CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

MechaTech's base of operations looked shabby enough from the outside and Bonnie was aware that no ordinary person's workshop was likely to live up to the one where he'd been made, but the room he followed Ana into was nothing to inspire confidence. It wasn't a small room, although it gave that impression. There was a closed door to the right and left of him, both considerably taller and twice as wide as the human-sized one he'd just come through, with nothing but empty space and plenty of scuff-marks on the floor to show that something was regularly moved back and forth between them. Everything else, including the coffee machine where Yoshi was presently hovering, had been shoved forward into the much smaller space beyond the doors. The walls were paneled in what was either plastic-looking wood or wood-looking plastic, Bonnie couldn't tell. The floor was poured concrete. The back wall was covered in sticky notes, invoices, receipts, and one of those giant calendars where you write in the month and dates yourself. A couple toys and some mechanical parts scattered wherever there was room to put them gave some hint of a personality, but mostly the place just felt unfinished.

"What kind of coffee do you like?" Yoshi asked, rummaging through a little basket of plastic cups. "I got double mocha, vanilla hazelnut, cinnamon bun, raspberry, and caramel macchiato."

"Doesn't matter. Mocha."

The coffee maker hissed and spat out a trickle of liquid. As the mug filled, Yoshi opened the mini-fridge. "Creamer? I got vanilla, hazelnut, Irish cream, chocolate caramel and marshmallow."

"How Irish?" Ana asked.

Yoshi blinked around at her in laughing surprise. "Are you kidding? It's not going to have real whiskey in it. It's not even real cream."

"Plain milk is fine."

"I, uh…I'm lactose-intolerant, so…fake creamer is what I've got."

Ana did a bad job of stifling a sigh. "Vanilla, then."

"Sugar? Or syrups? I got chocolate, caramel, butterscotch—"

"Dude, for real, are you a mechanic or a barista?"

"I like coffee," Yoshi said with an embarrassed sort of laugh. He handed her the steaming mug and a couple of pills, waited awkwardly while she downed them, then took the half-empty mug back and put it on the desk. "You okay?"

"It's just a headache. I'll be fine."

"Great. So…" Yoshi motioned weakly toward the door on Bonnie's right. "You ready to see the shop?"

She was and soon Bonnie had his first real look at MechaTech: a long shell of a building, lined with industrial shelves and racks, divided down the middle by workbenches to form two cluttered aisles which would have been narrow even by human standards. Ana was having enough trouble just maneuvering the handcart around, and she wasn't a seven-foot bunny with long ears to get tangled up in hanging wires.

"Sorry about the mess," Yoshi was saying, pushing gear and equipment out of the way. "It's not as bad as it looks. I know where everything is."

"No judgment here. You should see my workshop at home," Ana told him—Ana, whose workshop in the Quiet Room was immaculate. "Where do I put these guys?"

"Uh, anywhere you can, I guess. I got a couple works-in-progress on the tables, but there should be one clear for your bear. The rest of them can just stand up against the wall wherever there's room."

"Simon Says, Buster, turn to your right. Simon Says, Buster, take ten steps forward. Okay, um…I guess this is good. Carrie—I mean, Simon Says, Carrie, take one step forward." As soon as Chica had stepped off the cart, Ana pulled it out of the way, banging into two shelves, a rolling tool table and a chair in the process.

"Sorry," said Yoshi, springing forward to try and make more space behind Chica. "I swear I cleaned, I just really wasn't expecting them to be so big."

"It's my fault," Ana said tersely. "I should have sent you their specs so you could be more prepared. I was so focused on getting out, a lot of that shit just slipped my mind. We clear? All right, Simon Says, Carrie, take two steps backward. She in there? Simon Says, Carrie, take one baby step backward. Good. Okay, where's…? Simon Says, Buster, turn to your left. Simon Says, Buster, take two steps backward. One more…Simon Says one more…Simon Says, Buster, take one more step backward, Jesus. Okay, great. Buster wins."

"YAY!" Chica cheered, clapping her hands as Ana winced and rubbed her head. "GOOD GAME, BUSTER!"

Bonnie took a bow, making sure to smack his ears on the work table in front of him and hit the shelf beside him when he waved.

"Yeah, yeah, good game. Stand by before you break something."

"STANDING BY," said Chica and shut her eyes off.

"STANDING BY," said Bonnie, now wedged between two metal shelving units loaded end to end and top to bottom with half-built animatronics, each of them looking to Bonnie's admittedly jaded eye like some kid had thrown wires, motors and everything but dried macaroni and glitter into a vaguely animal-shaped framework. Even the 'fake' animatronics back at the pizzeria—the big ones like Tux or Swampy or even the little ones like the crows in Pirate Cove or the dancing mice in the South Hall—didn't look like this. It didn't exactly fill a bunny with confidence, knowing that the same guy who built those was about to work on him.

"I'll go get the others," Ana said, turning the empty cart around and tucking the restraints up around the handle. "You coming?"

"No, I think I'm going to make a little more space here."

Ana nodded, but her eyes narrowed. "Okay, so…before I step out, I'm going to say something and I need to hear you say you understand and you agree."

"I'm listening," Yoshi said with a quizzical smile.

"Good. I don't want you touching my toys unless I'm there to watch you do it. You can catalogue the spare parts, work on the new skins, or do whatever voodoo you do on the computers, but unless I am physically present, you keep your hands off my animatronics like they were made of spiders, you got that?"

"I'm sorry…what?"

"You heard me. And I'm aware it's unreasonable, but this is a hard line and I want to hear you say you'll toe it or we have no deal. You're going to have plenty of chances to do something sneaky behind my back, but believe me, I will find out about it and when I do, I will make you very sorry for a very, very short span of time. Do right by me and that will be the only time I ever threaten you," Ana went on, quietly overriding Yoshi's startled stammering. "Do me wrong…" She paused, pretending to think while holding his gaze, then affected a little shrug and finished, "Well, that'll still be the last time, but it'll end a whole lot worse. You need to ask me what that means?"

Yoshi stared, then slowly raised his hand and said, "Are you being serious right now?"

"Is that your way of telling me I need to convince you before you take me seriously?" Ana put a hand on the nearest worktable, close to, but not quite touching, a large screwdriver. "Because we can do that."

"No! I just…um…want to make sure you're not messing with me, because…you know…people mess with me a lot. And I can take a joke! If it's a joke."

"It's not. These guys are special to me," she said, looking over at Bonnie. "If I seem like a bitch right now, it's only because they are so important to me. Shit happens and most of the time, I can be very sympathetic toward the author of the unintended fuck-up, but where these guys are concerned—" She shifted her gaze from Bonnie to Yoshi, giving him the full force of her icy blue stare. "—I have no chill at all."

Yoshi took a long step back, both hands up like a man being mugged. "Hey, the customer is always right at MechaTech. If you want to be there, you're there. As long as you're aware that what you're asking is going to have an effect on our time-table, then you have my word I won't play with your toys behind your back."

"Good." Ana waited, then said, "Is there anything else you want to say to me?"

"No!" Yoshi said at once.

"It's okay if you do," she assured him. "You're not going to piss me off by setting boundaries. I like to know where I stand with a man, especially a man I don't know very well. If we're not good, you need to tell me now, while we can still negotiate."

"Nope, we're good," Yoshi said, too cheerfully.

Watching this scene play out left Bonnie with some conflicting emotions. He'd only gotten to see Ana in full badass-mode once before, when she'd gone up alone against six men, some of them armed. She'd taken them the hell down then and he supposed that must have been something to see, all right, but at the time, he'd been so afraid he was about to watch her die that he couldn't enjoy it. And he wasn't enjoying this as much as he ought to either. Yoshi was about the least-dangerous specimen of human he'd ever seen. Watching Ana go at him like this was like watching someone hit a marshmallow with a sledgehammer.

He couldn't say any of this, of course. Even if he wasn't pretending to be a mindless machine, he wasn't sure he could have found the right words to explain his unease. And he couldn't imagine how Ana could read any of his thoughts when even he couldn't fully grasp them, not to mention how she was doing it through this stupid senseless just-an-animatronic grin, but when she glanced his way, she sure saw something.

Her eyes clouded, then fell. After a moment, she glanced at Yoshi, who took another step back. She sighed.

"I'm not trying to scare you," she said. "I mean, obviously I am, but only because I want this to work and for that to happen, I can't afford misunderstandings. The rules—" She broke off, rolling her eyes, and finished in a humorless chant: "The rules are for your safety."

"Got it," said Yoshi, clueless.

"I'm going to go get the others," Ana said, wheeling the handcart around. "Make some space."

Yoshi immediately set to decluttering, but stopped as soon as Ana was gone and collapsed onto a tall work-table, burying his head in his arms. "Hi, I'm Yoshi and I'm lactose-intolerant!" he said in a high nasally sing-song, adding, "Idiot. Why don't you tell her about your toe-fungus while you're at it? That'll impress her."

He knocked on his head a few times, really drumming the stupidity in, then pushed himself up and continued moving loose parts onto shelves or into boxes, seemingly at random. "Don't screw this up, man," he warned himself. "She's a lot scarier than I remember." He nodded, agreeing with himself, then furrowed his brows like a kid looking at a particularly tricky math assignment. "Also hotter. Like, I remember she was good-looking, but up close, she is just ridiculously good-looking. I'm not usually an eye-guy, but those eyes are beyond blue. Sure, they're probably contacts, but I've never seen eyes like that, they're so…piercing. Like, she could stab a guy just with her eyes. Also with a screwdriver and I think I'm learning something about myself, because that almost makes her even hotter." He glanced at Bonnie. "What do you think, Buster? Think I've got a shot?"

Bonnie gave him some extra-loud stage laughter, complete with a knee-slap.

"Yeah, you're probably right," sighed Yoshi, picking up a loose roll of duct tape and tossing it an easy twenty feet across the room into an open box.

"NICE SHOT," Bonnie said.

"Thanks, but you know, girls like her don't go for guys like me, no matter how many downtown shots we sink. She's probably got a boyfriend anyway. Yeah. Some six-foot-forty inked-up bad boy with muscles on his muscles and, like, purple hair."

That was true. Used to be true.

Bonnie's ears twitched again.

Yoshi glanced at him with distracted curiosity, then pulled out his phone, moving over to the window to steal a peek through the dust-filmed glass as he tapped at the screen. He didn't appear to be actually making a call, though, so maybe it had nothing to do with them. Phones did lots of things these days. He could be checking his calendar or getting the weather report or reading his mail or anything at all.

When he was done with whatever it was, Yoshi started to put his phone back in his pocket, but paused and then tapped at it some more, now coming to stand next to Chica. He put his arm around her, held the phone out and said, "Smile!"

Chica cocked her head and opened her beak.

The phone flashed and made that distinctive and totally unnecessary shutter-snapping sound as Yoshi took a picture. He looked at it, but must have thought he could do better, because he adjusted his hair and took a few more at slightly different angles. As he examined the new shots, Chica's gaze dropped to look at the phone over Yoshi's shoulder, wincing a little at what she saw, but when Yoshi looked up, she was once again staring straight ahead.

Yoshi moved over and repeated his performance in front of Bonnie, and when the photo-session was done, Bonnie too stole a quick peek at the phone. He saw the last couple pictures Yoshi had taken (seeing his face—furless, cracked and still discolored from his dip in the quarry—made him almost miss the days when he didn't have one), and then the phone buzzed in Yoshi's hand. He swiped his thumb across the screen, giving Bonnie a great view of the chat-log. There was no name at the top, just a phone number, and a couple speech balloons below it.

she just got here in a yellow balloon on the right-hand side.

U talk? What she say? How she look? in a blue balloon on the left.

As Bonnie watched, Yoshi pulled up a teeny tiny keypad and pecked out letters, which the phone used as prompts for possible words for Yoshi to pick from. It would be a fascinating process to watch if not for the conversation that followed.

Looks like she's been driving all day and not in the mood for me to chat her up with a lot of questions

don't get cute w me

I'm not Just saying You said tell you when she got here, so she's here, but she's still unloading and she is one big mood right now

What mood?

"Dude, if I was good at decoding women, I'd have one," Yoshi muttered, but his fingers pecked out, Just a little stressed. She says there was some bad weather over the pass, probably the drive

The response was not a long time coming, but since all the others had popped up almost instantly, a five or six second pause seemed very noticeable. Then: Any1 else shows up U call me. Don't care what they say. Even if they just pull in turn around n leave, U CALL ME. Meantime do NOT tell her u talking to me

The sound of crunching gravel could be heard through the window. Ana and Foxy, almost at the door.

Okay, Yoshi typed, muttering, "What have you gotten yourself into now?" He put the phone down on a nearby worktable, but kept his hand on it as the door opened.

Ana came in first, pushing Freddy in the handcart, followed by Foxy, who was carrying Freddy's legs. She directed him over to stand against the wall with Bonnie, but her attention was already on Freddy. She frowned. "What's up?"

"Nothing. Sorry. Mom called," Yoshi said, holding up the phone with a broad, distinctly nervous grin. "You know how moms are."

"I know what you're going for here, man, but I guarantee, you do not want to get me started talking about my mother."

"Oh. Well, uh…hey, say cheese!"

"What?"

The phone flashed.

Ana didn't flinch, but Foxy dropped Freddy's leg and staggered back, shivering at the joints as he spat, "AHOY, ME LIT-T-T-TLE MATEYS AND WELC-C-C-OME TO PIRATE C-C-C-COVE!" He staggered again, banging into a set of shelves, then folded over at the waist and grabbed at his eyes, accidentally stabbing his hook through his open eyepatch. "IT'S ME, YER OLD-D-D-D FRIEND, C-C-CAPTAIN—Percy!" he barked at the end of it. "Bleedin' hell!"

Yoshi lowered the phone, staring. "What did he just say?"

"No flash photography!" Foxy snarled, almost pulling his patch off its tired hinge in his attempt to disentangle himself. "There's yer one warning, ye little weevil! Ye does that again and yer walking the plank right out'n this building!"

Ana put the handcart against a wall and marched over, hand out. "Give me that."

"What? No!" Yoshi pulled the phone out of her reach and backed up for good measure. "Okay, I guess I should have asked first, but come on. I'm not posting them on Facebook, for crying out loud, I need these pictures for work."

"That's too bad, because you're not getting them. Give me that fucking phone."

"Listen—"

"No, you listen. I may have bid on that storage unit like I said, but you have no proof of that, so let's pretend, just for shits and giggles, that I broke into one and stole them. Did you know that if you steal more than five hundred measly dollars' worth of shit, the great state of Utah considers that a felony offense? As is transporting stolen goods across state lines, as is receiving them, for that matter. Now you tell me: Is there a square inch on any one of them that you think is worth less than five hundred dollars?"

"Uh…"

"So for all you know, I am a felon and you are my accomplice and those pictures you just took are evidence of a fucking felony crime."

"Come on, I just said I'm not going to show anyone! You act like I'm going to Snapchat them or something!"

"And you act like no one ever picked up a friend's phone while he was in the shitter and flipped through his fucking gallery. You really think your stupid selfie is worth going to prison? Better question, you really think I think your stupid selfie is worth me going to prison? Because, spoiler, I don't."

"Okay, okay. I get it, but—"

"This is not a discussion," she snapped.

Although Bonnie knew how serious this whole thing was and how much depended on him acting like an object, hearing Freddy's most high-hatted words coming out of her mouth was just too fucking funny. He had to laugh.

Ana glared at him, then pointed at Yoshi. "Don't test me. Delete those pics right now." She paused to glance at Bonnie and roll her eyes a little, adding, "That's an order," to prove she hadn't entirely lost her sense of humor, even in these circumstances.

"Listen to me!" Yoshi exclaimed with convincing desperation. "There is no way to scan these guys into the system without taking them apart first and no guarantee that the computer will be able to figure them out. A couple of pictures on a phone may be the only record we have for how to put them back together. These things are irreplaceable, lady! I know you have some idea of what that means. You can't want me working blind!"

Ana didn't answer, but Bonnie knew her well enough to see the uncertainty behind her stoic stare. After a tense moment, she glanced at Freddy, still slumped in the handcart, then looked up at Bonnie.

"Okay, okay, watch." Yoshi poked at his phone, then showed it to her. "They're gone, okay? Now wait here! Just wait!"

And with that, he sprinted out of the building and into the house across the lot.

"Foxy, are you all right?" Chica asked worriedly.

"Aye. Bright flashing lights," Foxy added in answer to Ana's frown. "They can trigger a kind o' soft reset for me."

"What?"

Foxy nodded grudgingly. "Wipes me task log and sends me back to me home position. Not sure how that would play out, seeing as me home stage presently be a hundred miles and more away."

"And you didn't think that was something I needed to know?"

"If'n ye had a reboot switch, would ye tell me?" Foxy countered.

Ana huffed and sent her accusing eyes at Bonnie next.

"You can flash me all you want," Bonnie told her, then rolled his eyes. "I didn't mean it like that. I just meant the rest of us didn't get that upgrade."

"Upgrade," Foxy grumbled.

"Okay, well, I don't know what else to call it. All the Mulholland animatronics got it, so they could be reset without the technician having to get too close. They were…glitchy." Bonnie shrugged apologetically at Foxy, who snorted static back at him. "It shouldn't be a problem now, as long as nobody flicks the lights on and off really fast."

"Or takes pictures," Ana agreed and sighed. "What do I do about that? He's got a point, damn it, but I don't want pictures. It only takes one getting out in the world and this whole thing explodes. Once a picture gets onto the internet, it's there forever."

"Just because the worst thing can happen doesn't mean it will," Chica said, tapping her fingers. "We have to trust him if we expect him to trust us, don't we? And if he really needs those pictures—"

"He might," Foxy interrupted, "but ye don't. Ye know what yer doing and he don't get a vote."

"I'm not sure we can trust him to keep them private anyway," Bonnie agreed, keeping his ears turned toward the door. "He wasn't documenting anything, he was posing with us. And maybe I'm getting paranoid in my old age, but I'm starting to think you're right and we should get out of here."

"Bonnie—"

"Yeah, I know," he interrupted. "Everything you just said in the truck is still true, but that guy was talking to someone before you came in. Not here, on his phone. And not his mom, or if he was, they got a weird relationship. But he was definitely talking about you."

She looked at him and maybe it was her headache or the weird lighting in here or whatever it was, but something in her face, in her eyes, made her look like a stranger. No, not a stranger. Not herself, but still familiar in an awful way. For a moment, it was like the Purple Man himself was looking back at him, the way he used to look when no one was around to see him, when the smile was gone and nothing was left but the shadows and that killing look in his eyes…

Then Ana moved half a step closer and everything changed and it was her again, wary and stressed, but just Ana. "With who?" she asked. "Did you catch a name?"

"There wasn't one, just a phone number." He told her what it was and even before he'd finished, she was already rolling her eyes and bringing both hands up to cover her face, which was not the reaction he'd expected. "Do you…want to know what they said?"

"I can guess," she said sourly.

"He's coming," Foxy said, glancing through the window beside him and half-raising his hook. "What are we doing, luv?"

"Nothing," said Ana. "It's fine. Son of a bitch."

Before Bonnie could ask any more questions, his mics picked up running feet on the gravel outside. In seconds, Yoshi burst back through the door with an actual camera and a wild look in his eyes. He ran over, a little out of breath, and showed her what he had.

"Okay?" he pressed as Ana took it from him with an expression of distracted amazement. "It's a Polaroid."

"I know what it is. Where did you even get it?"

"I told you, there was a hoard. I've got a boombox, a dozen VCRs and an answering machine, too. My point is, we can take the pictures on this. You can keep them when we're done or burn them or whatever you want to do, just as long as I know they're there if I need them. Okay? Come on, you've got to meet me halfway on something."

"Fine." She held the camera up, but didn't give it to him when he tentatively reached for it. "You can take pictures with this, but just for the job and I get to keep them, and the camera, the whole time I'm here. You get no trophies, no keepsakes, no souvenirs. And this better be the last conversation on this subject. If I really have to waste time wondering if I can trust you, I clearly don't and I should just cut my losses now and leave. I don't want to do that, so don't test me. Got it?"

"Got it," he said meekly.

She handed the camera to Bonnie. "Someone dropped this," she said.

"I'LL PUT IT IN THE LOST AND FOUND BOX FOR YOU, LITTLE FRIEND!" said Bonnie, and popped the casing on his abdominal compartment, tucking the camera inside.

Ana snapped her fingers to stop Yoshi staring at this turn of events and pointed at him. "And from now on, if you need something like that, you talk to me first. I can be reasonable, believe it or not, and I want this to work. Don't make it any harder for me." Ana turned away while Yoshi was still stammering out apologies. She unstrapped Freddy and stepped back, wiping her face on her shirt sleeve. It must be hot in here. She was sweating a lot. Funny that Yoshi wasn't, but this was his place, maybe he was used to it.

"All right, Percy, let's get him on the table," Ana said, gesturing.

'That's you, dumbass,' Bonnie thought, looking meaningfully at Foxy, who belatedly remembered who he was supposed to be.

"You didn't say Simon Says," Yoshi guessed, sparing Foxy the trouble of covering for his embarrassingly long pause.

"Right. You're right. Percy," Ana said again, hard, "Simon Says put Barry on the table."

"AYE-AYE, LITTLE MATEY!"

"Don't forget his legs. Simon Says don't forget his legs. Now Simon Says turn to your right. Simon Says walk forward until you touch the wall. Simon Says turn around…not all the way around, just…Simon Says stop. You win. Standby, Percy."

Foxy rolled his eye, but played along with an only slightly sour, "STANDING BY."

Ana gave him a warning stare and went to the so-called 'operating' table to check on Freddy, straightening one dangling arm, closing a half-open eye, and then just standing there with one hand on his cracked shoulder, looking around.

Yoshi noticed and perked up. "So, welcome to my work in progress! The materials room is back there—" He pointed at a narrow door almost invisibly situated between two wide racks. "—but it's mostly full of what's left of the last guy's junk at the moment, which is why everything is sort of everywhere in here. Anyway it's probably not very safe, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't poke around in there. And, uh…you saw the office. It's kind of where I'm living right now, so…you know, it's got all the comforts of home, if you like closet-sized squalor. Uh, and the molding room is on the other side of that. It's cool with me if you want to wander around in there and see what I'm working on or whatever, but keep the doors shut. The materials are temperature sensitive and once we get into it, there's going to be fumes and paint particles and all that jazz that can really gum up the gear, and, uh…you know, I couldn't really afford to install the good filters and ventilation through the whole building, at first," he hastened to add. "It's on the list, it's just…you know…I was dumb enough to believe the guy when he quoted me an estimate, so I only budgeted for that, and then it was nearly double by the time he got done, so I had to prioritize and…"

Ana nodded, a glint of sympathy showing through the cracks in her hard face. "You got screwed over pretty good, didn't you?"

"Yeah. And…And you want to know the worst part? I knew he was doing it. I knew he knew I knew, and we both knew there was nothing I could do about it, because I was already out of the old shop and if I wasn't ready in a new one in time for the Halloween season, that was it, game over. Nobody really shops around for an animatronic guy, you know? They stick with you until you can't do the job and then they find someone else, and then they stick with that guy until he can't do the job and then they find someone else, but they never come back to you. So if I complained about anything at all, all the guy had to say was—"

"Well, we can do that," Ana supplied in a deep, drawling voice that was clearly meant to imitate someone specific, although Bonnie didn't know who, "but it's going to take some time."

"And I didn't have time," Yoshi concluded shame-facedly. "That piece of paper was stapled to the door for anyone to read, so he knew I wasn't going to fight him. I had to let him keep screwing me and just pray he got the job done when he said he would or I'd lose everything. Believe me, I know how this place looks, but I'm really good at what I do. I am, I swear, but that just…doesn't always matter."

"Not like dollar signs do," Ana agreed.

"Keeping my clients was way more important than standing on my principles with a sketchy contractor. And it all worked out, I guess. He finished half the work in all the time for twice as much money, but I've got my own place, I kept my clients and I can recover. Next year, I'll have all this sorted out, but for right now…keep the doors shut, please."

"Got it."

"So, okay, where was I? Uh…" He looked around and shrugged. "Is there anything here you haven't seen before?"

"Where's the assembly rig you were talking about? I've never seen one of those."

"Oh! It's right there." Yoshi turned around and pointed, and since he wasn't paying attention, Bonnie had a look for himself.

He knew he was looking at the right thing—there wasn't anything else in the way of Yoshi's finger—but it wasn't anything special. It was just a rectangular frame suspended over the operating table with a boxy sort of device attached to the side and a couple of jointed appendages fixed to sliding runners in the middle, each with a different tool-tip head. Bonnie recognized a drill, a clamp and something that maybe was a cutter, but he still couldn't tell what it was supposed to do. Just be extra arms, he guessed, so that one person could do the work of two or three, but it sure didn't look like it would be a very efficient assistant. He wondered why the guy didn't just get a Scoop, like Ana's. A glance at her face told him she wasn't impressed either, and while she wasn't as easy to read right now as she sometimes was, he could tell she was beginning to rethink a few things.

Yoshi could tell, too. "Something wrong?" he asked tentatively.

"No," she said, although she didn't try very hard to look like she meant it. "I guess I was expecting something bigger, which is stupid of me, since I didn't even know what it was."

Yoshi accepted that with half a nod, half a shrug. "You were picturing, like, a car factory, with a bunch of huge robotic arms building a bot while I stand off to one side in a hardhat checking things off on a clipboard."

"Maybe."

"Well, I'm not going to stand here and tell you that stuff doesn't exist, but if it does, it's in much bigger hands than mine. You know, the military, NASA…" He shrugged again. "Disney. There's a limit to what's available in the private sector unless your pockets go a lot deeper than mine, but I assure you, this is essentially the same thing, just on a smaller, admittedly limited scale."

Ana nodded, but her doubts obviously remained.

Yoshi fidgeted, looking at her, at Bonnie and Freddy, at the contraption hanging from the ceiling, and finally said, "You want to know how it works?"

"I can see how it works," Ana replied, studying the contraption through narrow eyes. "I'm just having a little trouble figuring out what it can do that I can't."

"It's not what it does, it's just that it does it with more precision than you or I or any human can. Okay," he said, spreading his hands and then patting the air as if he could push her skepticism out of the way and replace it with a more receptive mood. "Okay, so you remember how I told you the biggest part of the job is going to be scanning in all the special parts?"

"So the computer can design the animatronic."

"Yes! But actually, no, not in the sense of a working animatronic. The program doesn't know anything about wiring or compressors or actuators or anything like that. Its sole focus is on stability, not functionality. All it does is build a virtual model, factoring in things like weight, kinematics and especially what materials are involved."

"Materials?"

"Yeah," said Yoshi, looking surprised. "Different metals are…different? When it comes to, like, buckling under pressure or conducting heat or—"

"I get it, but I don't know what the parts are made of."

"It's cool, I've got an analyzer, we'll figure it out. Where was I? Oh yeah, so the computer takes all those things and runs simulations to see where the bot is more susceptible to things like pressure or friction, and then fast-forwards through ten or twenty years to see how those weaknesses cause the structure to deteriorate and where the risk of catastrophic failure can maybe be reduced by padding this or changing the configuration of that, and this all refines the original design until we arrive at one where the bot has the best quality of life." He paused, clearly catching himself by surprise with that particular turn of phrase, and grinned. "So to speak."

Ana didn't even fake a smile to be polite, just stood there and waited.

"Okay," said Yoshi, somewhat subdued. "Okay, so when it comes to complex machinery, stability and functionality have a major arc of descent over time. Something that works really well when it first comes together, even with careful maintenance, starts to lose efficiency almost from the moment it turns on and the reason for that—I mean, besides the obvious cost-cutting and planned obsolescence—is poor alignment of objects of function. And it doesn't even have to be that poor! Something that looks level to our puny human eyes may actually be .0001 percent off-true, and that's tiny. Most lay computers won't even register a discrepancy that small, so you could even have it calibrated and think you're good, but if it's a knee joint, to make this a relevant example, and your bot is walking around? I mean, my Fitbit tells me I take roughly three thousand steps a day, so let's assume your bots do too. In one year, that's over a million steps, not to mention everything else they do. Bending, waving—all of that has an impact on the joints. And these guys are big, okay? They're big and they're heavy. And the thing you have to understand about the pressure created by weight is that it changes based on things like the shape of the structure and how it's balanced and especially where and how it moves. It's like…It's…Okay, how much do these guys weigh? Like two, three hundred pounds?"

Ana glanced at Bonnie. "How much do you weigh, Buster?"

Bonnie flicked an ear at her. "IT'S NOT POLITE TO ASK SOMEONE HOW MUCH THEY WEIGH."

Ana smiled, just a little. "Operator override. How much do you weigh, Buster?"

"TWO HUNDRED EIGHTY-ONE-POINT-SIXTEEN KILOGRAMS," he replied with the same inane cheer. "MY ENDOSKELETON IS THE HEAVIEST COMPONENT AT ONE HUNDRED NINETY-SEVEN-POINT-ZERO-EIGHT KILOGRAMS."

"Keep in mind, that's his original weight, before…you know." Ana indicated Bonnie's skinless lower legs. "All this."

"Gosh, that's handy," remarked Yoshi, staring up at him in admiration. "I keep forgetting they talk."

Bonnie waggled his ears.

"Anyway, so two-eighty…that's about six hundred pounds. I like round numbers. So for simplicity's sake, let's say half of that is above the belt and half below. Okay?"

"Sure."

"So there's three hundred pounds resting on the hips, but because of how that weight is distributed and the fact that the legs have to move, the hip-joints are under the equivalent of nearly five hundred pounds of pressure. And that pressure increases exponentially the more joints we run into as we travel down the body. Pressure on the knees is six times real-weight. At the ankles, it's almost ten. So now you look at that slight discrepancy we talked about before, multiplied by every other moving part with an equally slight discrepancy, plus a few years of walking around and what do you get?"

Ana sent Freddy a brooding frown.

"Exactly," said Yoshi. "And this is why the development of a walking robot, even one like Big Dog, is a huge deal. Walking requires so many independently moving parts and interconnected objects of function, not to mention all the environmental variables, that it would be impossible for any human to deliver permanence just noodling around in his garage. The calculations involved in recreating a working human—and that's what we've got here, essentially," he interrupted himself. "Animatronics designed to have equivalent, if not superior, mobility to a human being. So yeah, the calculations necessary to their construction are so complex and there are so many of them, with every damn one of them affecting every other one of them, that it's only been recently that the average jackass like me can even get his hands on a computer with enough processing power to put them into a program, much less run it! Plus, I have the assembly rig, which can take that information and precisely implement it. Does it build the bot for us? No. But it knows what 0.0001% off-angle looks like and it can correct for that while we're aligning parts and drilling holes."

"Yeah, but what's the point of four decimal points' worth of precision when you don't even know how much the skin is going to weigh yet? And what happens when they pick something up?"

"That's the thing," Yoshi told her in the overly patient tone Bonnie had heard so many parents use when explaining the obvious to a child. "The computer will be able to tell us how much weight the scaffold can safely carry, based on the design and the materials and flexion and all that jazz, and if we put it together right, it won't matter how that weight sits. I mean, duh, of course it does, overloading is always a thing, but I'm saying…I'm saying…" He thought, then snapped and pointed at her. "You have bones, right?"

"Last time I looked."

"Okay, and those bones are precisely calibrated, as only God can do. If they weren't, your ability to stand or walk or pretty much do anything would be severely inhibited. It may even be impossible. But because your bones are precisely calibrated, you can fill out your frame—" He indicated her body with a few curvy sweeps of one arm. "—with another hundred pounds of muscle and organs and fat and it really doesn't matter. Everyone has fat," he added, color rising in his appalled face. "I'm not saying you're…I mean, not that there's anything wrong with—"

"You're fine," Ana said with a sigh. "And I'm listening. Go on."

"All I'm trying to say is, a strong skeleton allows you to carry a couple hundred pounds, whether you do that with flesh or by juggling barbells or—" He gestured toward her handcart where her hand still lightly rested on one grip. "—however you do it. From a technical standpoint, the risk of catastrophic destabilization is almost entirely focused on the internal support structure. A precisely calibrated skeleton can carry external variance just fine. With bots, just like with us, a strong core is the best way to assure a longer, healthier life."

Ana nodded, her gaze straying to Freddy again. "How long do your bots live?"

"Uh, well…I don't use the rig for all my builds. Most of my animatronics are just Halloween junk, you know. Simple mechanisms, simple functions. They only have to make it a few months at most, so it's more cost-effective to just slap them together and patch them up year by year. I do use it when I'm putting together an installation for a casino or something like that, but they don't tend to have a lot of moving parts, so it's not really a great measure of the rig's merits. And for that matter, the technology hasn't been around that long, so I can't promise, whatever, twenty years just because that's what the simulations estimated. But for what it's worth, I got the rig in 2009, and I've got animatronics out there that are still going strong six years later. They don't walk and talk, obviously, because nothing does that outside of sci-fi movies…and Buster's Burger Ranch," he amended, looking over at Bonnie. "But they are still doing what I built them to do and they're doing it without my attention. For all intents and purposes, without any maintenance at all." He gave that a moment for the respect such a statement deserved, then shrugged. "And if you still don't think that's good enough, then…I'm sorry, but that just means you don't understand the work, not that I can't do it."

Ana glanced at him, looked at Freddy some more, than turned all the way around and lifted her chin. "I believe you," she said. "I'm sorry, man. It's been a rough couple of days and I'm feeling it, but if you still want to deal with me, then we got a deal and I'll try not to be as big a bitch going forward as I've been up to now."

She offered her hand. Yoshi grinned and shook it.

'The beginning of a beautiful friendship,' Bonnie thought. He tried not to react in any visible way, but heard servos whine. When he glanced aside, he saw Foxy's remaining ear flat to the top of his head. 'Yeah,' thought Bonnie, watching Yoshi celebrate. 'I don't trust him either.'

"So, what do you need from me in the way of creature comforts?" Yoshi asked. "Anything I can do to help you settle in? Another drink? Snacks? Coffee stuff? I can go out and grab anything you want. I should do that anyway, since I don't really keep food at the house. What's your poison?"

Ana shook her head, paced some more, wiped her face, and said, with puzzling bitterness, "Monster. Ultra black, if you can find it." She pulled out her wallet, peeling off a few bills and passing them over with a short, unsmiling laugh. "Or Rehabs."

"Ultra black or Rehabs, got it. What about dinner? We got everything around here, literally everything."

"I don't care. I haven't had Chinese for a while." Ana gave up a few more bills. "Get me some of whatever's good, make sure there's glass noodles in there somewhere."

"Oh hey, I can pay—"

"No," said Ana. "That's going to be another hard line. I pay for all the food."

"Uh…sure. Okay. I'm not about to turn down free food. Um, here…here is my house key," he said, unclipping one from the set he carried. "You can go see what you're dealing with, and when I get back, we'll open this guy up—" He patted Freddy confidently on the chest, without commenting on the fact that the sweater that had been blocking Foxy's chest open just a few minutes ago was now doing the same thing for Freddy. "—and see what I'm dealing with. After that, I guess we'll see. Sound good?"

"Sounds good."

Yoshi turned around, almost bumping into Bonnie. He backed up, grinned, and held up the hand Ana had just been holding. "High-five, Buster!"

Bonnie gave him a light tap up top and a thumbs up for good measure. "HAPPY TRAILS, PARTNER!"

"Be back soon!" Off he went.

Ana followed him as far as the door, restlessly fidgeting with the key he'd given her as she watched him get back in his car and drive away. Only when he was good and gone did she close the door and she kept standing there for a while, staring at its back without speaking, giving Bonnie plenty of time to see how pale and strained and shaky she was.

This was not a good time to throw more gravy on the shitbiscuits, but this might be one of those situations where waiting was even worse. Wincing in anticipation, Bonnie ventured, "Ana—"

"If you ask me one more time if I'm okay—"

"Are we really staying?" Bonnie asked.

She looked at him with an amazing lack of expression for a human's face, then away at the featureless face of the door. "Yeah."

"Can we trust this bloke?" Foxy asked, reaching slowly for his hip where he wasn't even carrying his sword.

"Who, Yoshi? Probably."

"Even though he's reporting on yer comings and goings to some other bloke?"

"The other bloke is Rider," Ana said and grimaced. "I can just about guarantee that when I called him up way back in July, Rider told Yoshi to tell him if I ever called again, so he did."

"You're not mad?" Chica asked cautiously, tapping her fingertips.

Ana shook her head. "Poor bastard had to choose between getting on my bad side or Rider's. He made the smart choice. I'd do the same in his place."

"What's this Rider-bloke want with ye?" Foxy pressed, now raising his hook since a sword hadn't magically appeared in his hand.

"God knows," Ana sighed. Her attention drifted toward Freddy. She went over to him, pausing to adjust the position of his head before she opened his wrist compartment. "He's been weird lately, but if he wants to lean over Yoshi's shoulder and keep tabs on me, let him. I've never—" She broke off with a short, dark laugh and said instead, "I was going to say I've never kept secrets from him, but I guess I can't say that anymore," as she pulled Freddy's phone out of his magic trick compartment and handed it to Bonnie. "But in any case, he's always had my back and I trust him."

"Okay," Bonnie said, taking the phone from her. "What's this for?"

"I'm going to head over to the house and see what that's all about, and I want you to have some way to give me a quick heads up if Yoshi comes back and decides to get handsy when I'm not watching. You know how to use it without tipping him off?"

"Oh yeah," Bonnie assured her with a great deal more conviction than he could back up. "I know all about teching."

Ana's eyes narrowed slightly. "Texting," she said.

"Yeah," Bonnie said, locking his ears into a fully upright, confident position to hide the fact that the rest of him was secretly dying. "That, too."

Ana seemed to have trouble finding the words to respond to that and while she was thinking about it, Foxy said, "Ye sure ye don't want to give that responsibility to someone who ain't a bleeding ijit, or at least someone who knows the right bleeding word?"

"No," Bonnie retorted before Ana could speak. "She's pretty sure she wants to give it to someone with two hands, so they can hold it and still push buttons without putting their stupid hook through the stupid screen."

"There ain't any buttons on that thing, ye witless lummox."

"They show up on the screen when you tech…xt. See?" Bonnie said, putting the phone inside his wrist compartment and shutting it again with an extra hard snap. "I know what I'm doing."

"Oi, yer useless, ye are. Here's a tip from a pro: The harder ye work at sounding convincing, the less convincing ye sound."

"I'm not trying to convince you of anything, because I don't have to!"

"Good thing, that, because ye didn't. Ye got no brains at all, ye know that? No brains, no looks, no charm…and I'll wager this Buster can't even play the bloody guitar. No bloody wonder the restaurant closed and we ended up in storage."

That stung way more than it should have and without thinking, Bonnie shot back, "Yeah, and I'm sure that had nothing to do with the fact that our polite pirate attraction dropped f-bombs left and right."

"Once. One time. Ye got no sense of numbers either. I hope ye weren't teaching them kiddies to count."

The door closed.

Bonnie and Foxy looked at it, then around the room, mostly at the empty place where Ana used to be.

"She left," Chica said quietly. Her gaze when Bonnie tried to meet it was unflinching, but full of weariness and pain. "I wish I could go with her. I wish I'd asked her to open me before she went so I didn't have to listen to the two of you…because you won't stop. Even now, you put your ears down and you won't look me in the eye and you act like you're sorry, but in five minutes, you'll be at each other again. Why? No, don't tell me you're sorry," she said as Bonnie opened his mouth to mumble out something just like that. "Don't tell me you'll do better, just tell me why? What are you even fighting over?"

And of course Bonnie had no answer. If there had been an argument back in that first pizzeria, fighting as children do over who got more stage time or less of a father's love, he didn't even know what it was anymore. The tension had just always seemed to be there, as far back as Bonnie could remember, but it had never been this bad before. Not until Ana crawled out of the rain and into their lives.

But she wasn't his to fight over. And even when she'd called herself his girl, she'd made it clear that didn't give him the right to dictate who she talked to. He still had hopes that they might get back together again someday, but she sure wouldn't stay long if he kept on being a jealous dick.

And even as the rational side of him silently voiced this thought, the dark half muttered, 'Tell that to Foxy,' so there it was, if there was anything at all at the heart of this whole ugly mess. He'd been thinking of this all wrong, like Ana was the rope in a never-ending game of tug-o-war, but she wasn't. Although she made a great excuse, they'd been fighting since long before she'd ever crawled in through a broken door on a rainy night.

Well, it took two to make a thing work, whether it was love or hate you were working on. Foxy could say or do whatever he wanted, and always would—that was just how he'd been made—but that didn't mean Bonnie had to play. In fact, there was more than one way to win at tug-o-war; if you couldn't pull the other guy over onto his stupid fox face after decades of trying, you could always let go of the rope. And let him fall on his ass instead.

Okay, so he still had some stuff to work through, but at least he was trying.

Bonnie turned, expecting to see some similar feelings reflected back at him, but Foxy's one ear was still flat to his head and his plastic eyes almost seemed alive with the heat of the boiling emotion just under the cracked surface of his skin.

Bonnie offered a hand.

Foxy folded his arms.

"Look, I'm sorry, man. I am." He wasn't, but he could work on believing it later. The important thing was saying it now. "I've been biting your head off for no reason and I don't expect you to forgive me just because I ask, but I do want us to be friends, or at least—"

"Is this stinking bucketload o' chum part o' me politeness training?" Foxy interrupted.

"Uh, no, I just—"

"Then I don't have to listen to it. Fuck off with ye." Foxy turned his head and stared stonily into a shelf full of spooled wire of varying gauges.

"Got it. Fucking off," Bonnie said cheerfully, folding his own arms and finding a spot on the opposite wall between racks of unfinished animatronic animal heads to stare at. "See what great friends we are? Already in total agreement."