CHAPTER ELEVEN

As the sun began its final descent on the first day of July, Ana sat on the loading dock of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, enjoying the feel of the breeze if not the smell of it, and suffering the oppressive heat even as she basked in the inner warmth of a day's work done well. There were a few hours of daylight left and she supposed she had work enough to fill them, but she was comfortable with the progress she'd made. Yes, she'd have to make up tomorrow everything she'd put off today, but life was about learning to compromise and sometimes a girl needed a cold beer and some dank weed more than she needed to check off all her little boxes. Her only regret was that she hadn't thought to go get dinner first, but there was nothing she could do about it now. Once the cap came off and the lighter came out, the keys went away. Ana Stark had done a lot of stupid things in her life and had no doubt she'd go on to do a lot more, but she always flew responsibly.

So she was done for the day, but as ready as she was to relax, she found it difficult to switch off her brain. Again and again, it took her through a speed-build of the roof, looping through the stages, playing out alternate paths should various obstacles arise, bringing her triumphantly to the conclusion only to queue itself up again. She had a feeling the problem would resolve itself by the end of this joint, but in the meantime, it was damned annoying. She just wanted to relax and yet, here she was again, skipping through tomorrow to wake up predawn on the 3rd, climbing up to the roof and laying down the deck, building outward from the storeroom-corner so she never had her back to the road. Get the underlayment down, even if it meant working through the night, and up again at five on the 4th, tar and overlay in sections, should be done well before midnight. A good night's sleep and up at five on Sunday to finish off with the top-coat and all the booting around the HVAC system.

The real HVAC system, she amended, glancing back and up through the exposed beams at what she could see of the mystery ductwork that had been hidden in the old roof.

It still bothered her. What were they? They weren't anything to do with the air conditioning system; the effort of believing that, even half-heartedly, was too exhausting to keep up. But they weren't anything like the ducts she and Mike had crawled through at the Toybox, either. They were big enough, sure, but at the Toybox, the ducts had been on the ground and had openings in all the rooms where…someone…might want to spy on their prey. Here, the ducts were on the ceiling and the vents, what few there were, were set inaccessibly high, in places that Ana could not imagine gave anyone a good view of the guests below. If it wasn't for a practical purpose and wasn't part of Mike Schmidt's killer-animatronic nonsense, what was it for?

Easy enough to see for herself.

"Oh come on," Ana murmured, even as her heart leapt with excitement. "You can't really be thinking about climbing in there."

Why not? She'd been climbing on them all morning. Real life was not Die Hard and real air ducts could not hold the weight of a human being, but those were not real air ducts. If she ever wanted to know just what they really were, she had to get inside them. And besides…

Here, Ana's eyes closed so that she could better 'see' the ductwork behind her, and the way it branched outward from the middle of the building, from a great round hub set directly atop the vault that was the parts room. As if it were connected to it.

…besides, even if there was nothing in them, it might be worth exploring it just to get backstage. In all of Mike Schmidt's stories, the secret basement that was never on the building plans was always accessed through the parts room. The idea that she would find a secret stair (in her mind, it looked a lot like the one behind the grandfather clock in her aunt's house) down to Erik Metzger's evil underground lair remained ludicrous, but the shadow of her doubt remained. It wasn't enough to just look at the space the parts room occupied and know intellectually there wasn't room for stairs, she had to see it. She had to be there, to be able to search and say, finally and forever, nope. No dumbwaiter, no elevator, no maintenance shaft, no ladder. Nothing but a parts room and a little black binder with absolutely no connection between them.

Ana smoked, deliberately not thinking about it, not making plans. And when she reached the end of her joint, she put it out, got up, went inside and somehow ended up in the quiet room with her toolbox. She kept a couple glowsticks in her miscellaneous drawer. She took them now. Not a flashlight. She wanted both hands free.

"This is stupid," she told herself as she tucked the glowsticks in her pocket. "There's nothing up there." She found her kneepads and strapped them on to help with the crawling. "Except rats and spiders. It's going to be fucking choked with rats and spiders." She knew. "And Freddy will catch you and flip his ever-loving shit." She knew that, too, but Freddy couldn't be everywhere.

That thought wasn't even all the way out of her head before Ana opened the quiet room door and hit Freddy right in the face. She knew it was Freddy in part because he was the one animatronic she hadn't wanted to bump into, but also because when the door hit him, she heard a honking sound. Bonnie's nose was just a smooshed-down hackeysack ball these days, Chica's beak was MIA, Foxy couldn't leave Pirate Cove until after closing time, so the only nose that could be honked anymore was Freddy's. If she needed more proof, she got it when his paw hit the door from the other side; the door had one of those spring-arms on it and couldn't be slammed, but if it could, it would have knocked her back into the quiet room on her ass. Even as it was, she had to jump a little to get out of its way when Freddy shoved it shut.

"WATCH. IT," he growled, glaring at her over his hand as he adjusted his muzzle.

"Watch yourself, bear," Ana replied, because one beer and one joint wasn't much until you had them both at the same time on an empty stomach. "This is a big hall with a lot of damn doors. Walk on the other side if you don't want to get hit."

Any other day, he would have been as eager to chat with her as to set himself on fire, but today, for whatever reason, he looked her over, his gaze lingering on her knee pads, and said, "WHAT ARE YOU UP TO?"

"Nothing," she said, so casually. "Just working."

He grunted. The sound was not suspicious, but he still didn't move on. "I. THOUGHT. YOU. WERE. DONE."

"What made you think that?"

His head cocked. "YOU. DID. AN. HOUR. AGO. WHEN. YOU. SAID. YOU. WERE. DONE."

Ana thought about it, and sure enough, she had. In fact, her exact words as she'd limped into the dining room to throw her sweaty shirt at Swampy had been, "Fuck this day, I'm done!" but of course, Freddy Fazbear wasn't going to quote that back at her, verbatim.

"I thought of some other stuff that can't wait," she said. "Just real quick stuff. In and out."

He grunted, nodded, took one step, and then stopped to look back at her. "IN. AND. OUT. OF. WHAT."

Oh for Christ's sake, had she really said that? "It's a figure of speech, bear," she said testily. "Don't take everything so literally."

He grunted again, this time with a hint of disapproval, but at least he started walking.

Just started. After a few steps, he stopped and looked back. "HAVE. YOU. EATEN."

"Fuck off, Freddy," came out of her before she could bite it back. This was maybe a good thing; at least it convinced him all was normal. He grunted once more—his annoyed Freddy-grunt—and moved on.

Finally.

Ana made her way to the security office as fast as she could safely go. It took Freddy about thirty minutes to make a complete circuit of the building, assuming he didn't stop to talk to anyone. Plenty of time. She unwrapped a glowstick, gave it a snap and a shake, and hooked the plastic clippy bit through the neck of her t-shirt. It was green, casting an eerie alien glow over her familiar surroundings. In this light, she took her bearings.

The vent was directly over the security window, which was itself directly over the desk. An old desk, but a sturdy one. It took her weight when she cautiously climbed it, but left her wholly exposed to anyone who might pass by in the back hall, so she didn't linger.

She took her screwdriver out, but a closer inspection of the vent hatch showed her she didn't need it. The hatch was hinged and after a token protest, opened to her freely. Everything was black, but her questing hands felt a thick, rubbery pad on the bottom of the duct that was different from the smooth, sun-warmed metal on the other surfaces. There was no breeze, which at the time she was stupid enough to think of as a relief; the hatch already looked like a mouth and she wasn't sure she could make herself go in it if it was breathing at her. But the air was still and dense within the duct, unmoving. It gave up no sounds, although she strained her ears until she imagined she could hear the ocean—her own blood washing over her eardrums—no sign of even the smallest life, unless it was the unmistakable smell of death.

Rats, she decided. Maybe some birds and raccoons, if she had missed an exterior vent hidden in the eaves. Critters crawled into places like this all the time and died. Nothing sinister about it, just bad judgment by a dumb animal.

And so thinking, Ana pulled herself up and crawled inside.


With the imaginary kiddies sent off for the next twenty minutes, Foxy made himself cozy in the bow of his ship, humming as he watched the curtain billow in the wind. His stage had an overhang that prevented him from seeing the sky, but enough light came in through the holes in the curtains to let him see without lighting up his eyes, which he couldn't do during operating hours unless he was performing. Ana would have the roof on in just a few days and then he would be blind all day again, so Foxy meant to enjoy the hell out of his limited vision.

He pulled a doubloon out of his pocket. Brilliant things, pockets. He proceeded to walk it across his knuckles, appreciating little things like sunlight and pockets, killing time before the last set of the day started. The last full set, anyway. Technically, there would be a nine o'clock set, but he wouldn't even have time to go through his entire greeting before he'd be sending them off. In another week or two, the sun would be down before nine again. By the end of summer, it would be down before eight. Foxy did not keep a calendar here—Freddy didn't like him marking up the walls—so his only real sense of time these days came from how many performances he was forced to play out and how long his nights were.

He wondered if Ana would still be here when it got to be winter, and his nights were twelve hours long.

The East Hall door opened. Foxy heard grumbling, the wheeze and thump of Freddy's heavy footsteps. Patrolling before the next set started. All was well with the world.

"FOXY."

"Aye?" He flipped the doubloon, walked it, flipped it again. Amazing how easy it was, even without skin on his fingers, as long as he had light.

"HAVE. YOU. SEEN. AN-N-A."

"Aye, sure."

"WHEN?"

"Don't know." Foxy flipped the doubloon and caught it, thinking. "Noonish, I reckon. Maybe-be-be one. Suppose I see-ee-eeeeeeee—blasted box," he muttered, slapping his speaker. "I seen her a t-t-time or two since, running along the rafter-r-r—ARR!"

"BUT. YOU. HAVEN'T. SEEN. HER. IN. THE. LAST. HOUR."

Foxy knew he hadn't, but he thought about it anyway. "Ain't-t-t seen hide nor hair in at least-t-t two," he admitted, pocketing his doubloon and jumping down to the stage below. He moved the curtain aside and frowned out across the empty auditorium, golden in the sunset, to Freddy. "But there ain't-t-t nothing odd about that, mate. If'n I sees her at-t-t all, it ain't until she's fetching herself ready-dy-dy for bed. Is her t-tr-truck here?"

"YES. BUT. SHE'S. NOT."

"Well, that's proves it, don't it? She probably-ly-ly made herself a dinner and took a walk. Ye d-d-don't think so?" he asked dryly, since Freddy had answered that with an eye-roll and a scornful snort. "Let me g-g-guess. Ye been p-p-pestering her about eating and she t-t-told ye to back off."

"I," said Freddy, firmly and with dignity, "DO. NOT. P-P-PESTER-R-R."

"No, mate, never."

"AND. SHE. DIDN'T. SAY. BACK. BEFORE. SHE. SAID. OFF."

Foxy barked out a laugh. "No, I'll bet-t-t she didn't. Look, Fred, she's around-d-d. Sure, she might-t-t be hiding from ye, but if she is, ye might want t-t-to ask yerself why."

Freddy grunted sourly and turned around, muttering, "BECAUSE. SHE'S. SOME. WHERE. SHE. SHOULDN'T. BE."

"There are other reasons, mate," Foxy called, letting the curtain fall between them again. He caught the rail, swung himself up and onto the deck of his ship, and settled himself once again in the bow. He took his doubloon out, scratching his thumb over the face stamped into its plastic side, listening until he heard the door close and was sure Freddy was good and gone. Then he said, only half-playing, "Ye out-t-t there, luv?"

He listened, but heard only the wind, splitting around the new beams and exposed crawlway. For a moment, he almost thought he heard something else, something reminiscent of Mangle on her restless nights, but when he turned his ears in that direction and filtered out all other sound to the best of his limited abilities, the sound—if there even was a sound—was not repeated.

Freddy's paranoia was contagious, he decided. And he might be feeling a bit off-color about not visiting Mangle…Foxanne in a while. He'd sneak out tonight, if he could. Soon as Ana came out of hiding and Freddy calmed down. Until then…

Foxy leaned his elbows on the rails and flipped his plastic coin. He caught it, walked it across his knuckles and flipped it again.


Even after Ana was forced to acknowledge that she was lost, she wasn't immediately worried. After all, she had seen the ductwork from the outside. She might not have marked its various twists and crossways as well as she thought she had, but she knew what she was getting into. In hindsight, she probably should have waited until she was stone-sober. One beer and one joint wasn't much, but if it had been enough to keep her out of her truck, it should have been enough to keep her from pulling a boneheaded stunt like this. In the dark maze, she had nothing but her memory and her senses of distance and direction; all were impaired.

But still, she didn't realize she was in trouble. Stupid, sure, but not in trouble. She knew she'd find her way out eventually, she just had to keep moving. And when she came to an unexpected dead-end, she just had to remember that it had been two left turns at the last two 4-ways, go straight at the T-section after that, then a right…no, wait, she'd gone up one of the shafts at some point, but which one? Okay, so it was one left, then down, then a left…that didn't sound right, either.

She'd used her screwdriver to mark her way in the beginning, but whatever metal the ducts were made out of, her screwdriver was not up to the task of scratching it. She managed, but it was hard on her wrist and shoulder, and harder yet on the screwdriver; it snapped at the hilt on her seventh or tenth attempt. Without the hilt to give her a better grip and better leverage, the simple scratches she was able to create blended into all the others.

Because there were others. Deep ones, far deeper than Ana had been able to make with her screwdriver. They had to be tool marks made during manufacture or installment. Had to be, because as much as some of them might look like claw-marks and even though she had happened across dozens of little furry corpses (none fresh, but all obviously chewed on), the only animal big enough and strong enough to have left marks in this metal would have been a mountain lion. Maybe a bear.

Or a fox, thought Ana, thinking of Foxy's hook, his exposed metal fingers and clawed feet. But even that didn't wash completely. The scratches weren't just in the padding on the bottom of the duct, where Ana's own hands and feet bumped along as she crawled. They were everywhere, on every side, even the top of the duct. She could not imagine how even Foxy could have left them. So yeah, tool marks. That was the only rational conclusion and Ana was a rational person. She did dumb things now and then, but she did not own an Egg Minder and did not believe in ghosts.

She crawled on.

Time is a funny thing in the dark. It stretches out, snaps back. She would crawl for hours only to check her watch and see scarcely fifteen minutes had passed, or stop to catch her increasingly labored breath for just a few minutes and somehow lose half an hour. She had no idea where she was in relation to the building's rooms below her. Even right after she'd entered the maze, when she knew some of the animatronics were still performing, she hadn't been able to hear them. And now the restaurant was surely closed and they had no incentive to make noise. Here on the inside of the thickly padded duct, she could hear nothing but her own body bumping along, and that not very well. On the outside, she doubted anyone would be able to hear her at all. Maybe if the roof was on, but not with the wind blowing, howling like a chorus of church-going wolves as it split around the new beams and these very ducts. And even if she were to lie down and pound her boots, screaming for all her miserable life was worth, who would hear it?

Slowly, it dawned on her that there was a very real possibility she was going to die up here. She was lost, but that was actually the least of her problems at the moment. It wasn't like she was going to live long enough to die of hunger or thirst. Well…dehydration may play a role. The itch of sweat trickling down her skin and the sting of it in her eyes and open cuts was a constant irritant; even in the little time she'd been kneeling here, it had poured itself down her arms and legs into an honest-to-God puddle. That was not the kind of moisture anyone could just lose, but even that wasn't the big problem. The sun might have set by now, but it had been beating down on the maze all day, turning all the loops and coils of this exposed duct into one long oven that would not cool for hours yet, and she was somewhere in the middle of it, but she honestly didn't think she'd live even long enough to be cooked to death. No, there really was a big problem here and the irony was, she'd always known what it was, namely, that this 'air duct' wasn't part of the ventilation system.

The air wasn't moving. There were no fans, no pumps, no filters, no mechanical means of any kind to push the bad air out and pull good air in, and certainly her little human lungs couldn't do it, so sooner or later, she was going to suffocate.

And then she was just going to have to lie here, withering up in the dark like one of these dead rats and birds, because no one knew she was here and no one would ever think to look for her in the ductwork at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. She'd just be one more missing person in Mammon, not that there were too damn many people who'd miss her. Eventually, someone would find her truck in the parking lot and the cops would investigate to find she'd been living in an abandoned pizzeria just a few miles down the road from the fucking mansion she'd inherited—one more mystery for a town already choked with them. She'd probably go into Mike Schmidt's next black binder and he'd show her picture to the next fool who went asking about Freddy Fazbear as proof that the animatronics were eating people, and meanwhile, there would be Bonnie, waiting forever for her to come back…

Ana started crawling again, holding her stupid stump of a screwdriver in her fist. She did not panic. Her mind was the maze—splitting off into a thousand knotted paths, unlit and unmoving, with her forever at the center no matter where she went. She did not think and soon, even with her eyes open and staring, she stopped seeing as well, because when she came to the dropshaft at the center of yet another intersection, identical in every other way to every other four-way intersection she had already passed, she put her hand down it. It wasn't very wide, no more than ten inches across, but that was wide enough to feel as if it contained the entire open universe to her flailing, unanchored arm as she toppled forward. It did not, of course. It contained a colony of common house spiders and their communal web, ten years in the weaving, which swallowed Ana's arm right up to her shoulder. Her butt went up, her head went down. She clopped her chin a damned good one on the bottom of the duct, kicking up several dead spiders and one rather startled live one which she inhaled on her next breath and subsequently had to spit out.

Letting out a choking hiss that should have been a scream, Ana dropped the broken screwdriver down the shaft and yanked her arm out. She heard it fall, tapping off the side of the shaft at least three times, but never heard it hit the ground, focused as she was on slapping away the tickle of spider-legs both real and imaginary.

She didn't get them all. Her strength gave out instead. She fought the collapse, but it happened anyway. She hit her elbows, her chest, her chin again, and there she lay, slowly rolling onto her side as spiders fled the scene of what had been, for them, a horrific and unprovoked spree killing. It was all a matter of perspective.

After a while, Ana decided she felt better. Sometimes a good dose of adrenaline was just what it took to clear the mind. She knew she wasn't in the sort of trouble that a girl could really think her way out of, but even if all she'd managed to do was die with her head on straight, that was still something.

Ana's glowstick had come free of her shirt, but it hadn't rolled far. She collected it and sat up, forcing it against her chest with shaking fingers in mounting frustration until she realized she had broken the clip-part on the back. Okay, so what now? She took another one out, spent altogether too long working it out of its wrapper, gave it a snap and a shake and clipped it on. There. Back on track.

She looked at the shaft, now behind her. Had she gone over it or turned herself around? Or was this one of the intersecting passages? She aimed her clipless glowstick around the bottom of the duct in an effort to backtrack by her own sweaty handprints, but the air within the duct was so hot and dry, the slicks had already evaporated everywhere except right where she was sitting.

She needed to pick a passage and keep moving. The maze was not infinite. As long as she kept moving, she would get out. If she stopped, she'd suffocate, cook, shrivel up and die, not necessarily in that order.

Ana rolled onto her hands and knees again, testing their waning stability. Not good. She crawled back to the shaft and peered down, thinking that had to be a clue to where exactly she was in the building, because she'd seen the maze from the outside and there were only so many vertical shafts this narrow. All she saw was webbing and it was impossible to tell how deep it went. Deeper than her arm was long, anyway.

Ana glanced at her glowstick. "Got one more job for you, old soldier," she told it, and let it fall.

She watched it drop away into the dark, tearing through webs and catching the light of alarm in countless tiny arachnid eyes as it ripped away their homes and scattered their families, smack in the middle of the dinner hour. And then she kept on watching, because it kept right on falling, until suddenly the round walls of the shaft opened up and still it fell and fell, not in any air duct, but in a room, a dark room, darker than any room in Freddy's could be right now, except for the parts room or the manager's office or…

The basement.

The glowstick hit a plain, poured concrete floor in the very next instant, like a period at the end of her thought. It bounced, leaping as her heart leapt, and then rolled out of sight. She could see the green smudge of its light hovering on nothing, but the stick itself was gone.

Ana waited, not breathing, her pulse pounding in her ears, listening. For the slow rotted drag of a springtrap suit or the tap-tap-tap of the Puppet's stilt-like legs, she didn't know, but she didn't even try to tell herself she wasn't listening for footsteps. Any second now, she'd hear it. And then she'd see it. And then it would start crawling up the shaft to get her.

So she waited, but seconds became minutes, and the air got used up and stale, and nothing happened. How long did she want to wait?

Ana sat back as much as possible, confused, and so of course, as soon as she did, she thought she heard something. She leaned forward again, and before she knew it, she'd done the most amazingly stupid thing she'd ever done in a lifetime of straining for the Stupid Prize.

"Hello?" she called, immediately followed by, "Oh, you did not do that, you big dumb dead bitch." Too late, she shut up and listened, but if she had heard a rustling sort of thump under her words (surely, that was her imagination), it was not repeated. Was that better or worse? A rustle could be any number of totally normal sounds to be found in any totally normal basement (what basement? There was no basement!), but a rustle followed by a silence had only one explanation that Ana could think of and that was as a coldly deliberate and calculating intelligence that was listening back up at her.

So Ana did it again, on purpose this time, cupping her hands around her mouth and yelling with what was left of her lung power: "Hey!"

She did not send rats or snakes or deep crows startling. There was no sound at all. The faint light of her off-screen glowstick remained unwavering and immobile.

All right, so…she was back to her original and still-pressing problem: She had to get out of this maze or she'd die. The shaft was not a help to her. She couldn't fit through it and didn't want to slide down a pipe full of spiders into a basement whose access point was just as unknown to her as the exit to this maze. She had to keep moving.

Ana looked helplessly around at the identical passages of this intersection, picked one, and started crawling. Straight. Left. Left. Up. Straight. Down. Right. And there the passage terminated, but it had one more surprise for her.

She had been finding bodies all throughout the maze, most of them little more than thatches of fur or feathers and bone scattered over a crust of dried gore, so stumbling onto the rat's nest now was hardly shocking. No, it was the size of the thing that gave her pause. There were too many dead rats here to count, too many to even see. They had lived and bred and died here for years, their bodies overlaying one another until they formed a single ratcake, baked flat and filling the end of the duct at least ten feet in. Sprinkled in among them were other corpses, dried bellies torn open and stuffed with leaves and wires and other rattish nesting material. Squirrels, birds, the distinctive striped plume of a raccoon's tail—all brought home to feed a colony that had, at one time, surely numbered in the thousands.

The combination of aged rat death-piss-musk in this windless, airless, exitless corner was overwhelming, not merely a smell or even a taste, but also a color, weight and sound.

Ana started to back up to the corner, where it was wide enough to turn herself around, but the glowstick clipped to her shirt came loose and naturally, this part of the maze was on a slant and where did the damn thing roll but right down into the fuzzy middle of the ratcake.

And there, almost invisible in the shadows until the glowstick rolled up and bumped to a stop against it, was a shape. Long, low, pale, organic—like nothing she could put a name to, except that of course she could, and that name was, 'dead body'.

It couldn't possibly be a dead body, though. Rats would have eaten it a long time ago.

So the rats had been dead by the time the body was left. Or did she think someone had wrapped themselves up in that blanket and curled up to sleep on a bed of dead rats by choice?

It was not a body. It was much too small.

Dead child, then.

Smaller than that.

Dead toddler.

Too streamlined. No arms or legs that she could see. If anything, she was looking at an old blanket or sweater, wrapped around something else, maybe a number of somethings. The overall shape of the thing was lumpy and wrinkled, distended in the middle and pulled thin at the ends. Pulled, yes, that was the word. Something wrapped for safekeeping, dragged and ultimately dropped.

A dead something, that part of her insisted, because it knew even if she didn't want to admit it. Dead has a way of lying there that is different from all that is merely inanimate. Whatever she was looking at now, it was dead.

Ana crawled closer, blinking sweat from her eyes like tears, but it didn't move. How could it? It was dead. Or had never been alive. Or both.

When she finally reached the corner where it lay, she was more certain than ever that she was about to peel back this rotted winding cloth and find bones, so it shouldn't have surprised her at all that she did. But when her fingers punched through that brittle fabric, more like paper than cloth after all these years and chaotic weathering, and spilled out all those tiny bones, Ana let out a raspy, "Haaaa!" that was the closest she had come to a scream since her mother beat the last one out of her at the age of seven or eight.

She thought they were finger-bones, which made this an arm, which made it—here, she would later realize heat had fully cooked her reasoning skills—the arm Blue had torn off back at the Toybox. He had not eaten it after all, but pushed it down into his rubbery stomach as a trophy and brought it up here for safekeeping. This was the arm, torn off—how did Mike put it? Like a drumstick off a Thanksgiving turkey, because some little kid had committed the unforgiveable sin of poking an animatronic's nose and laughing at the happy honking sound it made.

Ana's vision wavered. She wiped frantically at her eyes, but it wasn't sweat obscuring her sight this time.

"Oh fuck, not here," she said and fainted.


Freddy came back at the start of the nine o'clock set. From behind the curtain, Foxy could hear him growling and pacing along the rails of the amphitheater for the three minutes it took to first welcome his little mateys to Pirate Cove and then to wish them fair seas and send them home. His curiosity as to why Freddy was not himself on his own stage shutting down the dining room was answered the very instant the last word was out of him, when Freddy said, "FOXY. WAKE UP."

"I'm up-p-p," Foxy said, shaking his head like that could clear it of the exceptions that came from having his closing program subverted. It wasn't so bad, nothing like interrupting his actual routine would have been, which was why Freddy had waited three minutes. On the other hand, there was always a risk of going black and Freddy took that seriously. Something was wrong. "We got c-c-company?" he called, already opening his cabin door and reaching for his sword belt.

"NO."

"No?" Foxy looked at the sword dangling from his fist and reluctantly hung it up again. "What d-d-do ye mean, no? What's wrong, then?"

"HELP. ME. FIND. AN-N-A."

Ana? Still missing?

Foxy buckled his sword on. He jumped down from his ship and then his stage, taking the amphitheater steps two and three at a time as Freddy, still pacing, watched him come. "Her truck-k-k still here?"

"YES."

"Anyone else c-c-come by?"

"NO. NOT. IN. A. CAR."

"Anyone at-t-t the quarry?"

Freddy spread his arms in a frustrated sort of shrug. "IT'S. SUMMER. AND. ALMOST. THE. FOURTH. OF. JULY. BUT. IT. DOESN'T. MATTER. THEY. HAVEN'T. COME. UP. HERE."

"Could-d-d she have gone down to them?"

"WHAT?"

"Ana," Foxy said impatiently. "C-C-Could she have g-g-gone down to see what they were about-t-t? She might just b-b-be passing a b-b—BOTTLE O' RUM—with 'em."

But Freddy rolled his eyes. "MAYBE. BUT. IT'S. NOT. DARK. ENOUGH. YET. TO. LEAVE. AND. LOOK. FOR. HER. SO. IN. THE. MEAN. TIME. JUST. HELP. ME. LOOK. FOR. HER. HERE. FIRST."

"Maybe it would-d-d speed things along if ye t-t-told me—TALES OF THE SEA!—where ye thought-t-t she was."

Freddy rolled his eyes again, but at least this time, he tried to hide it by rubbing at his brow. "I. HOPE. SHE'S. ON. THE. WOOF," he said at last. "I. HOPE. SHE. JUST. GOT. CAUGHT. IN. WORK. AND. I. CAN'T. HEAR. HER. BECAUSE. THE. WIND. GETS. IN. MY. MICS. BUT. IF. SHE'S. NOT. SHE'S. SOMEWHERE. SHE. SHOULDN'T. BE."

"If the only-ly-ly reason ye want to find-d-d her is to kill her, do it without me, mate."

"IF. SHE'S. FOUND. A. WAY. DOWN. TO. HIM. SHE'S. ALREADY. DEAD." Freddy lowered his hand and looked at Foxy without apology. "BUT. IF. HE'S. STILL. BUSY. WITH. HER. I. MIGHT. HAVE. A. CHANCE. TO. BERRY. HIM. AGAIN. BEFORE. HE. TELLS. ME. NOT. TO. AFTER. THAT. HE'S. OUT. AND. THERE. IS. NOTHING. I. CAN. DO."

Foxy looked away, nodding, feeling at his anger until he could push it aside. "Where have ye looked-d-d?"

"EVERY. WHERE."

"Well, then, ye'd have found-d-d her, eh? So stop and think-k-k. She fallen through somewhere?"

"NO. I'VE. LOOKED. EVERY. WHERE. EXCEPT—" Freddy motioned curtly toward the stage, indicating the parts room behind it. "—ROOMS. THAT. I. CAN'T. OPEN."

"But ye th-th-think she can?"

"I. THINK. I. CAN'T. FIND. HER," Freddy shot back. "IF. I'VE. LOOKED. EVERY. WHERE. I. CAN. GO. AND. I. CAN'T. FIND. HER. WHAT. DOES. THAT. LEAVE. STOP. LOOKING. AT. ME. LIKE. THAT."

"You check-k-k outside?"

Freddy recoiled slightly, blinking. "WHAT?"

"Ye say she ain't-t-t fallen through anywhere inside. She fallen off the edge o' the b-b—BILGERAT!—building?"

"I…" Freddy looked around, as if the walls had melted away and he could see the parking lot, here in the Cove.

"Or the edge o' the bluff?" Foxy pressed. "Ye know she g-g-gets a wee bit blurry when she gets working in the sun and ain't-t-t had enough to eat. Maybe she went-t-t out for a piss and walked-d-d right off the drop."

Freddy turned around.

"No, I'll g-g-go," said Foxy at once, moving past him. "If there's running that needs d-d-doing, I can do it better than ye." And if Mangle was singing to herself in her box, buried at the base of the bluff, there was no way Freddy would mistake her staticky voice for a distant radio playing out at the quarry or the shrilling of desert insects. Foxy wanted to find Ana. He would go as far as to say he was worried for her, but he still had secrets to keep.