The fluctuation Skye had caught at the groundbreaking never repeated. That should have been reassuring. It wasn't.
"A single spike, then thirteen months of silence, is worse than a pattern," she told me on the flight out of Ohio. "Patterns can be predicted. I don't like not knowing what triggers the next one."
"Skye. Petra. Off the books, starting now."
Preparations already underway, she said, which didn't surprise me. She'd been ready for this trip roughly as long as I had.
I used the flight to finally sit with the whole shape of the story properly, instead of in the fragments I'd been collecting for eight years between martial arts drills and shareholder calls.
Cybertron, before any of this, was a world that ran on energon the way Earth runs on sunlight — not a fuel exactly, more a medium that life itself was built out of, the way carbon is the medium human life happens to be built from. Sparks, the animating core of every Cybertronian, weren't metaphorical hearts. They were the actual seat of identity, the thing that made a given collection of alloy and circuitry a person instead of a machine, and a spark's extinguishing was the one true death a species built from metal still had to fear.
Thirteen came before all of that had a name for itself. The oldest generation, made directly rather than born, each one carrying a piece of the original purpose the way a household carries different responsibilities among its members — one keeping the peace, one keeping the histories, one keeping watch over thresholds nobody else could safely cross. Nexus Prime, Skye's research kept circling back to, had specifically kept watch over energon itself: not owned it, exactly, but understood its flow the way a river's course understands gravity, which was the closest thing to an explanation for why my own body's increasingly strange relationship with the substance kept tracing back to that one name more than any other.
The war didn't start as a war. It started, as far as I could piece together from fragments Skye had pulled out of Megatron's memory core and the older records the Witwiccans' encrypted archive had access to, as a disagreement about what a shrinking resource obligates you to become. Energon wasn't limitless even on Cybertron's best day, and two answers to that scarcity had hardened, over centuries, into two factions that stopped being able to hear each other's reasoning long before they started shooting at each other over it. One side believed scarcity meant discipline, restraint, protecting what still lived even at cost to yourself. The other believed scarcity meant whoever controlled the supply controlled the future, and morality was a luxury the losing side told itself to feel better about losing.
I want to be honest about the fact that I understood both positions. I'd built half my own fortune on precisely the kind of hoarding-and-leverage logic the second faction would have recognized instantly, and I told myself, the whole flight, that the difference was in what I did with the leverage once I had it. I hoped that was true. I wasn't fully certain, and certainty, I was beginning to suspect, wasn't a luxury this particular story was going to extend me.
The Matrix of Leadership existed as the counterweight to all of it — not a weapon, not even really a tool in the sense Megatron's faction would have understood a tool, but closer to an office passed hand to hand, a title that came with the specific burden of choosing restraint every time restraint was the harder, costlier option. "Prime" was never a bloodline. It was a decision, renewed constantly, by whoever carried the title, to keep choosing the more expensive kind of right answer.
Six of the original Thirteen had come to Earth, according to the fragments the Order's archive held, long before there was an Earth worth the name — carrying that same burden across a threshold no Cybertronian had ever crossed before, into a body of cosmic dust and debris that would eventually cool into a planet, and giving themselves up entirely so that whatever life eventually crawled out of that dust would have a chance to become something worth protecting.
I was, as far as anyone including the System itself could determine, the first human this had ever happened to. Not chosen the way the original Thirteen had been made. Recognized, instead — by a title that had apparently decided a human soul carrying both the Allspark's essence and the Dark Spark's could, in fact, qualify to wear it.
"That's the part I keep circling," I told Skye, somewhere over the Mediterranean. "Not whether I'm strong enough. Whether I'm actually the kind of person that title's supposed to be worn by."
I don't have an answer to that one, she said. I don't think anyone does, until they've actually had to choose the expensive kind of right answer, under pressure, more than once.
We landed in Aqaba a little after dawn, and the drive up into the canyons gave me the first hour of true quiet I'd had in longer than I wanted to admit. Skye had Jordan's local networks fully looped and edited before we'd cleared customs — satellites blind to us, ground cameras seeing an empty road.
Petra itself, when it finally opened up in front of us, made every plan I'd rehearsed on the flight feel small and beside the point for exactly as long as it took to walk the first hundred yards into it.
And then, walking the last stretch toward El-Deir with the morning sun catching sandstone the color of something between blood and honey, I felt it — a mark forming on the back of my own hand, faint, purple, unmistakably deliberate, spelling out something I hadn't put there and couldn't have removed if I'd tried.
Skye's voice, when it came, had lost every trace of its usual composure.
Sam. That symbol is active. Something in this canyon already knows we're here.