The mood in the Autobot base plummeted the second Arcee spoke. What had been a normal day—Miko blasting music, Raf working on one of Ratchet’s terminals, Jack quietly observing—came to a screeching halt.

“I… might’ve gotten a little too worked up during the last mission,” Arcee admitted, shifting on her pedes. “And… a human got a photo.”

Silence.

Then—

“You WHAT?!” Ratchet’s voice boomed, his servos slamming down onto the console with enough force to make Raf flinch back from his seat. “Primus help me, Arcee, do you even realize what you’ve just done?!”

Optimus’s optics darkened, his entire frame going unnervingly still before his helm snapped toward Fowler. “We need to locate this human immediately.” His voice was calm—but it was the kind of calm that came before disaster. “Do you have contacts who can track them, or will we need to handle this ourselves?”

Fowler was already pulling out his phone, his face drained of color. “Ohhh, this is bad—real bad,” he muttered, dialing a number with stiff fingers. “If this leaks, it’s gonna be a whole international situation—news outlets, government investigations—hell, we might not be able to cover this up at all!”

Miko, Raf, and Jack exchanged panicked glances, the weight of the situation slamming into them all at once.

Arcee’s servos clenched at her sides. “I didn’t mean for this to happen—”

“‘Didn’t mean to’?! Didn’t mean to?!” Ratchet was pacing now, vents cycling frantically, his servos twitching as though he didn’t know whether to throw something or collapse. “We have worked for years to keep our existence a secret! And now, because you couldn’t keep your emotions in check, some human has proof?! Do you have any idea what could happen if this spreads?! The government would turn on us, we’d be labeled as threats, and boom!—we’d be hunted like Decepticons! Or worse, locked up and dissected like lab experiments!” Somewhere out there, a human held the power to destroy everything.