The last thing anyone saw of him was a streak of fire climbing the wrong way.
Cade Yeager stood in the wreckage of Hong Kong with his hands raw and his ears ringing, watching the burning seam of Lockdown's ship cut up through the clouds. He had been close. He had been so close. The grappling line had caught Optimus across the chest, the spike driven deep, and then the engines had screamed and the ship had simply left, taking the Prime with it the way a tide takes a man who waded out too far.
"He'll come back," Tessa said. Her voice was small. "He always comes back."
Cade did not answer, because he had learned that you do not lie to your daughter twice in one day.
Up in the black, Optimus Prime hung suspended in a cradle of cold magnetic chains. The spike in his chest pinned him to a wall of trophies, the skulls and spines of Knights and beasts Lockdown had collected across ten thousand years. Around him the lights pulsed a sick green. He pulled against the bonds and felt them answer with a charge that walked through his frame like fire poured into wire.
"Save your strength," Lockdown said, drifting into the chamber, half his face a riot of cables. "There is none to spend. You will not be repaired and you will not be freed. You are a delivery."
"I am not yours to deliver," Optimus said.
Lockdown smiled with the part of his mouth that still could. "You were never anyone's. That was always your trouble. The Creators want their property returned. I get paid. Earth gets to keep spinning a little longer without you. Everyone is satisfied except you, and you were never satisfied anyway."
The ship folded space. The stars stretched into needles and then into nothing.
On Earth, the silence began.
For the first weeks they waited. Bumblebee parked himself on the ridge above the Yeager farm and watched the night sky, engine ticking as it cooled, headlights dimmed to embers. Hound paced. Drift sharpened blades that needed no sharpening. They were soldiers without a general, and they discovered slowly that they had never learned how to be anything else.
"He gave the orders," Hound said one evening, sitting heavily on a hillside that groaned beneath him. "He carried the thing inside him that made the orders worth following. We just carried guns."
"Then we learn," Bumblebee said, his radio stitching the words from three old songs. It was the first time he had spoken since Hong Kong.
The humans did not learn so quickly. With the Prime gone, the men who had hunted the Autobots felt their fear curdle into ambition. Harold Attinger was dead, but his work was not. There were others who had seen what Galvatron's body could do, who had the schematics from KSI, who wanted an army they could switch off. The Transformium did not care whose face it wore. It only knew how to become a weapon.
Within a year there were factories. Within two there were soldiers stamped out of liquid metal, faceless, obedient, marching in columns through cities that had cheered to be rid of giant robots and now cheered the ones that wore human flags. The new machines did not dream. They did not refuse an order. They were, the broadcasts said, perfectly safe.
Cade watched it all from the workshop he was no longer allowed to leave. They kept him because he understood the alien metal better than anyone alive. They kept Tessa because keeping her kept him agreeable. He repaired their soldiers with his hands and sabotaged them with everything else he had, a loosened relay here, a flawed memory core there, small acts of treason that he prayed added up.
"You think he's still out there?" Tessa asked him one night, the two of them sharing a single cot in a barracks that smelled of coolant. She was older now, harder around the eyes. The girl who had believed he always comes back had been buried somewhere along the way.
"I think," Cade said carefully, "that it doesn't matter anymore whether he is. We can't wait for him. That was the mistake. We all stood on that hill looking up."
Far above, time moved differently.
Optimus had stopped counting the cycles. The chains never loosened. Lockdown's clients, the Creators, were patient in the way of things that had made worlds and grown bored of them. The ship drifted between commissions, a hunting lodge crossing the dark, and Optimus hung in its hall and listened.
He listened to the trophies. The dead Knights of Cybertron, his ancestors, the ones whose courage was supposed to live in him. They did not speak, but in the long silence he found he could hear what they would have said. He thought about Earth. He thought about the fragile creatures who had been kinder to him than his own makers ever were. He thought about the boy who fixed trucks, and the girl who had once handed him a torn map of the world as if it were a treasure.
And slowly, across years, Optimus Prime did the only thing left to him. He let go of the idea that he would be saved.
It changed something. The charge in the chains drew its strength from his resistance, from the constant strain of a body fighting to be free. When he stopped fighting, when he went still and patient and deep, the current had nothing to push against. The green light dimmed by a fraction no instrument would notice.
It took eleven years.
On the morning the new soldiers marched into the last free city in the American west, the sky tore open.
The ship came down burning, but it came down wrong, listing, venting flame from a wound in its side. It struck the desert forty miles out and plowed a canyon into the earth. When the dust cleared, a figure walked out of it, scorched and ancient and upright, a sword in one hand that had belonged to a Knight ten thousand years dead.
They did not recognize him at first. He was older somehow, scarred over scars, the red and blue of him faded to the colors of rust and dusk. But Bumblebee, parked on a ridge as he had been for eleven years, made a sound no radio could counterfeit, a sound that was only joy.
"I am sorry," Optimus said, when they gathered around him, the few that were left. "I waited to be rescued. You waited too. We were all of us looking up." He turned his eyes toward the city, toward the columns of faceless metal soldiers pouring through its gates. "That ends now. Not because I have returned. Because you did not break while I was gone."
Cade found him at the edge of the fighting two days later, the both of them filthy, the both of them alive. There was nothing to say that the years had not already said. The mechanic put his hand against the Prime's battered foot, the way you touch something to be sure it is real.
"You took your time," Cade said.
"I had to learn something," Optimus answered. "Hope is not a thing that arrives. It is a thing you keep until what you were waiting for can finally walk through the door."
Above them the sky was empty again, but for the first time in eleven years, no one was afraid of it.