I will see to it that your sentence is mitigated."

"Ahh believe me, I would if I could," Jazz sighed. He ducked back out from the arc of the officer's fist, evading swing after swing. "Come on now, lemme buy you a drink—"

Jazz caught the next fist, pushing it back until it was coiled at the level of the enforcer's mouth. He grinned at the slight widening of optics.

"—we'll talk this out like reasonable mechs, hows about it?"

There was a moment of silence. And then something snapped closed around Jazz's other wrist, where it was groping the enforcer's hip. Jazz looked down. The band of an iron stasis cuff glinted up at him.

"Oh," he said. "Now that's not nice."

"You are under arrest," the enforcer said. "This officer will retain record of your statements for future evidence. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court."

Jazz looked back up. "You only got one wrist, though," he said, and then swept the legs out from beneath the officer.

They hit the ground at nearly the same time, Jazz pulled down a second behind him, but Jazz wasted no time in pinning the mech to the floor with the full weight of his frame, which—might not have been that much last week, but today was more than enough.

"I really hate to do this to such a pretty face," Jazz said, drawing back a fist, "but I don't see another way out of this for either of us."

A bestial, wall-shaking roar froze Jazz with his fist curled in mid-air. His audio receptors cycled up and down, searching for something recognizable in the frequency. For the first time, the officer looked distressed, even with Jazz's knees already pinning him to the floor. His optics widened.

"No no no," he muttered.

Jazz snapped upright. "Hey, that sounds like—"

The front door, at the other end of the bar, gave an awful creak like the shot of a supersonic rifle and tore straight off its hinges. A set of enormous claws hooked under the lintel of the door, and then Megatron's glowing eyes appeared in the foggy darkness outside.

"Aw, slag," Jazz said. If Megatron was here, then that meant—

"Jazz, you misbegotten excuse for a no-good Prime!" shouted the shrill but fierce voice of Orion Pax, "You get your aft down here right now and face the music!"

Jazz groaned. There was a sudden shift under him—a jabbing arm—and then the enforcer caught the single dangling cuff in his hand. There was a nanoclick in which his gaze tracked the distance from the cuff in his hand to the un-captured wrist, equations almost visibly scrolling behind his narrow optics, before he snapped the cuff closed around his own wrist.

"I'm not letting you escape," he bit out. The cord yanked taut between them with a useless sizzle of charge.

Jazz reset his optical feed. "Well," he said. "Alright then."

He scooped the enforcer up by the small of his back, rolled them both to their feet, and grinned.

"Twenny shannix says we can make the window from here," he said.

Before the enforcer could spit out the protest in his mouth, Jazz thumped the last remaining upright table, sending a still-capped bottle of something lavender spinning end over end. He caught it out of the air on their way down, and then let gravity carry them both the rest of the way to the ground.

The window shattered in a rain of light through the fog.

THEN:

Twenty minutes before the event that would change Jazz's life forever, the mech in question was lazing on a deep-set window sill in the lobby of the senate house, watching Orion and his gladiator exchange fleeting, reticent touches. It would almost be cute, Megatron clearly looking for reasons to touch Pax, his huge clawed fingers picking imagined specks of dust off the clerk's shoulders. When Orion reached up and framed Megatron's helm with his hands on the pretense of making sure his metal wasn't streaky, Jazz officially gave up and closed his optics.

"Remember," Orion was saying, "we're all behind you. You'll make an amazing Prime, God willing."

Yeah, sure, Jazz thought. Even God ain't that dumb.

Not that the mech had a sparkling's chance in an acid storm, even if God did take a wild liking to him. The politicos would chew him up like a garbage scow. Why anyone would wanna be Prime was beyond Jazz.

"Alright Jazz," Orion said, over his shoulder, "you ready to go?"

Jazz saluted the affirmative. Megatron gave him a deeply resentful glare, baring his sharkticon teeth, as if he suspected that Jazz had come here specifically to make his life more difficult.

"Remember, you just let us do all the talking," Orion said, "and if anyone pulls a weapon, get behind Megatron."

"Yes," rumbled Megatron, "you just look pretty and stay out of my way."

Orion licked his thumb and wiped a speck from Megatron's jaw cladding, causing the big brute to go hilariously stiff under his ministrations. Jazz winked at him, over Orion's shoulder.

"No problem, boss," Jazz said. "Looking pretty is what I'm best at."

He flipped his visor down. With any luck they'd be out of here and done with the temper tantrum before happy hour ended at Maccadam's.

---

RING SHOUT

In the muzzy glow of the night, Rodion was alive with the rush of traffic, a hundred thousand workers stretching their wheels to return home after shift. Iacon was old fashioned like that, real traditionalist, strict on the old taboos. The workday ended at sundown. They were serious about it too; even the hospitals stopped accepting patients once the sun went down. You lost coolant pressure in the middle of the night in Iacon, you better hope you could hold out until dawnbreak. In Rodion, it seemed, they had a looser approach to the situation.

Jazz paused his escape in the shadow of a rusted-out helipad on the roof of an apartment complex, probably unused since the last time the city caught fire and citizens had to be evacuated to the countryside en mass. The white-plated enforcer, now tucked underneath his arm, started to kick and wriggle.

"Hold your horsepower, now," Jazz said, "ain't sure we're in the clear yet."

"Release me immediately," the enforcer said, stubbornly banging his doorwing against Jazz's side. "This is futile, and a waste of both our time."

"Don't count me out yet," Jazz said brightly. "I like my odds!"

"You can't possibly run forever."

"Outran you all week," Jazz said, "and you the best, ain't you?"

The enforcer bristled. "I am an elite pursuit officer," he allowed. "I am certainly not the only one in Iacon."

"Nah, but you're as good as they come I'd say." Jazz set him upright on the tarmac, with an easy strength that felt as natural as running his engine, except when he remembered to be surprised at it. "I'm an ace for shaking a tail, but you kept right up. Figures they'd send the best, try 'n wrap it up quick."

The enforcer wobbled slightly as he caught his balance, doorwings bobbing urgently, a hand on his knee. He was a sleek one, smooth white with a finish you just wanted to lick. Impressive bumper.

"It's foolish to waste your energon and time trying to get away with the matrix. Give up the matrix now," he said, "and I will help you bargain for your freedom."

"Oh sure, and I could trust you with that, eh?"

"As I am your hostage, currently, it is in my best interests to arrange a peaceable exchange."

"Mhm," Jazz said, and arched his hands over his head in a stretch to get the kinks out, forcing the cop to lift his arm awkwardly as well. "I'm sure. So then your buddies on threat suppression duty can snipe me nice and clean after you're outta harm's way. Nah, my mech, I don't think so. But I tell you what, you just unlock that cuff and take it off, and I'll let you go like none of this ever happened."

"Unacceptable," the enforcer said. "An officer never abandons pursuit."

Jazz let his arms fall, and cast a sidelong look at his companion. "Say," he said, "what's your name, mech?"

The enforcer stopped brushing dust off his forearm and glared at Jazz. "SC-777."

Jazz tisked. "Come on now, nobody here but us nobodies. I know you got a name."

"Of course I have a name," the enforcer snapped, "I'm not a drone."

"Alright. Let's have it then," Jazz said.

The enforcer was still for a moment, except for the silent working of his closed jaw. "Prowl," he said, after a moment too long.

"That's a real nice name," Jazz said, "you pick it out, or one'a your batchmates?"

"Me," the enforcer, Prowl, said stiffly.

"Like I said, 's nice." Jazz ripped the seal off the ill-gotten engex bottle with his mouth and spat it onto the roof. "I'm Jazz, but you already knew that."

"Yes," said Prowl. "Are you really going to drink that now?"

"Sure am," Jazz said, and took a long deep gulp of something that tasted like thunder. "You want some?"

"What do you have to gain from this?" Prowl demanded, ignoring perfectly nice bottle of engex that was right there, being wiggled in his face. "No petty fence on the planet will pay you what that artifact is worth, and no law abiding citizen would dare the sacrilege of keeping it from its rightful host. It can't possibly be worth your life."

"Mmm, I think you're seriously underestimating the amorality of Guild Masters," Jazz said. "You wouldn't believe what those cats keep locked up in all sorta private libraries."

"Guild Masters are the pillars of Cybertronian society," Prowl said, "there may be some leeway for indulgences among the wealthy, but the very thought of such an enormous trespass on the laws of decency from such essential source of authority—"

"Aw mech," Jazz said, with a pained smile, "you are young, aincha."

"I fail to see what that has to do with it," Prowl said. "The premise is sound—if there were such a level of corruption in the very foundation of society, the result would be—"

"A slagstorm rust-pit planet full'a self-involved jackoffs?"

"—a deeply corrupt society," Prowl finished, with an understated judgmental look.

"So we're in agreement," Jazz said.

"No, that was," Prowl said, "I wasn't agreeing with you—!"

"Tell ya what, night's young," Jazz said, turning his attention to the skyline. He zeroed in the zoom of his visor on that delicate spike of a building, forbidding black and copper against the coal-dust night sky. "Let's do a little tour. If you stick with me till morning, no draggin' heels and causin' me trouble, at dawnlight I'll show you where the matrix is stashed."

Prowl threw back his shoulders. "And why would I ever trust the word of a petty thief?"

Jazz cocked his hip. "You think this is petty? Prowl, baby, ain't nothing petty about me."

"Nonetheless," Prowl said. "You are clearly trying to buy time. No doubt you will spend the whole night taking me further and further from the precinct's realm of control."

"Nah, there's plenty to do in the city. We can stay right here in Rodion if ya like. I just wanna show ya some things." He jerked a thumb at the spire of the dark building, only a few blocks away as the jetplane flies. "And I bet you wanna know what, too."

Prowl stared at him. And then Prowl followed the path of his finger across the night air, optics narrowing at the shape of black upon black.

"Yeah," Jazz said, with a grin, "thought so."

"…What about the gladiator," Prowl said, his wings twitching just slightly restless against their hinges. "And his little handler."

"Don't worry none about them," Jazz said, waving a hand. "They'd have a hell of a time tracking us down again, I'm sure we lost 'em good back in the narrows. They'd have to be some fool kind of stubborn to keep it up after that."

THERE:

"Yes, a speed model, that's what I said," Orion told the manager. "Maybe towing an enforcer, local colors."

Megatron and he were in the circular drive of a take-out fuel repository, the kind that sold cheap junk at least fifty percent filler fluid, something to taste good and fill your tanks without offering much real nutrition. The whole crude industry was built on selling muck that wouldn't even fill up a disposable to exhausted middle-caste city mechs, and by all appearances it flourished in Rodion. Megatron batted a curtain of neon beads out of his face and grimaced at the whole spectacle. The ceiling over the drive, the bare minimum required to shield patrons from a sudden burst of acid rain, was barely high enough to accommodate his frame.

Apparently Orion's treacherous roommate was an enthusiastic connoisseur of tacky neon and bad fuel.

"I dunno," the manager answered, "I see a lot of models in this business."

The manager popped the cap of a canister matching the stack displayed behind him and took a long, disinterested swig of lime green sludge.

"He would have been black and blue," Orion said, "some silver? Prominent bumper, low to the ground, curvy—"

"Heh," the manager said, "sounds like a hot ticket item. Don't you get enough cable from the big guy back there? Leave some for the rest of us, why don't you."

Megatron bared his knife-point teeth. "I'm going to crush your informant, Pax."

"Crushing people is illegal, please don't get us in more trouble," Orion said, without looking back. "Look, sir, all I need to know is if you saw him come through here. Did you see him come through here?"

The manager shrugged one narrow shoulder. His ID tag prominently showcased his guild ranking at a barely more than piddling level. Jumped up little bourgeoisie twit.

"Sorry bots, my data recall's gone all fuzzy," the manager said. He took another sip of his drink. "You know what might help shake that loose? A good hard hookup."

"I'm not cabling you for information," Orion said, his mouth a disapproving line. "That's not on the table."

"Who said anything about you, kid? Loan me your pet shark for a couple kliks and I'll tell you things about Rodion you didn't even know you didn't know."

There was a clank, a yelp—the can hit the ground and bounced, spewing lime green sludge into the gutter—as Orion hoisted the manager up by his prow and shook him until he jangled like so much loose chain link. Orion's skinny arms didn't even tremble at the effort.

"Listen here," Orion said, his usually pleasant and measured voice taking on an edge that made Megatron's engine hiccup, "I am two steps ahead of complete apocalyptic governmental shutdown and one step behind the police and I do not have time to play nice moderate middle caste negotiator with you. Do you understand me?"

The manager opened his mouth to retort, but Orion just shook him until he shut it and nodded frantically. Orion's frame blasted searing blue light; his expression was almost serene. For a second, renowned orator Megatron of Tarn forgot entirely how words worked.

"Thank you," said Orion. "Now, if you saw Jazz, you are going to say so. And then you're going to point us in the direction that he drove, and then you're going to get my friend a can of pop because you're sorry that you said such a rude thing to him, and we're all going to part here as friends, do I make myself clear?"

The manager nodded.

"Did you see Jazz?"

The manager nodded.

"And which way did he go?"

The manager pointed towards uptown.

"Very good. Thank you." Orion gently set the manager down on the pavement again and lightly brushed off the finger-shaped dents in his prow. "I'm always gratified to see the power of clear communication trump crude violence. Will you please get my friend his can of pop?"

With wide optics, the manager turned to the display of fuel mixes and fumbled one off the stand into Orion's waiting palm.

"It was lovely meeting you," Orion said. "Have a pleasant rest of shift."

Orion turned and hooked his arm around Megatron's, hauling the gladiator away with him before Megatron could even begin to process what he had just seen.

"Have some pop," Orion said, passing over the little blue can.

Megatron took the can, staring down at it dwarfed in his sizeable talons.

"What," he said, "was that?"

"Clear and direct communication, Megatron." Orion reached over and helpfully pulled the tab on the can's lid. "We are, after all, civilized mechanisms."

HERE:

In Iacon, propriety and tradition warred with the basic mechanical need to get absolutely slag-aft drunk in the company of poor acquaintances. Most Iaconians would recoil from the idea of running business after daylight hours; however, most Iaconians would go off their axels at the prospect of having no bars to drink at or halls to dance in after the long day was over. Bars therefore, or the reputable ones at least, got around this by running extensive tabs. Technically it wasn't business after daylight hours if your patrons all wired you credits for the night about the time they got off work, before the sun went down. Technically, then, it was just hanging out.

Red parties like this one, on the other hand, made no pretence about the goods and credits swapping hands. Rodion was less worried about that kind of thing. Dross, engex, port service, even the eponymous red—it all passed by in a swirl of crypto chips and hefty favors. In Rodion it was all highlife stacked on top of low life, and what the high life wanted, the low life provided.

"First stop of the night," Jazz said, plugging in his access to the security desk down below the thumping penthouse. "Promised a friend of mine I'd say hey next time I was in Rodion, and I hate to let a pal down."

The lift creaked down to rest on their level, heavy duty iron at odds with the tarnishing but still plenty pretty interior of the building. This had been a nice place, a couple centuries ago. Before the edges of Iacon half swallowed the entire borough.

Jazz made to stroll over, but Prowl wasn't on the same page—the cuffs jerked and they both stumbled, Jazz backward and Prowl forward. Jazz gave the cuff chain a thoughtful glance.

"This is gonna be a problem," he said.

"Good," Prowl said.

Jazz hummed. "Easiest solution would be to just carry you everywhere."

"You will certainly not," Prowl said, narrowing his optics.

"Better keep up, then," Jazz said with a wink, and then tugged him along.

They loaded up, Jazz pulled the lever down to the floor marked 20, and the lift cage shut closed around them.

From the moment the lift arrived on the party floor, the very air felt different from a bar like the one where they had begun the night. The electricity, fizzling up the backs of helms and leaping from audial to audial, gave the air a rich and bitter smell. There was a kind of ebbing tide, a continuous flow of movement from one end of the room to the other like a wave, as the partiers bobbed and gave ground to the frames around them. The vibe would've been nice, except for the vacant and sometimes distressed expressions of mechs still occasionally with the casings of boosters jutting from their necks.

"Ah," Prowl said, in the driest tone Jazz had ever heard. "A den of iniquity. Off to a strong start."

"Iniquity is a little much," Jazz said, tucking Prowl's arm tight against his side so that he could weave them both through the crowd. "Mosta the actual users are nice 'n classy upscale bots. I bet you wouldn't even think of arresting them if you saw 'em in daylight."

The soundsystem was pumping pre-recorded music; several discrete bouncers were mixed into the crowd, watching for disruptions to minimize. Dealers were flashing their headlights here and there, but for the most part the exchanges were casual and affable, with mechs nodding along to conversations held on private comms.

Prowl made a noise. Jazz turned his head to follow the enforcer's gaze, and found himself taking in the dance floor. "What?" Jazz said. "Don't tell me you got a problem with a little bump 'n grind."

Classical dancers were all hard angles and beautiful but precise patterns of geometry—the degree of a bend in a limb calculated to the most exacting measure, cascading into a complimentary angle, up and down a set of linear forms. This was not that.

Prowl's yellow optics narrowed. "One of those dancers is a sergeant at my precinct. I could have him demoted for this."

"Yeah?" Jazz said, squinting out in the same direction. He couldn't make out any enforcer colors. Must be wearing temp paint for the night out. "Well that'll be a fun little reward for making it to your next shift."

"That would require me to explain why I was here," Prowl said. "And I'm still hoping I can avoid mentioning this pointless bargain in the paperwork."

"Hmm." Jazz wiggled his way between two sets of easy loving party guests and pulled Prowl after him. "Where ya gonna tell 'em you were at all night?"

"Trailing you," Prowl said, shortly.

"Ah well," Jazz said, "true enough, as it go."

The DJ's platform, chest high on a mech of Jazz's recently augmented proportions, rose up from the crowd ahead of them in a glitter of red and gold. The DJ bobbed along to the beat, a rainbow of data cables connecting his body to the mixing station at his fingers. As one tune wound down into the cool spot of another, Jazz buzzed a familiar comm. number and raised a hand to his mouth.

"Blaster, my main mech!" Jazz called out.

Blaster lit up, scanning the crowd until he spotted Jazz down at the foot of the platform. He flipped up his own visor, leaning over the DJ station to offer Jazz a hand up to the platform. Jazz scooped Prowl up against his side, ignoring the snarl, and pulled them both up.

Blaster gave Prowl a second look as he reeled them both in "Whoa, who's your friend?" he said. His optics blinked off and on. "Jazz, did you bring a cop to my party?"

"Relax," Jazz said, "we're just seein' the sights tonight. He's my entourage."

Blaster gave him a pained look. "Ya know I'm thrilled to see ya, Jazz, but that ain't gonna go over well with this crew. They spook easy."

Hmm. There were an awful lot of booster casings hanging around the place. That could make a mech kinda jumpy around law enforcement.

"Didn't know you'd got into the tourist trade," Jazz said, eyeing the crowd below their little island of stage.

Blaster kept smiling, but his gaze jumped to somewhere left of Jazz. "You know how it is. Pays the bills, am I right?"

Jazz patted his friend's shoulder, just once. "Sure do, mech. Forget I said a thing."

"Right," Blaster said. "Yeah." When his gaze finally dragged back to Jazz, his smile was easier. "What brings you to town, anyhow? Rodion ain't you usual scene, and neither is the 926."

"Ah well—" Jazz shot a look at Prowl, which Blaster would have to be real slow not to notice. "It's a long story, and you're on the clock. I'll tell ya some other time."

"Sure," Blaster said, doubtfully. But he didn't push.

"Hey, so," Jazz said, leaning in the slightest bit—hip cocked for casual ease, shoulder turned in for intimacy, "you know anybody around here up for a bit of body work, on the down low?"

Blaster flipped his visor down over his face, and the glass screen lit up with a countdown—3, 2, 1, initiating—before the throughline of the melody all around them shivered and exploded into a frenetic beat.

"What kinda work?" he said, a little louder, to be heard over the new soundscape.

Jazz hesitated. "Aw, you know, all kinds."

"Come on, we talking racing stripes? Bumper reduction?"

Jazz shook his head. "Deep alterations. Fiddly stuff."

"Mmmm," Blaster said. His visor flashed a sine wave function and then collapsed it. "There's a guy in the narrows who does all that surgical stuff off the books. He ain't cheap though, you'd be better off just going to a regular clinic all above board like."

"You got his contact?"

"Uh, sure," Blaster said, and then pinged his comm with the doctor's info. "Jazz, baby, what's this all about? Should I be worried about you?"

Jazz flashed a grin. "Now when have you ever known me to need worrying about?"

"Alright…" Blaster said. He spun a dial and shifted two cueing lamps. "But look, hang around till the end of the set and I'll give Knockout a call ahead to let him know you're coming by. He's a fan, he might take it easy on you since he's sweet on me."

Jazz leaned over the station, one arm extended out behind him because Prowl refused to move along with him, and gave the side of Blaster's visor an affectionate peck. "Primus bless ya babe."

Blaster's visor flashed bright blue at the touch, and then a wave a blue lights flashed and fizzled down the length of his frame, from the base of his helm plug to the tips of his data cables. The plugs sparked in their ports—and then the sound system pulsed with another layer of sound, something soft-edged and cool and yearning atop the sturdy pounding beat.

Jazz drew back sharply. "Huh," he said, craning his neck to look at the speakers overhead. "That ain't your usual sound."

"Um," Blaster said. His optics blinked a couple times, and then he shook his whole body like he was trying to get water out of his seams. "Yeah, no, it's—not my usual sound."

"Well I like it," Jazz decided. He nodded to himself and then stepped back. "We'll get outta your cables for now, you wanna ping me when you're getting done with the set?"

Still a little dazed, Blaster said, "Yeah, uh, sure. No problem."

Down in the edges of the crowd, a few moments later, Jazz looked once both ways and then pushed Prowl back against the wall. The curved plating of doorwings made a muffled clang; Prowl's optics flared with harsh light. Jazz settled himself between the enforcer paint job and the rest of the room, one shoulder against the wall, one arm hooking over Prowl's hip.

Prowl went stiff under his hand. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Relax," Jazz said, "it's just camouflage. Don't want your buddy the sergeant recognizing you, do we?"

Prowl's doors, pinned to the wall, tried to flick and failed. "Don't get any smart ideas. I am not interested in services," Prowl said, lip curling. "Especially not from you."

"Who said I was offerin," Jazz replied. He gave the enforcer a sardonic once-over. "Ya do know not every musician is on the side hustle, right?"

Prowl looked unimpressed.

Jazz relented with a shrug and a self-conscious smile. "Alright," he said, "most of us are. But I ain't after business right now, mech. Come on. Time and place."

He couldn't help looking though—it was like trying not to imagine a polka-dotted combiner, you couldn't stop yourself once you'd been told not to. Prowl's port panels were prim and smoothly white-lacquered, spotless, outlined on his hips in just such a way that they were the first thing you noticed when you looked down.

Jazz belatedly dragged his gaze back up to the narrow yellow optics. He gave Prowl his most "hey, what can you do?" smile. Prowl frowned deeply.

"You were speaking to your associate about a frame alteration."

"…Yeah?" Jazz said, warily.

"That you would allow me to overhear your plans to refit indicates that you are unconcerned with my knowing, which means you plan to take me out of the equation somehow." Prowl drew himself up. "You should know that it isn't possible to buy my silence. I'm not that kind of officer."

Jazz shot him a sidelong look. "True or not, shouldn't be so quick to say it. Ya do realize what the alternative would be, right?"

Prowl's grim bearing indicated that yes, he clearly did.

Jazz sighed. "Ah, don't be so serious," he said. He rested his cheek against the wall, letting his optical array dim. "Ain't gonna bribe ya, sure as pit ain't gonna kill ya. I ain't interested in having that kinda slag on my conscience. You'll find yourself all right and tidy come morning, with me off in the wide yonder and chasing the horizon line."

"You are suspiciously confident about this," Prowl said. "Even if you shake me, your long-term odds aren't encouraging."

Jazz just grinned. "Cutting loose is a special skill of mine."

The close and glittering darkness swirled with Blaster's signature mix, and with the growl of Prowl's engine, so close against Jazz's chassis that it was feeling instead of sound. Jazz's fingertips skipped over the panel of one hip port-array, and trailed instead down the less taboo but plenty suggestive curve of a thigh. If you liked them curvy, and Jazz often did, Prowl was the model for you.

Just as Prowl opened up his mouth, almost for sure to protest, his gaze seemed to catch on something past Jazz's shoulder. His mouth thinned into a line.

Curious, Jazz twisted and cast over the crowd for the source of Prowl's unease. What he found was a mech not many steps away from them both, some kind of bulky jet, staggering as the press of people recoiled from him and flowed away into a safer and less involved distance. The optical lights were flickering wildly; the mech pressed a hand tight against his middle and gave a full frame shudder.

Jazz grimaced. "Yeah, he's got a fuel tank leak, probably. Watch your pedes, he's probably gonna—"

The mech hit the ground, knees first, and his entire stomach transformed open, spilling clotted energon in a splash directly across the floor.

"—Purge," Jazz finished. "Ahh, yep. Not much for that but ride it out."

"He's still convulsing," Prowl said, voice tight.

Jazz double checked. Yes, in fact—the tremors were faint, but not tapering off at all.

"Funny," Jazz said, slowly.

Prowl reached up and pushed Jazz off, whatever little sense of rapport they had been building gone like so much smoke.

"The red in his hydraulic fluid is bleeding into his other systems," Prowl said, prying open a compartment underneath his chest to unspool a line of clear tubing. "If I don't flush it immediately, it's going to rust his organs."

"You?" Jazz echoed. The chain between them jangled and snapped taut, drawing Prowl up short.

"Yes, obviously," Prowl said, giving the chain a yank. "Do you have an auxiliary fluid pump?"

Jazz opened his mouth, and then shook his head sharply. "I'll be nurse," he said, pushing off after Prowl. "Whatcha want me to do?"

Party-goers who had been watching the melt-down with uneasy, half-concerned optics mostly sighed and turned away with relief as Prowl fell to his knees at the jet's side. When Prowl directed Jazz to lift the mech's head up onto his lap, Jazz did it. He watched Prowl feel out the cracked place inside the tank, where contaminated fluid had begun to leak into the fuel tank, and thread the tubing into the gash.

"What's the goal here?" Jazz asked.

Prowl didn't break his focus for a second. "The magnetic iron solution that gives red its most popular street name is highly corrosive and deleterious on the organs. After continuous use, it begins to degrade the tubing it's injected into and leak out into neighboring systems. Since the fuel tank is the most heavily enforced organ, if it's begun to leak through there, it's almost certainly entered the coolant system which has direct access to the brain module. Keeping his head elevated mitigates the efficacy of the coolant pump. His optics are going to start bleeding hydraulic fluid now, so keep your hands clear."

There was a squeal, and then the glass in the mech's optic casing popped loose under the pressure and boiling hot hydraulic fluid poured out of the broken seal. Jazz winced.

"Without hydraulic fluid, he'll be immobile," Prowl went on, "but without coolant, his processor will start to fuse. Better to drain the hydraulic fluid entirely to prevent any more iron from seeping into his coolant."

Jazz watched his companion work with no little fascination. This wasn't behavior Jazz at all expected of an enforcer. Enforcers were callous, cruel, careless—they waded into the lives of civilians and destroyed them like comets tearing through the delicate construction of a satellite station, leaving twisted metal and wreckage in their wakes. Jazz, of all people, would surely know.

Prowl had not said a single kind thing to the mech under his hands, but he was here, finger joints slippery with decaying fluid, getting results. His fingers moved quickly—not as nimble or as clever as a trained medic, but without hesitation, without doubt. He was expressionless, laser-focused, yellow optics blazing like twin suns. Jazz felt himself pulled to the clarity of it, like so much corroded iron in the blood.

"Whoa," said an unfamiliar voice—and Jazz, startled, broke his mesmerized gaze. The unfamiliar mech, with a cube in hand, was leaning down over them and staring. "Are you like, a doctor?"

Wrist deep in another mech's chest, "No," Prowl answered, absently, "I'm an enforcer."

Jazz barely had a second to get out a good swear before the dance floor erupted into a panicked boil. Strung out red users set each other off in a chain of EM fields bursting against each other, setting off the confused dancers around them, pockets of panic blooming like fireworks and colliding into each other. Prowl's optics widened, realizing his mistake a second too late. His gaze snapped down, toward the mech in Jazz's lap, and then to the tubing in his own hand.

"Slag," he said.

Eyeing the stumbling feet and pointing fingers all around them, Jazz said, "Prowl, my mech, we gotta go."

"No," Prowl said, "I'm not done, there's still fluid in the lines."

Jazz smiled uneasily and said, from between his teeth, said: "Ain't got time, sweetspark. This ring shout is about to turn into a stampede."

Prowl hissed, threaded the length of tubing that had been in his hand through his mouth, and then buried both of his hands in the mech's open abdomen.

Jazz's comm. pinged him once, and then twice again, more insistently. He dumped the alerts.

"Pop his optics back into place," Prowl said, or at least that's what Jazz assumed he said. It sounded more like "ahp if ahig baff ihih peth". Jazz obliged.

A second later, Prowl slapped the chest plates closed and spat out the tubing, now pulled loose from the cavity. "Pick him up," he said.

Jazz tucked the mech under one arm and pulled Prowl up to his feet by the scruff of his collar faring. Prowl reached back and batted away the grasp, expression rumpled with distaste.

"Alright," Prowl said, "now we run."

LATER:

Once the no-longer convulsing jet was deposited on a friendly looking street corner and coerced into blearily calling an emergency contact, Jazz and Prowl found that they had drifted into a pleasantly upscale neighborhood, a broad boulevard strung with colorful crystal beads from one row of balconies to the other. The sides of the street glowed softly, lit up along the curbsides for best nighttime visibility.

"Well!" Jazz said, rotating his mech-carrying arm to shake the kinks out. "That was fun, eh Prowler?"

"Yes, if you think being dragged by a towline all up and down Primus' black asphalt is fun. You drive like you were onlined with a data pack from some other species. Have you ever even seen a traffic law?"

"I like to think of 'em as more traffic guidelines."

"I can't believe you haven't already been arrested for reckless driving before now," Prowl said. "Then you would be in custody already, and the matrix would be where it's supposed to be, and the department wouldn't have pulled me off of my seven current murder cases so I could go chasing some bohemian wastrel all over Rodion."

"Got a lot on your plate, huh?"

Prowl scowled, wings flicking. "More than someone like you can imagine."

"Oh, I can imagine some things," Jazz said, lightly. He considered the pale twin circles of the moons, like a couple more iridescent crystals strung suspended over the boulevard. "What's your idea of fun, officer?"

"My idea of fun is putting you in a cell and getting back to my case files. I still have four full frame autopsies to review."

"Alright, but what about when you get done with the autopsies?"

"Depositions. Interviews. Paperwork. Some other pointless car chase, no doubt."

"You know what I mean!" Jazz said. "When you're off work finally, what then. What's your scene?"

"I don't see what business it is of yours," Prowl said. He started walking a little faster, deliberately shifting up a step ahead of Jazz.

"I'm a mech's mech, mech!" Jazz laughed. "I like getting to know folks."

Prowl's doorwings hiked up; his gait turned into a stiff march.

"Here's all you need to know about me," Prowl said. "I was ordered to bring your frame back, on or off-line. The only reason I have chosen not to simply slag you right here in the street and drag you back to HQ as ordered is because I've deemed the recovery of the matrix more important to the welfare of our civilization than your arrest. So you are going to give it to me by morning, if you know what's good for you."

Jazz's mouth twisted. No fragging around, huh? Good thing the clinic was their next stop. Good thing for both of them.

"Don't you worry about me," Jazz said, to Prowl's stiff back. "I want outta this clusterfrag just as bad as you do."

Against the dark sky, in the soft glow of the running lights, Prowl's white paint glowed like a third moon.

"Still," Jazz said, rubbing absently at his chest plates, "not a bad night for a disaster, all things considered."

---

DEAD END BLUES

Knockout's clinic was in the deepest part of the dead end, which meant two things: it wasn't going to be easy to get there in alt, and nobody was gonna like the sight of a cop snooping around.

"We should at least get some soot on ya," Jazz said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. "Mussy up the finish a bit."

"Don't even think about it," Prowl said. He twisted his whole body away from Jazz, eyes narrowed. "I'm not about to stand here and let you smear dirt on me."

Jazz gave an overblown, put-upon sigh and said, "Oh well, guess we gotta settle for temp paint, next time."

They were at the edge of the Narrows, right where the pavement started to break up into pitted patches like the spots of some diseased organic. The construction of the buildings here read as a generation or two older, at least, but not ancient. The roads here were narrow and twisting, barely wide enough for a two-door and useless for speed.

Jazz lifted a hand to block out the glaring light of the all night diner (Prepaid Tabs Only) and eyed the skyline. "Now why would ya build a neighborhood ya couldn't drive in?"

"This part of the city wasn't built to a plan," Prowl said. "It was demolished entirely in a quake some centuries ago. The current street layout is built up from the shanty town that was initially erected in the rubble."

Jazz eyed the mismatched construction of the buildings before them, picking out uneven chunks of material cemented into the walls. "Government didn't send the mason's guild in to rebuild it?"

"By the time they felt it relevant to do so, it was already too late." Prowl set his shoulders. "The residents had made do. Crime flourishes here, in the labyrinth. Suspects escape, doors are walled up in an instant. No matter which way you go," his mouth quirked up in a mirthless smile, "there seems to be a dead end."

"Hmm," Jazz said. "Could be a problem for us tourists."

Prowl smiled a cruel little smile. "Let's just hope your friend's map is thorough."

There was something appealingly wild about it, as they moved between the squat and looming buildings. Jigsaws of mismatching material, windows fashioned from panes of broken glass soldered into raw lead, support struts and mangy buttresses spilling into the street, ragged tarps strung over the gap to protect pedestrians from the acid rains—it was patchwork and harmoniously erratic, built by mechanisms who already knew what they needed and roughly how to get it.

They weren't entirely alone in the place. Jazz followed the pings of his GPS deeper into the maze, with Prowl tucked against his side like a lover to obscure the particular stripes and colors of his enforcer paint job. White wasn't a particularly popular color among the lower caste, but it wasn't remarkable either. Anyway, they needed to hide the cuffs as well. This was convenient for both, whatever Prowl's muttering might have to say.

When they turned onto their second dead end, Prowl cursed and Jazz frowned. The GPS ping was telling him Knockout's clinic lay less than two blocks east as the jet flew from here, but there didn't seem to be a way to get there, not without circling the entire district.

There was a rustling. Jazz's audials spun up the sensitivity; he rapped the back of a finger joint against Prowl's hip, quick and casual, as he twisted closer. Prowl stiffened.

It was a whisper of displaced air underneath the rumble of the city—the sound of rusty gears twisting—Jazz spun on his heel just in time to catch the wrist of a lunging scav, in what would have been a perfect evasion maneuver if it hadn't been for the unaccounted-for weight of Prowl attached to his other arm, stumbling at the sudden tug. In the split nanoklik between realizing his miscalculation and feeling the pull, Jazz dropped his weight and redirected Prowl's tottering trajectory directly into the winged back of the scav, knocking that mech fully to the ground.

Jazz then dug his heel back into the decaying pavement, lunged forward, and caught Prowl under the chestplate before he could follow the scav all the way to the ground.

Prowl's vents wheezed at the sudden slam of inertia. "You—" he managed.

"Hold that thought," Jazz said, and turned his attention to the rag tag group of figures peering down the mouth of the alley.

They had the look of a crew wondering if they should cut their losses and scatter. Jazz lifted a hand to his mouth and called out, "Is this your mech, folks?"

There was some guilty shifting and shuffling. The scav on the ground let out a little disoriented sound.

"You can't just use me as a bludgeoning tool," Prowl growled at him, furiously scrubbing a spit-slicked thumb at a purple paint transfer. "I'm an officer. I'm a detective."

Jazz reached down and pulled the scav up, realizing as he did that the frame was seeker class, not something you usually saw out here in the urban landscape. This was a military frame class, one of the most high profile cold constructed models ever produced.

"Now what're you doing shaking down mechs in a back alley?" Jazz said, "You oughta be guarding a senator or bombing insurgents on the frontier somewhere."

"Uhhhm—" The scav spun his dizzied red optics, whose consistent dimness spoke of a lean life at least in recent times. "Well it's a long story involving a malfunctioning rifle and a bunch of foot soldiers who really should have had their insignia in a more visible place—"

"Friendly fire!" someone yelled, from back at the mouth of the alley. "He shot half his squad!"

"He can't aim!" another voice chimed in.

The seeker looked hurt. "I can too—"

"That's why we give him a shiv to use!" another voice shouted.

Jazz quirked a smile at the seeker scav and flipped said shiv up in his hand, letting the flat metal blade catch the light for a clear moment. "It's a nice piece. One of y'all is a craftsmech?"

There was some shuffling and nudging. "Er, yeah," a new voice said.

Jazz flipped the stolen shiv back down into his own wrist holster. It was nice—someone had seen fit to give it a proper handle, which almost made you forget it was most likely hammered out from some dead mech's scavenged leafspring. "Now I'm not looking for trouble with you fine folks tonight, so I'll give this back in a moment if ya like—but I'm not keen on having my lines sliced up neither, so what we're gonna do is trade y'all back your mech soon as you let us pass through. That sound reasonable to you gentlemechs?"

There was a pause.

"Suppose we double cross you, though?"

"Ah, well in that case—Prowl, baby, show 'em your slugger, there's a mech—in that case, we may as find ourselves in an untenable negotiation."

Prowl brandished his empty slug rifle as if bored, letting the butt of it rest against his hip. Jazz grinned.

"…Er, yeah, okay," said the main voice at the other end of the alley, "that seems fair."

The handoff was handled with extreme politeness, overseen mainly by a mid-sized mech with the shoddily-constructed look of a disposable cold con. No wheels or wings to speak of. Probably never even got a chance to scan an alt. Anyway, he seemed to be in charge of the little syphonist gang, judging by the sheepish glances their seeker assailant was shooting at him.

As Jazz handed back the blade, handle first, he said, "Now you good mechs seem like genuine local types, is that right?"

"Oh, sure," the seeker said, bobbing around the edge of the exchange, "we know every inch of the Dead End, no doubt. Except for uhhhhh whatever the frag is up on that one guy's block, we don't step a pede over there, that spawn of a glitch is off his rocket."

Jazz nodded, as if that made perfect sense and he completely agreed. "As if happens, we're on the hunt for a friend of a friend, name of Knockout, and I wondered if we might trouble you for a bit of direction. He's got a clinic somewhere around here."

Jazz reached into his storage compartment and fished out the mostly-full bottle of lavender engex, pulsing with an appetizing soft glow. "Now I know you good folks can't afford to be doing much for free," he said. "And I'm afraid we need the juice that's already in us now, but I do got this. It ain't much, but it's yours if you'll do a mech a favor."

The seeker snatched the bottle from his hand before the group's leader could finish opening his mouth; the seeker peeled the lid back and jabbed a talon into the fuel, sucking it clean in one neat pop.

"Ohhh," he said, "this is the good slag, boss."

His boss wavered slightly, optics flicking from Jazz to the glowing engex. "Is there enough in there for all of us?"

"Oh sure," the seeker said, "I could cut it with some of that moonshine from the big blue beaker and we could have a real night of it."

"….Alright," the boss said, finally. "Fair enough. Whirl, will you show our guests the side door?"

An empuratee, one hollow yellow optic winking, broke off from the pack and jogged down the street and then—without ceremony—kicked open one door at apparent random with his skinny but powerful digitigrade legs. It was the entrance to the crumbling edifice of a building with gaping windows, unoccupied and dusty on the insides.

As Prowl and Jazz edged closer, Whirl gestured broadly to the decrepit interior. "Come on then!" he shouted, in a voice like a rusty hinge.

They picked their way through unidentifiable garbage, to the back of the room, where a suspiciously well-cared for door sat cast in shadow. Down that hall and out into a ratty courtyard, rusty chain link tracing its pattern against the open night sky, and then through the only other exit—a broken chunk of wall that they each clambered over with varying degrees of grace. Prowl tugged too hard on the cuff chain, when Jazz was just swinging his leg over the top of the rubble, and sent his unwanted partner tumbling down with a yelp. Concrete banged his shoulder and scraped against his back on the way to the floor.

Prowl cocked a hip and looked bored, as if this had nothing to do with him, while Jazz scrabbled to his feet amongst the junk. The scav cackled.

"Ya'll gonna have KO saw that thing apart for ya?" Whirl asked, as Jazz shot Prowl a dirty look.

Ignoring where Jazz had grabbed his cuffed arm and was now using it to lever himself upright, Prowl—who could unlock the damned things any time he like— said, "Something like that."

"You still on the clock," Whirl asked, "or were you nice enough to stop running the meter when your john lost the key?"

"My-?" Jazz paused, and then burst out laughing, swaying and catching his balance against Prowl's side. "Alright, that's—aw, that's a fair, a fair assumption, considering—"

Prowl looked thunderous.

"Not that it'd matter," Jazz managed, eventually, "but it ain't like that. Tell 'im how straight 'n true you are, officer."

"I assure you," Prowl said, stiff as a beam under Jazz's shaky grip, "I did not engage this mech's interfacing services. I don't have the time or the funds to waste on frivolous personal expenses, and if I did, I certainly wouldn't spend it on the likes of a petty criminal without even a courtesan's license to speak of."

"Aw, mech, you wound me," Jazz said. "Seriously, I think you knocked me into enough concrete there to shake a gear loose, do I look lopsided to you?"

Whirl just cackled some more and trotted off up ahead into the darkness. Prowl made a face.

Technically speaking, it was illegal to provide port service without a courtesan's license—not that anyone ever bothered enforcing that branch of the law, unless they were already hunting for a reason to drag a hot piece of aft into the station. But Jazz did make a bit of rent here and there on the side, when the gigs were thin on the ground, just like most of the gig workers of Iacon. It wasn't like he minded Whirl reading the room. Jazz gave the cuffs a thoughtful glance. Maybe he should get the good doctor to saw him free. How many more sets of cuffs could Prowl possibly being carrying?

Prowl shook the slight on his honor off with some reluctance and allowed himself to be led along. Jazz could read the deliberation in his body language. Clearly this scav wasn't pressed about the specifics of their situation; why rock the boat?

The clinic they stepped into, at the long end of a shotgun corridor, was full of warm yellow light and the smell of expensive racer's polish.

"Hellooo," an equally expensive sounding voice drawled, as they stepped blinking through the door. "Well who do we have here?"

The mech who stepped out into the light, a cleaning rag working busily at a mess between his fingers, was certainly not your typical medical model. While back alley medics were rarely forged for the job, this gleaming creature looked more the type to purchase bodily modifications than perform them. He was extremely pretty, with a smooth and angular face, curves built for luxury and lines built for speed. His optics spun down narrowly when he noticed Whirl lingering in the doorway.

"You," he said, "are banned from this establishment. Have your own little savant patch you up, I know for a fact you can't afford to replace the equipment you're bound to break."

Whirl waved him off. "Just showin' the tourists here around. I'll get outta yer wires, Sparky."

As Whirl's presence receded into the dark, Jazz twisted and gave him a wave. "Thanks for the help!" he said, "You tell the bossmech to let us know if we can return the favor sometime!"

Pleased with the sloppy retreating salute, Jazz turned back to the room to find Knockout and Prowl observing him with varying levels of bemusement.

"What?" he said, and reached up to touch the side of his head. "Did I get a big paint patch scraped off earlier?"

Knockout snorted and turned back to the equipment he had been cleaning when they arrived. Prowl just kept looking at him, an inscrutable cast on his features. Not that this was unusual; Prowl's impassive enforcer mask was a cut above the rest.

"That was a novel approach to the solution of our problem," Prowl said, at last. It was impossible to tell if this was a compliment or a critique.

"That's improv, baby," Jazz said, popping a set of gun shaped fingers in Prowl's direction. "You take the chords they give ya 'n make it sing."

"Not exactly the part I was commenting on," Prowl said, with something approaching a smile. "But yes, you improvise competently."

Jazz gave him a bemused look, but let it go.

There was a firm clink, and Jazz glanced over just in time to see Knockout closing up a case of surgical tools with the snap of a lock. The box quickly disappeared into the depths of an unmarked cabinet.

"Quite a fashion statement you have there… Got a little too kinky on patrol time, did we?" he suggested. "Or maybe you were bored on a stakeout and decided to fool around with the equipment? It's not the worst waste of government credits I've ever seen, but a nice effort."

Jazz stiffened, as Prowl startled.

"I ain't-" and "He's not a-" they started at the same time, and then realized their simultaneous mistake. They exchanged an uncertain look.

"Hmm," Knockout said, unimpressed.

It seemed like a losing investment to protest too vehemently. The more attention Jazz drew to himself, the better Knockout would remember him. Besides… If Knockout thought his office was playing host to a double dose of cops, it surely didn't seem to bother him.

"Never you mind all that," Jazz said, at last. "You willing to help a mech out, all the same?"

"As long as your credits spend," the medic said. "I suppose you want that thing off."

"Actually, the cuffs are a problem I think we can solve for ourselves," Jazz said. "Maybe later, if we got the time."

Knockout lifted a brow.

"As it happens," Jazz said, delicately, "I got this thing…"

Prowl was looking very keenly at Jazz, all but poised to pounce, waiting to hear how exactly Jazz would spin his intentions. No question he was waiting to hear specifics of a body alteration, notes to put into a profile in an APB, indications of where Jazz intended to go after leaving Rodion. He could feed Prowl some misleading detail, reel him in. But there would still be the essential problem, which was that Jazz still had to get an alteration, and it wasn't going to be cosmetic.

Jazz rattled the cuff chain. "Don't suppose we could cut this off and then have a nice private chat about it?" Jazz said. "It's only, I wouldn't wanna trouble Prowl here with the details."

"Just try to cut me free," Prowl said, in an even tone, "and I'll drag you back to the precinct by your rear axel."

Jazz made a face. Alright. Well he did try.

"I was actually in the market to get something taken out. A bad mod, if ya like."

Prowl frowned. Jazz ran a finger over the seam of his bumper, absently swiping road dust off himself, and pretended not to notice.

"Port gripper?" Knockout said, eyeing Jazz's interface panels. "I swear no one has the slightest idea how to install the things. You're lucky you didn't get stuck with your plug jammed into his socket already."

Jazz coughed into a fist, hiding the twitch of an inappropriate smile. "Nah, not anything like that," he said. "Doc, I gotta ask—how serious are you about client confidentiality?"

Knockout shrugged one shoulder. "I'm an incorrigible gossip, actually, but I'm the most experienced surgeon you'll see outside of a hospital, and they keep records, whereas I don't."

Jazz looked from the doctor to Prowl and back to the doctor. He chewed his lip, a fang worrying at the soft metal. "Alright," he said, at last, and kept the edge of his gaze fixed on Prowl. "I'm gonna show ya'll something, and you're gonna have to be cool about it, alright? No calling up dispatch, no yelling for your friends."

"My god," Knockout purred, "what have you managed to do to yourself?"

Jazz gave him a lopsided smile and reached for his own chest, rubbing the heel of his palm against the metal. He wasn't looking forward to this; for a week he'd been avoiding thinking about this, about what it meant, about what was in him.

"Alright," he said, again, this time more to himself. "Alright…"

The transformation was smooth, like liquid rippling out from the easy thrum of his t-cog—his bumper folded back one microtransformation after another, until blue light spilled from the chasm of his open spark chamber, and then—like a cage in a menagerie, like the bars of a golden prison—

The petals of the matrix folded back, exposing a glittering blue cosmos of sacred history.

There was a clang, as Prowl recoiled backwards straight into a rack of engine parts. Jazz's wrist jerked and then hung limply between them, pulled by the chain.

"Now I've seen a lot of things," Knock Out said, stunned optics blinking and resetting, "but this would be a first."

Jazz grimaced down at himself, at the edge of gold that he could just barely see.

"How is this possible," Prowl croaked. When Jazz looked back up at him, he was sagged up against the tool rack, his kibble all but vibrating from the speed of his fans. In all the hours they had been cuffed together, Jazz had never seen him so off guard, so exposed.

"Last week I was at a senate hearing with a bunch of caste rights activists," Jazz said, "just a ride along, really. But they walked this thing past me on the way to the big fancy no-touch display case, and Megatron made a move like he was gonna crowd the mech carrying it, so I stepped in his way, and the next thing I know I've got the damn thing in my hands 'n my whole frame's going haywire."

His fingers hovered over the chasm in his frame, but he couldn't bring himself to touch.

He didn't say a thing about the heat in his wires, or the burning light in his head—about the sound of a thousand fractal voices calling from the veil of memory, drowning his thoughts like a wave crashing over him—about the feeling of being so full that his chest seemed ready to burst, to spill an endless truth like radiation from a boiling sun—the voice that was searing a loop between his spark and his speakers, awesome and infinite, saying Arise, Dulcimaeus Prime—

Forget all of that. He got an unwanted upgrade and a spooky parasite in his brand new chest cavity, which incidentally squicked him the hell out, and that was the long and short of it. Nothing else was worth thinking about.

"Can ya pull it out, doc?" he asked, aware that he sounded hopeful to the point of pity.

Knockout scrunched up his pretty face and leaned closer, his optics jumping back and forth across the apparatus. "It appears to be very tightly wedged into place, but not… welded, as far as I can tell." He reached out a tapered fingertip and tapped the metal, sending an ethereal hum through the struts of Jazz's frame. "I should be able to pull it out, with sufficient leverage. Just a moment."

While Knockout riffled through a chest of heavy duty tools, Prowl gathered himself one piston at a time, until he was again nearly the cool and severe enforcer that he had taken such pains to appear.

"I thought it was stolen," he said, his voice still a little tremulous. "I was told that you stole it. That they let you in to the senate building under the auspices of friendship, and you betrayed them out of greed."

"I reckon I did steal it, if ya wanna get technical," Jazz said. "But I think it'd be more accurate to say the damn thing stole me."

Something clanged against the floor, and Knockout came up from his tool chest with a triumphant aha!

"You're a Prime," Prowl said. "A real Prime."

"Uhuh," Jazz said.

"You're touched by the divine," Prowl said, "selected and remade in the image of Primus and the Thirteen."

"Dunno about all that," Jazz said, uneasily. "Last week I was a head shorter and a bust size smaller, but as to primeliness and what-have-ya, I ain't seen much.

"I've seen Primes before," Prowl said. "Primes are supposed to be—noble, and wise, and—and sedate—"

"Ah well, that's as may be," Jazz said, and tapped his helm, "But I ain't taking etiquette suggestions from a buncha stuck up dead folks making woo-woo noises in my head. I got that junk all cordoned off."

"You have it cordoned off?" Prowl repeated. "How?"

Jazz sucked his teeth, aware that he had made what one might call a tactical misstep. "Weeeeell," he said, "the fact is I mighta jailbroke my processor. At one point or another."

"You scrambled the read-write permissions on your own processor?" Prowl demanded. "Not only is that modification illegal, but it's extremely dangerous! No one should be able to edit their own brain while they're using it!"

Jazz nodded along. "I'll be sure to keep that in mind next time I have a brain module that needs scrambling."

"Why would you even need that!" Prowl said, hands flexing like he was trying not to reach out and strangle Jazz. "You can't possibly be doing the kinds of cortical boosters that necessitate that hack. The matrix would never pick a, a—"

Jazz examined his fingers, flexing his claws in and out of their sockets. "A no–good unemployed bohemian wastoid with a shady past?"

Prowl's mouth worked silently for a moment. "You'd be half corroded by now," he said, "if you did those kinds of boosters on the regular. You'd be glitched by now. And you're not showing any signs of being glitched."

Jazz shrugged. Prowl could think whatever he wanted. If he had a profile built up for some leaker glitch-head, all the better for Jazz.

"Are you really the new Prime?" Prowl asked, despairingly. "Is it some kind of trick? Are you having a laugh at my expense?"

Jazz dropped his hand. "Naw, mech," he sighed, "I ain't the new prime, and I ain't laughing at you."

He turned to Knockout and gestured at himself, inviting the medic to get a look. Knockout came up sidelong, like he wasn't sure if he could really approach safely, but when no punishing holy lighting shot out to slag him he perked up and shoved his whole hand into Jazz's chest cavity.

"Whoa hey!" Jazz shouted, and grabbed Knockout by the wrist tight enough to make the wires creak. "How about a little foreplay!"

"Don't act so frail," Knockout scoffed. His talons wriggled in Jazz's grip. "You're a prime, dollface, you're built to last. It would take an act of Unicron to kill you now."

Prowl glared at Jazz, as if this situation was his fault somehow. Jazz gave up and let go of Knockout. The rummaging in his internals commenced.

"If you're really a Prime," Prowl said, "why did you run?"

Jazz winced as Knockout prodded something sensitive. "Spare me the old cop wisdom. It ain't just guilty sparks who high-tail it."

Prowl hummed, consideringly. "Everyone's guilty of something."

Jazz set his jaw and didn't reply.

"Alright," Knockout said, "I think I've found some bits that won't snap off if I pull them. What say we give it a tug?"

Jazz spread his pedes, rooting his stance. "Ready when you are, doc."

Knockout closed his hands around the case of the matrix and heaved, digging his heels into the floor. There was a twinge in Jazz's chest, a hard tension, and then all at once the room was awash with terrible endless light, nuclear like the heart of a star, and in that light was the truth of physics—that all light is a wave, and so is sound, and all the universe is only shapes of waves one crashing upon the other in an endless improvisation within the mathematics of their nature. The edges of matter are only the illusion of stillness; all things are one single chaos of music.

The thread of tension snapped; Knockout staggered back, joints smoking, wheels spinning helplessly in place.

"Okay," Knockout panted. "Parson me if I'm jumping to conclusions, but I don't think it liked that."

Jazz, also panting, said, "Frag. Got any clamps?"

They tried it this way and that way, left and right. By the fifth bout of primordial harmonics, Jazz was woozy with it, audials ringing and frame staggering in place.

"That's it," Knockout said, throwing up his hands after the prongs he'd been trying to use literally melted to slag in his hands. "I give up! No amount of curiosity is worth this helm-ache, and no money either. I'm sorry sweetheart, but you're on your own."

Jazz clutched his head in his hands, claws digging into the smooth metal. "Unicron," he swore. "There's gotta be—"

"That thing picked you," Knockout said, flicking a finger in the direction of Jazz's open chest. "And I'm sorry to say, I don't think it has any intention of letting you go. Prime is usually a life-time appointment, you know."

"But I can't be Prime," Jazz said, "it's got the wrong damn mech! It shoulda been Orion! Hell, even Megatron woulda been better, at least he had, had—policy plans, political know-how, aptitude! I'm just a fragging burnout runaway, I'm half good with a zitaur and I know how to lick port without getting my glossa burned-" his panting was starting to transform into wheezing, panicked laughter, "-they're not exactly a Primely skill set!"

"You've been given an immense source of power," Prowl said, tone heavy with disapproval. "An authority unrivaled by any other single mech on the planet. You have a responsibility to—"

"I don't want it!" Jazz said, whirling on him. "It's too much! To hell with responsibility, maybe I don't have the capability to use this thing right! I'm good at reading people, but I ain't magic! Orion's gonna want me to take over his whole caste reform campaign, and I can't do it! You throw me into some senate house and tell me to change the world, I won't know up from down! I can't read those people, I can't fight that fight!"

Prowl had frozen, staring at Jazz with complete lack of expression. Jazz smacked his own chest panels, the cuff chain jingling and pulling at the sudden tug.

"I can't go out there and be the goddamn living path to Primus," he said, "some kinda goddamn gateway to enlightenment, strut around the forum telling poor folks to repent their sins like I ain't been a sinner all my life! Like it ain't all just another fancy light show, and it ain't my job to sell 'em all the dream?"

"A prime is supposed to-"

"The way a Prime is supposed to be, that's—that's the slag I can't take!" Jazz gestured at the whole of himself, up and down. "I ain't holy, Prowl! I can't be, I can't pull it off! I like a good time, I like engex and pretty mechs and jamming with my band in a dive bar for free drinks and copper scrap—that's my life mech, that's the only life I ever been happy in, and this little ball 'n chain wants—"

There was a painful, awkward silence, as Jazz forcibly gathered himself back up. Then he smiled.

"It's just not my scene," he said. His smile was light, carefree. "I'll hafta find another way."

Prowl considered him for a long moment. His yellow optics were blank, betraying nothing of the machinery inside his mind. Then the cuffs blinked green, at either of their hands, and then fell open between them.

Prowl caught them in mid-air and neatly tucked them into his storage pocket, neatly snapping the white panel closed again over his side. He took a step closer. He shifted into parade rest.

"I was tasked with orders to bring your frame back, on or off line. I followed you this far on the assumption that you would trade me the Matrix for your freedom, and that was a decision I was willing to make, even knowing that I would likely be reprimanded and demoted for it. I made this decision—I was able to make this decision, because my most primary directive is to serve the state of Cybertron. Before all other orders from all other commanders, that is my function."

Jazz cocked his head.

"If you're quite committed to getting the Matrix out of yourself," Prowl said, "then it falls to me to be certain that when you get it out, the relic is returned to the correct hands."

"And me?" Jazz asked.

Prowl screwed up his expression. "You haven't actually committed a crime," he admitted, "as far as I can tell. It's not illegal to be selected by the Matrix. If it was, every Prime would automatically be a criminal."

"What about resisting arrest?" Jazz prodded.

Prowl's gaze was steady, but the flick of his doorwings betrayed some hidden discontent. "I suppose that is what my superiors would have be bring you in on. But on what grounds would I have arrested you? The whole pretense falls apart."

"Sure never stopped any cop I ever met," Jazz said, mildly.

"You're a Prime," Prowl said, as though he thought Jazz was also very stupid, as well as apparently holy.

"And that matters, eh?"

Prowl stared at him for a long moment. And then Prowl turned back to Knockout, who had been perched on the edge of his desk, watching the theatrics with dull amusement.

"Is there somewhere in the area we can stay?" Prowl asked. "I've been running pursuit for nearly a week with no recharge, and it seems like we're going to be on the road for significantly longer. I need somewhere I can plug in and defrag, before making any plans. My tactical systems need a full reset or they start to pile up bad code." He glanced back at Jazz, and something about the stillness of his expression made Jazz think this small, personal detail was a kind of apology. Maybe.

"I could use a rest too," Jazz said, by way of possible acceptance. "I always problem solve better when I'm fresh."

Prowl nodded. "So how about it, then? Is there anywhere around here that two strangers can find accommodations for a recharge, without getting stabbed and robbed in the middle of the night?"

"Oh, sure," Knockout said. He neatly uncrossed and then recrossed his shapely legs. "You can rent a coffin at Gasket's berthhouse, if you've got the bearings for it."

---

Chapter Management

THE CULTURAL INVESTIGATOR

THERE:

The Movement itself was Megatron's, of course, but he did not actually carry the designations and contacts of every activist in the network. He left that job for mechs like Orion Pax, and Soundwave, who came online with archival software. Therefore, when the two found themselves thoroughly exhausted and looking down the barrel of another morning on the hunt, it was Orion who sighed and pulled up a map of fellows in the nearby area.

"We don't have a lot of choices," Orion said, after a moment of sorting, his optics fuzzy as he scanned the data on his HUD. "There's a few I'd trust to put you up, but most of them don't have the living space to do it. We could just keep going. I know you've got the core efficiency to run for a few days without recharge-"

Megatron glared at him. "Until I have to haul your frame into some hostel after you fall out unconscious in the street, no doubt. Like I had to do the night after we began this infernal chase."

Orion grimaced. "I can't believe he's kept this up for an entire week."

"He's a slippery little slime burrower," Megatron grumbled. "I should never have allowed you to take him into the Senate hall."

"I'm not surprised he's slippery," Orion said, "I know he's slippery. I just can't believe he's this energetic."

The trail had gone cold with Blaster, who claimed not to know where Jazz or his enforcer shadow had gone after the disaster at the party high-rise. Megatron doubted the truth of that severely. But Blaster stuck to his story throughout all of Orion's wheeling and prying, and then the local law enforcement had rolled up upon the scene, and they had all had to make a quick getaway.

"Here," Orion said, "I think I found someone who can help. He's not part of the movement, but he's a friend of mine and he's staying in the lower Rodion area for work. He's big enough that whatever he's renting will almost certainly fit you."

"Some paramour of yours?" Megatron demanded.

"Certainly not," Orion said, flashing an absent smile. "Just a friend. I haven't seen him in a while, but Bulkhead is a reliable mech. You'll appreciate him."

Orion trotted off toward the public comm booth, where the previous occupant was just slinking away with his data port all sparking. Tele-face line, almost certainly. The disposable hedonism of the middle classes never ceased to bewilder Megatron. Why would you waste credits on some anonymous program operated by sparkless computers when there were perfectly good courtesans trying to make a living all around you? It was nothing but randomized data pulses. And for what? Artless instant gratification?

Orion, probably drawing the same conclusion about the previous booth-user, pulled an anti-viral buffer out of his subspace and screwed it onto the head of his own jack. Megatron stared ravenously at the whole process. There were times that he dearly wished Orion was not such a comfortably employed and respectable citizen. If it were Orion offering the services, Megatron would have paid any price without question.

But Orion was too well off to lower himself to the work of the common classes, no doubt. Maybe he bought. Maybe he bought from Jazz. Megatron had been trying to figure out for years without the first thing to show for his effort.

Orion's data jack locked into the comm booth port, and his optics gave a sharp flare of blue light before settling back down to a normal brightness.

The booth screen lit up. Orion flipped through the directory with unseeing eyes. "You know how I met him?" Orion asked. "Jazz, I mean. He'd crawled into my pantry and he was recharging there, scuffed to hell I might add, without so much as a by your leave. I only found him because I realized I'd forgotten to check the expiration on some motor oil I got on sale a while before. Picture me, half-way to recharge, popping open the pantry to get my hands on some motor oil, and that slagging blue visor is staring up at me."

Megatron had trouble imagining this, not only because he'd lived his entire life in barracks of one kind or another and had no idea how a pantry worked, but also because he was fairly certain he would have just shot whatever was staring at him and called it a night. He certainly wouldn't have invited the creature to live with him.

"Jazz is really going to regret giving me the runaround when I catch him," Orion said, his faceplate a portrait of patient threat. "I've never met a more stubborn mech, I swear to you, Megatron. A vorn it took me to wear him down enough that he'd even talk about coming to a protest. I don't know if I'm madder at him for running, or at that blasted artifact for spooking him when we were so close."

The booth beeped. A comm connection initialized on the screen in front of them.

"I know he's running from something," Orion muttered. "But by the Thirteen, I wish he'd just tell me what that is."

HERE:

GASKETS BERTH HOUSE

Coffin 2 shanix / Diesel 5 shanix

Most of the buildings in the Dead End belonged to someone's territory. Knockout had explained, as he lazily marked the outlines of the territory onto a sheet of flimsy, that there were often empty shells around important enclaves such as the abandoned section around his own office. Try to camp out in one of those for the night, and you'd soon find yourself dragged in to face the latch boss, whoever that may be. For travelers, loners, and miscellaneous losers, your best bet was…

Prowl was picking at the smoky grey paint of his temporary coat as they waited on the doorstep of Gasket's berth-house. It was a crumbling edifice, tagged with dead end symbols so local and obscure that even Jazz couldn't make head or tails of them. A warm amber light glowed behind the foggy windows with their cracked glass. The cool of the night was setting in around them, that deep chill that fell on the streets just before dawn.

The door slid open, a manual pull, and a pair of suspicious yellow eyes peered out at them. A set of fangs flashed in the light. "What do you want?"

Jazz leaned aside and tapped the tin plate sign. "Says here you can get some fuel and a berth if you got money."

The mech bared still more of his teeth, which looked pitted and discolored from a lifetime of bad fuel but remained, nonetheless, razor sharp in their filed points. Syphonist teeth—and not the friendly gangster syphonists like Whirl and his seeker friend, who would rough a mech up and sap him a bit before picking his pockets and then most nights letting him walk away intact. These were Syphonists who waited in the shadows, ready to tear open lines with their teeth and swallow the mouthful of plating that came free, feral and foxlike, murderers by trade.

Jazz fixed his smile in place and tried not to let on that the metal on the back of his neck had started itching with dread.

"Drift!" a voice from inside shouted, rich and deep. "You scaring the customers?"

The glowering specter scoffed, and then slid the door open a fraction more, just wide enough for a body to squeeze through. His shape was formidable, in the way that only a sport car modded with so many spiky edges that he resembled a calcified pile of knives could look formidable. None of the kibble quite matched the rest; Jazz would put money he'd been stitched back together in pieces over the course of an impressive career in violence.

"If you give Gasket any trouble," he said, showing off his fangs, "I mean if you so much as spill his tea, I'll shove your processor out your afterburner, got me?"

Jazz put up his hands. "I'm hip," he said, "no worries."

The mech, Drift, pulled back and disappeared into the cluttered anteroom of the berthouse. The mech that stepped out from the gloom to greet them was broad, hefty, a bruiser in contrast to Drift's swift sharpness. He immediately stuck out a hand to shake.

"Hey there folks," he said, giving Jazz's hand a boisterous squeeze. "Don't let Drift scare ya off now, he's good people, you'll see."

"If that is your idea of good people," Prowl commented, "I am interested to see your idea of bad people."

The anteroom was mostly stacks of crates, hip and shoulder high, with a narrow winding path between them that led back to a rear door. Jazz watched with some amusement as Prowl tried and failed to find a comfortable way to stand with his doorwings open.

Gasket—almost definitely this was Gasket—made a thoughtful humming noise. "Well I figure if a mech is looking to rent a berth in the Dead End he already knows there's worse out there than a doormech with a bit of a bark to him."

Prowl flicked dust from the lid of a tightly stacked crate near his shoulder. "Like what, I should wonder."

Gasket started counting off fingers. "Roving empties, latch bosses and their cronies, the cops, the mech whose conjunx you got port from last week—"

Jazz laughed, Prowl stiffened. "The enforcers do not belong on that list."

Gasket's grin dropped, and he gave Prowl a thoughtful sidelong look. "Uptown mech, huh?"

Prowl bristled, probably at having been so quickly made as an outsider. Jazz resisted the urge to thump him in the back of the helm—did he really think, after everything tonight, a normal denizen of the narrows would have a nice word to say about law enforcement?

"Well, Uptown Mech, folks around here have a different relationship to the cops, sorry to tell you," Gasket said. "I bet you call up the bots in white every time you hear a funny little noise outside your nice three berthroom apartment just off the causeway. I bet you never even worry what happens to the grifters you report for loitering. Why should you, when there'll be another one waiting for you next week like nothing ever happened."

Prowl's jaw worked silently; Gasket turned away from them both, flicking his hand vaguely off to his right.

"Enforcers are just the guilds' goon squad anyway," Gasket said, "all they care about is yessir nossir, you want that disrespectful little panhandler dragged in by the bumper, sir? Cops don't care about you, mech. You step one toe-pede outta line and you'll find out for yourself, mark me, kid. Anyway, you want berths, I got 'em. Least until the hit squad come drag me outta here their damn dirty selves."

Gasket picked up the steaming cup of something thick and green that had been resting on a crate lid and left the room, without another backward glance. Prowl just stood there, fists clenched at his sides. His optics were hot.

Jazz sighed. "Alright," he said, "we gonna need somewhere else to sleep or what?"

"…No," Prowl said, and shook his head sharply. "No, this is the safest place. I'm only… working on acclimating."

"Don't spend much time around street folk huh?" Jazz said.

Prowl didn't say anything for a moment. "We aren't a goon squad. Yes there are… problematic elements in the enforcers, but…"

Jazz snorted. "You're a smart mech, Prowler. Run the numbers on the last vorn of arrests and check who called them in. You really wanna see a pattern, run the arrests against the unanswered assist calls and see who called those in."

Prowl's optics flickered, alarmingly, and then went almost white with heat bleed-off. Jazz recoiled, half ready to catch Prowl if the enforcer was about to glitch and pass out in the middle of this over-cramped room in the Dead End. But Prowl didn't so much as wobble.

"What—" Jazz reached up to poke Prowl's cheek and got his hand swatted out of the air. "What's happening right now?"

"I'm running the numbers," Prowl said.

"You're—aw hell, mech, really?" Jazz circled Prowl, fascinated despite himself. "From way out here? You got a live server uplink in that fancy processor of yours?"

"No," Prowl said, flicking his doorwing when Jazz's investigation brought them a little too close for comfort. "There's no squad modem to bounce the precinct connection off. I'm using the numbers in my long term memory storage."

"You just store those?" Jazz thought about this. "Wait, you can just run those numbers by yourself without burning out your entire processor?"

"Statistics are my area," Prowl said, and the burning heat in his optics abruptly faded back to a normal level.

"No slag they're your area," Jazz said. "They got you chasing after no good petty thieves like me when you got a brain like that?"

Prowl quirked his lips into a half smirk. Jazz couldn't help but grin back; Prowl was handsome as all hell when he knew how good he was.

Then Prowl's half smile fell. "Let's get a berth, before that syphonist comes back to run us off."

The thing that made Gasket's berthouse so appealing, Knockout had told them, was that the lids closed. The lids closed, locked, and the only one who could open them was Gasket—

The back room turned out to be a cramped warehouse of what did, honestly, look like coffins. On shelves rows and rows back in the orangey dimness, stacked three layers high, rough black boxes lay ready to be cracked open. On the higher shelves, the smaller sizes; on the lower shelves, the bigger ones.

Gasket glanced back at them as they came through, and gestured at the row of coffins in front of him.

"Only got one size tube that'll fit Uptown here, with the doors and such," Gasket said, "and you're too leggy for the standard ones yourself, handsome."

Jazz sighed. The damn frame upgrade struck again.

"Alright," Prowl said, his hands folded neatly behind his back, "we'll take two of whatever size will accommodate us. Price is not an issue."

"Weeeeeell," Gasket said, and there was something underneath the big show of regretful apologetics that looked an awful lot like glee, "the thing is, I got a couple gladiators sleeping off a bad week at the arena right now, and they're taking up most of the 2xls I had free. But I tell you what, I got one 3xl, unaccounted for, free for the taking, and I'll let you both have it for the price of one mech."

Prowl and Jazz, in mutual dread silence, stared at Gasket.

Gasket reached down and thumped the lid of an oversized coffin berth, and the lid slid back to reveal almost the exact amount of space it would take to fit Jazz's legs as well as Prowl's wings.

They both looked down into it.

Gasket grinned, shifted his weight to his other hip. "Can I interest you bots in some hot soup before recharge? It's mostly diesel, but there's some chunks of crystal in there somewhere."

LATER:

The coffin was cold when they crawled inside, but after a few kliks of wriggling and jabbing and kneeing, the space started to warm up. It was less like a recharge berth and more like a stasis pod, illuminated with strips of amber light that somehow managed to make it feel darker. Jazz knew better than to ask where Gasket had found them.

"This ain't working," Jazz said, finally, after getting bashed for the third time with Prowl's doorwings.

"And I suppose you're going to say that's my fault," Prowl said, looking a lot less cool and intimidating with his wings akimbo and his plating all out of alignment.

Jazz smirked at him, but didn't go so far as to say as much. Instead, he said, "Let's coordinate this plan of attack, howsabout? Here, look. I'll lay down, you just scooch—yeah, back that way, move your knee back, and I'll—"

Jazz wriggled underneath Prowl, laying back flat to the bottom of the coffin, and then pulled Prowl down on top of him. The enforcer landed with an oof of complaint against Jazz's substantial bumper, hands against the headlights. Jazz grinned.

"Come here often?" he quipped.

Prowl just looked at him.

"You, uh, you gonna come on down here?" Jazz asked, eyeing Prowl's posture. He couldn't exactly defrag up on his hands and elbows like that.

"You expect me to sleep on top of you," Prowl said, as if it was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard.

"I mean yeah," Jazz said, "why not?"

"Like primitive mechanimals," Prowl prompted, "like organics?"

"Aw don't be like that, conjunxes sleep together all the time. Not everyone's sleeping in military-approved twin berths with a regulation cubit between 'em."

"We," Prowl said, "are not conjunxes."

"Ohhh, I dunno," Jazz said, letting his hands settle on the backs of Prowl's knees. "You said screw the commandant and ran off into the Dead End with me, that's practically an elopement, by most standards."

"That is not even slightly an accurate portrayal of events," Prowl said.

"Mm." Jazz shrugged against the coffin floor. "You wouldn't bond me, Prowly Baby?"

"Not on your life," Prowl said, but he settled down onto his forearms all the same. It was a comfortable fit, for all that it had taken them a hell of a time to find it. Jazz was always happier with someone else close, the warmth and presence of a friend or a lover. Or even a pretty enemy, maybe one with shiny white thighs and a steel-trap processor.

For a long while, Jazz contemplated the running strips of lights buzzing down the length of the tube. The long, long night unfurled around him, exhausting and fantastical, full of strange things that only half made sense now, in the calm dark.

"What you said earlier," he started, "bout only being able to dodge orders because…"

Prowl stiffened against him. His optics narrowed.

"Now I don't know a whole lot about how they bring cops online in Iacon," Jazz mused, testing the edges of the thought, "but I know back where I come from, enforcers get mods. Compliance codes. They take ya straight outta the crèche and jab a needle in your helm, and they…"

Jazz trailed off. His wandering fingers found a nick in the back of Prowl's thigh cladding. The metal was razor sharp where it curled up.

"So I'm wondering, me, how bad they had to've fragged you up, that it sounds like you gotta leverage your own processor just to make one simple judgment call in the field."

Prowl said nothing. The silence stretched on, growing thicker and thicker with the secrets pinned in Prowl's stranglehold grip, whatever they might have been. Perhaps they weren't so hard to guess. Jazz could imagine some things. Jazz could imagine a lot more than most people knew.

Jazz looked at the mech, smudged in his dark matte paint. This curiosity was cruelty, really; forcing Prowl to spill his secrets, none of them any of Jazz's actual business, benefited nobody but Jazz himself. And yet, he liked Prowl. And for Jazz, liking someone and wanting to pull them open and touch all their hot little hurts, all their tangled scar tissue—those were one and the same function.

Prowl deliberately avoided his gaze. Jazz could make him talk, that was the thing. Jazz was good with people. He was good with people in a way that was sometimes bad for people; he was quick on his jabs, he had an instinct for pain. He could back Prowl up into a corner where he had no choice but to talk.

Jazz let go of Prowl's thigh. "The force that commissioned me," Jazz said, "they uploaded compliance coding before my frame was even cool, fresh out the well."

Prowl's wings jerked up, banging against the lid of their shared coffin.

"You're an enforcer?" Prowl demanded.

"Was," Jazz corrected. "I didn't just jailbreak myself for the rush, you follow?"

Prowl had him pinned beneath his glowing gaze, analytics tracking every angle and curve of Jazz's frame. Well, Jazz had some pretty good work done when he went on the run the first time—Prowl sure wasn't gonna find anything left there after the Primal reformat.

"My name wasn't always Jazz," Jazz admitted. "That's not the ID I came online with."

Prowl narrowed his optics. "I suspected."

"Did ya? What gave me away?"

Prowl relaxed, just a little, probably not on purpose. "The data was just a little too neat. Bureaucratic work-ups are riddled with leftover coding from previous templates in previous regimes. Yours were suspiciously clean of ghosts."

"Ah," Jazz said, chagrined.

"I preferred yours," Prowl said. His gaze flicked away. "The usual mess of data artifacts is extremely annoying."

Jazz laughed. "See if you can sell the department of citizenry on a fresh new template, once I'm in the wind. I'll give you a copy."

Jazz would have been satisfied to leave it at that, but Prowl wasn't laughing along. His gaze was somewhere on the other side of this moment, his brows pulled together and his digits tense on Jazz's chest plate. This close, in the tight silence, Jazz could hear the whirl of fans in his brain module.

"But why," Prowl said. "Why would you run? It doesn't make any sense. Whatever crime you committed-"

"Why're you so sure I done something nasty? Maybe I felt like a change of scenery."

"The cost of the jailbreak, the homelessness, the functionlessness, the sheer uncertainty—once you burned your identity, you would have been barely better than a Disposable. Whatever you had done, the consequences couldn't have been so much worse than that. Your precinct would have taken care of you, if you were in trouble, they take care of their own—"

"Yeah," Jazz cut him off, "only their own. And only the ones who will play nice." Jazz gave him a shrewd once over. "You strike me for a mech who doesn't know when to quit. I bet you know what I'm talking about."

They stared at each other. Prowl didn't argue. There was something happening behind his faceplate, something Jazz wasn't privy to. Maybe he could guess the shape of it. It was cruel of Jazz to hope his guess was right, a cruel thing to wish that on anyone. Prowl had struck him as a good mech, so far, and good mechs didn't last long in isolation.

Jazz squeezed the mech's thighs absently and said: "Maybe you'll understand, maybe ya won't. Ain't told nobody about this really, but if y'wanna know, I'll tell ya."

Prowl's doors flicked with interest.

Jazz let his helm fall back against the metal tube. "I wasn't a detective like you, I wasn't in HQ crunching numbers or slapping the cuffs on thieves. My spark came outta the well with a whole bunch of sparks commissioned for law enforcement. They'd just got a budget bump. Couple rounds of aptitude tests 'n they pegged me for an undercover. I got a way with people, see? Folks like me. Folks trust me. I pick up the patter fast."

"A dedicated undercover operative?" Prowl said. "Right out of the well? Why would they need that?"

"Some big contraband bust, you know how it goes, the entertainment guild starts hemming 'n hawing about how the booster scene's cutting into their revenue, and suddenly all the commissioner cares about is getting supplier names. I was fresh, coded up, unknown. And I was good at it too. Hardly took me a quarter vorn to work my way into the circuit."

His mouth twisted into a bitter smile. It'd been as natural as revving, as easy as shifting gears; he'd liked his job, and his job had liked him.

"Well I was fresh, like I said," he told Prowl, "bought the whole pretty lie, hook line and sinker, about how we're cleaning up the streets and making the city safer for honest folks, and you don't got nothing to fear if you ain't done nothing wrong. What did I know? I hadn't seen scrap. So I'm in the deep cover, working outta this smuggling warehouse, 'n I make friends with this low level stocker. She's an addict, but I like her. I tell her, hey, you stick with me, we'll bust this place wide open and then I'll get a commendation and you'll get an informant stipend, 'n you can get outta this place. Live up top. Start over."

Painfully savvy, Prowl said, "You were friends? Or you let her think you were friends?"

Jazz blew out a hot vent of air in the tight space. "See, any proper cop woulda just strung her along for the op, but I really meant it. That's the problem with me, I guess. I like people. I get attached. I had all these ideas about where I'd set her up when we were done, folks I'd introduce her to, jobs she could get trained up for. I just needed her to get my team into the base for this big sting operation, and then we'd all be sipping toasts on the top floor of the Red Tower, easy living."

"But?"

Jazz turned his head. The wall of the tube stared back at him, unforgiving. "She got shot. One of my crew, the crew she was helping, shot her in the first klik of the op. They didn't even stop to tag allies in the targeting system. And I just stood there, too slow, didn't know what was going on till I saw the body drop. Spark containment breach. Instant fatality. It was like—I promised that mech a life, and then I took the only one she had. How d'you walk back from that? How d'you unkill the dead?"

The dark hollow of that breached spark was embedded in his processor—the way the last flicker had jumped from the broken metal to his fingers as he rolled her over. The sinking feeling as he understood in an instant that this wouldn't even make it into the incident report. The way he'd had to hold silent amid the cheers and congratulations.

"How d'you go back home with your team mates, them mechs supposed to be helping people, and pretend it's all fine and sunshiny?" Jazz flicked a scrap of peeling temp paint from Prowl's hip. "The hell with that," he said.

After the first brush off from internal affairs, Jazz had given up on seeing anyone held responsible. He could read a room. He knew what happened to mechs who pushed their luck. Now, more than ever, he could see the knives inside of the sheathes, the ugly edge to chatter that he'd never quite felt before. He put away the paperwork and started saving up, stopped going to nights out with other officers, started making friends in low places.

"You could have stayed," Prowl said, frowning. "You could have tried."

He could have, Jazz allowed; but it was easier to run. Maybe he was a coward. He'd never claimed any better.

"Tried to what, tried to fix it from the inside?" Jazz said. He gave the wall a mirthless smile. "That slag never works. You just wind up with a knife in your back."

Prowl was quiet for a moment. "Not always," he said, at last. "Surely not always."

Jazz did look at him, then, and what he saw was the calculation of a familiar arithmetic, far away behind those twin yellow suns.

"Surely," Prowl said, "the seat of power is the seat of corruption. Surely the character of any solar system is determined by the star at its center. One mech, leveraged into the right position of authority—If the ultimate authority sets forth fair policies, surely—"

Despair and hope twisted up thick in the back of Jazz's throat. Despair that Prowl was only twisting himself up tighter in the tangle; hope that there was still anyone left who still could be bothered to fight.

"That your plan?" Jazz asked. "Climb the ladder and rule with an iron fist?"

Prowl's expression took on a grim cast. "I have considered the alternatives. I've run the numbers. Nothing changes if the policy doesn't change. The policy will not change until someone in authority addresses it. I have the best chance at making it to the top, if I am willing to do some unsavory things for the greater good."

It was a madmech's dream, a pretty suicide wish, but Jazz could never help but love a lost cause. "Yeah, okay," Jazz said, "even if that's true, it only lasts until the Guilds band together to have your body dumped in a reservoir."

The grim expression hardened. "But I can make them work for it," he said. "I can make them buy it at a dear cost. And in the meantime, while they're scrambling to cooperate, I will be establishing such a system as they will not be able to unmake in a vorn of sleepless nights. The longer I can hold them off, and the longer my system can survive after me, the more mechanisms will be afforded a taste of justice. Once they know it, they will never forget."

Jazz stared at him.

"And so you see," Prowl said, fixing Jazz with the incandescence of cold zealotry, "I do not intend to sell my life cheaply."

Jazz's understanding of Prowl shattered and coalesced, reformed—a dream, a beautiful madness, something ruthless and naïve in equal part, stared back at him from the body of this enforcer. Jazz had known idealists, like Orion Pax, and Jazz had known cunning mechs, like Megatron's Soundwave, but he had never seen anything quite like the determination in Officer Prowl's cold-burning optics.

"That's why I am the best," Prowl said. "I have to be the best. It's the only way forward."

You couldn't help but be unnerved, looking down the barrel of that kind of naïve pragmatism. The kind of mind it would take to contain it…

"What exactly're you tryina fix, Prowler?" Jazz said. "What's worth setting yourself up just to buy a few years?"

This close, Jazz could feel every creak and squeak of Prowl's frame as he physically clammed up. His mouth became an unbreakable line, once again.

"But you say you're not a goon squad, huh?" Jazz mused. "You want mechs like Gasket to believe they got nothing to fear, when you're walking head first into a smelter for the crime of wanting a little policy reform? Prowl, make up your mind. Is the Force good or bad? You don't seem so sure."

Prowl's cold fire banked, and his doorwings dropped a fraction. "It—" he said. "It can be better."

There again, Jazz felt it: the specter of that broken spark casing, dark and unmourned. Would Prowl try to fix that, along with whatever other sins weighed on his pretty decaled wings? Could he, could anyone? Was that even possible?

"Maybe," Jazz said, quietly. "Wish I could believe it, like you do. But all I see is another body on the concrete, and the whole thing falls apart, when the center won't hold."

He lifted his hand, let his palm block the light from one of Prowl's yellow optics. The other one burned like a star in a cage, between the tips of Jazz's fingers.

"Get some rest," Jazz said. "It'll all be there for ya in the morning, just the same."

---

CASANOVA, BABY!

Jazz roused from a defragmentation cycle deep in the afternoon, far away from the light of the sun. There was a warm weight on his chassis, a slow heavy rumble as the body tucked so close above him slept on. In that half-aware stasis, the days before seemed far away and dreamlike. All that remained was the heavy warmth, the slack limbs, the dozing engine.

Jazz let his visual suite spin up for a moment, indistinct and rudimentary, as he took in Prowl's face. Only the mouth was visible. The rest was burrowed up under his chin.

So much for decorum, Jazz thought, and then slipped back under for another round of desperately needed defrag and repair.

-V-

In the end, Jazz and Prowl stayed at Gasket's Berthouse for a full solar cycle, catching their systems up on the damage that a week of running had done. Prowl had lugged himself up out of the coffin when Gasket opened it, bleary and unhappy, and asked for an extension in the most miserable monotone Jazz had ever heard.

Once Gasket had locked them back in, Jazz had reached up and smoothed his hands down the hinges on Prowl's back until the enforcer reluctantly slumped and went limp on top of him. "More fragged up than you let on, huh?" Jazz said.

Prowl onlined one optic just for the sake of glaring at Jazz. "I told you," he said, "my processor starts to pile up bad code if it doesn't run a defragmentation. It's the tactical system."

"Shhh," Jazz said, and rubbed his thumbs against the base of the faintly twitching doors. "You just go back to recharging. I got you."

Prowl's one optic went dark. "You certainly do not," he grumbled. His arms, already resting on Jazz's shoulders, drew in tighter. His fingers dug into Jazz's plating, squeezing down.

"I," Prowl said, "have you."

-V-

Over questionable soup, in Gasket's front room, perched on a couple of crates of what Jazz would bet was some seriously illegal merchandise, Jazz and the newly awoken Prowl discussed their options.

"What we need is something that can withstand the potency of the matrix," Prowl said, picking an unappetizing lump of iron oxide from his own soup. "If you really want to get that thing out of your chest, we need something stronger than Knockout's tongs. Another artifact would be ideal."

Jazz snorted. "The Holy Tongs of Alchemist Prime, sure, gotcha."

Prowl sipped his soup. "You being a wiseaft gets us no closer to our goal, you realize."

"It's just for flavor, babe, lighten up." Jazz prodded the murky edge of the House Specialty. "Speaking of which, this goop could use a little spice."

From across the room, the now-more-familiar voice of Drift said, "Talk slag about my soup one more time, see what I do."

Jazz shot him a bemused glance and obligingly drank some more.

"Maybe Solus' Hammer could re-forge you," Prowl pondered. "It's supposed to be able to make anything out of anything. I'm not sure how much control the wielder has over the result, though."

"Hell, I'll give it a shot," Jazz said.

"Too bad it's been missing since cycle 656," Prowl murmured. "The Chief Armister discovered that it had been swapped out for a prop of remarkable accuracy by unknown parties."

Jazz groaned. "Don't get my hopes up, mech, come on."

"There are other artifacts. Most of them with known whereabouts."

"Think you're gonna have trouble finding one of those on a budget of, uhhh," Jazz dug out his last credit chip and examined the balance readout. "Enough shanix for a can of pop, apparently."

"Well we certainly can't use my credits. They're all in an enforcer run account. The moment I were to access them, the entire pursuit force would come down on us."

From the opposite corner of the room, perched up much higher, Drift snorted. He was meticulously cleaning one of his guns, the parts spread out on the crate between his legs in some arcane order.

"Excuse me," Prowl said, "do you have something of merit to contribute here?"

Drift set down half a silver tube and picked up another. "What d'you think you can really accomplish without money?"

"There are other ways to-" Prowl started, but Drift cut him off.

"There's only two kinda currency that matters in this world," he said. "Violence and money. If you got enough money, you can hire guards. If you're good enough at violence, they won't matter. So if you don't have money, you better learn how to shoot."

Prowl scowled. "I can shoot perfectly well, thank you."

"That's the difference between you 'n me, Drift my mech," Jazz said, settling back on his palms. "You look at the world like a mech with a mallet. I look at the world like a mech with a lockpick."

Drift grunted. Down went the other silver half tube. After a moment, he said, "That hammer you're looking for, it's like a big oversized golden thing? Double headed, stupid heavy?"

Prowl whirled in his seat, looking straight at Drift for the first time. "You've seen it? Where?"

"Not me, one of my contacts," Drift said. He snapped the cleaning cloth in his hand and went back to polishing the blackened fuel cells. "Ran hot stuff for the collector's market, off the books. Guild Master in Iacon bought it a couple vorn ago. It's just a show piece, though, won't work for nobody but a Prime, he says."

"Impossible," Prowl said. "Your friend was lying to you. There's no way that a relic of that magnitude would be trafficked by a guild master."

Drift gave him a dour look. "It's Triptych, the head of the artisan's guild. And he's got plenty of weird slag in that library of his, I've seen it. Took a job from him way back before he was Guild Master."

"But," Prowl said. "But, a holy object-"

"Just another shiny thing to show off for whatever cheap mercenary he hires next, trust me."

Prowl sat there, visibly at a loss, his mostly empty soup cooling in his hands.

"Well…" Jazz said, "it's a lead, I guess. I can probably wriggle my way in, with a little luck. Wouldn't be the first tower I managed to crack."

"Excuse me," Prowl said, "do you make a habit of breaking into the private residences of premier citizens?"

"I wouldn't call it a habit," Jazz said, easily. "I just like to keep my skills fresh."

"Skills?" Prowl said.

"Sure," Jazz said. "Ya didn't think that first gang had me pushing 'pads all day, did ya?"

Drift seemed to take some interest in this. "What territory?" he asked, snapping fuel cells into their intended locations.

"Aw, you wouldn't know 'em," Jazz said. "It was halfway round the world in Polyhex, and a while back to boot."

"I'm going with you," Prowl said, suddenly. At Jazz's startled look, he went on: "I have my own skillset. Between the two of us, we stand a much better job of getting in and out safely."

Jazz twisted up his mouth, considering it. He'd never worked much with partners. Still, he liked Prowl. And Prowl kept up better than anybody he'd ever tried to outrun, that was for sure.

"S'ppose we get caught," Jazz said. "That's gonna tank your big political dreams pretty good. Hard to enact policy reform from inside a spark extractor."

"Yes, well. You'll just have to be very good at what you do."

"No pressure," Jazz said, with a grin.

"If we can get inside without attracting attention," Prowl said, "we can utilize the artifact while still in the library, and then escape the same way we came in. No mess. No fuss. If nothing is stolen, there's no reason to open an investigation, is there?"

"Hmm," Jazz said. "Could work."

Jazz knocked back his soup; the stuff was still questionable, but it tasted a lot better with a plan.

LATER:

The message popped up, live on his HUD: HEY. HEARD YOU'RE IN RODION. GOT A GIG AT LITTLE SIMFUR. WANNA JAM?

Jazz brightened, straightening up from the table he'd been hunched over.

The surface in front of them was covered in an assortment of bits and bobs from Jazz's chassis pockets: lockpicks, zip ties, credit chips, busted electronics, and a couple of parts with the distinct look of something crushed by a fist. The pile had been amassed in search of the funds it would take to get from past the circuit of toll roads and up into the shining city of Iacon.

"Hold on a klik," Jazz said, pulling open the comm message in full. "I think we just got lucky."

"What?" Prowl said, scowling at the broken antenna in his hands. "Did you rip this off a person?"

"Yeah," Jazz said. "Hey, my buddy's playing a gig in a little bit here and he needs a full band. Big deal nightclub. I could make us some fast cash and dash, ya dig?"

"When you say nightclub," Prowl said, "please tell me you don't mean illegal unlicensed afterhours establishment. Jazz. Tell me that's not what you mean."

"Mmmmm… I could tell ya that, if it helps."

Prowl sighed. "You are determined to drag me through every troubleshot saloon and alleyway on this planet, aren't you?"

"You don't gotta go," Jazz said. He flipped a spent credit chip and caught it between two fingers.

"Oh yes, and I'm sure you'll come back to me straight away when you're done," Prowl remarked. "I wasn't made yesterday."

"What's the big deal? It's a party! Get a drink and enjoy the show, we'll be done before dawn 'n on our way."

Prowl curled his lip. "Mmph."

"Hey, we put on a good show!" Jazz laughed. "It ain't gonna be a snooze fest or nothing."

Prowl did not appear encouraged.

Jazz plucked the antenna bits out of Prowl's hands and set them back down on the table. "When's the last time you shook a little dust off, anyhow? It'll do ya good, officer."

"Doubtful."

"Ain't you ever had fun?"

Prowl gave him a withering look.

"Seriously," Jazz said, leaning forward over the table. "Forget autopsies and arrests. Ya do have fun, don't ya? Sometimes? On holidays at least?"

Prowl's withering look turned uncomfortable at the edges. He glanced away at nothing in particular.

Jazz stepped around and into his new line of sight. "Parties? Hobbies? You at least gotta go out with the squad for drinks sometimes, I know ya do."

"I have work to do," Prowl said. "I don't have time to go gallivanting about the town all night like certain functionless layabouts that could be named. If the rest of the force is distracted with such things, it only propels my own success that much faster."

Jazz gave him a knowing look. "And they ain't such good company, I hear ya."

Prowl crossed his arms underneath his prominent bumper. "So much of what people take fun to be is incomprehensible to me. What is the point of injecting corrosive substances to the point of memory failure? Where is the joy in making endless inane conversation with mechanisms who are doing their best to forget everything you've said? Anyway," and here Prowl turned again, edging out of the way of Jazz's attention, "I doubt I'd be welcome. You saw how effectively my mere presence put an end to one party already."

Jazz tilted his head, quietly considering the figure of pristine legal integrity before him. Prowl was beautiful, no two ways about it—there would absolutely be mechs happy to test their luck on him, just to see how far they could get. But most of the time, bad company was worse than no company at all.

Prowl, beautiful and clever and formidable as he was, probably didn't have a single real friend in the world.

"Well hey," Jazz said, and untucked Prowl's arms from where they were crossed beneath his bumper, holding out the stiff wrists away from his frame. "You still got ninety percent of a temp coat and nowhere to be. Let's have some fun, you 'n me."

Prowl's optics reset. "You can't be serious."

"As a spark breach," Jazz said. He bounced Prowl's wrists at a cheerful little beat until Prowl forcibly extracted himself from Jazz's grip. "Come on, you oughta have some fun before you deactivate. Primus knows once I give ya back to the force, ya won't do a damn thing for yourself. Lemme give you a night on the town, officer."

Prowl stared at him, rubbing his wrists vaguely. "Why?"

Jazz opened his mouth, and then found that he didn't have any words ready to go. He closed his mouth. He shifted his weight to one hip and tapped his own plating thoughtfully.

"I like you," he said, at last, "and I like to think, maybe when I'm a thousand miles from here and you're burning the midnight oil in your nice little office, you put down your pen for a second and you think of me. I want ya to have something worth remembering. That's all."

It was quiet, for a moment. Prowl's face remained impassive. And then he said, "I suppose we can make a detour. Briefly. But then we need to finish what we started, you understand me? We don't have infinite time here. The longer I'm at large, the more likely the precinct is to send backup after me. They may already have done so."

"Yessir," Jazz said, and pulled off an overearnest salute. Prowl did not seem impressed.

"Hey," Drift said, leaning over the table, "this junk looks familiar. I think I know the guy these came off of."

HERE:

It was just past dusk when they dropped off the freeway and into the neighborhood streets of Rodion's eastern quarter, home of the fast and loose, amid the restless traffic of coming partiers. The eastern quarter held most of the clubs, most of the nightlife, and most of the expensive disasters yet to be unlocked by the night.

Pauldron got knicked for passing a fake at the toll booth, Geordex's message had read. One of the bots can swing around his place and scoop up his instrument, if you're willing to come play it.

Little Simfur was a high end, classy joint, run by a couple of the biggest names in the underground. They took payment all night, no tabs required, and the Entertainment Guild turned a blind eye to the infraction in a complicated game of under-the-table chirolinguistics. The pay was a caste higher than the scrapings you got at regulation bars, and on top of that, you could play the kind of stuff that would get you fined at a regulation place. A good swing for the old band, for sure.

Jazz paused to lick his thumb and rub the burnished gold filigree of the statue set into the alcove by the door. Underworld mechs were just as religious as the Guild Masters, they just had their own take on it, that was all.

Prowl moved stiffly, as out of place here as a priest at an orgy. Jazz pulled him up against his side to lead him through the crowd, and Prowl allowed it with only a moment of stiffness. It felt good—in the warm low lights and the press of the milling crowd, smelling of hot engines—and the good feeling caught Jazz by surprise, because so much of it was Prowl, heavy and present at his side.

Geordex caught sight of him and waved, hopping down from the stage to meet Jazz on the milling dance floor.

"Damn good to see you," Geordex said, clapping a hand to Jazz's shoulder. "Hear you're in Iacon these days. You been moving up in the world, Jazz my mech?"

"Ehh, just happened to swing a good roomie," Jazz said, with a grin. "Figure I'll be on the road again soon, anyway. Big change coming, you know what it's like."

"Sure do," Geordex said. And then he leaned forward, peering with interest at Prowl, who drew back a bit at the sudden loss of personal space. "Who ya got there, Jazz? That bot's way too fine for the likes of you."

"Hey now," Jazz said. He did his best to look wounded, pulling Prowl tighter against his side. "I'm a catch and you know it."

Geordex grinned, giving his own visor a conspiratory flash. "You get tired'a this bozo, you just give me a ping, sweetspark."

"Thanks," Prowl said, dryly. "I'll keep that in mind."

Geordex leaned back again. "We're doing warm up now, but you can hang out down here, sweetspark. Music in ten. Tell the barmech you're with the band, he'll give you the first one free."

"I prefer to stay sober, if it's all the same to you," Prowl said. He twisted Jazz's arm up and extricated himself from the grip, skating back a step over the dance floor. Jazz watched him go. When Jazz turned back, from watching Prowl maneuver through the crowd, Geordex was giving him a good long look. Jazz shifted uneasily, feeling oddly called out given that nothing had yet been said.

"So," he said. "What's the set? We doing the good slag or what?"

"Yeah," Geordex said, not quite breaking his long analytical once-over. "Yeah, we're doing the good slag."

A sideways tone rang out from the zitaur up on the stage, a blat of untuned noise. There was laughter from the band.

"Ya got some work done, huh," Geordex said. "Pretty thorough overhaul. Any reason?"

Jazz hesitated. "Impulse buy," he said, and flashed a winning smile. "Looks good though, don't it?"

"Uhuh," Geordex said. The musician pulled Jazz under his arm and guided him towards the stage, bent a little closer than totally necessary as he murmured against Jazz's audial. "Blaster says you're up to trouble," he reported, quietly. "You alright? You and your bot gonna need a quick getaway?"

Jazz glanced sidelong at his old friend. Geordex had only ever known him as Jazz, but the mech was no fool. He probably had his own ideas about Jazz's past.

"Naw," Jazz said, "we're good. Don't worry 'bout us."

Geordex hummed vaguely. "That bot's seriously outta your league, though. I ain't blind. He's got temp paint on, and that means he ain't supposed to be showing up at a place like Little Simfur with a mech like you."

Jazz fixed his gaze on the stage instead. "Hey folks!" he called up to the band, "Who's got an instrument for little old me?"

Amidst the laughter and welcomes, Jazz let himself be pulled up onto the stage and out of Geordex's grip, leaving behind the whole conversation for the bright lights and organized chaos of the performance area. Someone handed him a well-loved electric dulcimer, not unlike the zitaur he kept back home at Orion's place, and he ran his fingers over the strings and frets eagerly, reacquainting himself with the instrument.

"Since we got Jazz in the band," Geordex said, after he'd been pulled up as well, "let's do the chain-gang set, alright fellas? G mode, Polyhex key."

He pinged Jazz the set list, and Jazz tabbed through it with growing anticipation. Oh, he could make a beautiful mess out of these songs. He couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten to play something with so little structure—it was nothing but skeleton, struts and loose bolts, waiting for a body to be built around it. In Iacon proper, even the underground clubs were wary of hiring this kind of music, what with the white hot spark of the government looming so close overhead, all-seeing and merciless. A night of loose-pede fun in Iacon could end with a heavy knock from the fist of the cultural enforcers, and no one wanted that heat coming down on them.

Up at the front of the stage, Geordex tuned himself into the mic frequency and cleared his intake. The speakers above them all fizzled with the sound. "Scoundrels and gentlmechs," he announced, "hope you're ready to wear your pistons out, 'cause we got a helluva show for you tonight!"

While the front mech worked through his patter, Jazz settled back in with the band and double checked his hookup, ran through all the usual scrap. Those moments before the music always felt like teetering on the edge of a plunge, but then—the moment the percussionist hit that first beat—like the rush of a long, endless fall.

This was freedom. The long fall, the endless drop, the blind rush in the darkness between cities where the roads disappeared into wilderness.

A thump of the drum. The low twang of the first zitaur. Charge climbed up Jazz's back, anticipatory, sparking. Geordex opened all his vents and let the sound resonate out of him as he built that first note.

"Well nobody knows what trouble I'm in-"

Jazz let himself stretch out into the music, feeling for its structure, its empty places. A rhythm, under his fingers, repeating like the binary of you you you, calling out beneath the loose and fleeting melody. Maybe most mechs wouldn't pick it out, but Jazz wound it through the pillars of the song steadily, supporting the rest of the band as the zitaur player leapt into frantic, shining improvisation.

"I'm vicious now, lover, cruel and unprincipled-"

The song swirled up around them; Jazz ran his fingers over the strings, stirring up whatever notes seemed to fit between the pulse of the percussionist and the growing choir of other instruments. He looked up, fingers dancing up the neck of the dulcimer, and let himself finally scan the crowd. Out in the room, just past the dance floor, Prowl had perched himself on the edge of a table and was watching the stage with piercing, yellow optics.

"Oh my love, my love is a plague-"

Prowl looked at him, directly, through the sway of the crowd. Prowl looked at him, and the speakers flooded with something cool and blue. Improbably, impossibly, Jazz felt the change in the quality of sound, and knew that it was coming from him. It was alien, familiar, it was a sound he knew and remembered and could not possibly be making with the passage of his fingers on strings and frets; it was a sound like the taste of smoke, like the way Prowl's frame felt in the midday darkness.

"Ain't that a shame?"

Spark in his throat, Jazz met Prowl's gaze and found the rest of the room stripped away, all the lights and motion, leaving only Prowl and his yellow starlight eyes.

"Well ain't that a shame?"

-V-

They did ten songs, each one wilder than the last, barely stopping for Geordex to engage the audience in some breathless patter. Jazz lost himself in the race to stay ahead of the ever-changing polyphony, in the towers that they built out of tin and scrap and gold.

At the close of the set, the band broke up to wild cheers over the sounds of overclocked engines. Musicians slapped each other on the backs, clasped hands with Jazz, and caught each other up in a spin of relief and delight before moving on to the next nearest mech. The spin of fans on the stage was deafening, now, without the music.

Jazz blew a kiss to the band, dancing down the stairs, alight and alive with the joy of growing a series of lifeless chords into chaotic perfect life—each time wilder, each time new. It wasn't until the audience swallowed him and spun him through, bumping shoulders and smacking aft, that he found himself face to face with Prowl again, in the wake of the performance high. His engine coughed, sputtered; Prowl regarded him with intense, tracking optics.

"Uh," he said. "How was that?"

Prowl didn't react. After a long moment, an island of stillness in the friendly push of the crowd, he said, "That was opulent, overdone, unprecedented, and probably several counts of heresy against the Primal ministry of culture."

Jazz smiled weakly. "Ya liked it that much, huh?"

"Yes," Prowl replied.

"I," Jazz said, and then paused. "Wait, what?"

"It was beautiful." Prowl flicked his gaze up to the stage where the band had moved on to playing a good old crowd pleasing rag, for an encore.

"The ministry says that to play unsanctified music is to summon the dissolution of Unicron into society's order. But I can't see how anything so intricately built could have anything to do at all with the Unmaker. It seems… if anything, it seems like the opposite. To make something, not to unmake it—"

Jazz snapped his fingers. "That's just the thing," he said. "It builds! We're all building something new together, something new every single time. No two sets ever quite the same."

"It's mathematical," Prowl observed. "There's coding in it."

"Uhuh."

"I had always heard that there was no logic in it," Prowl clarified. "That it was feral nonsense."

Jazz leaned past Prowl and scooped up the half-drunk cube of coolant that Prowl had been working on for most of the set. "Well they would say that, eh?" He knocked back what was left of the coolant. "If just any old nobody could invent new music, the Guild of Entertainers wouldn't need masters, would it?"

Prowl frowned at the stage. "If the ministry could just hear it played…" he started to say.

"Ahh, who cares what they think," Jazz said, flapping a hand dismissively. "We like it, and that's what matters."

Prowl considered this for a long moment, and then he stood up. "Collect your credits," he said, "we should get moving. Dawn isn't that far away."

In the end, Jazz got more than enough out of the night to take them over the toll, and the band bought him a drink for the road, and all in all it was with a whirl of laughter and knowing shouts that Jazz extricated himself and Prowl finally from the club. At the elevator, on a whim, Jazz hit the button for the roof instead of the ground floor.

"What are you doing?" Prowl asked. Outside the glass of the lift the night glittered with lights at all levels, as if they were surrounded on all sides by stars.

"Just playing it by audial," Jazz said.

The doors slid open. The rooftop was a garden patio, unlit and empty, meant for private parties overlooking the city. Crystal cultures opened in clusters of dark-glittering gemstones underneath the night sky.

"I ought to put you back in the cuffs," Prowl grumbled, as Jazz darted out into the midst of it.

Burnished platters on burnished tables, underneath the clear dome of a crystal gazebo. Immaculate glazed tile. A center circle marked out in mosaic, perfect for dancing in.

"Ain't that something," Jazz said, with a whistle. "This's gotta be how Primes live, don't it?"

"I'm sure the palace has much finer things than any nightclub," Prowl said. "No matter how illicit it may be."

Jazz scaled the gazebo in a few easy grips and swung himself up onto the roof, surveying the garden from the highest ground. Down below, Prowl put his hands on his hips.

"You could find out for yourself, you know," Prowl went on. "If you weren't so hellbent on abdicating the Primacy. The palace will certainly not be lacking in creature comforts."

Jazz grimaced. "I told ya, that life ain't for me. I don't mind a little scrimping 'n saving if it means I live free."

"Who's freer than the Prime?" Prowl demanded. "You're being deliberately unreasonable."

"Nahh," Jazz said. He swung his pedes through the empty air. "See, as it stands I'm a nobody, 'n that means I don't answer to nobody. And I like it that way."

Prowl reached up and swatted the tip of Jazz's swinging pede. "That's your problem, Citizen Jazz. You won't take responsibility. You're already Prime, whether you like it or not, and your debts are already in force. Everyone answers to someone, even you."

Jazz shot a suspicious look down over the edge of the gazebo roof. "Yeah? And who d'you answer to?"

"To my superiors, obviously."

"That all?" Jazz prodded. "Just the officers, just the commissioner? What about the public, what about the people?"

Prowl's mouth formed a thin line.

"You can lecture me about what I owe Cybertron when you figure out what you owe it, how about that?"

"..."

Jazz sat back, gave the sky a good long look. "Moons are out," he remarked. "Pretty night."

"I suppose," Prowl said, still sour about being philosophically routed.

"Aw, don't be like that," Jazz said. He slid down, caught the edge of the roof, and swung to the floor in front of Prowl. "It's a pretty night and you know it."

Arms crossed, Prowl rolled his optics and then couldn't quite help a sidelong glance at Jazz. "Is that what we're doing here? Admiring the scenery? We are on a timetable, you know."

"I was thinking..." Jazz said, tapping the edge of his helm, "you don't like crowds and parties, sure, but that don't mean you can't have any fun. There's a lotta fun two mechs can have, all by themselves."

Prowl glared at him. "I think I've made it abundantly clear-"

Jazz held up his hands. "Nah ah ah," he said, "nothing like that. I'm not selling if you ain't buying. I just thought..."

He reached out, slowly, and pulled Prowl's hand into his own hand. The white-plated fingers folded into his with unexpected ease, their metal made cool and blue in the moonlight.

"How'd you like a dance with me?" he said. "Just one dance. Night's all ours, up here. We could make time for one song."

Prowl looked down at their hands, a complicated expression twisting his features. It didn't look like a no , but it wasn't a yes either.

"Come on," Jazz said, drawing himself in closer, letting his voice fall quiet. "Do something frivolous for once. What's the harm? I won't tell nobody."

"I'm not your paramour," Prowl said. "Pretend games and cover stories are one thing. Letting your band think we're involved is one thing, and I went along with that. But you're not mine, and I'm not yours. We're hardly more than strangers."

"That's alright," Jazz said, easily. "I'd like to dance with a handsome stranger, if he'll let me."

Prowl hesitated.

"Do you have any Polihex dances?" Jazz asked.

Prowl shook his head.

"No worries. I got a few Iacon downloaded. You got a waltz in there?"

"No, Jazz." Prowl shook his head again. "I don't have any dances. They're not considered appropriate downloads for an enforcer."

"Woof," Jazz said. "Things've changed a lot since my day, huh?"

Although he'd never been as comfortable in the halls of the police plaza as he had been out in the backstreets, undercover. He might have more blank spots than he thought.

"It was…" Prowl gently removed his hand from Jazz's grip. "Nice of you. To consider it."

"Hey, don't give up so easy, officer." Jazz flicked open his interface panel and tapped the jack. "I got plenty in here to share, all you gotta do is let me in."

The suspicious glare was probably deserved, all things considered.

"No funny business," Jazz said. "I swear, only the most chaste and pure of intentions, me. Hell, you can jack into me, if you're that nervous. I'll walk you through the file path."

"...No," Prowl said. "It makes more sense for you to initiate the data transfer."

He flicked open his hip array. All prim and perfect, of course-blue moonlight on the delicate prongs of his jackhead as clean and clear as reflection in glass. The dark soft recess of the port, below it, waiting to configure to Jazz's specs. Jazz indulged himself in a moment of thick, sweet hunger, and then straightened himself out again.

"Nothing but the dance," Prowl warned him.

"Nothing but," Jazz said, with a grin, and plugged in.

The inside of Prowl's systems had the meticulous, endless, utilitarian feeling of mortarless architecture, held together with nothing but cut angles and perfect symmetry. Jazz slid through it, smooth as you please, kicking up no sparks, until he reached an empty storage slot that could process kinesthetic data. In his mind, he tabbed back and forth between his many choices. Would Prowl like this one? Or maybe that one? Would this one be too silly for him?

Ah. Now that… that could work.

As easily as he entered, Jazz slid back out, leaving nothing of himself but the file.

He looked up from closing his array and found Prowl, with a pensive distant look, touching the soft recess of his port with two fingertips.

Jazz shifted forward. "I didn't hurt ya, did I?"

Prowl startled. Immediately the array cover snapped closed, locking away Prowl's softer components. "No," he said.

Jazz waited, thinking there might be an explanation coming, but when Prowl said nothing more, he shrugged and stepped back. "How's the data? Any errors?"

"It's clean," Prowl said.

Jazz nodded. "Alright then." He put out his hand, open palmed, waiting.

Prowl shot it a wary look. "What."

"Open the file, babe. We gotta run through it."

Hesitantly, Prowl laid his hand in Jazz's hand. You could tell the exact moment he ran the file, because the components of his arm began to flare and loosen with the turn of his t-cog. The housing of Prowl's wrist spun, a smooth click click click, like the tumbler of a lock, to match Jazz. Where their fingers touched, their plating transformed back, and their wrists interlocked.

"This seems impractical," Prowl said, observing the single operant mechanism of their combined hands.

"What's the fun if there ain't a little challenge?"

Prowl took a step back, falling into the opening stance of the style. Jazz matched him, and the bridge of their arms stretched between them.

"One time through, real slow," Jazz said. "Just like learning a new form."

The tips of their pedes marked a mirrored half circle on the mosaic floor. Around they went, like gladiators sizing up their next opponent-Prowl moved as smooth and seamless as he had in the bar where they met, capable with a physicality that Jazz could never tire of watching.

"Real good," Jazz said, and slowly spun himself back into Prowl's chassis. "Just like that."

"If you do that at speed, you'll bounce off me like a spinning top."

"That's the trick of it," Jazz replied. He unwound himself again, wrist components spinning in their housing. "You wanna just barely miss me, when you come close. Your turn now. Go on."

Graceful over the tile, Prowl echoed his tight turn and light steps. He came to rest just a vent away from Jazz's chassis, the heat of him almost tangible, before retreating the way he'd come. The coolness of the night rushed into the place where Prowl's frame had been.

Jazz felt, all at once, as if he was again on the edge of that long endless drop-the perfect disaster, the fearful joy-

"Alright," he said, breathlessly, "let's do that for real."

His speakers crackled. The file he pulled was muzzy, a bootleg from a night under a lurid Ultihex sky, all full of distant shouts and cheers.

The beat was right. The speed, the slow climb.

Prowl's optics narrowed. As the downbeat hit, they whirled to life.

Prowl did this as beautifully as he did everything, with an economy of motion that left him never quite still and never quite frantic, always at exactly the place he needed to be. Whereas Jazz was full of playful flourishes, half steps like grace notes, recklessly flirting with musical cataclysm. Jazz filled into the spaces Prowl left; Prowl provided the safe harbor that Jazz fell into again and again.

Faster and faster, as the speed of the song built. Jazz's chassis thrummed with the sound of it. High above Rodion, alone, the garden hummed.

In the moonlight, as blue as Jazz's visor-in the glow of the city, as yellow as Prowl's optics-they circled each other in an endless looping figure, a lemniscate. No matter how close they came, their frames never touched.

Except, of course, for the entangled union of their hands.

---

THE LIBRARY OF UNLOVELY THINGS

Breaking into a Guild Master's tower was probably the trickiest thing Jazz had set his mind to do, but he had plenty of experience with all sorts of security systems from all sorts of dastardly enterprises. The best thing to do, really, was to open it from the inside.

In any fancy type building, there was bound to be service access. Fuel delivery, trash disposal, servant access, you name it. All you had to do was turn on those magnets that make your fingers go numb, scale the back wall over the dumpster, scooch through the trash shoot, and come up in the grub room when nobody was looking. Sure, there's supposed to be security on the perimeter, but who's got time for that on a day to day basis, when you're understaffed and the guards are constantly getting pulled off to help move furniture or intimidate the vagrants out front?

Jazz and Prowl had the advantage of two different kinds of cop know-how, on top of everything else.

When Jazz strolled out onto the loading bay ramp and gave Prowl an easy-as-you-please hand up the sheer concrete wall, that was basically the end of it. It was late evening, most of the day staff gone up to their rooms for the night. With clear audials and some luck, a mech could make his way up through the support levels and into the master's floors without encountering anyone at all.

"Awright," Jazz said, as they stood at the edge of the elevator shaft, and stretched his fingers until the hydraulic fluid in them crackled. "Let's do this thing."

"You can't be serious," Prowl said. He peered down the shaft, one hand clenched around the door frame as if he expected someone to come up behind him and shove him in at any moment.

"I told ya," Jazz said, "Central service staircase is gonna be busy all night with staff toting over pillows and cleaning up messes. They're gonna know we don't belong the second they get a look at you, and I ain't far behind."

"Ridiculous," Prowl muttered. "Even if you can climb this, I certainly cannot."

"You ain't gotta do a thing, babe." Jazz flexed his claws, transforming the talon tips in and out. "I can carry ya."

"You cannot carry me," Prowl retorted, "I can cling to you like a stellar barnacle and hope I do not lose my grip, but you cannot carry me."

"Eh, six of one, half a dozen of the other."

Prowl scowled fiercely at him. Jazz put on his winningest smile and held his palm out, fingers wiggling invitingly. "C'mon, officer. You're in this deep. Why not close your vents and swim the rest of the way down?"

For a moment Prowl only glared silently. And then, with a heavy sigh, he allowed Jazz to pull him in close. They settled on a position with Prowl clinging to Jazz's front, arms hooked around neck, ankles hooked around waist. Time was when Jazz couldn't have pulled this off-he used to be a bit smaller than Prowl, and the heavy claws were definitely new to the specs. Primus, in his infinite wisdom, had seen fit to give Jazz the perfect frame for hauling a pursuit vehicle up a sheer metal face for the purpose of burglary: a small waist to latch legs around, powerful hydraulics to pull with, and just enough broadness to hold Prowl curled against his chassis. Prowl's doorwings were pulled in, their shiny backs just skimming the shaft wall.

It was close, like the intimacy of the coffin. Jazz tried not to let his imagination get away from him-the climb was going to be hard work, regardless of his bravado, there wasn't going to be a lot of processor power left for contemplating how Prowl's thighs shifted against him.

"You know you could just order me," Prowl said, some time later, when his face was tucked into Jazz's neck and Jazz's magnets were cinched tight to the wall.

"What?" Jazz said, thinking mostly of the order of fingers disconnecting and reconnecting with metal, the foothold left behind for the next step.

"You're-" Prowl seemed to cut himself off. His features shifted invisibly against Jazz's neck. "I've already said I will not let you leave me behind. You could simply tell me to follow, and I wouldn't have much of a choice. The coaxing wasn't necessary."

"Mmph." Scratch what he'd said before, there was still plenty enough processor power left to contemplate every excruciating little motion of Prowl pressed against him. "I ain't in the habit of being rude to pretty mechs, I guess," he said, with what little processor he had left for conversation.

Prowl was quiet for long enough that Jazz slipped from waiting on his reply to simply processing the next handhold, foothold, swing and pull.

A rich mech's tower was a kind of self sustaining system, a complete machine within its great glass casing. The Guild Master would live somewhere up there, above the halfway mark, surrounded by floors and floors of luxuries-a private spa, a detailing shop, any number of particular parlors for particular kinds of entertainment, each with their own dedicated floor-and luxurious apartments for guests and kinfolk. The lower floors were occupied by servants: instrument tuners, chefs, fetch-and-carriers, security, you name it. Once they passed safely into the zone of silent, unoccupied rooms in the aerial sector, it was safe to exit the elevator shaft.

The floor that they eventually emerged onto turned out to be a grow-house, floor to ceiling in all kinds of crystal cultures and air-corals, their glimmering red limbs spread toward the ceiling. The gardener had retired for the evening, leaving the lights at a low simmer.

"In a perfect world," Jazz mused, as he helped Prowl back down to his pedes, "I'da had a few weeks to get to know the staff, feel out the lay of the place, but we don't got that kinda time so we're gonna have to wing it."

Prowl gave him an adorably annoyed look. "You mean we're going to have to check every floor until we find the library, don't you?"

"Yeeee-ep."

"Delightful."

Most places had a service staircase, for the help to pass safely out of sight, and a central path between levels for the use of the master and his guests. Tryptich must have been a wheeled alt, because what they found beyond the brightly gilded exits were smooth ramps accommodated expertly into the architecture.

As they passed a wide hollow floor dedicated to some kind of rich mech's sport Jazz could only begin to guess at, the silence started to draw Jazz's attention towards Prowl. His optics kept trying to slide over to where Prowl was walking, just a step ahead, like a vanguard.

"Look," Jazz said, "I've been thinking. Why don't you come away with me."

Prowl turned and stared at him. "What?"

"When all this is over," Jazz said, "when you got the matrix back where it goes, when you're done doing your planetary duty and all. Why don't you come with me? Get outta here, leave the pricks as the precinct behind. I bet we'd make a great team, you and me. We could make for Simfur, see what it's like down in the southern hemisphere."

"You're talking nonsense," Prowl said, stiffly.

"We could do it," Jazz assured him, "I already done it once. I got contacts, surgeons, document specialists. Hell, there's even the Forge. You could be anybody you wanna be."

"A wishful fantasy." Prowl turned away. "I'm SC-777. I cannot be anything but that."

"Come on," Jazz wheedled, "I'm offering you a way out. No more ethical questions. No more orders. No more getting used like a drone by every sergeant who needs a body to run fetch or grab drinks or worse."

Prowl glared at him, and spun right around, taking off at a brisk pace.

Jazz raced after him. "I know you know what I mean. I know what it's like around HQ. I seen it. You ain't the slightest bit interested?"

"I'm good at my work," Prowl said. "I am a valued member of my team at the precinct."

"Prowl," Jazz said, more earnest now, "come on. You don't even like 'em. Don't sacrifice yourself for these yahoos. You stay here, you already told me what's gonna happen. I don't wanna see you go that way."

"Thank you for your concern," Prowl said, sounding the opposite of appreciative. "Let's stay focused on the mission at hand, why don't we."

"It's really that important to you," Jazz said, frustrated, "to die for a cause? Wouldn't ya rather live instead?"

"It's some measure of redemption. For what I've done." Prowl pressed his hands to the door ahead of them and pushed it wide. "For what I am."

"For what ya are?" Jazz scowled. "What's so goddamn bad about ya that ya gotta die to make up for it?"

Prowl's left doorwing twitched. "I was cold constructed."

There was a stretch of silence. "Uhuh?" Jazz said, when Prowl seemed to be waiting for a response. Apparently, that wasn't the right one.

" Cold constructed," Prowl said, again, with particular emphasis. "Made out of dead metal and a synthetic spark. Built to specs."

"Yeah, babe," Jazz said, "I know what cold construction is. I didn't fall off the colony shuttle yesterday."

"You're being remarkably dim about it, then," Prowl retorted. "I know what I am. You know what I am. I'm soulless. A necessary sin against nature. Commissioned by the very government that considers me an abomination."

"That's all just some silver age fossil's opinion, baby," Jazz said, "you ain't an abomination just 'cause you was born different. You got a spark, just like any of us."

Prowl stopped still and whirled. He gestured roughly to the whole of himself. "Look at me. I'm a programmed thing, a pretender, a hollow shell animated by a knock-off soul. If Primus had meant for me to exist, he would have made me himself."

"Baby, no," Jazz said.

"I'm not your baby!"

Despite himself, Jazz pressed a hand tight to his chest, over the space where his spark rested, his mouth a grimace. His fingers left scratches in the finish.

"Let's not play at euphemisms," he said. "If I'm not an abomination then nothing is."

"Okay," Jazz said.

Prowl looked up sharply. "Okay?"

Jazz nodded. "Okay," he said. "Then nothing is."

"Jazz," Prowl snarled. "That's not how this works! It doesn't matter how I feel about it, or even how you feel about it!"

"It don't matter—I'm the Prime!"

"When it suits you," Prowl said, "when it wins you an argument! But you won't face it down without running, and what good does that do me? What good does that do anyone like me?"

Jazz took an involuntary step back.

"The fact is that I was built to serve a purpose, and I will serve that purpose, because it's the only thing I'm good for. It's the only thing I'm allowed to be good for. You and I aren't the same. Aftermarket tinkering aside, your spark was forged—you can be anything, do anything, you can choose to fail, if you want to. The only choice I have ever had is in choosing what to die for. And if I have to die to stop more things like me from being made, then that's what I will do, and I will excel at it!"

"Things like you?" Jazz said. "You're Prowl! You're not a thing, you're brilliant and clever and ruthless and you can choose to live! Just like I did!"

Prowl jabbed a finger at him. "All you know how to do is run. Nothing changes if you do nothing! You have the kind of power I'd kill myself to buy even a fraction of, and all you can think about is how to get away from it. And when you go, you'll leave the rest of us holding the cube!"

Jazz balled his hands up into fists, but he said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Prowl pushed open the door to a room full of liquid shimmering in endless bottles, gestured sharply through the opening. "Go on," Prowl said, "we're wasting time."

They climbed in silence until they reached the library.

THEN:

Once upon a time, there was a fresh shiny newbuild commissioned by the Polyhex Law Enforcement Commission, and his name was Ricochet. Ricochet was spun up from the Well on a sultry summer night, snatched from the upburst before the spark was even cool, and brought away to be protoformed. His frame designers had poured their budget into all sorts of delightful toys and cutting edge body tech, some of it sheerly for the fun of seeing what it could do in the field.

Ricochet was handsome. In a way, Ricochet was an experiment, a test case in peacekeeping tech, and why would you choose to make your vanguard of next gen development anything but dashingly handsome? Of course the charm, now, the charm was all his own. Several of his batchmates had come out just as pretty, and with sour tempers on top of it.

The first time that Ricochet reported in to command, after being in the field for a season with only the occasional handler check-in, the whole plaza felt at the same time intensely familiar and intensely strange. Like fragments from a dream: the white walls, the sounds of voices.

"Must be nice to get in off the streets," said the Captain, striding easily through the halls of Polyhex Police Plaza. "Relax your plating, get a good deep vent of that properly filtered air."

"Oh, I like it out there, sir," Ricochet assured him. "Every night it's something new, yannow?"

"Mmm," the Captain said. "I forget how young you are."

Ricochet sensed that he had said the wrong thing, but he wasn't certain how so. Several dialogue options scrolled through his processor, but he discarded them all. His instincts told him that police plaza was different territory from the neighborhoods of Maulers and Crypts. The responses that would have served him in those places might only undermine his credibility here.

"I'm sure I still have a lot to learn," Ricochet tried, aiming for deference. He wasn't certain he'd hit the right note. There was a crispness to plaza talk that didn't come as easy after spending the first full season of his life at large.

His social processor was spinning at double time already, taking in the tempo and tenor of life among his distant kin. He'd already noticed that nobody around here seemed to do anything alone. He was still working on parsing the unique and somewhat unsettling tone of captain-to-officer interactions.

"A word of advice, Ricochet," the Captain said. His palm pressed flat to the door lock pad, fingers sinking into the memory material until they were totally swallowed. Whatever signs or symbols he spelled out inside, Ricochet would never have been able to guess.

"Sir," Ricochet said.

"You may have your fun out there, as you find it," the Captain said. "Allspark knows that we all have our vices. But don't forget who your people are, my boy. At the end of the day, none of those reprobates will lift a finger for you when the steel hits the metal."

"Yessir," Ricochet said, uneasily.

The Captain nodded, to himself, as the door slid open before them. "Still, that's what you were built for. I suppose we shouldn't complain if you're well suited to your job."

"Yessir. Nossir."

"That's a good mech," the Captain said. He settled heavily into his chair behind the desk, one knee falling aside, and crooked a finger at Ricochet. Ricochet stared. The door shuttered closed behind him.

"Come here," the Captain said, possibly because Ricochet had just been standing there staring. "You want to be a team player, don't you, Ricochet?"

"Yessir," Ricochet said, because he did, he wanted to be useful and helpful and well liked, and he wanted the approval of senior officers. It was so miserable suddenly being the odd one out, lost in a place that ought to be his home. He never felt lost like this at the warehouse, down at the docks.

"You're one of us, aren't you, Ricochet? You can do anything for me just as well as the regular black and whites, can't you?"

"Yes," Ricochet said, "sir."

"Alright then," the Captain said, and tapped the pelvic plate that housed his configuration. "Come down here and give my port a good cleaning."

Hesitantly, Ricochet came across the floor. He dropped to his knees beside the desk, between his captain's knees. The port array was right at the juncture of broad black thighs—part of him shied away from coming in that close, being penned in on either side, but this was his captain, wasn't it? His mentor? What did he have to be uneasy about?

"Someone showed you how to lick port before you went off on assignment, didn't they?" the captain asked.

"Er—" Ricochet thought back. Yes. Yes, his first day out of the framing facility, before orientation. A regular officer. Behind the plaza's generators, outside the building. Was that strange? That seemed strange in retrospect, but he hadn't thought anything of it at the time. Everything had been new, strange, interesting.

"You want to show willing," the Captain said. "Initiative is rewarded around this precinct."

"Right," said Ricochet. Pulling his nerves together, he ducked forward and gave the edge of the panel a long, sultry lick.

The panel of the Captain's array flipped back. A hand cupped the back of Ricochet's helm, fingers stroking in vague approval at his sensory horns and seams. A little shiver of pleasure, like lightning, like white delicious fire, crackled down Ricochet's back.

"That's right," the Captain said, "there you go. I knew you could do it."

Ricochet bit off a moan of surprise as the shiver of pleasure doubled and pooled at the back of his stowed cable, different than anything he'd felt when he was fooling around with the mechs at the dock. It was everything at once, more intense, almost like it came from somewhere outside of himself, like a booster shot to the helm. He buried his face in the crux of his captain's thighs, abruptly needing to feel soft mesh against his tongue, to feel the crackle of charge jumping into his wet mouth.

A thumb stroked lazily at his left horn.

"If you're good," the Captain said, "I'll let you jack into me, after."

Ricochet was good. Ricochet was very, very good, and he knew this, because he was allowed to overload his captain three times before being sent off to the TO's office for his final debrief.

In the cool damp of the spacedock, full of the steaming vapor from the hulls of icebound ships, for days afterward Ricochet would watch himself like an audience watching a holo, familiar but distant. It wasn't a luxurious life, working his way up the esteem of the gang—it wasn't as if he never labored, or worried, or held his tongue in furious hope that he'd played the right card—it wasn't as if there weren't pitfalls and schemes and ugly truths abundant in Polyhex's underworld—but somehow all of it wracked his nerves less than simply thinking of the Captain taking him under his arm in front of another enforcer, the weight of his frame, the heat and the smell of gunpowder. A good cleaning, he'd said. A good cleaning.

Ricochet wanted so much to be approved of. He ought to feel satisfied. It wasn't so different from what he'd done with some of the dock mechs, flirting, sneaking a little tactile at a dive bar after a shift. It shouldn't feel different. And yet, why did the Captain's words rattle around his helm, still, after days and days away from the plaza?

And why did the idea of going back again, the next time he was called for, fill him with such nameless dread?

NOW:

Tryptich's library was a museum of the beautiful and terrifying. Whole intact frames, the protoform expertly scooped out, lined the entrance to the floor. Warrior's frames, Jazz thought, maybe favorites from past seasons at the arena. Even good gladiators could meet a nasty end. And most of their patrons would be more than happy to sell those frames to a collector, just to recoup the investment.

"Morbid," Jazz observed. He cut his gaze aside, to judge how Prowl was taking the conversational gambit. Prowl did not return the glance, still advancing down the dark hall.

"Technically legal," Prowl allowed. "But in very poor taste."

A thousand little joints in Jazz's frame released their tension. He smiled at Prowl's back, and pushed on forward.

There were all sorts of disks and cassettes and drives archived around the library, most of them behind cases or in clear-fronted cabinets. One great crystal-faced cabinet boasted the only surviving remnants of a golden age experiment in frame technology that churned out nearly a hundred living, sparked flashdrives. The experiment was a failure, obviously—the sparks had burned out the tiny frames and left nothing but corpses behind. Triptych had displayed them in a gruesome sequence, transforming from alt to root across a half dozen forms.

"I really don't like this mech," Jazz said.

Prowl said nothing. When Jazz glanced at him, his face was cut into a deep, troubled frown.

"Rich folks, huh," Jazz sighed. "C'mon, we got a hammer to find."

Some of the library's contents were benign curiosities—an off-world tapestry, a star map, a gorgeous three-frame screen depicting the disgrace of Megatronus Prime. Some… were less benign.

Jazz caught up with Prowl, standing stock still, in front of a holo projector playing a silent scene on infinite loop.

Jazz reached for his shoulder. "What's—"

Gossamer and insubstantial in the projector, the shuddering figure of a flight frame fell to its knees. It shattered into oil and fragments of twisted metal, shrapnel, its chest wrenched open wide like a shell, allowing the pearl of its spark to tumble free in a gush of blue.

"Oh," Jazz said. His throat was tight, all at once.

The video reset. Jazz grimaced, looking away from the nameless mech caught in a relentless loop of his own miserable fate.

"Come on, Prowler," Jazz said, tugging gently at the shoulder in his grip, "you don't want that slag in your processor. It's just some leaked military footage. Leave it alone."

Prowl did not budge.

"This is a cold case," Prowl said, his voice almost a whisper. "I know this body. I've studied this file. He died right here in Iacon, hardly six blocks from enforcer headquarters."

The video reset.

Well that was. Horrible. Jazz tugged more insistently, until Prowl finally stumbled free of the projector's awful hypnotism.

"He had debts…" Prowl was muttering, "we traced the debts back to a street gang, the gang said they'd sold his debt—"

"Babe, come on, you don't wanna go down this road. Triptych is a Guild Master, he's not gonna let you bring the judge a case based on… on evidence that implicates him in a crime, let's be realistic here now. For all we know, the filmmaker works for the slagger."

"That's what I am worried about," Prowl murmured.

Jazz glanced sidelong at him, risking the overfamiliarity of pulling Prowl a little tighter against his side. Prowl didn't even protest, although there was no crowd here to play for, no observant friends or strangers. Jazz supposed you could excuse the naivety. Prowl was only a detective, not even sergeant yet, and probably younger than he liked to let on. But as Prowl advanced in the world, as he planned to, ugly secrets like this would be lying in wait for him, rushing up to meet him. Those secrets would be the price to pay for the auspices of power.

Jazz wished he could say that he believed Prowl would survive, noble and pure, against the rush of darkness rising before him. More likely, though, Prowl would be swallowed entirely by the chill tide of concession and compromise, swept out, dragged down, warped by his own ambition.

That was the future Jazz wanted so much to save him from. Prowl was practical, and an idealist, and under enough pressure the delicate crystal of that personhood would almost certainly shatter.

They found the hammer at the back of the library, in a beautifully gilded case set into an alcove, surrounded by a few other trinkets along the Primal theme of things. The whole case was one enormous lock. This was the really dicey part; if they set off an alarm at this stage, there would be no getting out of here in one piece. Enforcers would be on them in a second, the whole building would be locked down, and to add insult to injury, Prowl would get charged as an accomplice.

Jazz looked back over his shoulder as he took a little lockpicker's box out of his subspace. Prowl was watching him from a few steps back, his expression grim.

"Relax, babe," Jazz said, and spun the box over his fingers like a showman, "I can handle it."

In truth, Jazz hadn't done this in a long time. Not since he'd taken up with Orion, for sure. He used to pretty much have to break in somewhere if he wanted a place to sleep, since he was, you know, actually a fugitive with a false identity. A pre-rental check would have turned up some red flags he couldn't afford to have turned up. It was Orion Pax, with his bureaucratic genius and slightly bonkers set of priorities, who had forged the current documentation on the Jazz identity.

Maybe Jazz should have done a little recreational B&E, just to keep his hand in… But while Orion had no compunction on forging an ID for a fugitive, making him complicit in a whole new fresh slew of crimes seemed like a poor repayment to a good friend.

Anyway. With any luck, this bad boy was just another of those heavy-duty flashy lockboxes that the rich seemed to be so enamored with. And all you had to do was… dig into the system a little deeper…

The door of the case gave way with a pneumatic hiss. Behind him, Prowl startled.

"How did you do that?" he asked, edging a little closer.

"Learned some wild things on the force," Jazz said, offhand. "I'll tell ya 'bout it some time."

He unplugged his cable from the lockpick and tucked the little box back in his stowage. "Let's do this fast," Jazz said, snapping the panel over his subspace closed.

The forge was a double headed mallet, golden and silvery, somehow shorter in the handle than Jazz was expecting. It looked unwieldy, top heavy, a little gaudy. It was kind of mesmerizing, watching the blue light flickering in its case like grasping fingers against the transparisteel. Prowl hovered uneasily at his back, the twitch of his doors disturbing the otherwise motionless air.

"This is really a holy artifact?" Jazz said, tilting his head at the shape before him. "Whaddaya think, Prowl, you think this is the real deal?"

"Jazz," said Prowl, in a low voice. "I don't think this is a good idea."

"What, you think it's a fake?"

"No, it's—" Prowl shook his head, almost irritably. "I'm sure it's real. That's not the problem. Think about where we are right now. Think about who we're stealing from."

"Ain't stealing if you don't take nothing," Jazz said, brightly.

"That's not," Prowl said, and then cut himself off. His whole body gave a strange little shudder, ending with the tips of his doors raised high behind his back. "Suppose you do manage to extract the matrix," Prowl said. "You don't know who they'll give it to next, if you give it back..."

Jazz shrugged one shoulder. "Same guy who woulda got it if I wasn't there, probably."

"You don't know what they'll do to you, if you give it back."

"We've come this far," Jazz said. His fuel pump was like a jackhammer in his chassis.

Prowl's hand shot out, catching Jazz's wrist as he went to take a step. Jazz stilled.

"Listen to me," Prowl said. "Having the Matrix inside you right now affords you a certain amount of protection. Your personage is holy, your abilities are formidable. There's only so much that can be done to you, especially if you place yourself in the public eye. But if you let this thing be taken out of you, you are powerless."

The plating under Prowl's grip fizzled with a confused sort of charge. "Don't tell me you're worried about me, officer," Jazz said, his mouth oddly thick as he tried to pronounce the words.

"Why shouldn't I be worried about you?" Prowl said, sharp and low, the way you'd tell a terrible secret. "Look around us! Look at this place! If someone at the highest echelon of society can have this level of careless disregard for right and wrong—"

"We been knowing, Prowler, you're the last one to hear."

"That just makes it worse!" Prowl insisted. "The Guild Masters elect the senate! There are fifteen guilds, and if even a fraction of them are mastered by someone like this—Jazz, I don't want to see what they'll do to you when their spite has free reign!"

Jazz frowned. "Well I can't just run off with the damn thing."

"You have been so far, and look at what you've managed! I barely caught up with you! Surely all you need is a head start..."

Jazz looked from Prowl to the artifact glowing eerily in its steel cage. Live like this, with this target on his back, for how long? Forever?

"They'll let me go," Jazz said, "they got to. Once I'm normal again-"

"You'll never be normal again, Jazz! You'll always be a threat to the line of succession, a potential Prime waiting in the wings. They'll never sleep easy knowing you exist."

Crackles of blue light leapt from the golden hammer grip to Jazz's hovering hand, buzzing and fizzling like a warning. He hesitated.

If he could just shed the cursed thing, make it over the border into Kaon, lose himself in the crowd, wouldn't that be enough? Would that be enough? Would anything ever be enough, now that he was on the map again, now that…

There was a sudden, hollow thud from beyond the walls of the library. Jazz snatched his hand back, meeting Prowl's wide optic.

"Silent alarm," Jazz said, tanks heaving in a mess of panic and dread. Stupid, stupid, he'd been distracted—rusty—

"Or else one of us was caught on surveillance," Prowl said, grimly. "Can we make it out?"

"You know we can't," Jazz said, with a humorless smile. "Maybe I could scale the side of the building and make a break for it, maybe they're not monitoring the outside, maybe, but you—"

"Forget me," Prowl snapped, "worry about yourself."

The sinking feeling in Jazz's tanks met a strange kind of sad warmth and tangled up somewhere around the region of his throat. "Can't," he said. "We don't know if they saw us together. I ain't gonna leave you like that."

Sounds of motion echoed down the vaults of the library. No shouting, no reading of rights yet. But Jazz could never forget the sound of heavy enforcer cladding as it readied to spring the awful trap.

"Jazz," Prowl started.

That jackboot echo swelled; Prowl opened his mouth to argue.

All hesitation, all second guessing, all measured reason—Jazz left it untouched in the clean bright line of what needed to be done. He grabbed Prowl's hand and forced it closed around his own wrist, squeezing until Prowl automatically mirrored the grasp. Then he twisted his own arm up behind his back, Prowl still hanging on for the ride, and brought Prowl's remaining hand up to his own throat, forcing it closed around his throat.

Jazz turned his head and shouted. Prowl recoiled, startled, from the sound, but Jazz didn't allow him to let go. The low suggestion of footsteps in the anteroom transformed into a pell mell clatter of stomping and sprinting.

Jazz's hand, clutched to the back of Prowl's, looked for all the world like a prisoner scrabbling to peel himself free from the hold of a merciless enforcer. At Jazz's back, Prowl stiffened. The sound of his machinery this close, like it had been in the coffin bed they'd shared, betrayed surprise and confusion and—damn, for a moment to take a second look at this, just for the aesthetic—the sudden frantic whirring of cooling fans.

Just in time for the rest of the squad to come screeching around the corner. Pedes scraped the polished floor as the officers took in the scene, skidding to a hasty stop before they could bowl over their quarry and accidentally set him free.

"Say the rights," Jazz muttered. Pinned here, between the hounds and the implacable cliff edge, anticipation and fear and excitement swirled through Jazz like a shot from the headiest booster, thrumming through his speakers like a subsonic invitation to dance. It took everything he had not to break free from the capture he'd engineered himself, to spin free and run hard, ride the cliff edge and disappear into the night.

"What." Prowl said.

"Say it," Jazz hissed, "say it now!"

The two pursuers, beat cops from the look of them, were sidling closer, eyes gleaming in even parts wariness and hunger. Prowl jolted, his hands clenching reflexively at Jazz's throat and wrist.

"You are under arrest," he said. His uncertain voice smoothed out into the dronelike hum that Jazz remembered from the rooftop that first night. "This officer will retain record of your statements for future evidence. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court."

Each fingertip in the cables of Jazz's throat glowed against his relays.

"Aw, damn," the first enforcer said, edging closer, "I was looking forward to a little squealer-hunt. Don't suppose you'd let him off the leash so we can have a bit of a tear and chase…?"

If anything, Prowl pulled Jazz tighter against his chassis. The heat from his machinery seared Jazz's back, the rumble of his engine pressed close enough to feel as if it was Jazz's own.

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," Prowl said.

The beat cop sighed. His partner elbowed him sharply in the side.

"Glad to see you hale and whole, detective," said the partner, offering Prowl a smile. "We had a bet going round the office whether you were offline yet or what."

"You're gonna get a new partner," the first cop said, rubbing at his side. "Captain's been in a bad mood all week 'cause Sarge let you go off by yourself on pursuit."

Because he was so, so close, Jazz felt the ripple of repulsion in Prowl's frame. But all Prowl said was, "I see."

"It's been a weird time around the office," the second cop said. "Let's get this skiv in the pen, and then you can go calm Barricade down yourself. Honestly it's got me kind of annoyed. There are other mechs on the force, does he know that? You might wanna remind him."

Prowl's fingers tensed, and then his affect smoothed, down to the growl of his engine. "Yes," he said, "alright. Would one of you lend me a set of cuffs?"

The second cop pulled his set from his stowage, while the first cop circled a little closer, eyeing their fellow officer's quarry with interest. "I said it had to be this guy," the first cop said, "when your deets came up on the frame recognition report. Why else'd you be out here in the Towers? Some of the guys thought you just wandered off and got helm-fragged at a rager, but I knew you must've still been following him."

The cuffs snapped open with a sizzle in the second cop's hands.

"Yes," Prowl said, his voice distant, although he was speaking from only just beyond Jazz's audial, "I never lose my mech."

---

WHY SHOULD WE DIVIDE?

One precinct was very much like another, Jazz was finding out, as he was hauled into holding for his first time in Iacon custody. Same white halls, same grubby pigiron cellblock. He'd been on his best behavior, living with Orion, and really hadn't had occasion until now to check 'tour the drunk tanks' off his bucket list. The enforcer at his back pushed him over the threshold into the last cell on the block, and he stumbled hard over the uneven floor, catching himself with a shoulder against the far (not very far at all) wall.

"Gotta admit," the officer said, lingering in the doorway, "you got some bearings on you, stealing a whole Matrix. I don't even know what the Prefectus Lectorum is gonna charge you with."

Jazz grimaced into the wall, where the officer couldn't see his face.

"You're a pretty big mech," the officer said, "shiny too. Custom work on that frame, or I'm a 'Tesson's toaster. You're no everyday thief, are you?"

Jazz snorted, his grimace twisting into a wry smile. He pushed himself away from the wall as best he could in cuffs and slid down to rest on the floor. "The appeal to ego is appreciated," he said, "but with all due respect, I don't gotta tell you nothing, sir."

The officer frowned. He looked a lot like Prowl, they all did, but this one was more pinched. Less healthy. If Jazz had to guess, that spark never quite took to those construct specs—he'd probably blow a major fuse in a chase someday and spin off into a barrier, and that would be the end of him. Kinda sad, when you thought about it. He'd have lived a longer life in a different frame.

"This can go a lot easier on you if you tell us who you're working for," the officer said. "Just keep that in mind. Whoever it is, I don't bet they're gonna be nearly as loyal to you."

"Uhuh," Jazz said. "Yanno, that paint peel you got on your pauldron could be from incompatible nanite cultures. I seen it a couple times on cold cons. You oughta talk to somebody about it."

The officer slapped his hand closed over his shoulder automatically, and then his expression went murderous. "You keep your smart-aleck comments to yourself or I'll make you wish you had."

Jazz let his helm fall back against the wall. "Right." He sighed. "Sure didn't miss this part of the plaza."

The door slammed shut. Jazz gave it a couple days before they started to warm up to him around here—that was, if they let him sit instead of hauling him off for some sham trial.

His tank sunk like a punctured hull. It was just starting to set in what he'd done to himself, jumping to take the bullet for Prowl like that.

He'd been dragged in several times in Polyhex, when he was an undercover. A fake arrest was a convenient way to get him in off the street for extended check-ins, away from the gangers. But once he was inside, cuffs off, the reception had always been warm. Sometimes too warm. It wasn't until he was on the run in Staniz that he'd had his first taste of real arrest, complete with rough handling and cuffs that didn't just pop open when he pinged their frequency.

That time had been part of a sweep-up in the red light district, when the city was cracking down on unlicensed courtesans. He'd got lucky that time. Remembered what officers liked, kept 'em happy and well-disposed, and managed to slip free the same night without trial or sentence. Might not be so lucky this time. Probably wouldn't.

He'd never known a perp to make it out of holding on their own—hadn't heard of many getting through this part without making a deal, and even then, prospects were murky. Escaping from holding was just about impossible once you were in the cell, but… maybe a transfer between prisons… maybe he could…

Behind his back, out of sight of the cameras, Jazz began the extremely unpleasant and time consuming work of shorting out his stasis cuffs. If only they'd been dumb enough to throw him in here without emptying his stowage first. Those lockpicks would have made this so much faster.

On the off chance Prowl was watching the cameras, Jazz fixed the corner of the cell with a bright look and flashed his visor.

Alright. Nothing left now but to kill time, and hope his luck hadn't run out for good.

THEN:

"Can I ask you about that?" Orion Pax had asked him an eternity ago, shaking out the living room tapestry on the balcony of the apartment, a heavy thwump thwump with each dusty snap.

"Bout what?" Jazz said. He was propped up on the couch holding a cold compress to his hip, where the self repair nanites were producing so much excess heat that something was likely to melt if he didn't keep it cooled.

It was a few months into living here, with Orion Pax, in Iacon. It was summer. Jazz remembered because he'd told himself then that he'd only stay for the season, just until the summer storms were over and it was safe to sleep on the street again.

"Why you do that," Orion said, "sell port service, I mean. It seems kind of dangerous." He indicated, presumably, the compress on Jazz's hip.

"Aw, this ain't no thing," Jazz said. "Workplace accident, you know how it goes. Wasn't like Crusher was tryina crush me."

"His name is Crusher," Orion pointed out.

"The mech's in garbage disposal," Jazz laughed, "what'd you expect?"

Orion gave the tapestry another good thump and then folded it over the balcony railing. Clouds were gathering again, Jazz remembered that too—Orion's blue paint in the gathering storm, so dark it looked navy.

"I was just wondering why you do it," Orion said. "You make pretty good tips performing, and I've told you a hundred times that I don't need you to pay rent. You don't have a license. It would be safer just to not, wouldn't it?"

"Mmm," Jazz hummed. "Besides that half the musicians on the planet are doing it too? I like people. I like makin' people feel good."

Orion nodded, vaguely, clearly not getting it but willing to take Jazz at his word. Remarkable mech, Orion Pax. Spark the size of a city. Mind like an open harbor.

"Crusher's getting conjunxed anyway," Jazz said, "so this was sort of a goodbye. Bummer for me, I'm gonna have to expand my client list again."

"That's nice for him, though," Orion said, and bent down again, prodding at the pile of various flimsies and cloths he'd gathered up from the stuffy apartment. "We should all be so lucky as to find love in this unjust and segregated world."

"Yeah, I dunno," Jazz said. "Love I can jive with, but marriage? Who'd wanna be tied down like that?"

"Uhuh," Orion said, and came back up with the dust cover of what had been the spare berth and was now Jazz's temporary night stay. "Help me shake this out?"

Jazz pushed himself up off the couch, only wincing a little bit, as Orion searched in the bundle of cloth for its seams. There was a satisfied snap of cloth, and then Orion offered out one of the edges.

"Domestic life," said Jazz, reaching out to take the corners of the sheet. "Nah, that ain't my thing."

"You might be surprised," murmured Orion. "Sometimes you meet someone who makes you want to change your whole life for them."

Jazz shot Orion a questioning look, and Orion ducked his helm.

"Or so I've heard," said Orion, apparently concentrating hard on perfectly matching his sheet corners. "I mean—you know what I mean."

"Yeah, I guess," said Jazz, thinking back to the young undercover cop he barely recognized in himself. "But I'm happy as I am. Music, friends, a good place to sleep… What more can a mech want?"

NOW:

Jazz had just popped the last major wire loose in the cuffs when the deadbolts in the cell door hissed and clunked open within their housing. Jazz sat bolt upright, shifting to hide the cuffs a little better behind his back. Was it time for the interrogation? Maybe they'd start with a first course to soften him up—bounce him around the cell a little bit, blow a few fuses?

He doubted they'd be nice enough to send in a designated Good Cop to sweeten him up first, not after he dismissed the last one out of hand—

A newer, darker thought sent the first flash of real fear shooting through the cage of his chassis. What if they'd cracked his cover profile? What if they knew about Ricochet—

His fuel pump flooded his lines with hot energon as the door rolled back, clicking on its heavy rails, casting light and shadow over the profile of Prowl.

Jazz sagged. He realized his fingers were scraping deep into the cement wall and retracted the claws before they could chip. "Prowl," he breathed.

"We need to go now," Prowl said. "Before I check in with my captain. I've set the monitors back by enough that I should have an alibi if you leave right now."

The hot flush of energon in Jazz's lines didn't recede, in relief, although it should have. Instead, his fuel pump doubled in speed. "You're—?"

"Yes," Prowl said, " obviously. Was I not clear enough? I'm engineering your escape."

Prowl retreated, through the open doorway, and the strip of floor that he vacated, just beyond the threshold, might as well have been the mouth of an ocean.

"You've given me enough trouble over the last week that they'll believe you could do it," Prowl said, "but we need to get out of here before they do a deep scan on your frame and find out what's inside of you. The scanner tech is gossiping in the break room right now. We have approximately 13 kliks before he tires of discussing celebrities and reports back to his post."

Jazz heard him, but Jazz wasn't listening. The light streaming over Prowl's tense doorwings—the graceful curve of his chevron, the red an almost defiant slash of color over his starkness—

"Change your mind," Jazz said.

"What?"

Jazz surged forward, the shorted cuffs falling away behind him. His hands stopped just short of the star on Prowl's hood. One more time.

"Come with me," Jazz said. "Give it a chance. Give me a chance."

Prowl looked away. "You know I can't," he said.

Something hot and thick lodged in Jazz's throat. The frame under his hands was vibrating even harder than his own, somehow. He tried to imagine Prowl living his kind of life, quick-footed on the edge of disaster, never quite knowing what note came next. Gutters and rooftops. It was a nice dream, but it was only a pale wish against the looming certainty of the other future: Prowl here, alone, forever. Grinding away the daylight to make his doomed life go a little further.

It always hurt to say goodbye. Jazz got too invested in people, that was his problem. Damn fool of him to think this time it might end different.

"Right," he said, and tried for a smile. "I know. The illustrious Officer Prowl can't be off traipsing around the world like some kinda vagabond bohemian. You got promises to keep. Gotta change the world."

Prowl's mouth twitched as if it was considering a smile. He reached up, hesitant, and clasped Jazz just below the shoulders, in an enforcer's gesture of camaraderie. His mouth opened. And then, alarmingly, there was a voice from the hall beyond the cell block.

"SC-777," it called out, "you back here? O-20 says you're back in from pursuit."

Prowl's optics flared. His grip on Jazz's shoulders dug in hard, and for a second he seemed almost ready to surge forward and cover Jazz's frame with his own. Wouldn't have worked, with Jazz's new size, but nice of him to consider it.

"One moment," Prowl called back. "I'll come to you, just give me a moment to lock up."

The voice took on a teasing, condescending quality. "You get back to the home base after a week away and you don't spare a minute to come debrief me? For shame, officer."

"Whozzat?" Jazz whispered.

"My captain," Prowl said, grimly.

"What are you doing in there anyway?" the captain's voice asked. "You know we have to get him on record or the confession doesn't count, kid."

A series of inscrutable little twists fled across Prowl's face. Abruptly, he pushed Jazz back—back towards the empty cell, where Jazz had just been freed. Despite everything in Jazz screaming at him to make a break for the door, he allowed Prowl to hustle him back until he could no longer see the door or much of the hall itself.

Prowl's mouth spread and twisted into a grimace. His doors flicked, and then settled into a tight stillness.

"I'm going to get him into the guard station," Prowl said. "He'll dismiss the guard for a fuel break so he can have me alone inside. Once he's distracted, you move quickly down the hall and find the maintenance shaft outside to the left. It'll take you under this unit and drop you off in the boiler room. Don't let anyone see you."

Prowl reached down and—without so much as a by your leave flipped back Jazz's port cover and jacked himself in. A fuzz of arousal shivered down Jazz's back, but before he even had time to register the presence of data uploading in his short term storage, Prowl was back out of him.

"I have a contact in the Primal Vanguard," Prowl said. "Call this comm channel, tell them I sent you, arrange an in-person meeting and tell them what you are. They'll help you get the matrix back into the correct hands."

"Prowl—"

"Don't argue with me," Prowl hissed. "You're going to make it out of here if it's the last thing I do."

He pulled back, let go, and took one retreating step after another until his back was nearly against the wall.

"Get out of here," he said. "Get that thing out of your chest, give it to someone you trust. Be safe. Live. It's what you're best at."

And then he turned and was gone, a set of footsteps retreating down the hallway. There was a click, the door unlocking, and the pleased voice of Prowl's commanding officer. Jazz waited a long minute, his spark in his throat, before creeping out and closing the door behind himself. He made sure to sabotage the lock pad, so that no one would think an officer had used the passkey to let him out.

He tried not to think about the rough purr of the voice behind the locked guard station door, just loud enough that he couldn't help but hear it as he slunk past, keeping low to avoid throwing a shadow against the darkened glass. He tried, but the sound rattled in his helm for a long, long time after the trap door had fallen closed behind him; in the dark beneath the boiler room, in the rusty drain waiting for a stranger to pick up the line.

Primus but he wished the last thing he ever heard of Prowl wouldn't be another enforcer captain saying—

There we go. Nice to have things all getting back normal, isn't it?

-V-

Somehow, Jazz expected the apartment to be empty.

Frozen, he stood in the doorway face to face with Orion Pax, who was likewise frozen in the act of reaching for the door. Behind him, on the couch, the enormous gladiatorial hulk of Megatron was barely contained by the modest piece of furniture. Megatron's sleeping engine let out a grumble and backfired.

Jazz gave Orion a significant look. "Guess I don't gotta worry about finding someone to take my half of the rent, huh?"

"You—!" Orion started, and then visibly throttled himself back down as the bulk on the couch gave a snort of sleepy protest.

"What're you doing back here?" Jazz asked, peeking around him. "Thought we left you on the trail back in Rodion?"

"We gave up," Orion said shortly. "We have other things to do besides chase your exhaust pipe, you know."

"Really?"

"No, not really," Orion said, scowling. "Some fink uptown called the cops on me and I got sent home with a road rage ticket. But it doesn't matter, I'm done. I know you, Jazz. If you don't want to be caught, you won't be."

That rocked Jazz a little, though he tried not to show it. Uncatchable, unflappable Jazz, that was him.

Then Orion leaned forward, peering out into the hall. "Where's that enforcer you were cuffed to?"

"Ahh," Jazz said, and ducked past Orion so he wouldn't have to pretend to smile, "he let me go, if you can believe it."

Orion glowered at his back; Jazz danced around the chairs left pulled out and the scattered maintenance equipment presumably left around by Megatron, making his way to his own little corner of the apartment.

"I can believe it," Orion muttered. "You have a way of getting away with things."

"Just here to pick up my zitar," Jazz told him, bending over to shake the wrinkles out of the blanket he'd left in the corner that fateful morning, expecting to be home again that very night. Made it back after all, just a little late. "Then I'll be on my way."

"You're going?" Orion demanded.

"Sure," Jazz said, "figure I kinda overstayed my welcome, all things considered. Anyway—" he jerked a thumb at Megatron, "—three's a crowd, as they say."

"What?" Orion said. "But—you've still got the Matrix?"

"Eh. I'll figure something out. You know me."

"Jazz—" Orion dug the heel of his palm into his brow. "Jazz, what was all this about? You pick up the Matrix, transform in front of the entire Senate, and then you spend the next week running away from me like I'm trying to drag you back to an execution. What are you doing? Why did you run?" Frustration creeping into his voice, he said, "Why did you run from me?"

Jazz shrugged one shoulder. He grabbed the zitar by the neck and straightened up, giving the frets a cursory check for damage. "Knew you'd be like this. Try'n talk me into taking up the crown."

"I shouldn't need to talk you into it!" Orion said. "A sacred ancient artifact just pronounced you worthy of the greatest honor on Cybertron, and you run? The government is in a panic because of you, no one knows who's in charge, the Aristos are talking about naming some pet admiral of theirs acting Prime—"

"Yeah, see, this is the lecture I didn't wanna get," Jazz said.

Orion lifted his hands like he was going to reach out and strangle Jazz, and then pulled them back at the last minute into shaking hovering fists. "Okay," he said. "Okay. I'm not mad. I won't lecture you."

"Yeah?" Jazz cocked his helm. "Cause you seem mad."

"I'm not mad!" Orion shouted.

Megatron's engine grumbled, and Jazz shot Orion an amused look. The librarian wilted.

"Just," Orion said, "just tell me why you're running."

Jazz set the instrument back down to lean for a moment against the wall. "I know you don't get it," he said, "but not everyone's cut out for heroics. I never asked for this slag."

"So you're just leaving," Orion said. "Leaving me . Just like that. You weren't even going to say goodbye?"

"Aw, OP, you don't need me." Jazz dug out the zitar's case from the haphazard pile of his belongings in the bin beside the window, and setting the zitar gently in place. "I'll get this matrix thing pried out of me one way or another and then you all can try it again, but right this time." He popped the clasps. "I always thought you shoulda been the one to get it anyway. You're really the brains of the operation, between Megs and the rest of 'em. Ya got a good spark too. That's in a lot shorter supply."

"Jazz—" Orion thrust his hand out and caught Jazz by the elbow. "You have a good spark too."

Jazz stilled, the zitar case clenched in his hand, engine turning over in his chest with a sick empty lurch. "Yeah, maybe," he said. "Better'n some. But I'm a coward."

"You're not a coward," Orion said. "What is going on with you? Look, I know I was mad before, but you can still talk to me, right? I got ticketed, I calmed down. I'm sorry I picked that shopkeeper up and shook him."

"You did what now?"

Orion waved him off. "I'm slagged off that you're running, I admit it, but you're still my friend. You're one of the most important people in my life. Maybe the most important. Just tell me what's going on in that six-fifty horsepower processor of yours, okay?"

The case hung heavy in Jazz's hand, the weight of his one real possession like an anvil in his grip.

"Prowl was right," Jazz said, turning his head aside. "I don't know how to do anything but run."

Orion gave him a tug, and pulled him around until they were facing each other. He lifted his hand, gently forcing Jazz to face him.

"He let me go," Jazz muttered. "The enforcer. I tried to take the fall and then he let me go, and I went, 'cause all I know how to do is run. I ain't worth it. I ain't worth any of this. I never asked any of y'all to chase me, I never asked him to help me, and I sure never asked for this stupid hunk of crystal in my chest."

"I… I know you didn't, Jazz."

"I'm just one mech," Jazz said, voice raw, "I can't do it, OP, I can't."

"Jazz," Orion said, "what are you afraid of?"

"I'm afraid to fuck it all up," Jazz said, his voice like glass in his tightening throat. "I know the world is messed up, but I can't be the one to fix it. I don't know how."

Orion grimaced in sympathy. His palm was warm against Jazz's cheek. "You don't have to do it alone," he said. " No one can do it alone. Just look at Megatron—he might look like a romantic hero, but he's got me and Soundwave and the whole campaign team behind him. You need people you can trust to take the weight."

Jazz's frame throbbed with frustration, and dread, and an irritating hot spot just behind his optics. He'd thought he could just get his stuff and go. This hadn't been the game plan.

Orion squeezed his shoulder. "No Prime or senator or even Guild Master is ever really alone. They have staff, cabinets of people, administrators and advisors. If you did take up the Primacy—wait, listen, it's just, if you did— I'd be behind you the whole way. Me, the team, Megatron—"

"I don't think Megatron's been behind anyone in his entire life," Jazz said, with a wet almost-laugh.

"He will be this time, if he knows what's good for him," Orion retorted.

Jazz lifted his hand and pushed Orion's gentle grip away. "But it's me who gotta be the Prime," he said. "If I screw up, I take everyone down with me."

"Yeah," Orion said, softly. "Yeah, maybe you would."

Jazz turned away, snapping the clasps of his zitar case with more force than necessary. The Mithril Sea was supposed to be nice this time of year. Maybe he'd head south, find a resort town, do some busking, start over. Be someone new, be anyone, anyone except Dulcimaeus Prime.

"Isn't it better to try?" Orion said, "Even knowing you might fail? If you don't try, nothing changes. Isn't there even one person you'd change things for, if you could?"

The dark hollow of a breached spark chamber; a voice behind a frosted glass door. Of course there was. Of course.

"Look," Orion said, "at the end of the day, I guess it's always going to be your choice. No one can make you take up the Primacy. But ask yourself something. Is this really the world you want to live in, Jazz?"

On the handle of his zitar case, Jazz's hand tightened.

"You could stay," Orion said. "You could stay, and try."

"That slag never works," Jazz said. "It's easier to run."

Orion's hand hovered over the handle of the zitar case, and then his fingers closed over the back of Jazz's knuckles. The case swung. His hand was warm.

"Don't you think," Orion said, "that a one-in-a-million chance is better than no chance at all?"

THERE:

A half-shift after his official time of release, Prowl finally clocked out at the precinct.

The work had piled up while he was gone, as he knew it would—four days back at his desk and he had only barely begun crawling out from underneath the backlog. He hadn't had time to socialize much since his return, which was somehow both a worry and a relief. Chatter filled the lobby in every direction, with its high ceiling and regimented pattern of broad, U-shaped desks. Enforcers, as a rule, were highly social mechanisms, although there were always the odd exceptions.

Where was Jazz by now, he wondered. As far as the eastern seas? Perhaps he'd gone south, to the rebels in the Kaonite confederacy. That was what Prowl might do, in his situation. It would be easy to get lost amongst the anarchy for a while. Of course when Ultra Magnus' legionnaires finally crushed their stronghold at long last…

"Oof," said one of his neighbors, pausing in their way to peer over the enormity of work displayed on Prowl's workspace. Prowl had actually needed to expand the computer screen to 3x dimensions laterally, just to be able to keep his eye on all the irons in the current fire. "Don't they give cases to anybody else around here?"

"Apparently not," Prowl said, dryly, and powered off the screen before J-220 could get a closer look at the confidential material displayed there.

J-220 leaned back, balancing their weight on their heels and the grip on the edge of his desk. "Well better you than me, I guess," they said. "I guess that's why you're so popular up top, the brass like results. You gonna forget all us little guys when the boss finally promotes you to sergeant?"

Prowl reached over and pushed their fingers off the edge of his desk. "A sergeant is not really any different than a regular officer."

"Yeah," they said, falling back easily, "but the pay raise is nice, innit? And you can move outta the barracks if you want, no red tape."

Prowl hesitated. Admitting that one wanted space was considered gouche among enforcers. "Er," he said, "yes I suppose."

"Maybe when you're a sergeant, the captain will pay a little more attention to the rest of us," J-220 said, in a tone that was more uncomfortably bitter than they had probably aimed for.

Prowl locked his frame in place before the bristling arc of his doors could give him away entirely. "Yes," he said, "maybe."

"We may not all be tactical geniuses, but we contribute around here too, you know," J-220 went on, with a meaningful increase in volume.

"Of course," Prowl said, "we are all single cogs in the great Cybertronian machine."

J-220 eased off, nodding to themself. "Every frame has a function," they agreed, absently. And then more brightly, "You think you might stick around for drinks after alpha shift? Swing 'n me are gonna hit up the nightlife."

"You know it's against protocol to use personal names during shift hours," Prowl said.

J-220 made a face. "Never mind then, Primus."

When he was once again alone, Prowl allowed himself a moment to simply slump against the edge of his desk and release a long hot vent. It seemed so much harder than before, just—just being here, going through the motions. It was a week away from the office, that must be what it was. He'd fallen out of sync with the rest of the plaza, somehow.

The mood here had been tense, the first few days after Jazz's escape. Barricade was furiously embarrassed about fumbling such a high profile arrest, but Prowl's alibi was… not one that Barricade wanted investigated, or scrutinized. So it hadn't been. Strange mercies. Such attentions from a superior to a subordinate were not technically permitted by regulation; like many things about the reality of law enforcement, de facto and de juro on the subject were not in alignment.

Prowl hurried through the plaza, head and wings down. Barricade was still in a foul mood, even after the active senatorial pressure to recover their thief had eased up the last few days. Prowl had no desire to be—

"SC-777," the captain's voice barked out.

Prowl stopped. The compliance coding he'd lived with his entire life buzzed angrily at the back of his helm.

Obey commander good reward
[?] commander?

He shook it off. "Yes sir," he said, and turned to the office door, where Barricade was already beckoning him in.

The office door shut automatically behind him.

[?] Commander?
Error: Authority tree conflict

"This fragging Matrix slag," Barricade grumbled. "You're goddamn lucky you don't have to talk to the politicos, SC-777. One day they're blowing steam down your neck and the next day they won't even answer your comm. I swear I'm about to snap a cable here."

He sat back on the desk with a sigh, rolling his head as if to work the kinks out of his wiring. Prowl said nothing. He was not expected to say anything.

"C'mere, kid," Barricade said, and held out a hand. Prowl sank into it, settling onto his knees on the floor as that palm closed around the back of his helm.

Prowl snapped open his interface array and unspooled his cable, ignoring the little shiver that went up his spine as his fingers brushed the jack tip. Like Prowl, Barricade's frame model had dual hip arrays. This would be more comfortable if they were both upright, but respect for authority dictated that Prowl take the floor and unspool all the way to make up for the difference.

"Go ahead and skip to the main event," Barricade said, "I don't think we got time for all the bells and whistles right now, I just need a break."

Obediently, Prowl skipped the preliminaries. The head of his jack slipped into Barricade's warm, pliable socket, and a rush of data swallowed Prowl's processor. There was a soft ripple of sensation as the port spiraled out and then clenched back down on Prowl, locking him into place. Barricade relaxed, and a pale echo of his enjoyment rebounded into Prowl.

"Mmm," Barricade sighed, as his pleasure centers were stroked by Prowl's probing consciousness. Prowl had long ago learned exactly which data structures were most receptive to stimulus, and went about activating them methodically. Each stroke left a matching pale glow in Prowl's own sensory suite, but without a reciprocal connection that's all there would be. Except for—

"This is why you're my favorite," Barricade told him, thumbing his own headlight absently. "Mm, yeah. Good boy."

[?] Commander REWARD

Prowl's frame flooded with pleasure, from the tips of his doors down to the pulsing housing of his jack. He shuddered, burying his face in the crux of Barricade's thigh, and flushed hot air from his vents.

"That's right, kid. Just like you were made for it."

The sick half-in, half-out sensation of this last few days intensified. Guiltily, Prowl gave up on resisting his worse nature and tried to imagine the voice above him as deeper, warmer, more musical.

It couldn't hurt anything, after all. Jazz was a thousand miles away, much too far away for this to matter to anyone.

Some time later—both too soon, and also much too long—Prowl stepped back out of his captain's office with all his panels back in their proper place. He made his way to the exit. It was now nearly half a full shift after he should have been off the clock. The sky was turning murky with night, beyond the transparisteel windows.

There would be no time to waste in recreational walks around the more scenic city paths tonight. He barely had enough time for a proper recharge cycle before he was due back on shift again. He often felt, especially lately, that there was some obscure conspiracy in this world, centered on the intention of keeping him chained to his desk. Chasing after Jazz had been the first breath of freedom he'd felt in a terribly long time.

His spark felt dim. It was probably the dark, and the cold.

Prowl stepped down onto the Plaza steps, revving his engine against the growing chill. He blew hot air on his fingers, and then looked up. He stopped dead in his tracks.

"Jazz," Prowl breathed. His fuel pump lurched in his chest.

There, indeed, was Jazz, at the bottom of the steps. Whole and hale, as bright and handsome as ever. Their optics met, mirror expressions of surprise, as they both realized with whom they had come face to face.

"What are you doing here?" Prowl managed. The audacity of Jazz's presence at the police plaza was staggering. Most of the staff inside this building had received the APB ping on him weeks ago, and their targeting computers would recognize him in an instant. And yet here he was, bold as brass, and Prowl couldn't help the sweep of relief he felt at the sight of his—his—

"Hey Prowl," Jazz said, in an uncharacteristically soft voice.

Had Prowl's spark been dim? It was burning now, spinning like it was about to burst free of his chest.

"...I thought you would be long gone by now," Prowl said.

"So did I," Jazz said. His gaze darted aside, but at the same time, he edged forward. "Look, about what you said—"

Energon flushed Prowl's lines—his chassis was hot and cold, caught between yearning and annoyance, as he turned away. He closed his arms around himself. Abruptly, he became aware of a grey film of misery that had settled over his spark, bit by bit, so mundane and inexorable that he had hardly noticed it until now, only as it sloughed away like mud in a rainstorm.

He had wanted Jazz to run. Prowl had gambled on it, prayed that the alibi would hold, thrown himself on the mercy of uncertain probability. He had wanted Jazz to go, to make a new life for himself, to forget about the lone enforcer who had only been able to save one of them and had chosen Jazz to save.

Jazz ignoring his wishes shouldn't have made him feel so terribly, horribly relieved.

"I told you, I can't go," he said, even as he wanted nothing more in the world than to hear Jazz try and convince him. It wasn't that Prowl thought he could be swayed. He just wanted to hear Jazz speak to him, again, as if his solitary future was one that mattered.

"Now hold on," Jazz said, "you ain't even heard what I got to say."

"You're wasting your time," Prowl cut him off.

"Babe—"

Prowl steeled himself. "I'm glad to see you safe and in one piece, and I wish you well, but there's no future for us. Not like we are. We have to say goodbye."

"No," Jazz said, suddenly certain again, suddenly full of the steel and charisma that Prowl remembered in him. "I won't let you go like this," he said.

Prowl refused to turn and look at him. If he looked at him again he might not be able to look away.

"You can be better than all this," Jazz said, swinging his open palm at the facade of the plaza, its polished columns, its lying motto picked out in stone. "And I can—I can be better than this too."

Arms wrapped tightly around himself, Prowl glanced at Jazz out of the corner of his optic. He was tall, and beautifully shaped, and his black plating shone like a vast countryside sky where window lights flecked the void like stars. Maybe not a picture book Prime, but certainly something with its own defiant kind of nobility.

"I don't know how this will all end up," Jazz said, fiercely, "I don't know what tomorrow's got in store, I don't know anything except that you'n me are good, and I want to see where that goes more'n I'm afraid of how things could fall apart."

Prowl turned, unable to help himself, and met the blazing hopeful blue of Jazz's visor.

"I think we're better together," Jazz said. "I think we're stronger together."

"What are you saying?" Prowl asked.

"I'm saying, let's not say goodbye," Jazz answered. "Let's—"

But then he startled, frame stiffening, at something just out of Prowl's range of perception. Fear, bright and awful, lanced through Prowl; the clatter of running footsteps grew from faint to deafening in the span of a klik, hardly long enough for Prowl to think twice about the fact that his hand was shoving into his stowage, fingers closing around the handgrip of his sleeper slug rifle.

Slowly, shoulders hunched, Jazz spun on his heel to face the first huffing and puffing pursuant who rounded the corner.

He spread his hands sheepishly. "Eyy, fellas... you found me."

The first of several bots, mechanisms audibly straining, bent forward and rested his hands on his knees as his frame urgently dumped heat. There was a good deal of strained swearing.

Prowl squinted. " Ironhide?" he said. What was the captain of the Primal Vanguard doing… out…

Jazz brightened up, as no one came forward to scuff him just yet. "Perfect timing, actually," Jazz said, "y'all can help me escort my new policy advisor back to the palace."

"I'm… gonna… kill…" Ironhide wheezed.

A younger, somewhat fresher face at the old bot's shoulder said, uneasily, "Uh, boss, we're supposed to protect—"

"Grave'd be a lot easier to protect," Ironhide remarked, darkly.

"Jazz," Prowl said, not daring to jump to the most obvious conclusion, "what's going on…?"

Some of the mechs down below looked up for the first time, fixing Prowl with interested stares. Jazz paused. He twisted back, looking over his shoulder up at Prowl with a half-smile on his handsome lips.

"D'you know, the Primal Vanguard swears this whole oath to uphold the Primacy no matter what?" he said. "I half thought they'd just dump me back on the senate floor, but it turns out when these fine buncha bastards swear an oath, they don't mess around with it."

Prowl's fuel pump hammered. "You—?"

Jazz turned all the way around. He set his shoulders against the bitter evening wind. "I'm gonna try," he said. "Unmaker knows I'll catch hell for it, but I'm done with running, so I'm gonna try."

"The announcement will be in a couple of days," the younger guard piped up, helpfully. "Dulcimaeus Prime is, um, not the most popular with the senators so, uh. Before we make it public, we have to be sure he's totally safe to ride out the transfer of command."

"I'm puttin' together a council," Jazz said. "Good mechs. Big thinkers. Folks I can trust. I'd like you to come be a part of it. The way I figure it, on our own, both of us, we're doomed. But together, you know, maybe we got a chance."

"I—" Prowl said, feeling dizzy, "I'm not even a sergeant yet."

"Don't matter," Jazz said, easily. "I already know there's nobody I'd rather make a stupid one-chance-in-a-million plan with."

Prowl's processor blazed, thoughts racing down a dozen parallel tracks. Legislation. Assassination. Policy reform. Jazz's unrestrained and personable madness behind the great golden colonnade of the Primal Palace. Was he armed? Who were his allies?

"Whaddaya say?" Jazz asked. He held out a hand. "You wanna try to make a change in this fucked-up lost cause of a world, Enforcer Prowl?"

Prowl looked down at Jazz, at the bottom of the steps, his outstretched hand like a streak in the darkness. For a moment, all Prowl could think of was the rooftop, above Rodion. Jazz's hand, waiting—ready to lift Prowl, in his own small way, into himself. Jazz was a meteoric, reckless. Brilliant. Under his passing light all the dysfunction and misery of Prowl's life had been illuminated for a single moment, and then quietly swallowed again by the night.

Prowl took one step down. And then another. And then his hand was out, and his fingers clasped the warmth of Jazz's fingers, and he could almost taste it on his lips and on his tongue—a purer, cleaner truth.

"I have thoughts," he said, "on inter-city traffic law and policy."

---

END

[And that's a wrap! Please let me know if you enjoyed!]