Bumblebee understood a little better what it was all about when, after the race, Rick got out and went up to the blond who'd dropped the flag. It soon became clear that this was Tracy, and it was evident that she was more committed to being broken up than Rick was.

Bee might not understand much about humans, but he knew rejection when he saw it. In fact, the girl did more than reject him. She yelled at him, and even slapped him. It was obvious she felt at least part of the blame for what had happened to her brother, Mark, rested on Rick's shoulders. It was unclear if she was mad at him for telling Eddy, or for not telling Mark first. It was unclear, especially since Bumblebee was listening from a distance and mostly caught the screaming and emphatic gesturing.

Finally, Rick threw up his hands and stalked to where Bumblebee waited. He threw himself down in the driver's seat and slammed the door, but didn't immediately do anything else.

Evidently, he'd been in that race to impress Tracy, and she hadn't been impressed. In fact, she seemed to be as angry now as Rick had been when he'd first come into the garage that morning. He wasn't angry now though. Conflicted emotions flickered through his eyes, until he leaned against the seat and closed them, obviously trying to make himself relax, but not doing very well at it.

After awhile, he turned the key in the ignition and Bumblebee's engine sprang to life in response.

Bumblebee felt tired and beat up, but he knew full well that he had sustained only minor damage, mostly cosmetic. As one of the five cars to have survived the race relatively intact, Bumblebee was slated to run the after dark race, so it surprised him when Rick turned him around and drove back to where the traffic cones had been replaced, pausing to wait for the teens nearby to scurry out and move them out of his way, then drove off. He supposed maybe they were just going to come back later.

When he got out, Rick had circled Bee once, probably to make sure his license plate, lights and bumpers were all still properly attached. It didn't appear to surprise him that Bee was entirely in one piece, just badly scratched and dented. Considering that more than one car had burst into flames today and how many collisions Bee and Rick had been directly involved in, it should have.

"I didn't believe Fina before," Rick said as he drove, "But I happen to know from experience that you were only listening to me about half the time out there. And there's no way you came away in one piece if you were really the car you appear to be. Now, I'm betting you've got some kind of advanced anti-collision software or something. Fina went a step farther. She says you can talk. I don't know that I believe that but, if you can, I'm telling you now: don't bother, I don't want to hear it. My parents already read me the riot act more times than I care to count, I don't need to hear whatever it is Dad programmed you to say."

Bumblebee didn't need anyone to tell him that this kid was lying. There was no sense in addressing a program with these words or tone of voice. On some level, Rick knew Bumblebee was more than just some piece of software, even if he was denying that to himself. Fina herself had said it, and it hadn't been the first time a human had done so. Cybertronians had a presence, humans were able to sense on some level that they weren't simply another machine. It didn't hurt their disguise any, because people would normally shrug it off or -because they were in public with other people around- not even notice it at all. Not unless they were purposely looking for it would they notice.

Bumblebee had more than once encountered someone who knew without knowing. On one occasion, a little old lady getting out of her own car had smacked Bumblebee in the next parking space with her purse. She had apologized, patted his fender and gone on her merry way, seemingly unaware of what she had just done because she had acted without thinking about it. Like as not, she had almost immediately forgotten the incident. Bumblebee would have too, except that it had happened before and since, in much the same way. People just knew life when they saw it, even if they didn't realize it.

They drove until they came to a parking lot. Bumblebee didn't know a lot about stores, having never been inside of one, but something about this strip put him ill-at-ease.

Rick found a parking space and put Bumblebee there, but he didn't get out immediately. Instead, he pulled out his wallet and counted the bills in it, then sat back for a seemingly thoughtful moment.

"Jason, a guy that works here, buys drinks for minors. We pay double retail, but it's worth it for those of us who can afford it. Wait here," Rick didn't appear to realize the implication of his instruction as he climbed out of the car and crossed the parking lot to enter the establishment.

So far, Bee hadn't been especially fond of how anything had been going since Ratchet had first sent him out to check the possible Decepticon activity what seemed like a lifetime ago. He was a soldier, prepared to have to fight, to kill, to endure torture, even to die for what he believed in. But what had happened to him the past few days was not covered by his training or experience, and he didn't know how to get out of this, or how to make any of what he'd seen better. He was helpless in a way he'd never been before. Helpless to keep the people around him from actively and intentionally ruining their lives.

A few minutes later, Rick came out of the building with a bottle in a paper sack. When he got in the car, he twisted around and set the bag in the back seat. Bumblebee didn't know what it was, but he didn't like it. He followed well enough to understand that Rick had somehow subverted the law to get that bottle, and he wanted no part in the deception or illegality of it.

Unfortunately, there wasn't really anything he could do about it, and it wasn't long before he found himself following Rick's directions to drive up a hill, then off the road to a patch of dirt near the edge of a bluff overlooking a large lake. A guardrail stopped him from driving right off the edge, but Bumblebee knew that he could not only jump it, but actually break through it without sustaining any significant damage. When Rick turned him off the road and drove him up to the railing so that his front bumper almost touched it, Bumblebee was half afraid the boy would try to drive him right off the edge even though there was no good reason to do that.

But Rick shifted him into park, reached back and retrieved the bottle instead.

Bumblebee would shortly find out that was actually much worse.

"Any closer to finding out where he is?" Arcee asked, somewhat impatiently.

"Not since you asked five minutes ago," Ratchet replied with no small measure of annoyance.

"Sorry," Arcee apologized, "I just feel so useless. I mean, Bee's out there doing who knows what for who knows what reason and all I can do is just stand here, waiting for you to narrow it down a bit from 'a place that has snow and road construction'. I mean, we don't even know he's still there."

"Maybe not, but we do know he's scheduled to come back," Raf supplied, not looking up from his laptop, which was running a program to try and match the landmarks visible in the video to a location.

"How do we know that?" Arcee asked.

Not glancing from his screen, Raf pulled up a web page and sent it to one of Ratchet's monitors. The page showed pictures of five cars. The picture on the left was before the first race, the one on the right was after it. The license plates were cropped out of the photos or otherwise not pictured. Bumblebee's photos were from the side, so his license wouldn't have been visible anyway.

"That's not right," Arcee observed, pointing to the picture of Bumblebee's left side prior to the race (the angles had been chosen to show off the worst of the damage the cars had sustained, with them being photographed on all sides prior to the race and then only two before shots picked to be paired with the after shots), "Bee doesn't have any scratches like that on his side."

Ratchet looked up from what he was doing and took a closer look at the photograph. He hadn't even noticed before. Bumblebee had been identified by them from the race footage, and he had barely even glanced at the post race results and ad for tonight's race. Now he actually looked, the dent and deep scratch from fender to fender on Bumblebee's left side was impossible to miss.

"That's new," Ratchet said, pulling up the image on his main screen and expanding it to look more closely at the pre-race damage, "Not more than a day or two old, I'd say."

"Yeah, maybe," Arcee persisted, "But that's not just paint damage. Bee would've had to be involved in a serious altercation with something or someone to get body damage like that, right?"

Arcee knew as well as Ratchet what it took to dent the plating of a Cybertronian's armor, because denting the same was in her everyday job description.

"It's hard to say from this image, but it looks like he may have acquired some of the paint off of whoever or whatever he scraped against," Ratchet said, "the damage isn't serious, but it looks like he clipped another vehicle, probably one going the other way by the stress patterning."

Ratchet was referring of course to the way the metal surface had bent in response to the 'stress' of being dented. Arcee didn't disagree, which was hardly surprising since Ratchet was the expert.

"But what does that tell us?" Bulkhead, quiet until now, asked.

"It tells us he was probably in an accident sometime after we lost touch with him, but before the race," Ratchet replied, then looked to Raf, "Rafael..."

"I'm on it," Raf replied before Ratchet could finish.

If Bumblebee was involved in an accident, then surely there must have been a police report of it, or something. If nothing else, some other car was looking much worse for wear and maybe in a repair shop even now. If not even that, then maybe a traffic camera would have picked it up. If they could find evidence of an accident involving and Urbana 500, even to just finding a camera recording of an Urbana 500 and a damaged vehicle passing the same place at nearly the same time (assuming the accident itself had gone unrecorded), they could cross reference with what their location software had come up with concerning the illegal racetrack. It was a bit of a long shot, just because of the sheer amount of time and number of possible locations, but maybe, just maybe they could speed up the process of finding Bumblebee.

After he'd been drinking awhile, Rick started talking.

He explained to Bumblebee with slurred speech that he'd been hoping to run away with Tracy, that this city had nothing worthwhile to offer him. He continued that he'd picked Bee because he didn't believe what Fina said, and that he felt the Urbana would be less conspicuous than the Jag with its custom license plate. Besides, running away from home meant he wouldn't have much in the way of money, and he had not forgotten what his father said about never needing to fill the gas tank. He said that Tracy had been the one to break up with him because she found out that Fina had cheated on Eddy with her brother Mark, and Rick had known but not said anything. He said now Tracy was mad at him because him telling Eddy had gotten Mark into the hospital. She wouldn't go with him, so he said he'd just be going alone without her.

"I was kind of hoping to crack up and win her sympathy, but you just couldn't let that happen, could you?" Rick accused, "You just had to keep going, like your indes... ind... well, like you can't be broken. So now... now I'm going alone. With you. With you alone. And... somewhere... we'll have to get those dents pounded out and splash a fresh coat of paint, otherwise... well, you'll stick out more than the Jag."

Bumblebee couldn't see what the percentage of crashing would have been in terms of improving Rick's relationship with Tracy, but then he'd stopped following the logic of all this almost as soon as he'd been present with it. To him, it all looked very stupid and juvenile, but he supposed it was probably because he simply didn't understand enough about human culture.

"Well, guess I'd better hit the road. I want to win that race first, though," Rick said, "You don't need a sober driver, do you?" Bumblebee declined to answer, "Good, 'cause you haven' got one."

He shifted into Drive and tried to accelerate, but Bumblebee refused to move because he was still facing the guardrail. After a few seconds, Rick seemed to realize his mistake and shifted into Reverse, then turned the wheel as Bee backed up so he could get onto the road again.

The bottle he'd left on the passenger seat tipped over and proved it wasn't entirely empty as it began to spill its contents onto the seat cover. Rick dove for the bottle, forgetting the wheel. As he righted it, Bumblebee wondered if Rick would've done that in any other car. He hoped not, otherwise this kid would be in for a very short future. Whether he liked Rick or not, he didn't want the boy to die.

Unlike the night before with Fina at the wheel, Bumblebee paid attention and didn't allow Rick to drift him over into the wrong lane. He realized they weren't heading back the way they'd come, but when they blew past a road construction sign, Bee simply assumed they were coming in from a different direction, though he was pretty sure only one road connected to the race track.

Then they came to a sign in the middle of the road. The sign said that the bridge ahead was under construction and not safe to drive on. That was an understatement. As they approached, Bumblebee could see that the middle of the bridge wasn't merely under construction, it didn't even exist yet.

Rick, however, didn't seem to see the problem and tried to accelerate.

Bumblebee did not heed the instruction, cutting power and praying he would roll to a stop before reaching the raw emptiness that lay ahead. He continued forward against his will, until his front bumper came into contact with the sign. It fell over, but he came to a stop.

"What the hell?" Rick muttered, pressing the accelerator, then banging the wheel, "Move!"

He leaned forward, reached across the dash, and hit the button.