CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Ana started with a drink while Yoshi prepped the bong. Just a little drink from a little bottle, no more than a shot, a double shot at most. She'd bought a full sleeve of these a few days ago to last her the rest of the trip, and then she'd had to buy another one because it didn't, and she was probably going to have to go out again and get one more because she drank two of them—they were so small—before she went in to do her smoking. She brought two more little bottles with her and sipped at one while Yoshi lit up and fired one off.

He watched her curiously as she settled herself on the floor at Bonnie's feet, and once he'd exhaled, asked, "What are those?"

"Whisky nips. Want one?" she offered, knowing he'd refuse. "They're top quality."

"I'm sure they are, but I'll stick with this." He tipped his head back and blew an expert smoke ring, then passed the bong down to her.

Ana capped her bottle and set them both aside on a shelf—See? this careless gesture said. I don't need to finish them. I may actually forget where I put them because I am not an alcoholic—and helped herself.

He pulled out his media player, plugged it into a paint-splattered speaker and found some music. Weird shit, full of synthesizers and experimental rhythms, not her thing, but it was his shop.

They smoked. Well, she smoked. He took the bong when she passed it, but only took one or two hits after that first one. Mostly, he just held it and watched her, offering it whenever her gaze wandered to the two bottles on the shelf beside her. That was annoying. It wasn't like those were the only things on these shelves. This shop was full of stuff to look at and to prove it, she picked up an unfinished project for inspection. She could identify a head by the creepy plastic eyes, and a couple of appendages, but the rest was all cables and motor boxes, too many to fit within its small frame.

"Zombie baby?" she guessed, wiggling the thing's lower jaw so it would 'chomp' on her finger.

"One of my therapy animals, or it will be," he added. "I have to get some parts machined before I can finish it."

"Therapy animals," she echoed, smiling. "These would be all the sleeping cats and dogs you make for old people to pet."

"Yeah," he said after a moment.

"Sorry, not trying to be bitchy," Ana said, knowing damn well she was, but with enough presence of mind to at least feel a little disgusted with herself, even if she couldn't stop. "I can't help thinking they're a little creepy. And pointless. Sorry, that's just how I feel."

Yoshi rolled a shoulder, taking that pretty well for a guy who'd just had his work insulted by someone who was sharing his stash.

She should shut up now before she made it worse. She knew it and had no trouble agreeing with it, but couldn't follow through for some reason. Her mouth opened and out came, "I'm just saying, for what one of these things has to cost, they could have bought a hundred real cats or a dumptruck full of ordinary stuffed animals."

"Oh, I never sell them. Which I guess is kind of dumb, because they are expensive and I have to make that material money back on other jobs before I can make another one, but some things you just shouldn't put a price on. Maybe you can, but…you shouldn't. Plus, it gives me something to do when I'm between crawling zombies and tourist traps. They're not as complicated as your bots…but in a way, they're more challenging because I actually have to fit compressors and wires and actuators in there."

"You don't sell them? So…you make hyper-realistic animatronic animals…for fun?" Ana laughed into the bong. "And I thought I was bad. You need a different hobby."

"Thing is…" Yoshi glanced around, tapping his eyes off several unfinished animals of various sizes and shapes. "When I hit my rock-bottom and all that, the only one who didn't turn her back on me was my grandmother. She was in a care home, so it wasn't like she could take me in or anything, but I'd visit every day and we'd play cards and she'd try to hook me up with other residents' grandkids and cuss me out for not cutting my hair and…just do grandma-things. She gave me a reason to stay clean when I…wasn't enough of a reason." He was quiet a moment, then said, "She had Alzheimer's."

"Oh. Sorry."

"Yeah. She'd lived with it so long at kind of a high-functioning level that I…I don't know. I got used to it? Like I knew what the disease was and what it did to other people, but it's like I thought she was never going to change. Until she did. And when it did…"

"You don't have to talk about it."

"It's okay. It's just hard to think about it. She forgot my dad, she forgot her sister and her friends…she forgot me…but she never forgot her dog. She never forgot Lulu. She just sort of forgot Lulu had been dead for, like, fifteen years. So she'd go around saying her dog was lost and no one was helping her find her. And that eventually morphed into saying the nurses stole her dog. Lulu wasn't just missing anymore, she was hurt and hungry and scared, and Grandma…got a little mean. She got a lot mean," he amended, looking away. "The home actually had a resident cat, but she'd get so worked up, the cat didn't want to come near her, and she didn't want a cat anyway. So someone got her a little plushie pug, which only upset her even more. Imagine for a second that you lost your dog and it feels like you've spent every day for as long as you can remember looking for it, and finally someone says they found it, but then they give you an obvious stuffed toy and try to tell you this is your dog. So yeah, she didn't take that well and I can't really blame her. Next thing I know, she's sedated or in restraints all day, crying and begging everyone to please just let her see her dog. So I gave her Lulu the only way I could. I built one."

"Wow," said Ana, subdued.

"Yeah. It helped her a lot. She'd sit there and pet Lulu and just…live in that moment, instead of…all that confusion and static." He was quiet for a few seconds, then said, "She had five more years after that. Five years. Nothing…Nothing could have made them 'good' years, but…Lulu made it hurt a lot less."

"I'm so sorry," Ana said.

"Yeah. Anyway, the home asked if they could keep Lulu after Grandma passed. And somehow someone else heard about it and a few months later, another care center got in touch with me. And so on. I've figured out a lot of different models now," he said, nodding at a few of the tangled-looking samples on the shelves. "Big dogs, little dogs, cats. I try to keep as many as I can ready to go, so if I'm ever contacted for a specific breed, I can deliver as quickly as possible. There's not always a lot of time."

"I kind of feel like an asshole now," Ana said wonderingly. "You're a fucking hero."

Yoshi squirmed uncomfortably, pulling a bottle of soda over between them like a shield. "I'm just a guy. But…before it all went bad for her, Grandma told me something. I'd been whining about how, you know…I'd squandered my genius and thrown away everything my folks worked for. All that crap. And she just had no time for that. Gave me a whap upside the head and told me everyone had the power to use what they had—no matter what they had—to do good, and as long as I was doing that, it didn't matter whether I worked at NASA or McDonald's. And she was right, you know. It's not just nurses and crimefighters and billionaire philanthropists that change the world, it's comic book artists and video game developers and the ordinary people who can be inspired by them. Did you know Jim Henson made Fraggle Rock to end the Cold War? That was his ultimate goal for that show and it could be argued that he did it. He helped, anyway. He took what he did best—making puppet shows—and he used it to make the world a better place. And if he could do it…maybe…so can I."

It was something to think about, but unfortunately, thinking was not coming easily to Ana at the moment. She did her best to sum up her disordered feelings and all she could say was, "Your grandma was awesome."

Yoshi nodded, staring into the inner workings of Foxy's battery. Eventually, he stirred himself, said, "Fuck Alzheimer's," and passed the bong.

"Fuck Alzheimer's," she echoed, like a toast, and breathed in more smoke. She didn't need more. The effects were already hitting, fast and beautifully hard, like a hammer wrapped in cotton candy and sprinkled with glitter. She leaned back against the wall, staring at the overhead lights, surprised to see the auras jeweling up around the edges. "Is this stuff dusted?"

"Nope."

"It doesn't feel like your other stuff. It's stronger."

"Damn right it is. This is pure Purple Princess."

Her mind's eye immediately conjured Erik Metzger, crowned, kneeling to gather the young girl she must have been into his open arms. She shook her head hard, dispelling the image like more smoke. "Never heard of it."

"I'm not surprised. It's popular with a certain crowd, but it's not really a 'fun' smoke."

"A certain crowd?" Ana echoed.

Yoshi shrugged, staring into Foxy's exposed battery case and avoiding her gaze. "People with severe anxiety issues, trauma, PTSD…I take it for panic attacks. Other people tend not to like it because it goes from happy-floaty to gentle suffocation real quick. You don't really get a chance to, you know, enjoy the experience, but…sorry, but I figured the goal tonight wasn't to put you into a good mood as much as—"

"Put my lights out?"

"—get you out of a bad one," Yoshi finished tactfully.

"And you were right. See?" she added, glaring at Freddy, who smoothed out his scowl before Yoshi could look around. "It's medicinal. It's not just me who says so. This man is a registered super-genius. He went to all kinds of college and could probably wipe his ass with degrees for a week and still find some to hang on the wall, and even he says it's medicinal."

"Who are you talking to?"

Ana pointed and then had to sit there for a million years with invisible dots scrolling by over her head while she blanked on the name he was supposed to be going by. "Barry," she said triumphantly. "Barry doesn't believe in recreational intoxication, which is his opinion and he's entitled to have one, but I'm medicating and he needs to back his big bear ass off me when I do it."

Yoshi took that in stride. "Well, you can tell Barry that he can relax. I'm responsible for you while you're under my roof and I take that responsibility seriously."

Freddy grunted.

Yoshi looked at him.

"You're getting high right along with me, man," Ana said dryly. "He's not impressed and neither am I, for that matter. I'll tell you what I tell him: I can take care of myself. I always have and I always will."

Yoshi nodded sagely. "In my experience, there's two kinds of people who say that. The kind who really can and the kind who've just had to because no one else was around."

"Uh huh. Look at him," Ana muttered, returning her narrow stare to Freddy. "Look at him just…disapproving of my lifestyle. He's only waiting for you to leave the room so he can start in on me."

Freddy's eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

Ana had another hit and listened to the music. The discomfort of sitting on the concrete floor gradually drifted away. She lost track of where her arms and legs were at and just floated, still very much in the workshop and totally together, but on a tether.

"So," said Yoshi, watching her.

"So," she agreed.

"So…about tonight…"

She groaned.

"We don't have to!" he hastened to say. "I'm just saying, if you want to talk about your date—"

"Don't call it that," Ana said even before Bonnie shifted or Foxy's ear-pin tapped the table as he flattened it. Her heart tried to swim out in both directions, protecting the feelings of two guys at once only to come snapping back like an over-stretched rubber band. "That wasn't a date. We've never dated. Why would you even think so? Did you fuck him back when he was your dealer?"

"No, but the two of you just seemed really—"

"No. Never get involved with your dealer. Sure, he'll give you the third-leg discount at first, but when the relationship goes south, he starts cutting your shit with baby powder. Or Drano."

"That sounds like the voice of experience."

Ana shrugged, scooting away from the wall, which had become disturbing solid and uncomfortable during her momentary flare-up, and settling against Bonnie's legs, which were not fully furred yet, but still a perfect cushion. "Some people have mothers that teach them to bake cookies and girly-up their hair. My mom's advice was a bit more pragmatic."

"Yeah, your mom," said Yoshi with grave sympathy. "That stuff would give anyone issues."

"I don't have issues," said Ana, genuinely surprised and a little irritated. "It is what it is. I don't have to be all choked up and neurotic for the rest of my fucking life just because my lousy childhood happened. Your mom sucked, too, but you're over it, right?"

"Um, I'm a socially-maladaptive recovering addict with recurrent panic disorder, low self-esteem and a crippling fear of both success and failure, which as you can imagine made me super-employable and even better at running my own business, so obviously, yeah, I'm completely over it."

"You're fine," Ana snapped.

"I'm not fine," he laughed. "I'm aware I'm not fine, which I guess is a good start, and I work at it every day to try and be better, but I'm not fine. Even the best parents can mess a kid up when they're not trying to, and when they are? Man, my folks didn't let me have soft drinks when I was a kid. I didn't have my first Dew until I was working at Disney. The guys there would buy them for me." He was quiet a little, then forced a smile and said, "I thought I was making friends. They were making fun of me—the little kid with his kid-drinks. But even after I figured that out, I still drank soda, I just bought them myself. It was my little rebellion. But come on, does this look like a healthy relationship with soda?"

Ana looked around at trash bags bulging with empty cans and dozens of empty bottles, the product of just a few days' drinking.

"I'm killing myself with this crap," Yoshi said and took a deep swig from a 2-liter bottle, draining it and shaking the empty at her. "I go through three of these a day. I've gone a whole week before without eating solid food at all."

"So quit drinking," Ana said, uncomfortably aware of the irony.

"I don't want to. It's easy when it's that stuff," he said, nodding at her whisky. "That stuff hurts, it makes me sick as hell and there's a non-zero chance even a little bit will kill me, but soda's yummy and the caffeine and sugar keeps me charged. For some reason, just knowing it's poison isn't a good enough reason to stop drinking it, so I guess I'll keep going until my metabolism craps out on me and I gain three hundred pounds and get diabetes. And I probably won't quit even then," he added, contemplating the bottle.

"Dude, stop," she said with something like real panic. "I can't hear that shit right now, I really can't."

"Sorry."

He let her be for a while, long enough for the music to take on silvery highlights and golden shadows. Bonnie's legs behind her and the floor beneath first turned soft and then pulled apart, leaving her alone in the space she no longer strictly had to occupy. Her eyes were open, but she wasn't really using them. She wasn't really stoned the way she thought of being stoned and she wasn't really drunk. How did Yoshi describe it…? Gentle suffocation. That was it. She was trapped in some giant, ghostly fist (her mother's, maybe), having her sense of self and consequence squeezed out of her instead of air. It didn't feel like being high at all. It felt like dying, but without the panic and fear. She could feel the call of that void, just out of reach, urging her to let go and find it and she was trying…she was trying…

"Hey," said Yoshi.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

"Hey," said Ana.

"Look, I wasn't going to say anything, because it's so obvious you don't want to tell me, but I have got to know. And bearing in mind that I'm stoned and you could probably tell me anything at all and I'd believe it, I can only ask you to remember I'm a nice guy and please don't fuck with my head when it's fragile."

Ana laughed, then laughed again when she glanced at Freddy and saw him giving Yoshi his DARE-bear stare. Shaking her head, she said, "Hit me."

"Where'd you really find them?" he asked, giving Foxy's battery a pat just in case she didn't know what 'them' he was talking about. "Because there's no freaking way anyone who knew what they were would just…put them in a storage unit and ghost the payments."

"Good stuff slips through the cracks all the time," she told him. "You know that little big-headed gnome-guy from Labyrinth ended up unclaimed at an airport? And that guy was a famous movie star animatronic, not some knockoff Chuck E Cheese band."

"You keep calling them that like you think if you say it often enough, I'll believe it, but I have lived in the wonderful world of robotics almost as long as you've been alive. I know all the major players and most of the minor leaguers. There's no such place as Buster's Burger Ranch."

"Yeah, so? Probably a theme park or something that never got off the ground, which is how the animatronic entertainment ended up in storage."

"Lady, that's Freddy Fazbear," he said and he said it with such affectionate disdain she could neither be offended nor alarmed. "And don't even try to pull that innocent 'Who?' face on me. You already told me you come from Mammon. You know damn well who you've got here, and I knew it too, by the way. At least, I knew you had Bonnie, and if you found one, there was a damn good chance you'd found the others."

Ana's only answer was a poker-faced stare.

"Relax. I didn't tell anyone," Yoshi said and laughed. "I don't even know anybody I trust enough to tell. I mean, they all seemed like nice guys in the lab, but I saw some nice guys pull some sketchy shit when it came to getting credit for innovative design. There's a perpetual kinetic battery in that thing. The scaffold is conducting power and you can put your finger in there while it's doing it and not get shocked. All the auxiliary parts just plug in and go, with no actuators to speak of. The navigations system, the sensor relay, the freaking AI…" He brought it all in with an expansive wave of his arms and dismissed it with another, saying, "The opportunity to get hands on tech like this has turned more than one engineer to the Dark Side."

"But not you?"

"Like the old joke goes, been there, done that, and all I got was a lousy t-shirt. What would it get me anyway? Fame's overrated and I make enough money…when I'm not flushing it away on online real estate auctions or shady contractors. This is all I want, just to see them, up close and personal. Work with them. Leave my mark, you know? Contribute to the myth."

"You wouldn't say that if you knew what the myths really were."

"Ah, I quit believing in ghost stories a long time ago." Yoshi shrugged, settling back in his chair. "They're just machines. Weird machines. Amazing machines. Maybe dangerous machines, but just machines. At the end of the day, they only do what you tell 'em to do."

"You believe that, huh?"

"You believe it," he countered. "If you didn't, you wouldn't have reprogrammed them into Cowbunny Buster or Barry and Carrie or Percy—" He curled a finger around Foxy's hook and lifted it up for a teasing shake. "—the polite pirate. You gave them a new life, because you know they deserve better than to be…ghosts," he said, glancing back at Freddy's old skin hanging on hooks behind 'Barry'. "Ghosts, trapped in the haunted houses of their old bodies…and their old stories."

"Dude," Ana said solemnly, "you are high as fuck."

"I sure am. But to be honest," he went on in a lighter tone, "if I found Megatron himself crashed in my backyard with two halves of a bomb helpfully labeled 'Annihilation of the Human Race' in each of his hands, I'd fix him up, too. Or a Borg or a dalek…you know, just insert your nerdgasm here, but my point is, you don't get a lot of chances to get your hands on the for-real cutting edge shit. When it happens, you grab on and never mind what it cuts, you know?" He took a moment to visibly pull his rapidly-scattering thoughts together and said, "But that's me. Why are you doing this?"

"What, you get the manifest destiny speech, but I've got to have a long, complicated backstory?"

"My reasons are perfectly relatable within the context of my character," he replied in his wise sage voice. "You…I just don't get you. No one called you out of the blue and asked you to come fix up the Fazbear Band, you put yourself in this story. And you're paying for the privilege, which is no small consideration all on its own. Plus, you worked so hard at keeping their identities secret, I got to think you believe at least a little of the ghost story that goes with them, so let me ask you again, why are you doing this?"

Ana shrugged. "I could tell you, but it's such a long fucking story and I am tripping balls. I'd be dead sure to get the details wrong and the details are, like, so important."

"The devil's always in the details," said wise sage Yoshi.

"No, not always. Sometimes he's in purple."

All four of the animatronics looked at her. The sound of cameras focusing and servos turning made a cicada-like buzz for a brief second clear enough that she actually almost saw one.

"Okay, well, that…checks out," Yoshi said with a puzzled smile. "But I still want to know. If you can't tell me the whole thing, just tell me how it started. How the heck does a story that ends with you and the freaking Fazbear Band even begin?"

She thought about it, then said, "I guess if it begins anywhere, it begins with my mother."

"Yeah? What did she do?"

"She hated me," Ana replied matter-of-factly. "The kind of hate that goes way beyond just knocking me around or calling me names. It wasn't enough for her to not want to be my mom, she didn't want anyone else to be my mom either. She didn't want there to be even one place where I felt safe or happy or loved. Not even a fucking pizza parlor."

Freddy let drop one note of the Toreador March before he apparently remembered not to do that.

Yoshi looked that way, eyebrows raised and smiling. "What was that?"

"That," said Ana sourly, "was the opening chord of the DARE-bear March. Da da da-da daaaa, don't do any drugs. Da da da-da, drugs are for chumps. Big prude."

Foxy snorted.

Yoshi startled and looked down at him too, but apparently decided he hadn't really heard it and turned back to Ana. "You're telling me a story."

"I am?"

"Yeah. And you'd better hurry it along because my edges are coming distinctly unraveled. What about your mom?"

What about her mom? Ana couldn't remember, so she backed up the part that seemed the most solid and dove in again. "I was born in Mammon. Lived the first ten years of my life there and would you believe I never set foot in a Fazbear's Pizzeria? My mother wouldn't let me go."

"Why not?"

"She didn't have a reason. She was not a 'reasons' kind of person. She didn't want me to go the same way she didn't want to look at me or have me around. I was a little bitch. I was a rotten, whining, food-stealing little bitch, but I was her little bitch and she didn't want me to go anywhere that I could ever be completely free of her. So I couldn't go to Freddy's, not even when one opened up, like two blocks from the school we went to. Every single day, I had to walk or ride my bike right past it, twice, but I never once went inside. Two miles, I had to go between school and home, can you imagine that now?" she interrupted herself wonderingly. "Sending a kid to bike two miles alone? And, like, five on the weekends, when I went all the way out to my cousin's house. Meanwhile, today you hear about people getting CPS called on them for letting their kids play in their own fenced yard."

"It was a different time back then."

"It sure was. Anyway, David, now, he went to Freddy's practically every day. His mom worked there, so he'd bike with me as far as the corner by the bank and then I'd go home and he'd just go to Freddy's and hang out until she got off work and they'd drive home together. He loved it there, but he knew I wasn't supposed to go and he'd never do anything to get me in trouble, so he never asked me. Except for one time. One time. That was all it took. And I almost got inside."

"Almost?"

"One foot," she explained and pointed. "This one."

He frowned at her boot.

"I really think that's why I went back," Ana said thoughtfully, studying her foot. "If I'd gotten to go a million times, like every other kid in that town, I'd have driven right past it without a second thought, but I'd never gotten to go and it was right there and I almost got in one time, just once…and I couldn't leave it like that. Yes or no, but not almost, you know? Not almost."

Yoshi nodded and confidently said, "You are making no sense at all."

"I know. I'm suffocating," said Ana with a sigh, leaning back against Bonnie's legs. "And I'm drunk. I drink a lot. I think I'm an alcoholic. Don't tell anyone. The thing you got to remember, the thing you have to understand is, it was hot. It wasn't summer yet, but it sure thought it was, and the sun was out and we were pouring sweat and there's Freddy's, and for the first time ever, David asked me if I wanted to go in. Just to cool off for a while, he said. He said his mom would give us a snack. He said we could see the band and he'd introduce me to…you know. All his friends. And I knew it was wrong," she said with strengthless little laugh. "And I knew she'd kill me if she found out, but I loved David and I loved my Aunt Easter and I…oh…I just wanted to go so bad. I had this idea that it was David's other home. Not the house in the woods, which was big and creaky and kind of scary at night, but his real home, like Narnia through the back of the wardrobe or Hogwarts for Harry…insert your nerdgasm here," she added.

Yoshi smiled, but not really.

"I thought, because I was eight at the time and eight-year-olds are stupid, I thought I could live there. Did you ever think that way when you were a kid? Did you ever look around at the mall or the WalMart or whatever and think everything you could ever want was there?"

"Yeah," said Yoshi. "It was Disneyland for me, but yeah. I did."

"He said we should go, just the once, and just the once, I said okay. And we pedaled in and got off our bikes and I don't remember anything David said to me as we walked up, but I can remember how my heart was pounding, because I knew it was the first time, the last time. I would walk through those doors and he'd bring me in…" Her eyes drifted toward Freddy and a tear, unnoticed, welled and fell. "…and I could live there and never ever ever go back. David opened up the door and I could see him on the stage. He waved and I knew, okay, I knew he was waving at David, but I could pretend it was for me too. I could pretend he'd been waiting to see me all those years and he was glad I was finally there. He loved me. He'd save me. All I had to be was brave for one…more…minute."

"Are you crying?"

"No," she said mechanically. "I'm fine."

And she didn't feel it, but the tears kept coming, silent, as all her tears ever were.

"So…What happened?"

"She caught me. The one time, the only time, I ever broke the rule and she just happened to drive by and see me. I heard screaming brakes and even before I turned around, I knew it was her. And it was. And Freddy was right there. So I ran. She drove straight across the parking lot and hit me. Knocked me…shit, I don't even know—fifty feet? I got up and ran again. She got out of the car and came after me. I got one foot inside. This one." Again, she pointed, then wiped at her eyes, which hurt for some reason. Her fingers came away wet; she rubbed them dry on her jeans and closed her eyes, leaning back against the soft, bumpy wall.

"She caught me by the hair," she said sleepily. "She broke the radio antenna off our car—we never got it fixed either. Every time we went driving, we had to listen to wind and tires. That sucked. I hate silence. Anyway, she broke it off and beat me with it until it was bent too bad to keep hitting me. She held me by the shirt until the shirt got whipped off me and then she held me by the hair. She pulled this huge chunk out, actually. I don't mean how you get your hair caught in the brush and rip out a few dozen strands at once, I mean she tore it right the fuck out, with a bit of skin still attached. There's a scar. I'd show it to you, but there's hair grown over it now. You can still feel it, though. You want to feel?" she offered, leaning forward and sinking her fingers into her hair. "It's right…not that one, that one's from the time she broke a bottle on me…and that's from the day she pushed me over on the rock. This one! Feel!"

"No, thank you," Yoshi said softly.

"Okay, well…It made a sound like celery crunching, only wetter. I heard it through my whole skull. Can't eat celery to this day." She stopped, puzzled. "Where was I? Oh yeah. Three people went into the building, right past me. Five people came out. No one stopped her. A kid asked what was wrong with me and his mom told him not to look and just keep walking. It was a different time, all right. You know, whenever I hear people talk about the good old days and how the government wants to tell everyone their business, I think about that. Eight people walked right past the lady whipping a little girl's back bloody and did nothing. Eight grown-up people, that is. And, like, twelve kids, but kids can't do anything. I don't blame the kids. The only one who said anything at all to her was the guy who told her to move her car because it was blocking his in, and if she'd turned around and hit him, maybe then someone would have done something. If she hit him, that'd be assault, but she hit me and that's just parenting. And that's the good old days, baby. See no evil, hear no evil. That's what all those people wish we as a nation could go back to. I mean, Mike wanted to know how three hundred and…and…I don't know. Lots. Three hundred and lots of people could go missing in Mammon and that's how. I could have been one of them so easy. I could have been beat to fucking death right there in the parking lot of a busy restaurant in the middle of the fucking day and no one would have seen or heard a thing. Freddy never even stopped singing. Even he didn't care. Or maybe he didn't see me, I don't know."

"You okay?" Yoshi said at last.

"I'm fine." Ana drew up her legs, wrapped them in her arms, made herself small, and closed her eyes. The music played, all drums and zithers, like flashes of light and threads of gold through the black of her memories. She told the story, because it was important to finish what you'd started, but mostly she listened to the music and watched the colors it sparked inside her. "I think Aunt Easter finally stopped her. I don't really remember. I think I heard her voice. I think I heard David crying. I don't know, honestly. It's all a mess. I was a mess. She threw me in the car when it was over and took me home and knocked me around some more because I couldn't be trusted and also, I got blood all over the car. She made me scrub it out, but it had set in by then. I ruined the car, so…I had to stay in the closet for a while. That's fair."

"Do I even want to know what that means?"

"What, the closet?" Ana roused herself to some bewilderment and laughed at him. "It was just a closet, you know, with shoes and coats and shit. I had to stay in there when I was bad. Usually only a few hours or maybe overnight. That time, I was there for like…a month, I think. More than a week, anyway. Except for school. She didn't even let me out to go to bathroom. I used to keep this one jar hidden in there for just such occasions, but it filled up and there was nothing I could do but just, you know, go. That closet reeked. She made me scrub it until my hands opened up, but I could never get the smell out."

"Jesus, lady."

Ana shrugged. Her wandering eye caught a glimpse of two little bottles of whisky that had appeared like a miracle on the shelf beside her. She fished one down, opened it with some difficulty, and drank. "Doesn't matter anymore," she muttered, eyeing the second one. "Everyone involved is dead now. Except Freddy. Freddy Lives."

"Did you ever tell anyone?"

"Tell anyone what?" she asked, honestly confused.

"That your mom tried to kill you?"

"No, she didn't. She didn't actually try to kill me until I was fifteen." She reached for the second bottle.

Yoshi took it away before she could close her hand on it and put it up on the work table, a million miles out of her reach. "God, I am already regretting asking you this, but what happened?"

"What?"

"When you were fifteen?"

"Dude, you are making no sense," Ana said crossly. "Wait, you mean the accident?"

"Accident?"

"Well, that's what they called it. They said she was drunk and she sure was, but it was no accident. I don't remember all of it," she added, letting her eyes slide shut to better see those memories. "I was in my room, doing homework. That's my last clear memory and then I was in the trunk of the car. I'd been awake for some time, apparently, but I don't remember any of it. Head injuries are like that. Messy. People don't realize. They think it's so clean, like you get hit once and you're out for a few hours and you wake up pretty and confused right before you get either murdered or saved, but it's not like that at all. They found seven distinct injuries to my head, face and arms from the bottle that she used. They found skin under my nails, fingers and toes. I'd fought back. I'd got all the way out into the hall before she finally got me for good. And I'd been awake in the trunk for a while, long enough to knock out one of the taillights, but I don't remember any of that. My first clear memory is seeing headlights on the road behind us and trying to force my hand out through the place the taillight used to be to, I don't know, wave them down or something. I don't know what I was thinking. It was so dark. They'd have never seen my hand, even if they were close enough, which they weren't. Then my mother turned off from the main road and there was nothing behind us at all.

"She'd taken us to this park down by a river that ran through the town. At that time, I honestly thought she'd thought she'd killed me and had brought me there to bury me. I don't know what I was thinking," Ana said sleepily. "There was no shovel in the trunk with me. I should have known better. Anyway, I panicked and crawled as deep into the trunk as I could go, trying to pull up the carpet there and crawl through into the backseat, because I thought if I couldn't get out and run as soon as the car stopped, I'd never get away. But the car never stopped.

"I did pull the carpet up and I managed, some fucking how, to squeeze out into the backseat. It was like trying to squeeze through the U-bend of a toilet. You don't just go through and get out, there's this framework and all these springs and the trunk is on a totally different level from the seat. My shirt got snagged when I was halfway out and I was trying to get it loose, seeing the front seat like a fucking tower going up forever with my mother sitting in it, hunched over the steering wheel. All I could see was her arm and her hair and the part of her cheek they call the blade. Anyway," she sighed, "I could see her and I was terrified of making any noise because I was stuck and helpless when I heard the tires go off from the pavement onto boards. Wooden boards. The sound they make is so different. She hit the gas. It was no accident. She was drunk, but there was nothing accidental about it. She romped on that gas and the car just took off when it hit the end of the pier. She was still on the gas, with nothing under the car, so all I could hear was the engine revving, and then we hit the water. The nose went down and she leaned back, sort of relieved-like, like the job was done now, and watched the river come up over the front of the car. It took a long time. You'd think it'd just hit and sink, but it took forever. She had time to light a cigarette and smoke half before the water even touched the windshield where I could see it.

"We floated there, I don't know how long. I was still stuck, trying to wiggle out, and the car was just bobbing like a cork. I had the feeling we were moving, and now and then, we'd bump something in the water or it would bump us, but we didn't start sinking for the longest time. Then suddenly, the nose went way down and the water started filling up the front of the car, pulling it even further down, so that when I finally got loose, I fell up against the back of the front passenger seat like it was the floor. Mom looked back at me, but she just laughed and kept smoking. She was in the water almost up to her neck by then, and was trying to finish off her cigarette before it got any higher. She didn't say anything to me. Not then, not ever again." Ana thought about it. "You know, I think the last words I ever heard my mother say were from that morning at breakfast when she called me a selfish cunt for drinking the last of the milk while she was holding the milk. I told her she had it in her hands and she threw it at me. Then she screamed at me for spilling the milk all over the kitchen floor. Every day with her was like that. You never knew when the explosion was coming because it didn't have to make sense. There was no trick to keeping her quiet, no happy music that would just keep her in the fucking box. Anything could happen. Anything. There I was, doing my homework like everything was normal, and suddenly, a spider."

"Huh?"

"Huh?" Ana echoed, trying without success to open her eyes. "Who's there? Where am I?"

"It's Yoshi. You're in the workshop. Remember?"

"No." But his was a calm voice and a vaguely familiar one, so she thought she was all right. She slumped back, groping above her with one limp hand until Bonnie's hot metal fingers caught it and gave her a careful squeeze. She squeezed back, lolling against his legs, and mumbled, "Wanna watch a movie later? I miss…I miss movie nights. I'll let you pick."

"What happened?" the voice asked.

"What happened?" she slurred back at him. "When? What?"

"In the car. How'd you get out of the car?"

"What car?"

"The accident."

"It was no accident," said Ana out of habit. She frowned in the dark behind her eyelids. "She meant to do it. She put me in the trunk."

"You got out of the trunk. You crawled into the backseat and the water was coming in, remember?"

"Door locks," mumbled Ana. "We had power locks and windows. I could hear the locks clicking as they shorted out, but they wouldn't unlock. The windows wouldn't come down. The water swallowed the front seats and washed up over my knees. Cold. It was a warm day and I guess it was a warm river, but you know how it is when you jump in a pool for the first time and it feels so cold? It was like that. Just shockingly cold. I couldn't get the door open. The car was completely under and going deeper. I could feel us moving, but I couldn't see anything. The lights on the dash went out. It wasn't totally black, but the water was so murky, I couldn't see more than darker blobs in the dark water. There was no way out. I rolled onto my back in the cold water and started kicking at the window, but the water ate my foot and slowed me down. I couldn't get a good kick in. There was nothing in the car I could use, nothing. I kicked and kicked and finally felt it break, but by then, the water was in my ears and I couldn't hear it. The water came rushing in. One second, it was up around my ears and then it was over my face, that fast. I kind of pushed up and grabbed one more breath and then that was it, all the air was gone. I couldn't see anything, couldn't tell where I was or where my arms and legs were. The car was turning over and moving in the current, so it felt like we were going two directions at once. I couldn't find the window until I cut my hands on it. I pulled myself through it and looked up and I could see white light shining on the surface of the water way, way overhead. I looked down and I saw my mother watching me through the window. I suppose she could have been drowned by then," Ana said dubiously, "but I don't think she was. I never saw her blink, but I know she was watching. And I swam away. I didn't go back for her. I didn't even think of it. I saw her watching and all I could think was to get away. I swam the whole way up with my lungs aching, thinking any second, I'd feel her hand around my ankle, pulling me down. Sometimes I dream that. Not the trunk so much or even the swimming, but her hand on my ankle, pulling me down. I don't have nightmares that I didn't…you know, didn't save her. I have nightmares that she didn't die."

She drowsed comfortably, far from the water, but floating all the same.

"What happened?" a voice asked. Yoshi, she thought without really recognizing it. The voice belonged to Yoshi. "After you got out of the river?"

"I didn't. I drowned."

"Uh, no, you didn't. You're alive."

"You can drown without dying. I drowned. I drowned and lived. I've been drowning ever since."

"Okay," said Yoshi's voice after a long airless silence. "Okay, but how'd you get out of the water?"

"I don't know," she said disinterestedly. "A lot of that is just…confusion and static. I had a lot of head injuries when I was a kid, and the doctors say I was oxygen deprived a long time in the water. I lost a lot of memories from before that night. I got most of them back, I think, but not all of them. It's not like it is in the movies, where you just get hit again and suddenly, it's all there. It's like…blood on bandages. It bleeds through, but not everywhere and not all at once. It seeps."

"Who found you?"

"When?"

"When you were in the river? Who saved you?"

"No one. He never came. He let me drown. He was supposed to come and he didn't. He always sails away at the end. He always lets me drown."

"But you got out."

"Did I?" Confused, Ana turned that over, but the images formed soon twisted into new shapes. She let them go and shrugged them away.

"How?" the voice pressed.

"I don't know. I was in the water and then I was walking. I didn't know where I was and then I did. As soon as I knew what street I was on, I went to Rider's place. I walked all night. I had shoes and then I didn't, but I don't remember taking them off. I don't remember knocking on his door. I think I remember him opening it, but I don't know. He was just there in the open doorway with all this light behind him. There were other guys there, but he made them leave. He got his girlfriend to take me to the hospital and say she'd found me. I got crazy pneumonia from all the water in my lungs and, you know, the memory problems from being oxygen deprived. I had to talk to the cops," she said, still disgruntled after all these years. "They put me in foster care. I kept running away and Rider kept picking me up and making me go back until he gave in and stabled me. He's not such a bad guy. I mean, he is, he's a very bad guy, but he's, you know, all right. And I'm okay now. Everything's all right."

"Jesus, lady." Yoshi was quiet long enough that she almost forgot he was there, before suddenly saying, "How could anyone do that to a little kid? To anyone, really, but especially their own kid?"

"I deserved it."

A few more notes of familiar music dropped like Honda Civics into a lake, sending ripples of distortion across the craptastic vaporwave coming out of some hidden speaker.

"You don't believe that," Yoshi said in an odd, thin voice, much thinner than he was. And he was pretty thin.

"Everybody believes it," Ana said sleepily. "We're all born bad, aren't we? All of us stained by the sins of our mothers and fathers, and we totally accept that we can never be good enough on our own to make up for that. We're all born going to hell unless God decides you're worth saving, and if you're not, then fuck you. No one can save what God forsakes. And that's what Mammon is, you know," she said, yawning. "A Godforsaken place. No one is ever saved. It's just like the clock says: Hansel and Gretel went in that oven, the wolf ate Little Red, and Sleeping Beauty withered away to bones in that tower. There are no happy endings in the real world. No one is ever saved."

The music played. She listened, drifting alone in the dark.

"Think I'm going to call it a night," someone said. A man, unknown to her, but not a stranger. She heard creaking and rustling as whoever it was got up and then footsteps coming toward her. "Come on. Wake up."

"Nnngh," said Ana irritably and said it again as she twisted away from the hand that tried to worm in under her arm. "Lemme 'lon."

"I can't. Come on. Let's go. You can have the bed."

"No," she sulked. "Not stealin' your bed. 'mma guest in your home. Rule nummer whatever, be a good guest."

"At least go sleep on the couch in the office then. Anywhere but the floor."

"Wanna sleep here." Ana pushed herself back along the wall until it folded away and dropped her onto the floor. She curled onto her side, hiding in her arms and her hair as the hands—two of them now, maybe more—tried and failed several times to get a grip on her.

"Okay," the voice said when the hands at last gave up and flew away. "If I leave you here, do you promise not to go running off into the desert and die?"

"Sleepin," Ana said stubbornly. "Go away."

"That's not a promise."

"Fuck you."

"Neither is that." The hands plucked and pushed at her some more, and the voice sighed. "Fine. Listen…Are you listening?"

"No."

"I'm locking you in. Don't panic and wreck the place. This stuff is expensive. You hear me?"

"No."

"Good." The feet went away. The music shut itself off mid-song and the quiet swallowed her, full of teeth. The hands returned one last time to slide a rolled-up towel smelling comfortably of machine grease and WD-40 under her head, then went away forever. "Freddy, you're in charge," said the voice, receding. "Keep an eye on her."

Somewhere unrelated to her, a door opened. Wind blew, cold and full of desert smells. Somewhere else, a door closed. The air grew still and heavy and hot.

Servos noisily whined. The wall at her back moved. She slid off and would have fallen, but someone caught her. Metal bones closed around her, pulling her against Bonnie's soft, soft chest. "Oh baby," he said, breathing purple all over her swirling brain. Skeletal fingers combed through her hair. "Oh, I have never wanted to kill a dead woman so much in my whole damn life, and you don't even know it, but that's saying something. I am so fucking angry."

Ana smiled, drowning in the darkness. "Love you."

"Love you, too. No, Freddy, no!" Bonnie said and then new hands found her, huge and leathery and unbreakable. Again, Ana curled herself small, but he lifted her anyway, pulling her easily out of Bonnie's arms and into some strange new suffocating embrace.

"Ana."

Mr. Faust's voice. What was he doing here? No, not Faust. Freddy, saying her name over and over, a little more distant each time until gravity suddenly rolled and took her with it. The unexpectedness of this provoked some instinctive fear-response even through her stupefied brain and she roused just enough to recognize that the world was still a thing and she was somewhere in it, tucked up in Freddy's lap where he sat on some sort of familiar floor, holding her in the crook of one powerful arm, smoothing her hair back from her face and patting at her cheek. "Ana, wake up. Look at me, Ana. Please…"

She tried to tell him to shut up and let her sleep and could only make a disgruntled snoring sound.

"Is she okay?" Girl's voice. No name, but a soft yellow color that pulsed behind Ana's eyelids with every anxious word. "Freddy, is she awake?"

"I don't know. I don't know. Ana? Ana, please open your eyes if you can hear me. Please, I need you to know…I saw you. I remember you. I never forgot you. I never forgot. Wake up. Please wake up."

"Give over," another voice growled, bringing with it phantom sensations of shiver-bright pleasure and bone-deep grief. "She's gone black. She's out for the night."

"How could you?" Bonnie again, his voice scratched through with static and anger. "How could you see something like that and let it happen?"

"I couldn't stop my show." Freddy rocked her, his hand running and running through her hair. "She was outside the restaurant where she couldn't trigger a child endangerment exception. The show had started and my override guidelines didn't allow me to respond to situations outside the building. That took years to wear down and…and she was why. Oh, Ana. Ana, I saw you, but I couldn't help you. I had to let it happen, but I made sure it would never happen again. I remember you, Ana. I remember all those people who walked past you. I remember all the people who just sat in their chairs and watched. I remember the song I was singing. I remember everything about that day." His voice cracked. Silence hummed through his speakers. He touched her face and said, "I remember David."

Ana tried, but could not quite rouse herself enough to care. She turned her face a little more into the darkness and the heat of his body. The chemical smell of whatever had been used to coat and protect his fur was strong, stinging at her nostrils and burning the back of her throat. The smell of the quarry still lurked beneath it, soaked into his very bones—a little breath of home. She smiled.

"I remember David," he said again, rocking her in his arms. "And his mother. Ana. Ana, what was your aunt's name?"

"Mmmuh."

"Leave it, Fred. It ain't important now."

"It is, Foxy. You don't understand. Her name wasn't Easter at all." He shifted her; her head lolled back, her throat arched and vulnerable, and he patted her cheek too hard to sleep through. "Ana! Wake up! Tell me about Aunt Easter. Why did you call her that?"

"Eesser."

"Why? Why did you call her Easter?"

Ana shook her head, groping through fathoms of black tar to push at him, but her arms were heavy and soon fell away. "Twins," she said sullenly. "Lemme sleep. Sleepin."

"You can sleep when you tell me her name. Why did you call her Easter?"

"Twins. Too small. Bad birth. Bad…blood. Too small. Made'um stay inna…inna preemie-thing. Mom came home first, but it wassan'other week n' days before they brung th'other'n home…Eesser Sunday. So we called her Eesser. Easter," she said carefully, rising up just far enough to forge the word and bring with it a ghost of her aunt's smiling, pretty face before it all sank away again, and her with it. "It was…our secret name. That's what we do in Mammon…we all keep secrets. No one called her that but me."

"What did everyone else call her?" Freddy insisted as, somewhere, that yellow voice began to whisper/whine, "No. Oh no. No no no no no—"

"Marion," said Ana. "Melanie 'n Marion. They got 'round. That's wha' they say. Had…Had babies w' no daddies. His came back. David hadda go…go stay w'is father she said. Buh tha wassa lie. Foxy tol' me th'truth. He got took away 'n 'dopted by…by someone else."

Someone sighed, followed by Bonnie's choked, furious, "You told her what?"

"He gotta 'nother fam'ly now. We were gonna be a fam'ly, but…" She tried to shrug. Her hand smacked limply against Freddy's arm and fell back into her lap. "A'leese he got away. Mom took me. Wanted t' kill me herself, she said. Lemme sleep, okay? Lemme sleep. You promised."

"All right. All right, go to sleep." He pulled her to him again, closing her in the hard plastic box of his arms, and rubbed her back. "It was David," he said, but not to her. "Her cousin…was our David. How could you miss that?"

Silence.

"You didn't," Freddy said slowly. "You knew. You knew the whole time."

A sigh, and somehow even the sigh was gruff and stubbled. "Not the whole time. I only knew she were familiar. Couldn't pin down just who she put me in mind of, but I knew she were someone I knew. All her talk o' Cousin David put the thought in my head she might just look like Marion. And she does, ye know. Her colors are wrong and she's built sturdier, and that threw me off more'n it should've, but she's the spitting image o' Marion Blaylock down in her bones. We just don't see because—"

"We love her," that deep voice rumbled and stroked her hair. "We hated Marion, but we love Ana, so we couldn't see it."

"But you said…" Bonnie's voice shook, then came back like a fist. "After the scan, you said you couldn't match her with anyone. You said—"

"I lied."

"Why? For God's sake, you were the one pushing for that to be true, why would you turn around and lie about it if you were right?"

Silence.

"Answer that," Freddy growled. "That's an order, Foxy."

"It weren't Marion I were trying to hide. Oh damn ye. Have it, then. Just remember, ye asked for it." A harsh scrape of metal hitting a concrete floor, then footsteps, heavy and unpadded. "Her colors are wrong, but they ain't entirely unfamiliar either. Ye just stop and think a moment when the last time was ye saw eyes like hers." Metal fingers closed on her face, carefully prying her eyes open. Light stabbed in; colors flooded through the air, forming faces without meaning. "Striking, ain't they? Lots o' blue eyes in Mammon, but they're mostly that deep, sorta smoky color that he had. Not like this, so pale and perfect and clear…just as blue as yer own, Fred, like they was painted on…but I never really realized how rare and precious this color be, because they were damn near the first color eyes I ever saw. And that hair. All that hair, wild as weeds when she ain't got it braided up. Never mind the color of it, who do ye know with hair like that and eyes like these?"

Silence.

"Oh my God," said Bonnie.

"It gets worse," the other voice said heavily. "I need to show ye…Hell, I can't go, I got no bloody sensors. Bon, fetch her keys and go out to the back o' the van. Find out where she put the junk she took out o' Fred's gullet. Ye'll see a couple o' pictures. The opening o' Fredbear's and one o' Marion and David. Fetch 'em in here."

"If you've got something to say, just say it!"

A sigh. "How bad do ye want to hit me right now?"

"So bad, you have no goddamn idea."

"Then go get the pictures, mate," the other voice said, "because they can't lie and we all know I do."

Unfinished metal feet clanked away.

Ana slept and dreamed of pulses of yellow, red and brown color.

"Here," Bonnie's voice said, waking her without any sense of time's passage or his return. "This had better be good."

"It ain't. If there's anything good in any o' this, this bit is furthest from it. Look at 'em. Look at their faces. No, no, not them two…these two."

More silence. It lay on her, full of prickles. Ana groped along Freddy's arm until she found his shoulder. She pulled, mumbling, and he lifted her all the way off the ground and stood with her cradled in his arms.

"Humans all look alike," Bonnie said, filling her head with purple light. He sounded scared, but trying not to show it.

"Not that much alike," the girl's voice whispered. "My God, the same eyes, same hair, same smile! How did we never see this?! She has to be…has to be…"

"She's his daughter," Mr. Faust said.

"Oh my God," Bonnie said again. "What…Who could…Jesus! Did he know? How could he…? Even he…Did he know?"

"Of course he knew. Does she know?" Freddy lifted Ana higher, patting at her back like a baby after the bottle while she drowsed. "That's all that matters."

"I don't think so, but I ain't sure, either. She plays it close."

"Why didn't you say something?" the yellow voice asked plaintively.

"Ye didn't want to hear she might be kin to Marion, ye sure as hell wouldn't want to hear she was kin to him." A grumble, rough as rust, and a grudging, "Maybe I could have tried harder to tell ye, but I didn't want to hear it either. It don't change anything, I ain't saying it does…but as long as it didn't have to be true, I didn't want it to be."

"What are we going to tell her?" asked the yellow voice.

"Nothing!"

"Bonnie, we can't—"

"It doesn't matter now!"

"But—"

"It doesn't matter!" Bonnie snapped as static hissed and spat under every word. "She is who she is and nothing she is has the first fucking thing to do with him! None of that matters! She's Ana. Nobody else. She's Ana!"

"We have to at least tell her about David! She deserves to know the truth!"

"No, she doesn't! She doesn't deserve that! You think about it, Chica! You stop and really think about what the truth is and tell me she deserves to live with that!"

"Thank ye, mate."

"You shut up! I may understand why you did that part, but I'm still mad as hell about the rest of it!"

Silence, shot through with troubled colors and the breath of a bear, stinking of oil and blood.

Freddy said, "Ana?"

She did not answer. She was sleeping.

"All right." His hand cupped the back of her head, gently patting her just once more. "We'll talk tomorrow."

"Freddy, I'm begging you," said Bonnie, but that was all he said.

Footsteps retreated, one by one by one. She tried to follow, but could only manage a few sporadic twitches. She was alone, alone in the dark and the damnable silence.

"It's all right," said Freddy, alone with her. "Hush now. Be calm. Everything's all right."

The world tipped, spun, then crushed close around her and finally settled.

"Sleep now, baby, sleep," he rumbled, singing softly against her ear, and suddenly she was crying and crying hard. "Night is calling, full of dreams." He held her as her struggles inevitably waned, rocking now and then, but his song never broke. "Slow the midnight hours are creeping…and I, my loved one's watch am keeping…"

With all her strength, she managed to raise up her arm and push. Her hand slapped into something solid and slid along it until it found teeth, but nothing bit.

"Cares are heavy," he sang as she wept. "Set them free…"

Her arm was too heavy. She felt it drop and dangle painfully behind her until Freddy gently tucked it across her chest between them again.

"…and sleep now, baby, sleep."

She slept.