Dream: On Luna 1, Red Alert fills his days mapping out the moon's extinguished hot spot, a job that has become an obsession he revisits even in his dreams, as his naturally paranoid personality causes him to seek out patterns in the points of light. He drives past a herd of Roboids as he returns to base, then finds himself over-analyzing Fortress Maximus's greeting, always looking for hidden meanings in everyone and everything. Red thinks of the last time he could not deal with these pressures, and how he attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself into the oil reservoir on the Lost Light... and as he looks as his reflection in a window, viscous black oil begins to stream from his eyes and mouth...

Reality: Red Alert awakes with a start in his quarters, roused from his nightmare by cerebro-surgeon Cerebros. Together, the pair go to the facility's space bridge chamber to join Fortress Maximus in bidding farewell to Bolt, the most recent Roboid that Cerebros has succeeded in restoring to his old self, undoing the domestication process Demus subjected him to. Once Bolt has bridged back to Cybertron, Cerebros makes a controversial proposal: inspired by Rung's mention of an encounter with Sunder, he has developed a brain implant that will allow him to take remote control of the Roboids' mental functions and repair them with much greater speed than the current weeks-long by-hand procedure. Red turns away from staring at the space bridge—where he notices five blots that seem to form a pattern identical to one he mapped in the hot spot in his dream—to voice his objections due to suspicions over Cerebros's past with the mind-meddling Institute. Max takes Red's side, but before any more discussion can be entered into, Prowl suddenly bursts out of the still-open space bridge! Still seething with hate for the strategist over the catastrophic Garrus-9 affair, Fort Max immediately attacks Prowl, but Cerebros calms him down long enough for Prowl to reveal the reason for his visit: something dangerous is about to arrive on Luna 1.
Elsewhere on the moon, Outrigger and his Roboid pal Beak explore the Titan graveyard for Outrigger's video blog series. They discover that one of the Titans' spacebridges is operational, and Outrigger spots what he thinks is a repaired Roboid standing beside it. He realizes his mistake when the tiny robot whirls on him and slices his torso open with its sword—it is, in fact, Sentinel Prime, who then transforms into head mode and reconnects to his larger body, lurking nearby. Sentinel's companion, Sovereign, is appalled, but Sentinel explains that he has not killed Outrigger: that task will fall to Sovereign, who Sentinel instructs to consume Outrigger's spark so that his Titan Master physiology can convert it into energy to power a host body. Outrigger is down but not out, however, and manages to clobber Sentinel with his crane jib before making a run for it and leaping out of the Titan.

Prowl explains Sentinel Prime's recent inexplicable return to life to Red, Max, and Cerebros, along with the shooting spree he embarked on in Iacon earlier that day. Recalling an old plan of Sentinel's from four million years prior, to somehow find and use a Titan to crush the Decepticon uprising, Prowl has assumed Sentinel will head to Luna-1 next to try and make this scheme a reality, and has made it there ahead of him to shut down the facility's spacebridge and prevent his access. Given Prowl's recent treasonous actions, Red Alert is naturally suspicious, and even thinks Prowl and Sentinel might be in cahoots... and when Beak comes flying into the room with Outrigger's data tablet in his mouth, containing a video record of what Outrigger has seen, that's all the evidence Red needs to believe Prowl has been deliberately distracting them. The quartet head out to investigate; along the way, Prowl and Max discuss the disturbing video message recently sent out by the crew of the Lost Light, and how all attempts to contact them h

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