CHAPTER FORTY

Freddy waited for her on the show stage, standing by the half-hidden door in the back wall, his head bent and eyes shut. He opened them when she climbed onstage with him and, when he saw her change of attire, he nodded once. Not in agreement and certainly not in approval; it was a nod Ana recognized too well, one that said, 'Well, the ball's rolling. Might as well get behind it as stand in its way.' He turned and opened the small access panel, staring for a few seconds into the red light now glowing out above the keypad. He glanced at Ana as she joined him, grunted wordlessly, then deliberately pushed eight buttons: 1-2-0-8-1-9-8-3.

"Holy shit, will that be easy to remember," she said, startled into an anxious laugh.

He looked at her, his finger hovering over the Enter key.

"It's my birthday," she explained, then quickly shook her head as he twitched, to forestall an unscheduled outbreak of birthday songs. "Not today. August 12th 1983."

He looked at the keypad, his brows drawing minutely together.

"You know, it's like if you wrote it out as the day, month and year…never mind. Just go, Freddy."

Still frowning, he pushed the enter-key.

A faint tone sounded and the red light turned green. The door seemed to draw itself on the wall in thick black ink a fraction of a second before it suddenly swept up, releasing a shower of choking dust. It latched somewhere above her with a heavy, uncomforting clank. Hot, stagnant air blew out of the dark, stinking of rotten meat and wires.

Ana stepped forward at once, but Freddy didn't budge and he filled the doorway as effectively as a refrigerator. Oblivious to Ana's impatience, he lit his eyes and scanned the room. She couldn't squeeze around him. The best she could do was steal glimpses of the room beyond his massive bear-shaped bulk.

She wasn't sure what she was expecting. Given the overall secrecy and security of the place, let alone Freddy's resistance, nothing short of a xenomorph hive could have possibly shocked her, but it was just a room. A small room, relatively, six-sided, with doors in three of the four longest walls, each one neatly labeled. On the four off-sides were storage shelves, lockers and cupboards, every door thrown wide and every drawer pulled out, if not removed and smashed apart. It was impossible to know whether the floor were tiled or carpeted or covered in the bones of missing murdered children, for that matter. He'd warned her there'd be a mess and there was—broken storage shelves and drawers, ceiling tiles, insulation, props and backdrops, holiday decorations, and, to judge by the hot sour smell, more than a few rotting rats. It was a mess, all right. Not like the rest of the building—abandoned and falling apart—but the kind of deliberate, angry mess that only came from someone actively trashing it.

Ana hunkered down, shining her flashlight around and between Freddy's feet, searching the floor for the promising glint of metal among the debris. She didn't find it. What she found instead were discolored bones, scruffs of fur, and tatters of dry flesh and meat mixed in with the junk. Not just one or two unfortunate animals, but dozens, lay scattered around her in hundreds of pieces. None of them were fresh, but not all of them were time-dried and withered out to critter-jerky, either.

"Jeez, is this what you were afraid I was going to see?" Ana asked, examining several furry corpses lying on garbage stained black by the fluids of their decomposition. "You got a real low opinion of me, don't you?"

Freddy grunted and picked up a rat-chewed flannel shirt, kicking at the compacted mess underneath it before he let it drop again. "DO. YOU. REALLY. WANT. TO. KNOW. WHAT. I. WAS. AFRAID. I'D. FIND," he asked, now peering behind a series of standing backdrops—spring, summer, autumn and winter landscapes all rendered apocalyptic with neglect.

"You didn't really think it would be another body, did you?"

"PEOPLE. BREAK. IN. ALL. THE. TIME."

"Yeah, but the power's off. Even if someone knew the code, they couldn't get in."

Freddy grunted and pointed with his hand and eyes. High on the wall above the last sort of standing set of shelves was another of those access hatches to the Rat Race maze in the ceiling. "I. BLOCKED. THOSE. OFF. IN. THE. OTHER. ROOMS. FOR. A. REASON," he told her as she uneasily relived those hours crawling through the suffocating ducts. "I. KNEW. KIDS. HAD. CLIMBED. IN. BEFORE. I. WASN'T. COMPLETELY. SURE. THEY. HAD. ALL. CLIMBED. OUT. WOULD. YOU. BE. AS. UNDERSTAND. THING. OF. THE. MESS. IN. HERE. IF. IT. WAS. MADE. OF. PEOPLE."

"Honestly?" She straightened up and looked him in the eye. "Probably. People who get stupid in old buildings get hurt. That isn't your fault. Letting Bonnie's voice and Chica's legs and all the rest of what's broken here stay broken because you're afraid of what I'll think if I find a dead guy who got his stupid self killed crawling around in abandoned buildings? That's another matter."

Freddy sighed. She knew she shouldn't think of it like that—it was just a surge in his cooling system, however apt the timing might be—but that was how it looked, so that was how she saw it. He sighed and wordlessly stepped aside.

Ana climbed up on knee-deep drifts of compacted trash and dead animals and made her unsteady way toward the first cupboard, but apart from a couple hundred dead bugs glued to a stack of placemats by fluids that had seeped in from the adjoining cupboard, found nothing. She opened the next cupboard and recoiled at the sight of a mangled…rat? Opossum? Cat? Something fuzzy and long dead. She shut the doors on it and moved on to the next one with a growing sense of confusion and urgency.

The room was not that big. In just a few minutes, she was back at her starting point, looking at Freddy who was looking at her, waiting for her to realize what he'd already told her: There was nothing here.

No. She had to be missing something. This…This was the fucking parts room! The restaurant had only been open a week! None of the parts had been used. They were all still here! They had to be!

Again and again, Ana circled the room, pulling drawers first open and finally all the way out, feeling out every corner and pushing the larger pieces of junk around in her quest to find one more hiding place, as if she could force an animatronic speakerbox to pop into being just by looking hard enough.

Nothing. Those ransacked closets had never been stocked. The shelves had never held anything more technical than a string of Christmas lights. There were no parts. Not broken, not old, not buried…not here. There had never been parts.

Freddy let her have a good long look before resting his huge hand on her shoulder. When she looked at him, he said again, "THERE. IS. NOTHING. HERE."

"But that's impossible. This is the parts room."

"AN-N-A."

"This is the parts room!"

"I KNOW."

"It has to be here," she insisted, twisting out from under his restraining grip. Where hadn't she looked? She peeled up the top layer of trash and dropped it again when she just found more dead animals and torn-up props. And then her eye went up, climbing the upended drawers and bent racks to the very tops of the mangled shelves.

They looked empty from here, but there might be something shoved back against the wall.

She started forward, her boot skidding in the corpse of a raccoon just fresh enough to still be a little slippery.

Freddy caught her arm, steadying her before she could topple over, maybe face-first into another dead animal. He didn't release her once she had her balance, however. "ENOUGH," he said, not unkindly. "THIS. CAN'T. BE. GOOD. FOR. YOU. COME. OUT."

"I just want to check the top shelf."

"AN-N-A. THERE. IS. NOTHING. THERE."

"I have to look. Freddy, please." She looked at his hand, firm as iron around her arm, then up at him. "I have to be able to tell him I looked everywhere before I tell him there's nothing I can do. Please."

His grip tightened for a moment before, with a sigh of defeat, he released her. He watched from the doorway, frowning, as she picked her way through the carcasses and climbed the shelves. She heard him fidget when she wedged her fingers through the slats to pull the vent open and peek into the duct, but it was dark and silent, so she let it close again.

She relaxed then, just a little, just enough to finally turn her head and look at what was sharing the space at the top of the shelves with her.

She came face to face with a speakerbox.

The whole thing.

Weird spirally burner. Cable. Connecting plate. Vocal coil. The case was open, but it was there. Everything but the screws. It wasn't exactly mint-in-box, but it still looked good. In fact, it looked great. Especially for something that had been sitting for years on top of a shelf.

Slowly, against her will, she turned her head back and stared past the slats of the vent into the blackness beyond. She saw nothing, but heard a soft, awful, slithery scrape, as of a snake with claws, returning to its denning place under the building.

Her mind conjured an image of Springtrap Bonnie, but crushed it just as fast, partly because it was terrifying to picture that…that thing squeezing itself through the ventilation system, but mostly because the duct, big as it was, was still less than two feet across at the very most and there was no physical way Springtrap Bonnie could fit through it. Foxy, sure. He was smaller than the others, leaner of build, but even he couldn't do it without scratching the hell out of the interior; Springtrap Bonnie would be scraping every side at once. If she'd heard anything at all—if—it was a rat. Just a regular old everyday filthy rat.

"WHAT. IS. IT," Freddy asked, reminding her that he—and Bonnie—existed. "WHAT. ARE. YOU. LOOKING. AT."

"Nothing." Ana seized the speaker and dropped to the floor, still staring up at the vent, daring eyes to appear behind the slats.

Nothing did. Because nothing was there.

"Just a rat," she said, as much to herself as to him, and turned her back on the vent to show Freddy the prize in her fist.

He looked at it for a second with confusion. In the next instant, he'd lunged and caught her wrist, yanking it painfully up and into the light of his eyes. "WHERE. DID. YOU. GET. THAT."

"On the shelf. You saw me."

"HOW," he said, then looked up, over, down and all around. His cameras whirred, changing focus as he searched the shadows. Then he released her, crunched over to the other side of the room and picked up a cracked heart-shaped piece of pink plastic. He turned it over in his hands, then bent to knuckle aside a mummified opossum and collect a wedge of white and pink plastic. He looked back at her, frowning, then dropped both pieces of trash and came to put his hand forcefully on her back, pushing her out more than guiding her.

As soon as she was through the door, he'd shut it and caught her wrist again to peer even more closely at the speakerbox she'd found.

"ARE YOU OKAY?" asked Chica from the kitchen.

Freddy looked at her, then at Ana. He took off his hat and rubbed his brows, looked at the hat, then put it on again. "IT. WAS. JUST. THERE. ON. THE." He clicked a few times.

"On the top shelf."

"NOTHING. ELSE."

"A couple dead spiders."

"WHAT'S THE MATTER?" Chica asked, waddling into the room.

Freddy shook his head at her, still frowning at Ana. "THERE. WERE. NEVER. ANY. PARTS," he said to himself.

"Yeah, I…I saw that. It might not work," she admitted, grudgingly offering it for a closer inspection. "It might be one of yours."

"WHAT?"

"One of you might have had a defective speaker. Maybe they found it in some…some quality control test or something. I mean, I don't know, but they had to have changed it out for a reason. If worse comes to worst, maybe I can jerry-rig one good speaker from two busted ones."

"CHANGE. IT. OUT."

"Had to have been. You can see it isn't new."

Freddy leaned over for another look, prodding at the visible scratches on one side of the case. He grunted and straightened up. "I. HAVE. TO. TALK. TO. FOXY," he said abruptly and left without another word.

As his heavy footsteps receded, Ana was left staring at the speaker in her hand, wondering why it disturbed him…wondering why it disturbed her, too.

"HI BONNIE," Chica said. When Ana looked at her, she stopped tapping her fingers together long enough to point shyly at the hall. "EVERYBODY NEEDS HELP SOMETIMES!"

Right. Priorities.

"Wish me luck," said Ana, hopping down from the stage with the speaker clutched close to her heart.

"GOOD LUCK!" Chica chirped obediently, trailing after her. "DO YOUR BEST!"

She could hear her phone's ringtone from the hall and her jog became a sprint. It wasn't that she was afraid of missing Yoshi's call by a minute or two, as much as a fear that Bonnie would try to answer it if she wasn't there to stop him. And she was right to be afraid; Bonnie had indeed picked her phone up, although he put it down again fast when Ana ran in.

"Found one," she told him, somewhat breathlessly, showing him the speaker as she took back her phone.

Bonnie's ear-pins came up and he reached like he meant to take it from her.

She slapped his hand, then gave him her flashlight and helped him aim it at his throat. The security camera on the wall came on just then and its light helped, too. Pulling Bonnie's outer head closer, she found a way to prop the phone up between its eye sockets so it could 'see' what she was doing and she could keep her hands free.

"Everyone good?" she asked, looking at the phone—Yoshi gave her a thumbs-up—and then Bonnie—he mimicked Yoshi—and even the security camera—it did nothing. "Okay then. Let's do this."

It took a long time, mostly because Yoshi wanted to stare at everything instead of just tell her what to do, but at last, the box was in place and everything connected, so the moment of truth was upon them.

Bracing herself against the crush of disappointment, Ana leaned back just far enough to look Bonnie in the eye. "Say something," she ordered.

"Hi," he said and it was his own voice, if anything, less scratchy than before. His ear-pins came up. "Hey, g-g—GREAT JOB!"

"Oh, thank God," breathed Ana, tossing her screwdriver aside to throw her arms around him and hug his inflexible neck. "See, I told you you'd be fine!"

He hugged her back, one hand rubbing at his new speaker as if to feel the chuckle coming out of it. "Never d-d-doubted you for a—SECOND SLICE—second, baby g-g-girl."

"Whoa," said the forgotten man on the other end of the line. "What's going on there?"

"Where?" asked Ana, drawing back to peer into Bonnie's still-opened neck at the rest of his inner works. "What's wrong?"

"With his voice. That skipping."

"I don't know. He's always done that. Why? What's it mean?"

"Since we know his speakerbox is brand new, it can only mean his sound chips are corrupted. Which means we know he has them, because a sound file can't skip, it would just not play. That's simply got to be a physical defect on a physical entity. Well," he added with a laugh that wasn't entirely kidding, "either that or a stutter." He waited for her to laugh, then sighed and said, "Okay, look…is there a hook-up somewhere around that I'm not seeing? Like a…a switchboard or control panel or…something?"

"No, nothing like that. Or do you mean this?" she asked suddenly, climbing off Bonnie's lap to open his chest compartment. It seemed to her that he made a grab at her wrist, but as soon as his chest was open, he did that thing again where he blanked out. His head canted; his eyes went dark. His hand twitched, letting the phone and flashlight fall as his arms dropped to his side and he slumped, still upright, but empty.

Ana picked up the phone and turned it so Yoshi could see the odd plate set in Bonnie's chest.

"What the hell am I looking at?" he asked in a soft, strained voice. "What…What is this? Lady, what is this, seriously? Am I…? Am I having a flashback? Is that what this is? Are those lungs? Are those fucking lungs?"

"No," said Ana, puzzled. "That's his compressor. Also doubles as the central cooling system. You would not believe how much heat this thing puts out."

"It's breathing."

Ana watched the twin bellows at either side of Bonnie's battery expand and contract as his fan pulled air in and pushed it out. "Sort of," she said, then tapped the plate to hopefully draw the guy's attention to it. "Is this what you meant by control panel?"

"Is that a stomach?"

Ana sighed. "Yeah, sort of. But…You know those baby dolls they used to make, where you could spoon feed them water or whatever and they'd suck it up? It's like that, a gimmick. They eat, but it just drops down into this and waits for someone to come along and drain it out. It's more like a colostomy bag than a stomach."

"Okay," he said, but queasily. "And those…those aren't really lungs."

"Well, yes and no. See, the air comes in and cools, then it goes out again through all these tubes. He's exhaling through his nose, sure, but also, like, his eyes and fingers and pretty much every joint in his body."

Unbidden, an image of Springtrap Chica rose up in the back of Ana's mind. Once again, she heard Mike telling her how the customers had seen a viscous red fluid dribbling from Chica's eyes, beak, fingers and toes. She shook it off, but it took some shaking.

"Anyway, if he stops breathing, he's not going to suffocate, he'll just overheat and short out or something," said Ana. "This is a machine. Seriously, I've got to tell you this? This is a machine. Those aren't lungs, it's a compressor, a heat-sink and a cooling system. This isn't a stomach, it's a waste-disposal sac. That's not a heart, it's a battery."

"Never seen a battery like that before and lady, I have seen them all."

Ana shrugged. "It's a kinetic battery. He just walks around and it recharges itself."

This seemed fairly self-evident to her, but Yoshi reacted as if she'd told him she kept a little leprechaun in there running on a solid gold wheel.

"What do you mean, 'recharges itself'?" he demanded.

"What do you mean, what do I mean?" she countered, baffled. "You ought to know what a kinetic battery is."

"I do. And you know what else I know? I know it takes more voltage to direct the charge than the device can generate without using a transformer and a capacitor, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a kinetic battery. I also know that the heavier the device is, the more current it has to draw off to power itself. At this precise moment in time, cutting-edge today time—the best kinetic battery in the world can only dependably produce a few millivolts. Plus, moving parts take up a hell of a lot of space and always carry a greater risk of breaking than solid-state devices, so it's not considered a really great investment from an economical angle. Not to mention the fact that generating a magnetic field inside a computer is generally considered a bad thing. That's why you find them in wristwatches and flashlights and not in pacemakers or warheads. And I think it goes without saying that the one place you would never find them is inside an animatronic rabbit where it appears to be supplying the power directly to the scaffold, I mean the endoskeleton. So come on. Give, lady," he said, leaning closer to his camera so that his face (and mostly his nose) filled her phone's screen. "Where the hell did you get this thing?"

"Storage unit auction," said Ana.

He stared at her.

She waited him out.

"Okay," he said finally. "You know what? Whatever. Moving on. There has to be a way to access the software on this thing. Look around. Is there any kind of user interface there at all?"

"I keep telling you, no," said Ana, showing him the solid case of the plate.

"Okay, but that makes no sense. There has to be some way to access his program." He paused. "Is something written on that?"

"Uh, yeah, but that's nothing. That's my name."

"I can see that, Andy."

"Ana. It says Ana."

"I know, that was a…A Toy Story…never mind. I mean on the panel itself. I see one light burning and two more that aren't. That means it has separate settings, which means there has to be a way to get its abso data."

"What? Its what?"

"Abso. A-B-S-O. It stands for absolute…never mind, that's technical. In layman's terms, it's a correction factor that establishes an indicated value of zero when the 'bot is at the predetermined Home calibration position."

"Because that's not technical," muttered Ana. "Look, I am not the expert here. Just tell me what to look for and I'll tell you if it's here."

"Fair enough. First things first, let's find the power switch."

"He doesn't have one."

"You didn't even look."

"This is not my first time crawling around in here," Ana said crossly. "You think I could have missed something as obvious as On/Off? I can honestly say I have gone over every inch of this guy at least a dozen times today alone and there's no power button. Or if there is, it sure isn't labeled."

"Okay, so what do those indicators say? Is there perchance a Home setting or Reset or Default or maybe even Stand-by?"

"He's already in stand-by mode," said Ana, leaning back to show Bonnie's slumped and dark-eyed body to the phone. "That happens when you open his chest."

"Yeah, but he's still breathing, so he's obviously not off."

"I breathe when I sleep," she argued.

He squinted at her. "You don't see how that's not remotely the same thing?"

"Fine. Whatever. But no, I don't see any reset buttons here. I don't see any buttons at all," she added, stressing the word 'button' as she ran a finger down the short line of lights. "These are only, I don't know…like you said, indicators."

"There has to be something we're missing. What do those words say? Read them off to me, top to bottom."

"Night, Day and Auto."

A pause. "What does that mean?"

"How the hell should I know?" Ana asked reasonably. "This shit's supposed to make sense to you."

"This shit—" Yoshi picked up the animatronic dog again and shook it at her before heaving it off to one side. "—makes sense to me. I work with robotics and special effects, not…Okay. What's he set to now?"

"Day."

"Day," he mused, now craning his neck to try and get a better angle through the phone. "If I had to guess, I'd say we're looking at the AI settings and if there's more than one, there has to be a way to change them. Look for a port on the control panel there. It might not look like a jack or a USB port. It could be anything, a hole, a slot, anything."

Ana scowled, pushing each of the buttons-that-weren't-buttons in turn, then sat back and looked into Bonnie's unseeing eyes. After a moment, she looked back at the panel in the middle of his chest, reading, not the three settings, but her name. She could still remember writing it, drawing out the letters by the orange flicker of her lighter, using her fingers to feel out the dimensions of his battery case afterwards, and feeling…

…that little dimple. Like he had a missing screw.

Ana put her hand on him and felt for it again, her fingertips tapping and sliding along the side of his internal casing, and just when she'd decided she was mis-remembering it after all, she felt it again. A tiny hole, only a little bigger than a headphone jack, within an asterix-shaped inset.

She turned the phone on it, as much to see it for herself as to show Yoshi. "Could that be something?" she asked.

"I don't know," he replied, which was not exactly encouraging. "I've never seen anything like that on a bot. In a video game, sure," he added with a laugh. "Looks like one of those RPG keyholes. Seen a key with a star-shaped handle lying around anywhere?"

"Can you be serious for, like, five seconds?" asked Ana impatiently, and like a slap, suddenly realized in fact she had. Not a key, though, although it had been on a keyring. The one she'd found in the security office, the one with the funny little fob, the one that looked a little like an allen wrench. What the hell had she done with that thing? She knew she'd kept it, because the Frankenstein's monster string doll attached to the keyring had so reminded her of David, but then what?

She'd found it cleaning out the Mermaid's Grotto, the same day Mason's boys had first broke in. And she'd…she'd put the keys in her pocket. Were they still there?

"Let me check something," she said, setting the phone down. "Don't go anywhere."

Chica was pacing in the hall, still clasping her hands and looking nervous. "IT SURE IS GREAT TO SEE YOU," she said, waddling after Ana as she ran by.

"It's great to see you too," said Ana without slowing down. She dashed across the dining room, banged through the opposite door and ran up the hall to her room. God, what a mess. What was it about Mason's boys that made them want to throw her clothes around?

Ana started hunting out pairs of jeans and checking the pockets.

A timid knock sounded on the jamb of the open door, followed by Chica's cheerful, "HI, BONNIE!"

"Yeah, he's doing just fine," Ana said distractedly. "We're almost done. We fixed his voice and now we're working on his stutter—aha!"

As soon as she snatched up the keys, Chica's entire demeanor changed. Her eyes went big. Her beak clacked without words for several seconds as she twitched and clicked and finally glitched out completely. Chica turned and lurched away as fast as she could go, out the door and down the hall, chirping about birthday girls and singing the Helping Hands song.

Whatever. She'd deal with Chica as soon as Bonnie was fixed. One thing at a time.

"Found them," she said, reseating herself on Bonnie's lap and showing the keys unnecessarily to the phone.

"That has to be it," said Yoshi with obvious excitement as he squinted at the sunburst node just beneath the bend of the allen wrench. "Does it fit?"

It did, and what's more, as soon as the sunburst was firmly set in the asterix-shaped indentation, the whole thing depressed slightly and took on, not a loose feel exactly, but a moveable one. Instinctively, she rotated the arm of the wrench—the key—first up, then down, and watched the lights on Bonnie's chest move correspondingly. Night, Day, Auto, and back to Day.

"That's it!" said Yoshi, startling her with his forgotten existence. "Okay, go ahead and set it to Night."

Ana started to obey, then took the key all the way out of its socket. "Why?"

"A corrupted sound file is usually caused by overplaying it, kind of like having a needle on a record player go over the same track until it creates a scratch. He's been stuck in the same groove so long, he can't get out on his own. So we want to push reset, so to speak, break him out of that groove and maybe see if we can move him on to another playlist, if possible. It makes the most sense to have the 'bots shut down at night, when whatever time-travelling attraction they belong to is closed. So set it to Night and let's see what happens."

Like a devil on her shoulder, Ana heard Mike Schmidt say, 'It's different at night.'

"I'm pretty sure he's in stand-by right now," she said.

"He may be sleeping, but he's not shut down. We need to shut him all the way down to start him up again. Go ahead." Off-screen, a knock and a man's voice. Yoshi looked to his left, then back at Ana. "Listen, I've got to go. Do what you've got to do, but give me a call tomorrow if you're still having troubles. Hell, give me a call if you don't. I would really love to know how that thing works out for you. And if you ever decide to sell it—"

"I'll keep you in mind," Ana said politely, since, 'Never, fuck off,' was not the way to handle a guy who'd given up his evening to talk her through a voice box transplant for free.

That knock again, more insistent.

"Gotta go," said Yoshi. "Call me, I'm serious." Then he was gone.

Ana put the phone aside and looked at Bonnie. There was no reason to continue and every reason not to. He worked just fine on his current setting and she had no idea what the others did. The key seemed to fit, but hell, a knitting needle 'seemed' to fit in an electrical wall outlet, but that didn't mean they were meant for each other, and it was extremely plausible that jamming this or any other object into these keyholes would have a catastrophic effect on Bonnie's insides. He was a machine and every machine, no matter how well-built, was only ever one crash away from the scrapheap.

But that wasn't what she was really afraid of, was it?

Just what was his night program anyway?

Just what Yoshi said it was, probably: his shut-off mode. But that wasn't as exciting as the thought of animatronics shambling up and the down the halls of an abandoned pizzeria, possessed by the spirits of murdered children and intent on seeking revenge by killing anyone who resembled the fuzzy memory they had of their killer, something that might be as simple as anyone wearing a purple security uniform…like the one she was wearing.

She plucked half-heartedly at the loose collar, but didn't take it off and didn't really know why not. Maybe just because removing it meant that on some basement-level of her heart, she believed if Bonnie saw her in it on his Night setting, he'd seize her, tear her arms off and crush her skull in one bite. And she didn't believe that.

'Should I be afraid of you?' she'd asked, snuggling up in Bonnie's arms on the Fourth of July, and he'd said, 'Not going to lie to you, baby girl. Yeah. Yeah, you really should.'

She still didn't believe it. Bonnie would never hurt her. He was a rabbit-shaped robot with a computer for a brain and he wouldn't hurt anyone, but especially not her, because even if some sliver of Mike Schmidt's story was true and his AI had made the Syfy Channel leap from cold calculation to miraculous sentience, it still did not mean he killed people. He wasn't that Bonnie. He was built to operate at this site. He was—

Without warning, another fragment of Fourth of July memory bubbled up: 'Have you ever seen fireworks?' she had asked, already sleepy with drink and only half-listening when he said, 'Not at this place, but at Circle Drive…'

No. No, she'd been drunk. She did not remember that. He had never said it. He had never been outside these walls until Mason had—

died

No! Dragged him out and thrown him in the quarry! Mason Kellar was not dead! He and his brother and all their meth-head minions were still very much a pressing danger and to prove it, Ana put the key in.

It clicked.

She turned it. The light of Day switched off and the light at Night came on. And when she shut his chest, his Night program would boot up and it would…she didn't know…run a maintenance scan or defrag his memory files or restore his factory settings. And if she was hesitating at all right now it was only because she was afraid he wouldn't know her when she set him to Day again, not because she thought his eyes would open up black and silver and his hands would rise and his mouth would open, full of teeth…

Somewhere down the hall, the Toreador March began to play at full volume. Freddy was coming. His footsteps were ponderous, heavy, uniquely his own. Like Mike had said, not human. "IT IS UNLAWFUL TO TAMPER WITH THE ANIMATRONICS," he bellowed. "FREDDY FAZBEAR AND ALL ASSOCIATED CHARACTERS ARE THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OF FAZBEAR ENTERTAINMENT INCORPORATED! STOP! IF IT'S HOT, DAMAGED OR DOESN'T BELONG TO YOU, DON'T TOUCH! AN-N-A! STOP! NOW!"

"BE CAREFUL OUT THERE! SAFETY FIRST!" Chica called and then squeaked as Foxy roared, "Get out o' me fucking way, woman!"

She was running out of time. Foxy was fast. So. Who was the real Bonnie? Day-Bonnie or Night-Bonnie? She touched the corresponding indicators and felt the heat of Bonnie's life pulsing up at her through the glass case that protected his heart. The letters of her name stood out even blacker than she remembered with the light from the watching camera shining down on it like a spotlight. Day or Night? He couldn't be both…

…but he could be neither.

Ana turned the key until the light next to Auto came on and shut Bonnie's chest.

"NO!" Freddy bellowed, lunging through the security door and reaching out both arms as though he meant to snatch her up from twenty feet away.

Behind him, his voice dry as bones and rusted through, Foxy said, "Did he get-t-t her, Fred? He got her, didn't he? Ah hell. Oh, Ana."

Bonnie's eyes flickered and came on. "SYSTEM ERROR. CLOCK DISCREPANCY DETECTED. CORRECTING." He clicked. "CORRECTED." He sat up straight. He looked at her and although his eyes did not iris up black, the lids did come down in an irritated slant. "What did you do that for?" he asked, and immediately, his ear-pins twitched high. He reached up a hand as if to clutch his throat, then looked down at his chest and up again at her, his eyes open as wide as they could go.

There had been no static when he spoke. His voice was clear, not like a radio when the channel comes in strong, but as clear and full and real as her own. His ear-pins, standing straight up, did not tremor. They stared at each other, him and her, for an endless blink of time; she shivered, but he never did.

In the doorway of the security room, Foxy pushed past Freddy and came one step into the break room before stopping short. Freddy hadn't moved, didn't speak. Chica was somewhere behind them; Ana could hear the tapping of her fingertips. The three of them together were only as quiet as animatronics could be; static and clicks and low electronic humming filled their silence. They held themselves still except when they couldn't; ears twitched, hands shook, and joints rattled as glitching tremors washed over them.

Bonnie was silent. Bonnie was still.

"Are you okay?" Ana asked warily. "Bonnie? You're kind of freaking me out, my man. Say something."

"Ask me…" His eyelids narrowed, turning his shock-round eyes to suspicious slits. "Ask me to sing a song."

"What?"

He seized her arms in a powerful, nearly painful grip and leaned forward, pushing her out into empty space, metal teeth looming close and plastic eyes burning bright. "Tell me the show's about to start! Ask me to sing a song! No, wait! Make me! Make me sing a song! Say it! You know the words! Say it!"

"Uh…come on, gang? It's time to get this show started?"

Behind them, Freddy and Chica both spasmed and clicked hard. Foxy looked at them, then at Bonnie. His ears turned and tilted; the left one sagged on its spring, rattling softly as it tremored.

"HEY KIDS!" Chica stuttered, swinging herself around like a puppet on broken strings, bashing into Freddy and the wall as she dragged herself from the room. "LOOKS LIKE FREDDY'S ON HIS WAY TO THE STAGE AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!"

"I THINK IT'S TIME TO SING A SONG!" said Freddy, growling under each word and pounding out the Toreador March as he followed Chica from the room.

"YAY!" said Chica, clapping her hands.

And Bonnie said, "No."

Freddy and Chica receded, their voices growing smaller and scratchier with distance: "UH OH! I THINK BREWSTER LOOKS A LITTLE HOMESICK. LET'S HELP OUR NEW FRIEND CHEER UP WITH HIS FAVORITE SONG! OH, BREWSTER ROOSTER HAD A FARM! COME ON, EVERYBODY SING ALONG! E-I-E-I—"

"No!" yelled Bonnie, shaking her in his hands. "No! No no no no, no! No, I will not sing along! I will never sing another fucking song about fucking pizza ever the fuck again!"

He lost his grip; she was quite sure she did not struggle. But one second, he had her and in the next, she hit the floor on her butt and sprawled. It was an accident, she knew. Bonnie would never…never hurt her.

"You're alive," said Ana numbly and looked at Foxy.

His ears dipped lower. "Ana," he said, reaching his hook toward her. "Luv, I know what-t-t yer thinking—"

"No." She scrambled back until her boots magically found traction and she fell up onto her feet, still shaking her head. "No, you don't have the first fucking clue, Captain, not even. You do not know what I'm thinking and you don't want to know."

"Ana." Bonnie touched her arm and backed up when she yanked away from him. His plastic eyes—plastic!—always so expressive, registered only confusion and hurt. "Ana, what's wrong?"

"What's wrong? What's wrong?!" She laughed, too loud and too shrill. "I can't…do this. I can't…"

She turned blindly, stumbled out through the other door and into the storeroom. She put a hand on the loading dock door, but couldn't make herself pull the lock. She could hear Chica singing even from here and although she didn't want to see, when she moved again, that was where her feet took her—through the kitchen and into the dining room to stare up at the stage where Chica stood alone on a stage for three and led an empty room in Brewster Rooster Had A Farm.

At first glance, she looked like an animatronic, nothing less and certainly nothing more. Just a kid-friendly robot, now old and breaking down, but Ana, who had seen this routine dozens of times by now, could see a franticness in the glitches that stuttered through her, a desperation in the static that obscured her simple song.

But she was alone up there.

Ana looked around and as soon as she moved, Freddy's eyes switched on in the shadows at the back of the room, next to the table where she used to sleep.

They looked at each other.

'He sees me,' thought Ana. 'He knows who I am.' Then she thought, 'He's always known.'

"Are you alive?" she asked.

Freddy clicked to himself a few times, then stepped forward, stopping when Ana backed up. He took David's hat off, then his ears, groping clumsily around their bases for the catch he couldn't feel. Their naked frames jutted like bones, twitching as his ears would have twitched, as he put their fuzzy cases down. He lifted off his muzzle; the scaffold beneath gleamed dully in his eyelight. He took his head off and looked at her.

"THIS. IS. WHAT. I. AM," said the moving parts sticking out of Freddy's bear-shaped body. The cameras whirred, plastic eyes floating in front of a metal skull, keeping her in focus.

"What…I don't…" She shook her head again, trying and failing to shake out of this whole situation and find everything just the way it was before Mason and that whole mess ever happened. She wanted to believe it was still happening, that this was just a coma-dream as she lay with her skull cracked in Pirate Cove, but as attractive as the idea was, she couldn't make herself believe it. "Who are you?" she whispered, unsure if she wanted to know.

"I'M FREDDY FAZBEAR."

"What…What does that mean?"

A familiar weary grunt came from the speaker in the bear's throat. The floating eyes turned toward the empty head on the table. "I. ASKED. YOU. THAT. MYSELF. ONCE." He looked back at her. "YOU. HAD. AN. ANSWER. FOR. ME. THEN. AND. THE. ANSWER. HASN'T. CHANGED. I'M FREDDY FAZBEAR."

She heard the words, but all she grasped of their meaning was that it made more sense than anything any computer program could have come up with on its own. He was talking to her, as he had always talked to her. Nothing had changed. They weren't doing anything different, she just hadn't seen it. How the hell had she not seen this?

Footsteps in the kitchen.

Bonnie came to the doorway. He had put his head back on, but not his muzzle or his ears; it wobbled when he moved toward her, unsecured. She took an instinctive step to meet him, stopped, and backed up.

Bonnie's ear-pins drooped. "Don't," he said. "Please don't go. Please, there's so much I want to say to you, now that I finally can. Ana, I—"

"You're alive."

Bonnie backed up again and looked at Freddy, who put his head back on, then back at Foxy, now coming up behind him.

"It's a lot-t-t to take in, mate," Foxy said quietly. "Give her a minute."

A minute? Was that all it was supposed to take? One minute?

She wanted to laugh, but all she could do was say, "You're really alive," for…how many times was it now?

"Yeah," said Bonnie. "Well…sort of. I guess it depends on your definition of 'life'."

She stared, feeling time like onion skins peeling back, layer by layer, forcing her to relive everything she'd said to him…everything she'd done…

"…AND ON THAT FARM, HE HAD A CHICKEN. E-I-E-I-O! WITH A CLUCK-CLUCK HERE, AND A CLUCK-CLUCK THERE!"

"You pervert!" she shouted.

Bonnie blinked, his hands drawing up slightly and his ear-pins folding back. "What?"

"Don't you 'what' me, what the hell is wrong with you? How could you—How could you—"

"I…I thought…" He took half a step back, hesitated, then brought his ear-pins all the way up and advanced on her. "How could I what?" he demanded, glaring. "Go on. What the hell did I ever do?"

"What did you do?! How many times have you seen me naked? Let's start with that!"

He folded his arms, countering, "How many times have you got naked in front of me? How the hell is that my fault?"

"You practically motorboated me that night I put your face on!"

"Hey, you put my face in your boobs," he reminded her defensively. "All I did about it was nothing."

"You grabbed my ass, like, ten minutes ago!"

"Okay, maybe I did, but none of the sensor plates in my hands work, so I didn't know I was doing it. Besides…" His voice faltered, but then his ear-pins went down at an aggressive angle and he said, "You've done your share of the groping."

"That…That…That was different!"

"Different is a word, all right," he said flatly. "You want to tell me how you can make out with what you think is an inanimate object, but I'm the pervert?"

"I showered with you," said Ana, and before he could even point out that had been her idea, she clapped both hands over her mouth and whispered, "Oh my God, I showered with all of you!" through her fingers.

"BELIEVE. ME. THAT. WASN'T. FUN. FOR. ANY. OF. US," said Freddy.

"Speak for yerself, mate."

Ana heard them, the same as she heard Chica, still chirping away happily down on Brewster's Farm, but they were not fully present. For her, there was only Bonnie. "When did this happen?" she demanded. "Was it…Was a recent thing? Like, your program just…mutated because it wasn't being maintained or…How long have you been alive?"

"Hell if I know," he said with a note of convincing uncertainty in his annoyed voice. He looked at Freddy again, as if for help, but it was Foxy who answered.

"We were b-b-built in '66, lass. However long that's b-b-been, that's how long we been alive."

"How…" She rounded on Freddy, pointing a shaking finger into his face, in easy biting range. "You told me you were new when this place opened!"

His expression shifted, pained. "I. TOLD. YOU. AS. MUCH. OF. THE. TRUTH. AS. I. COULD."

"Horseshit! And you!" Ana turned on Foxy next; he did not flinch. "You told me—"

"I lied," he said calmly. "Say hey for the life of a pirate."

Ana's arm dropped.

"Yeah, well…" Bonnie took a small step toward her, reaching up to steady his unsecured head. "I didn't. I never lied to you, Ana. Everything I ever said…I meant it. And…And I need to know that you—"

"That was you on my poster," Ana interrupted, staring at him. It was the only thing she could really think in that moment. She had loved that poster until there was literally nothing left of it to love. Now she was twenty years older and he was just the same. "You were right there at Circle Drive the whole time." And then she turned and looked at Freddy, seeing him as he had been that day, all those years ago, waving at her through the smudged glass windows as she ran for the door. "That was you."

"YES," said Freddy.

"And you're alive. You've always been alive."

"YES."

"What about the others here?"

"WHAT. OTHERS," asked Freddy, watching her closely.

"Tux and Swampy and…and Brewster? I mean, my God, man," she said, turning on Bonnie again. "I ripped his eyes out! You didn't even try to stop me!"

"Why would I stop you? Those are just animatronics."

"You're just animatronics!" She tried to shout it, but her voice was locking up on her. It cracked on the last word and wouldn't come back right away. She had to stand there, breathing too hard and too fast, almost a full minute before she could try again. "You're…just…What are you?"

"It's complicated," said Bonnie, looking as chagrined as his inflexible features could allow. He glanced at Freddy, then pushed a hand over the bald top of his head where once he'd had a shock of fuzz that was nearly hair. It was a gesture of perfectly identifiable helplessness and frustration, a gesture she'd seen him make before, one that was at once natural and foreign and utterly human. "Ana…can we…talk?"

Talk? She could barely breathe.

Bonnie took a step toward her.

She backed a step away.

His ears lowered. "Oh, don't do that, baby girl," he said softly. "Please, don't run away from me. You know I'd never want to hurt you. You know that."

Never want to was a very different thing from never would. When he came toward her again, again, she backed away.

They looked at each other as Chica came to the end of the song and then just stood, tapping her fingertips together.

Her hand began to hurt. She looked at it in some confusion and saw the keys, squeezed too tight in her fist.

"Ana." Bonnie took another step, reaching out for her arm.

She bolted for the door, but skidded to a stop halfway there and stood, shivering on her feet and looking down at those keys. Then she pivoted, as jerky and clumsy as an animatronic herself—a real one, not whatever these were—and threw them at Freddy's feet.

She ran. She left her tools. She left her pack. She left Bonnie.

She ran.

End of Part III: Children of Mammon

Everything Is All Right continues in Part IV: New Faces, Old Bones