The constant rush of the wind outside the jet served as a source of ambient, steady noise as the Chrysler corporate jet leveled off at cruising altitude. The plush interior of the airliner would seem fit for royalty any other time, but that day it only served as a reminder of how small they were in the grand scheme of the manufacturer's political business.

Strip struggled to stay awake as the white noise filled the silence in the cabin. His left side ached. He and Izzy had to convert out of their flight modes to enter the aircraft, and his crumpled, scorched panels had made it impossible to do on his own. Izzy had been forced to tear them off so the undamaged panels could move properly. The bare wire ends and exposed manipulation equipment felt raw and unprotected, but he was too tired to care. That sort of pain seemed an old friend, a reminder that he was still alive.

Next to him, Izzy stared absentmindedly out of a window, taking a brief moment to meditate and clear her mind. Hasty decisions were rarely good ones, she knew that, but she still questioned her choices that morning. She tried to approach it logically, but could come to no clear answer. Instead, she elected to take a breather and save it for another time. She supposed it didn't really matter at that point, anyhow.

Lightning sat facing them, unsure what to do. The two older cars seemed a bit detached, but he didn't blame them. He thought about what the King had told him earlier that morning, before they confronted Chick. He glanced at the damage they'd both taken on protecting him. It didn't look comfortable in the least, but yet they didn't show any emotion one way or the other. What had they been through that made them so numb? Lightning tried to reconcile the fact that a seven-time Piston Cup champion had spent his life fighting some forsaken battle, but despite being mere feet away from the King, it still didn't make sense. The two just didn't seem to fit together.

Behind the rookie, Chick sat cattycorner toward the plane's cockpit. They'd haphazardly shoved him up inside the aircraft and tied him down with ratchet straps so he wouldn't roll around during takeoff and touchdown. While Izzy's electroshock tool had promptly knocked him out and rendered him unconscious, it seemed to have left him in more of a dreamlike slumber than an out-cold, anesthetic sleep. Every five or six minutes, the Buick would inhale an unceremoniously loud snore and mutter a few indistinct words before growing quiet again. Every time they thought he'd finally stopped, he'd do it again.

Hhhnnnkk.

Izzy's eyelid twitched in annoyance.

"I swear, if I have to hear that one more time, I'm gonna blow a gasket," she said in an alarmingly calm tone.

"Maybe you should zap him again," Lightning offered. "Worked pretty well the first time."

"Can't," she said disappointedly. "No sparks on an airplane."

Strip looked over at her. "Where'd you get that, anyway? I don't have one."

"Built it," she answered shortly. "Got bored and needed something to do. Regular Tasers just don't do what I want them to. This one delivers a dose of anesthetic and the electricity accelerates the effects on the body."

Lightning tightened his lips, subtly trying to conceal his reaction to her intimidatingly concise explanation. She had said it as nonchalantly as one could about inventing a new sort of weapon. He figured he should respond in like manner.

"Wow," he nodded a little in approval. "That's terrifying."

Izzy cracked a smile. "Thanks, I thought so."

A silence settled over them once more. Lightning shifted uncomfortably. Though things had calmed considerably, his predicament still troubled him. He'd had enough.

"So, uh." He seemed almost hesitant to break the peace. "Can I…?"

"Ask away," Strip told him, anticipating the question. "We'll answer what we can."

Lightning nodded once and tried to think. What did he want to know? Where should he start?

"Well, so here's what I know," he began slowly. "I was built for a war. All of us were. Well, maybe not Chick, but he chose to fight anyway, sort of. But you guys all knew what you were? Why didn't I? Just – fill in the gaps, I guess. I need the full picture."

"How much do you know about the war itself?" Strip asked. "You gotta understand that before anythin' else."

"Um, it's just GM, Ford, and Chrysler goin' at it because they all hate each other, right?" Lightning answered, realizing he knew nothing about company politics.

"Well, kinda," Izzy answered. "It's a bit more complicated than that, though. Yeah, it's true they never got along. They were always trying to outdo each other, seeing who could build better, faster, more reliable cars. Trying to improve quality of life, y'know? But in the sixties it got to be too much, and the CEOs became obsessed."

"These are the same guys that are still in power, yeah?" Lightning asked attentively.

"Yep," Izzy answered. "They all got together one day and tried to figure out a way to best each other, once and for all. Something fair, they said. And, well, here we are, fighting some stupid war."

"See, that's what I don't get," Lightning interjected, frowning. "Why jump into a war? That's not what they do. They're the manufacturers, isn't their whole code about creating life?"

"They didn't all want to fight," Strip told him. "Not all of 'em, anyway. Rick – the Chrysler CEO – wanted to settle it on the track the old-fashioned way. Just see who could build the fastest, most durable racer. The other two shot that idea down real quick. Said somethin' like that wouldn't be remembered, and escalated it to a full-blown war. Kinda funny how we all ended up on the track in the end anyway."

"Were GM and Ford really that power hungry?" the rookie asked. "That they're willing to kill? That still… I don't get it."

"Well, Ford's CEO has always been a bit unstable, from our point of view," Izzy explained. "He's an excellent businesscar – one of the best the world's ever seen. But he didn't get there honestly. I don't expect him to go out honestly, either. He likes to make bold statements, get the public's attention. Paul – the guy that created you – is honestly just a crowd pleaser. He likes being in the spotlight. The idea of a war put him there. And Rick, well, he had a temper of sorts. They ticked him off and he wanted to beat them out of spite. Agreed to something he shouldn't."

Lightning sighed. He'd never met Paul, though he knew the name. Paul Orchard, GM CEO and overseer of all manufacturing operations. Always on the news. Sometimes for philanthropy, sometimes for questionable or risky manufacturing decisions. The one and the same that had sunk so much time and energy into creating his one-off, custom build. Just to have him killed.

"Alright," he shook himself in frustrated disappointment. "So what happened next? How did you guys get wrapped up in this?"

"We were built to fight," Izzy continued. "Or, rebuilt, I guess. Whatever you want to call it. Taken off the line, assessed for a fighter's personality, and modified for flight and combat. Rick jumped right in after the intention of war became public and – "

Hhhnnnkk-ahhh.

" – I swear I should have killed him earlier," Izzy whispered at the sudden interruption. "Strip, why did you have to grow a conscience?"

"Don't blame me," Strip defended himself. "You're the one that electrocuted him."

Izzy opened her mouth to retort, but Lightning cut in before she could get a word out edgewise.

"Right, so, tangent, if I can," he inserted hastily. "King, forgive me for being so direct, but how in the world did you get selected to fight? You don't seem like the type. At all."

"Yeah, that's a bit of a long story," Strip answered, glancing out a window. "Short answer, I wasn't. Not at first. It was sort of an afterthought."

"A mistake on the manufacturer's part," Izzy corrected begrudgingly, taking hold of the conversation before it went down a path she wasn't prepared to follow. "There were only supposed to be twelve of us. But someone had to go and make friends and got all fussy when he was separated."

Strip looked at her in slight irritation. "Like two week old me was supposed to know any better."

"And so they roped him in and made him lucky number thirteen," she continued as if she hadn't heard him. "Became part of the family we made for ourselves. Rick thought if he was going to hang around the fighters, he'd be better off being one himself."

"Didn't work out very well," Strip muttered.

"Again, had too much of a conscience," Izzy threw in. "That, and all he wanted to do was race."

"Huh," Lightning pondered it. He looked to Izzy and asked her a question directly. "What about you? You didn't get to choose to fight, but you didn't resist?"

"Never thought I had a choice," she answered. "None of us did. They gave me a job. I wanted to protect what we had at Chrysler, and I was gonna get it done one way or another. That why I was chosen. Goal oriented, focused, driven for a cause. It's all I know. The only one that ever resisted was him."

She pointed toward Strip. He looked down at his hood and brought the memory of that first battle back to the forefront of his mind. It'd been years since he willingly recalled it.

"I fought that first battle," he said, finding the words uncomfortable in his mouth. "We lost someone and I couldn't handle it. I just ran. I had someone help me get off the factory grounds and I got as far away as I could. Never looked back."

"Next thing we knew, Dinoco had a new racer," she added as though she were proud of him. She was, but she'd never actually expressed it in his presence. "Lost all contact for about fifteen years, though."

"And then the second battle happened," Lightning added understandingly, thinking back to what Doc had mentioned earlier. "Back in the eighties. That's the one everyone remembers."

Strip and Izzy both sighed simultaneously, and for a moment, Lightning hesitated, wondering if he'd said something wrong. He knew how catastrophic it had been on both sides. Debates were still frequently aired about who had really won. Technically, Chrysler had, as Ford apparently withdrew their last soldier and surrendered. But Chrysler lost much more. All things considered, no one really won.

"It was the night after I won my second championship," Strip said when Izzy didn't make a move to respond. "That was when Chick showed up. Not long before his racin' days. He had control of eight newly manufactured, modded Mustangs. Used them as extensions of himself to take us all on at the same time."

"Why did you go back to fight?" Lightning asked. "Right after a Piston Cup win?"

"That was my fault," Izzy said in a quieter tone, leaving her former lightheartedness behind. "I came looking for him because Ford announced their intent to fight. Fight with real soldiers anyway. I didn't want them to figure out he was one of us. Ford wanted twelve accounts of death. Without him, there were only eleven of us left. If something happened to us, the rest of the aero cars would be at risk of being killed as Ford looked for the last of us. I panicked."

"I went back because I wanted answers from Rick directly," Strip answered more directly. "But that was when Stephen decided to attack the RenCen and then us. I couldn't just sit it out. I was in the building they bombed first. Someone I cared about died. I had to fight."

"We lost everyone that night," Izzy whispered, looking Lightning straight in the eyes. "I watched everyone I ever cared about fall out of the sky. I was the only one that flew out of there that night. Some of them died before they ever hit the ground, Lightning. Others caught fire on impact and burned. Strip was half-dead when we found him – underneath a collapsed building half a day later. A miracle he's still here at all. I thought I was the only survivor. Do you have any idea what it's like to watch something like that happen? To your family?"

Lightning looked down at his hood, unable to meet her stare any longer. He shouldn't have asked. He'd known about the losses, but they had just been numbers in a history book to him. Chrysler lost ten fighters, and Ford lost eight. That left two and one, respectively. Numbers, they were all just numbers. He'd never understand. He thought about the folks of Radiator Springs. They were his family now. What would he do? He shivered.

Strip watched as the kid cast a guilty stare downward. That was the second time in half a day he'd gotten that lecture, albeit in a different light. It was a hard piece of information to accept, but that made it all the more important.

"Point is, kid," he said in a gentler tone, "you can't fight if you don't have a cause. What happened that night ain't your burden to bear, but it's ours – we'll always have to live with that memory. You need to understand that."

Lightning nodded. He felt out of place. What was his reason to fight? Did he even have one, other than his manufacturer-given role?

Hhhrrrrnnnkk.

"Oh. My. G – I'm gonna – " Izzy growled.

"And I'm probably the last car that's gonna jump to Hicks' defense," Strip continued, cutting Izzy off mid-swear, "but he's got somethin' to fight for, too. If what he said was true, and I think it is, he's been at risk of bein' controlled most of his life. He's angry."

"You think he'll be on our side?" Lightning asked, unsure if he really wanted to know the answer.

Strip hesitated. Izzy looked at him, curious.

"I think so," he answered. "He probably won't like it, but we both know he'll do whatever'll get him what he wants. And I think he just wants to be free."

"We still need to be careful, though," Izzy warned. "Doing 'anything' to get what he wants still includes killing us if it gets bad enough. Don't let your guard down."

"Right, okay," Lightning agreed automatically. "Of course."

A few seconds of silence passed between the three of them. Lightning looked out the window. The brown, dusty landscape below had turned to green. They'd be over Detroit in no time at all at the speed they were going. He hadn't felt prepared to begin with, but right then he felt even more unfit.

"Does any of that help at all?" Strip asked him, seeing him fall into thought.

"Yeah, yeah," Lightning nodded, though he still seemed distracted. "Good context. Explains a lot. But there's still one thing I don't understand."

"What's that?" Izzy asked.

"Ford's been the one that's attacking you, right?" he asked. "GM just sat around and didn't do anything for years. Why would they wait so long just to build someone as useless as me? Why do nothing and then sign an alliance? What are they trying to accomplish?"

Strip shared a glance with Izzy. Lightning watched in apprehension as they seemed to communicate nonverbally. A couple awkward moments later, they turned their attention back to him.

"We don't know," Izzy told him, shaking herself in confusion. "Paul just showed up one day, said he didn't want to fight anymore. We drew up a contract and he signed it. No questions asked. Though he did say at one point he was interested in how well you'd perform on the racetrack. Said he didn't want anything to happen to you before you got your chance to try it out. It was so random, the way he said it."

"Huh." Lightning settled into his seat and considered it some more. His conscience refused to rest at ease.

"Honestly, I didn't trust it when I heard about it," Strip told him. "Seemed a little too good to be true, but it's all cleared legally, so now I just don't know what to think."

Lightning frowned in a concerned manner and glanced behind him at Chick before turning his attention back to the duo before him. He didn't want to ask the question that crossed his mind, but his mouth started moving before he could stop it.

"If there hadn't been an alliance, what would you have done?"

Strip sat silently, unprepared for that question. Would he have stayed behind to scout out Chick's intentions in Radiator Springs? Would he have taken such initiative to make sure the kid stayed out of harm's way? After that tiebreaker race, the answer was clear.

"Nothin' different," he answered sincerely. "We're in this together, we're gonna get out of it together. Somehow."

Hhhnnnkk-uuuuuhh.

"That's it. I'm thowing him out the hatch. Out of the way, kiddo."

"Chill out, Iz."