CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Ana had worked for most of her adult life, doing everything from mucking out horse stalls to building meth labs. She'd clocked in at bakeries, ski resorts, orchards, day care centers and a great many construction sites. She'd learned that, no matter what the work itself was about, the first day was never about getting stuff done, only getting familiar with the site, the tools, the rules and the team. No matter how dire the circumstances or how little time she had to change them, Ana knew nothing was going to get done today.

And nothing did.

Well, maybe not 'nothing'. Yoshi took her through the house, showing her all the badly-started, unfinished repairs that needed her attention. She used her roombuilder to take some measurements, made estimates of the necessary materials, and reassured him that it wasn't as bad as he thought it was, which was even mostly true. There were a lot of little things that needed to be done, but nothing too back-breaking. As she wrote up a list of equipment she'd need for him to pass along to his hotel-friend, she was already mentally making a second list of the stuff she could do now. Despite her earlier bitching about how he expected her to work without tools, she had brought her rolling toolchest, since she'd expected to do some work on the animatronics and it was literally easier to bring the whole unit than to cherry-pick and safely pack a couple dozen instruments. She kept that to herself for now—the first day was awfully soon to trust her excitable engineer with toys he wasn't allowed to touch—but she figured she could check off at least half of these boxes in a single weekend. With only a few exceptions, none of the jobs would take more than a few hours. Even if this wasn't the arrangement between them, she could see herself doing a lot of this work anyway, just to bring her body to a state of physical exhaustion and force her restless mind to sleep, but not yet. Not until the real work was underway.

When he was done showing her torn linoleum and leaky pipes, she took him back to his workshop and let him give her that tour, too. He showed her the computer program he'd be using, pulled up a filed called 'Lulu' and clicked Build. Ana watched, feeling Yoshi's pride and anxiety like static at her back, as the computer picked out metal rods, sized them, cut them, joined them together, then picked out motors and compressors and wires and pumps and fixed them to the frame, forming a body with six appendages not quite equally spaced around it. Joints went on; four of the appendages became legs. A motorized pendulum was attached; now there was a tentacle-like tail. A great deal of modifications and mechanisms slowly transformed the bulbous final appendage into a head with bulging eyes, wide jaws and sharp fangs. Some kind of monster, one of his Halloween horror creatures, she thought, until a second framework was wrapped around the mess and a skin set over that and suddenly, she was looking at a cute little sleeping pug. Its sides rose and fell with steady 'breaths', it could open its bright eyes, perk up its floppy ears, move its head, wag its curly tail, and generally do sleepy dog things, even if its legs couldn't do much more than twitch as it 'dreamed'. The speedbuild ended with a short clip of the finished animatronic 'sleeping' in an old lady's lap, responding to her careful petting with happy pug-grunts and snuffling, and if it wasn't exactly indistinguishable from a living animal, it was damned close.

All of this was cool, of course, but the real show was playing out on the sidebar, where the parts necessary for every step of the build were linked, along with precise measurements and installation requirements. Everything anyone needed to build a pug was right here, and although Yoshi was evasive when she asked him how long it took to go from design to fully-fleshed animatronic, she believed him when he assured her he could build another one in three days, a week if he had to order the parts. She was pretty sure she could build one herself in that timeframe, except for the skin, and it would only take her that long because she didn't know her way around the equipment yet.

Leaving Yoshi with a similar video of Freddy's rebuild—Freddy's schematics—was still a little troubling, but only a little. Without Faust's unique parts, he'd never be able to make his own Fazbear animatronic. At best, he'd just have a giant doll, marvelously articulated perhaps, but one that would never move on its own power…or think its own thoughts.

"So?" Yoshi ventured as the video came to the end of its second playthrough.

"I'm impressed," said Ana, honestly enough.

"Awesome!" Yoshi reached over her shoulder and opened a new file. He named it Barry. "You ready to get your hands dirty?"

"Way ahead of you," Ana murmured, then pushed herself away from his computer and they got to work.

Sort of.

It took nearly an hour just to take all the pictures he insisted on before he was ready to start taking things apart, and then it was her turn to bring momentum to a crashing halt while she impressed upon him the importance of listening for the beep. She didn't really think she had anything to worry about as far as that went. Technology had advanced considerably over the last fifty years and unlike the men who had disregarded a young Fred Faust's warnings to follow the protocol before removing hardware they knew nothing about, Yoshi had probably fried a thumb drive in his time. When she told him to listen for the beep, he agreed immediately and his enthusiasm for following that rule did not wane no matter how many times she said it.

The practice run was a dissection of Freddy's dismembered legs and it was there that Ana began to understand just what a grueling process this was really going to be. Freddy's left leg was composed of one upper leg bone, two lower leg bones, three joints—hip, knee and ankle—and a foot. How many parts was that, seven? One would think so, but no, because the bones were capped with connecting plates and fasteners, the joints were complex mechanisms in their own rights, and the foot…there had to be a hundred separate parts in the foot alone. Plus, there were pumps acting as muscles, tension springs acting as tendons, numerous sensor pads acting as nerve clusters, separators, contractors, flexors and stabilizers. Each of these components had to be matched to their Toy-sized equivalents, from which the new endoskeletons would be assembled, and those corresponding parts scanned into the system, and even that wasn't as simple as it sounded, not just because the scanner took for-freaking-ever (although it did), but because Yoshi had to first create a file for each piece, identify all its component materials with his analyzer, get its precise weight and measurements, and then teach the program how that part connected to other parts, and give the program a way to cross-reference the files for those parts, and if they needed auxiliary objects of function, most of which had to be 'built' inside the program from their own separate parts, all of which needed to first be scanned in, which meant Yoshi had to create a file…

It was a painstaking process and of course, pains should be taken. This repetitive, brain-melting tedium was what was going to restore her animatronics to their full potential and keep them alive for years to come. One mistake could mean the difference between Freddy Fazbear and Freddy Fazmobile. She was glad to see Yoshi taking it seriously, she just wished he'd take it seriously a little faster.

She suspected he was taking longer than he had to, but if he was trying to impress her with how methodical he could be, she had no one to blame but herself. That she even wanted to blame someone was only a testament to her own mood, which had steadily eroded under the strain of thinking through her headache and steadying her trembling hands, until all she wanted to do was…whatever she had to do to make it stop.

But she didn't. She was not an alcoholic.

The left leg took six hours. The right, 'only' four. As Ana debated whether to continue deconstruction with Freddy's hips or his arms, Yoshi began to drop hints that he had come to the end of what he called his 'effective work cycle.' She supposed that was fair. It was nearly midnight, after all, and she sure couldn't say she wasn't tired.

"We'll jump back in first thing tomorrow," he promised on receiving her reluctant agreement. "Bright and early. Crack of dawn. And you know, this really is the slowest part. Most of the core structure appears to be the same from one model to the next, excluding the heads and some minor feature variance in the arms. If nothing else, the materials are definitely the same, so once we get Barry fully scanned in, the others should be a breeze. We might get all three of them done in a day. Or two."

'Or three,' Ana thought.

Sensing her lack of enthusiasm, Yoshi dialed his own up another notch. "I'm really happy with what we've accomplished here. I guarantee we'll be starting reconstruction by Friday."

"I appreciate the sentiment, but please don't make me promises just to make me happy."

"I'm not. Whether we finish by the end of next week or not, that I don't know, but we'll definitely have started."

They were sitting in his 'office,' whose primary function appeared to be preventing cross-contamination between the modeling room and the workshop. There were a few officey touches—a three-drawer filing cabinet that doubled as a table for the coffee maker, a chair that would have been at home on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, a compact desk just big enough for his computer set-up and a tasteful array of action figures, and the sagging, much-worn and suspiciously-stained sofa he kept as a 'reception area.'

At the moment, Yoshi had the comm while he saved their progress for the day and shut his system down. "So at the risk of poking the dragon," he said, switching off the monitors one by one, "let's talk sleeping arrangements."

Ana gave the threadbare arm of the sofa beside her a pat. "This'll do me fine. Or if you want to sleep in here, I can sleep in the truck."

"No, you are definitely going to want something temperature controlled. It's not so bad right now, but I make no promises for what it'll be like in three hours. Last month, it was still eighty degrees at night. Next month, it'll be below zero. You've never seen weather as crazy as Vegas."

"Spoken like a man who's never been to Mammon."

"Mammon, as in Utah?" Yoshi perked up. "Is that where you're from?"

Cursing her tired brain and loose mouth, Ana shrugged dismissively. "Born there, moved away when I was a kid, recently moved back. I'm surprised you've heard of it."

"Heard of, never been. What's it like?"

"The open mouth of Hell," Ana replied.

Yoshi blinked a few times, then cleared his throat and started over. "My point is, I got a bedroom. One of us should use it. I spent all week cleaning it," he admitted with a self-conscious laugh. "You probably noticed."

"Not really," she said, which was true. And as his face fell, she added, "They're all clean. Some parts of the house are in more of a condition than the others, but there's really nothing in there you need to feel ashamed of, seriously. The way you described it, I was expecting…" Memories of her aunt's house tumbled through her mind—boxes stacked to the ceiling, floors sagging under the weight of the hoard, the basement so deep in garbage that she had to crawl to the stairs. Shaking her head, she simply said, "I was expecting a lot worse."

Yoshi accepted that with an uncomfortable smile and a shrug. "I guess I still see it the way I found it. Anyway, the bed is brand new. Well, the bed is from Goodwill, but the mattresses are brand new. And the sheets. And the pillows. I'm sure it's more comfortable than that thing," he went on super-casually while his face filled up with color. "It's a lot bigger, anyway. You can stretch out. Roll around. You know. Really…really get comfortable. Probably even two people could…Sorry," he said suddenly. "Forget I said anything. I'm not good at flirting and it's obvious you're not interested. You're not interested, are you?"

"No," Ana said gently. "Is that going to be a problem?"

"No," he said at once, showing immediate relief only faintly tinged with disappointment. "It's just one of those things I figured I was always going to regret if I didn't at least give it a shot. I'm the kind of guy that let a lot of opportunities knock and walk away, you know? And now it's too late to…you know…change it. And I've got good genes, but still, you know, my life is almost half over at best, so I figure, from now on, I'm going to answer the door every time. Maybe knock on a few myself. What's the worst thing that can happen? Don't answer that. But never mind, point is, no means no. So, you can have the bed and I'll sleep out here."

"I'm not kicking you out of your own bed, man. I'd rather sleep out here anyway."

He smiled a somewhat hurt smile. "To keep an eye on your bots? Make sure no one's sneaking parts?"

She supposed that was her cue for a polite denial, but instead she shrugged and said, "Put yourself in my shoes, man. Where would you be?"

"Right where you are," he admitted with a laugh. "Well…I'll see you in the morning then."

"See you." She waited for him to leave, waited a little longer, then got up and opened the door to workshop.

The room was dark, not completely silent, but very still. Ana ran her eyes restlessly across the half-glimpsed shapes lining its tall walls as she stepped inside, then opened the exterior door and stepped across the threshold into the open night.

Even here, miles away from the city limits, she could see Las Vegas as a dome of smudgy color hanging in the midnight sky and hear the faint murmur of its frenetic activity. If she didn't know where she was and had only this seemingly lifeless scratch of land beside this empty road to judge by, she might think she was seeing nothing but the reflection of the long-set sun, hearing nothing but the wind. Hell, she might even think she was back in Mammon, except that she couldn't smell the quarry.

But in any case, she could see lights on in Yoshi's house and as she stood in the doorway, she even glimpsed his shadow on the blinds as he moved around inside.

She backed up into the workshop and shut the door. "He's gone for the night," she said to the seemingly empty room, turning on the lights.

At once, three sets of servos shrilled out in something like harmony as three animatronics came to life amid dozens of inanimate ones. Chica even stretched, like she had sore muscles from standing all day, before going to the operating table where Freddy—half of him anyway—lay sleeping.

"Everyone okay?" Ana asked, coming up on the table's other side to reassure herself with the sight of all those delicate cogs and wheels still spinning in Freddy's battery case.

"Fine as paint," Foxy grumbled, pacing and tapping his hook aggressively off shelves and tables, pipes and jars full of nails, as if he were testing them and finding them all out of tune. "I'm like to die o' boredom, but other'n that, all's well."

"It's not that bad," Chica admonished.

"Not that bad? This here be the worst conditions I ever been kept in, aye, and that includes the bloody vault! At least we could move around in the vault. Stretch our pins and pumps. Talk!"

"I don't remember having any epic conversations," Bonnie remarked.

"Whether we did or not ain't the point. We could have. Tell the truth now," Foxy said, turning on Ana with his hook raised. "How long are we going to have to keep this act up?"

"I don't know." Ana boosted herself up and sat on the table beside Freddy, letting her feet dangle. She kicked her legs idly as she studied the workshop around her and thought how much it looked like her own—the orderly chaos occupying the shelves, the mechanical odds and ends strewn atop every surface and the empty pop cans and fast food wrappers under them, the good smells of machine grease and solder, the ceiling racks full of lesser used equipment like the overhanging vines and branches of some hardware jungle. Its familiarity should feel soothing to her frayed nerves, but it didn't. Maybe just because it was someone else's lived-in mess, someone else's hard work all around her. She hoped that was all it was, but she still felt…not discouraged, exactly, not as if she'd been given a reason to have doubts or face failure, but as if she expected to. A weight of doom lay over her, a foreboding fed by absolutely nothing that she could put her finger on, and no amount of rational thought could shake it off.

"I don't know," she said again and this time said all of it. "I told my boss I'd be home in two weeks, but just because that's all the time we have doesn't mean that's all the time we're going to need. I'm trying to feel like we made progress today, but I just don't know. It feels like I spent the last twelve hours watching someone else stare at a computer."

When he wasn't playing on his phone. But that was a bitch-session for another time.

Foxy snorted through his speaker. "Could be worse. Ye could have to stand there, not moving nor speaking nor showing any sign o' life, watching someone else watch the bloke doing the computer-staring. I'd like to see ye do that two hours, much less two weeks."

"Take a Midol, princess," she said, rubbing at her weary eyes. "We're all perfectly well aware of how much this sucks without you actively trying to make it worse. Shut up. No, for real," she added as Foxy swung around with a few choice words for her. "I hear something."

Servos whined as Bonnie and Foxy swiveled their ears around, both homing in immediately on the same direction. She didn't need them to tell her 'something' was footsteps in the gravel, coming closer, and they didn't need her to tell them to get back to their places and save the arguing for later.

When Yoshi knocked, she was once again seemingly alone in the workshop, which was a good thing, because he didn't wait for her to answer before hesitantly opening the door, just enough to show her half of his anxious face. "I saw the light on," he began, sounding like he'd rehearsed. "I figured maybe you were…um…I don't know, strange place and all that, and, um…well, I know I didn't exactly make the best impression on you, so I figured, you know, I can either make it a little better or a lot worse, so here I am, and I'm thinking maybe you'd be interested in…uh…"

With sudden decisiveness, he pushed the door open wide and stepped in, holding up his red and yellow bong with the pot leaf emblem etched on the side. "No strings," he said hurriedly. "It's just the best way I know to, you know, chillax and make new friends. What do you say?"

She should say no, if for no other reason than to give the animatronics a chance to relax and be themselves after half a day being lifeless robots. Miserable as she was, this whole thing was much harder on them.

On the other hand, miserable as she was, didn't she deserve a break too?

"I say light that shit," said Ana and soon her headache was, if not completely gone, at least insignificant enough that she no longer cared if she had one. She sat on the cold concrete floor (a discomfort that was also insignificant) with her back against Bonnie's legs, listening to the weird-ass vaporwave playing on Yoshi's shop-radio and watching smoke drift in the currents of the air conditioning while Yoshi perched on his high workstool, gazing into the workings of Freddy's battery case like all the secrets of the universe were performing there just for him.

At length, he roused himself from his fascination to look at her and say, "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"All that." Yoshi waved at the door to the office, closed now, to keep the fragrant smoke from travelling into his work setting and soaking into the fibers of that sagging couch more than it already had. "Coming on to you. I knew better."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing bad!" he assured her. "I'm just saying…a guy like me, a girl like you…I'm not exactly your type."

That prickled on some level, but in her present mood, all it raised was a crooked smile. "I'm not sure you can call what I'm apparently attracted to a 'type.'"

"Still. I should have kept it professional. Sorry I made it weird."

Servos whined.

Ana patted Bonnie's foot on the off-chance that he could feel it. "Relax. We're good. You got nothing to be sorry about, as long as you take no for an answer."

"I will, I will. I am, I mean. Sorry," he laughed. "I'm doing it again. Making it weird."

"You're fine."

"You don't have to spare my feelings. I know I am. Believe me, the one social skill I have honed to razor-like perception is knowing when I'm making it weird." He took another hit, but all her hopes that he would go back to staring at Freddy's battery evaporated with the smoke when he blew it out and said, "I never really learned how to talk to people, you know? Except about work. I can talk your dang ears off when it's about work, although I try not to. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that most of the people who want my bots actually have zero interest in how they're built. And I don't know how to talk about anything else. I should get new hobbies. Do you have hobbies?"

"Sure, I got the Three Ms," Ana said breezily, and heard three pairs of eyes and two pairs of ears come to alert. With hopefully not too much noticeable effort, she focused and carefully continued: "I medicate, I fix up broken machines and I…watch movies. I used to read, too, so…three Ms and an R?"

"Movies, huh? That sounds cool. Do you belong to any clubs? You know, where you sit around and discuss, like, themes and symbolism and metaphors and stuff?"

"No. I just watch them. Or read them. Depending on whether it's a movie," she amplified, reaching for the bong, "or a book."

"Or if the movie has subtitles, you can do both. That's, like, twice as much leisure in half the time. Efficient. I need more hobbies. I knew a guy and he was into this one show, this anime, and I kind of wanted to hang out with him more off-work, so I tried to get into it, and I had questions, you know? So I do some research online and the anime's got a manga, so I find a shop that sells them and I go there to see if the manga tells you more than the show, and this other guy there hears me talking to the clerk and he calls me a weeb." Yoshi gave that a beat to let the full indignation come to fruit. "A weeb! Like, dude, I'm Japanese! I get to watch the cartoons from my own freaking mother country! Well…my grandma's mother country. My point is, I can't be a weeb, by definition. He's the weeb for even knowing what a weeb is!"

"Did you tell him that?"

"No, are you kidding? I just slunk out of the shop and went home to fume about it. And you know, the worst part is, in retrospect, maybe he wasn't even making fun of me. He was a grown man in an Avengers tee looking at Star Wars mangas. What are the odds he was really flexing on weebs at all? Maybe he was just as socially awkward as me and trying to break the ice with a joke so he could come over and join the conversation. He probably knew all about the stupid show. We could have been friends. But now it's too late!" Yoshi said with renewed energy, thumping a finger down on the table next to Freddy's skull. "I can't even go back to the comic shop because of how I ran out and even if I met him again in, like, the grocery store, he'd never want to talk to me because even if he doesn't really think I'm a weeb, he probably thinks I'm a huffy little drama queen!"

"You should switch to another school," Ana said dryly.

"I know, right? I mean, not that I should do that, I know you're joking, but that's where you're supposed to work through all this stupid stuff and learn how to have actual adult social interactions. Only me? When I was technically in high school, I was, like, nine. I still thought girls had cooties. And friends? I never had friends as a kid. I had a PR agent and a manager. What did I need friends for?" He thought about it and laughed. "I still don't. In the whole damn world, I have, like, one real friend right now."

More servos whined, probably as Chica suppressed some sympathy.

"One's all you need," Ana said, hoping to distract him before he noticed.

"Yeah." His smile softened from the defensive thing it was to something real and a little stoned. "Yeah, I guess you're right. Still, it messes a kid up. My parents really laid that whole special-genius thing on me and I bought into it, hard. I mean, I was a kid. What does a kid know? Your folks create the world around you. They control all the variables. If they tell you you're the smartest boy who ever lived and everyone loves you for it and if they don't, it's just because they're jealous of your intelligence, of course you're going to believe it. You've practically got no choice."

Ana nodded, thinking of the world her mother had built around her. A small world, no bigger than a locked closet, stinking of sweat and tears and piss, and herself the only inhabitant…

"I didn't know better," Yoshi was saying morosely, once again staring into Freddy's battery. "I wasn't allowed to be with other kids, because they'd just hold me back. I couldn't afford distractions like sleepovers and sports. I was special. I wasn't being isolated and emotionally stunted, I was learning discipline so I could reach my full potential. My parents had a plan for my life," he concluded bitterly, "and having friends wasn't part of it."

"Dude, you're bringing me down."

"Sorry. Sorry. It's just it sucked," he went on, sorry or not, while Ana sighed and rubbed her eyes. "Even when I bought into the whole super-genius thing, I still knew it sucked. I only got through it by telling myself that once I got my degrees, my life would be all Doogie Houser, you know? I'd be the youngest and most respected engineer in the robotics industry. I'd spend my days giving press conferences and looking awesome in a lab coat and at nights, I'd hang out at clubs with all my grown-up colleagues who were in awe of my genius, and my life would be one endless hilarious sitcom and maybe I'd touch a boob." He propped his chin on his palm, tracing the inner workings of Freddy's battery with the fingertips of his free hand. "It took years, literally years, before it dawned on me that no one was jealous and no one was in awe. The kids my age justifiably thought I was a pretentious little twit, the kids on campus thought I was a snot-faced know-it-all with an entitlement complex, and my 'colleagues' in the industry thought I was a publicity stunt. And let's be honest, they were all right."

"Come on, man. You earned your place. You quoted me a list of achievements as long as your arm."

"Yeah, but they weren't only mine, were they? I was just a cog in the machine."

"But that's how things are done. No one's ever the one guy who does whatever, it's always a group effort in the real world."

"Tell that to my parents," Yoshi said with a snort. "I was headhunted into Disney when I was fourteen and to hear my parents talk, you'd think I was there to wear a mouse suit and get my picture taken with kids. Disney is cutting-edge, it's right up there with NASA in the field of robotics, but somehow I was letting them down? When I told them I'd been chosen to head the team that built the first self-guided car in the world, they told me working on a team was like riding a bike with training wheels and nothing to brag about. Like…really? Nothing, literally nothing I could do was living up to my full potential, whatever that was supposed to be. The pressure was enormous, and that wasn't even the worst part yet. The worst part came in…what was that, '91? '92? I'd done some redesigns for the audio-animatrons at Disneyland and it was a pretty big deal back in the day, so I scored an invite to meet some of the other youngbloods in the industry…and I got a reality check like a brick to the fricking face. For the first time in my life, I wasn't the smartest or even the youngest kid in the room. I wasn't special. I was good, okay, but I sure wasn't the best. You know what I was? I was seventeen and already burning out in the nichest of niche industries. I told my folks I wanted to quit and they lost their damn minds. Tears, shouting, the whole bit. How could I squander my genius? How could I even think such a thing after everything they'd done for me, everything they'd sacrificed? And my manager," he added with a special sort of tone, "decided my moodiness was because I wasn't sleeping well, so he gave me some sedatives to help with that. And peppers, so I could focus in the mornings. And mood stabilizers, which as you have probably guessed, only destabilized my mood even more. And he was a doctor, so of course he knew best. And I have to admit, in the beginning, it really seemed like the pills helped. I felt like I was getting things done again. I wasn't," he added with a rueful grin, "but I felt like I was. Lots of projects going in lots of directions, lots of…you know, momentum! But everything's a work in progress. Nothing's done. You know?"

Ana did not answer, but she thought of her aunt's house. And Freddy's, for that matter. Two huge, sprawling buildings full of empty rooms, half torn up, half put together…

"My work got worse," Yoshi continued. "A lot worse. I don't really remember much of that. I was high pretty much all the time for the next three years. And then, one day, I didn't have a manager or a PR guy or an agent to 'fill my prescriptions' and I had to get a drug dealer like a frigging pleb. And then sell drugs so I could afford my own."

"I was wondering when Rider would come into this," Ana remarked.

"Yeah. And in all fairness to the guy, he told me I was going to get sloppy and I'd get caught and ruin my life. But what did he know? He was a drug dealer. I was a super genius."

"Did you get sloppy?"

"Yup! And I got caught, but he was dead wrong on the last one. I didn't ruin my life. I got fired, so the pressure bubble of that whole mess popped overnight. My lawyer made me a sweet deal—no jail time, no record, just rehab…and I need to come clean. That's where I really picked up my name, in rehab. My parents never let me play video games. But I do kick absolute ass at Mario Kart, I never lied about that."

The guilt on his face was so profound that Ana felt moved to reach out her foot and give his a sympathetic tap.

He smiled wanly, then shook it off and smiled for real. "It's also where I got off the hard stuff and that alone really straightened a lot of stuff out. My folks were so ashamed by the scandal, they disowned me, so I don't have to deal with that toxic bullcrap anymore. Plus, I kept Rider's name out of it, and when I got out of rehab and had nothing…you know, it sounds weird, but he was there for me. Put me up for a few weeks—at a pot farm, but still. It kept me solvent until I could get back on my feet."

"Don't ever tell anyone but me that part of the story," Ana advised him. "Rider will kill the fuck out of you if you let it be known he's a soft touch."

"Believe me, I try not to even think the guy's name too hard for fear he'll pop up in front me like the damn Devil himself. Pills sure never made me freak out like I did the night he suddenly called me up telling me he had another job for me after, what? Eight years? Ten? And that job was you, Buster." He put out his hand, and Bonnie, never one to leave a bro hanging, give him a high-five. Yoshi settled back with a broad grin, saying, "Washing out may have been the best thing that ever happened to me. My name may be mud on the company level, but I kept some individual contacts, which is a hell of an advantage in any industry. The work I do may not be exciting, but it pays the bills and I'm my own boss."

"If you're happy, that's all that matters," Ana agreed, thoughtlessly raising the bong in a salute to Chica, who said shit like that all the time.

"So that's my story," Yoshi concluded. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"What was it like for you, being the smartest, youngest kid in every class?"

He caught her with a mouthful of smoke and it took her a while to cough it all out, laughing all the way. Even once she got herself under control, all she could manage at first was a hoarse, incredulous, "Seriously?"

He'd been smiling, bewilderedly trying to share some unknown joke, and now his smile faded. "Um…yeah?"

"Dude, I am so far from smart, it's not even funny. Unless you're stoned," she acknowledged and coughed again, croaking, "Then it's fucking hilarious."

"Oh come on. I feel like a freaking caveman around you. I was terrified to even touch this guy," he said, patting Freddy's battery case. "No pictures, no video documentation, no schematics. Just me, taking something irreplaceable apart. Every time I think about having to put him back together without any kind of safety net, I want to pee myself a little, but you? I'm looking at your face right now and you don't even see the problem. If it wasn't for all the finicky stuff that comes with miscalibration, you'd slap him back together right now."

"No, I wouldn't," Ana said mildly. "I'm under the influence and he's heavy machinery."

"Yeah, whatever, you know what I mean. Look at this. Look at this!" He leaned out and popped Chica's thigh casing open, exposing the bones of her leg, with all the modifications Ana had made. "Don't think I didn't notice this. The solder's so fresh, I can smell it. I know you did it."

"So?"

"So how long did it take you?"

"I don't know, I wasn't looking at the clock. A couple hours at least."

Yoshi clapped both hands to his face and groaned into them, then slapped his thighs and all but shouted, "That's what I'm talking about!"

"What? Jesus! Why are you yelling at me?"

"A couple hours? Hours?! A couple days! That's what it should have taken, if it could be done at all, which it can't," he said, pointing at her accusingly. "There might be a couple people alive today who could do it in one day, but I'm sure as hell not one of them, and I'm good, lady. But a couple hours? By hand? That's impossible. The guys who built them probably couldn't even do that, and it works, doesn't it?"

"No," said Ana, oddly defensive. "I mean, yeah, enough to walk around on, but it's not a perfect fit, so it's just a matter of time before it blows out on her."

"Yeah yeah yeah, but it works!" he insisted. "That's a big, big deal!"

"Why are you getting so keyed up about this?"

"Because they're awesome!"

"Dude, you need to dial that down. It's an animatronic animal band, not the cure for cancer."

"Hey, there's a lot of degrees for awesomeness, okay? Don't gatekeep my joy. 'Dial it down,'" he groused, glaring at her from under the fringe of his hair. "Lady, you need to dial it up. I honestly…I don't know whether to laugh or get mad here. It's like you've got the holy grail I've been chasing all my life and you're using it as a popcorn bowl or something. Not out of ignorance, because you know what it is, but you don't care about the holy grail and you need something to put your popcorn in!"

Ana was a little too stoned to get mad, but she tried. "Okay, first? Popcorn is fucking delicious and I would really like some right now."

"Yeah," Yoshi sighed. "Me, too."

"And second, I'm here, aren't I? I dropped my whole damn life and drove all day to get these guys to the best in the business, so don't fucking tell me I don't know what I've got."

"Yeah, yeah," he said between calming puffs. "I know. I'm sorry, but you've got to understand…you just don't see them the same way I do, because…you know…you see them every day. When I saw awesome every day, I didn't appreciate it either. But…I…don't anymore. I used to. I used to be the golden boy of robotics, and I…" He looked at the bong, laughed smoke, and set it aside. "I made a few mistakes, and now I make crawling zombies for Halloween and flying reindeer for Christmas and the occasional display piece for tourist traps and I'm…better than that. Okay? I may never be awesome again, but I'm way better than that. So being here, seeing them, working on them…? It's like God Himself is smiling on me for the first time in almost twenty years, and you're calling them an animatronic animal band like they're the Countrytime Bears or the Banana Splits. And you know better. You've got to know better." His attention wandered to Chica's patchworked leg and he shook his head wonderingly. "I'm good, but damn, you are on another level entirely."

"All I did was take something apart and put it together again. It's about as miraculous as doing a jigsaw puzzle."

"Yeah, right. If you were using pieces from a different puzzle that you just hand-cut to fit the pattern and still somehow made the same picture. Let me tell you something, lady. Real talk? These things are impossible. You know that, right? They should not exist. They are butter-soft sci-fi bullshit brought to walking, talking life and they're amazing, but they're impossible. I look at them and, wow, I don't know what they are or how they work and they scare me a little…and meanwhile, you just took a broken leg off and built a new one like it was easy. It's not easy. Tell me you know that. I think I could handle the crippling feelings of inadequacy better if I just knew that you knew how amazing you are."

Ana shrugged uncomfortably. "I got a knack, that's all. It doesn't mean anything. It sure doesn't mean I'm smart in any way that actually matters, it just means I'm good at putting shit together."

"Good at putting shit together," he echoed and covered his face again.

"No, come on. I had to repeat the sixth grade. I flunked everything. I flunked art, for God's sake. I dropped out of the ninth grade with a straight-F average, and when I'm not working scut jobs at minimum wage or refurbing meth labs for my drug dealer, I'm not working at all. My life is legit better now than it has ever been before and it's still a goddamn shipwreck. Oh knock it off," she said irritably as more servos whined. "You know it's true."

Yoshi, who had been about to speak, clearly thought that was directed at him. He visibly swallowed some words, fidgeting, then went ahead and said, "Well…maybe…I mean, if that's really how you feel, maybe you could come work for me."

She laughed, groaned, and laughed some more.

"I'm serious."

"I know you are, man, but it's still funny."

"But why not?" he pressed. "I know how this place looks, but I'm working on it and my contracts are solid. You can stay here until you find a place—no funny business, I swear!"

"I have a place," she said with a bittersweet smile. "I need to get back to it. And you don't need me. You know what you're doing, you got a good thing here, and the last thing you need is someone like me fucking it all up for you. You're a nice guy, Yoshi, but trust me, I'm no good for nice guys." She tipped her head back, looking up at the tower of Bonnie's familiar body, made strange by this angle. "I'll make you wish you never met me, if I give you half a chance."

Bonnie's ears twitched, high above her.

Yoshi seemed to be having trouble thinking of what to say, which was understandable. Ana took pity on him and gave him an easy out.

"I got to get some sleep," she said.

"Yeah," he said with obvious relief. "Me, too. This was fun, though. We should do it again sometime."

"You want to think twice before you give me a free pass to mooch off your stash, friend."

"If you're buying all the food while you're here, it's the least I can do." He offered her a hand, which she didn't need but did accept, helping her climb stiffly to her feet and watching as she took her first unsteady steps. "You sure you don't want the bed? Instead of me, I mean! I'm not hitting on you, I swear! I'm just saying, it's not too late to switch places."

"I'm good," she said as she opened the outside door for him and waved him through (without realizing it, she kicked one foot out in front of the other as she did it, nodding once, unconsciously imitating Blue's habitual little bow every time he got the door for her). "See you tomorrow."

"Bright and early," he promised, backing out into the night.

"Crack of dawn."

He finally went, locking the door behind him as a gallant gesture that was entirely pointless, considering he kept the key and could unlock it just as easily, but she appreciated the sentiment all the same. She switched off the workshop lights and moved to the window to watch him go, a little unsteady on her feet, maybe, but only a little.

"He's gone," she said at length. "Hopefully he'll stay gone this time."

"The guy can sure talk, can't he?" Bonnie came over and had a look for himself, leaning in over her shoulder to share the small window with her. His warm chest pressed against her back, the rhythmic vibrations of his cooling fan in sync with her breaths. "I got to admit, I wasn't expecting his life story."

"I feel so sorry for him," Chica added. "No child is emotionally equipped to handle that kind of pressure. What kind of parent would put him through it? And then to just…abandon him for not meeting their impossible expectations!"

"He turned out all right," Ana said sleepily, leaning into Bonnie's cracked side. She didn't think about it. He was there, so she did it. He put his arm around her with the same distracted ease and it didn't mean anything. "Nice guy. A little skittish, but he knows his shit. I'm feeling a lot better about him than I was this morning."

"Feeling lots o' things tonight, ain't ye," said Foxy in a flat, humorless tone matched by the hard shine in his yellow eye as he stared at her.

"Mostly feeling stoned," Ana admitted, giving Bonnie a last pat before detaching herself. "Heading to bed," she announced. "Night, guys. Night, Chica."

"Goodnight!"

"See you," said Bonnie, already poking through the drawers of Yoshi's workspace. "Score. I found a deck of cards. You guys want to play some poker or something?"

"Aye, deal me in," she heard Foxy say as she walked away. "But I warn ye, I bluff, I cheat, and above all things, I be a sore loser when I don't get what I want."

Ana's heart tried to tell her something when her ears heard that, but whatever it was couldn't penetrate the thick blue smoke filling up her brain. She left it all behind with the closing of a cheap door and flopped down onto Yoshi's lumpy, uncomfortable couch. Just a loveseat, really, but she'd slept in worse beds. Even the smell of it, musty and sour and a bit smoky in spite of his preventative measures, resonated with that child-sized part of her and made everything feel a little more like home. She drowsed to the low grumble and hum of Yoshi's computer as it labored steadily through its backlog of tasks, until the lines of reality blurred. For a second, it seemed perfectly plausible that the long drive to Yoshi's place and everything that had happened after that was one big, tedious dream and now she'd half-woken up to find herself back in the pizzeria with Bonnie's arms around her, listening to his cooling fan gasp and strain behind his cracked chestplate. With her last semi-conscious thought, she wondered if she'd remembered to lock the loading dock door, and even before she'd quite finished reassuring herself that she had, she was deep asleep.