New Faces, Old Bones

by RLeeSmith

It's true: Freddy Lives. And Ana Stark soon realizes that she can live with knowing that. The pizzeria has become her home, and Freddy and the other animatronics have become her family. But there are still plenty of other secrets left for Ana to discover, some of them buried below the pizzeria itself…and the worst of them wants to be found.

63. Chapter 63

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

Just being back in the pizzeria was great, but Ana knew Freddy wouldn't truly feel like he was home until after he'd patrolled and verified that every inch was exactly as he'd left it, so it was something of an understatement to say she was surprised to find him still in the kitchen. And although the three of them had not been making any effort to be quiet as they picked their way through the store-room (Chica wanted to watch a movie later, Bonnie was game as long as it wasn't a cartoon, and Ana was trying to find some way to wiggle out of it without saying, 'I just want to get drunk and go to bed,' because it made her sound like an alcoholic), Freddy did not acknowledge them at all. He stood in the opposite doorway, one hand holding the one remaining swinging door open and the other at his side, restlessly flexing on his microphone as he stared out into the dining room.

He wasn't posing, but he cut a striking picture there all the same. The restaurant wouldn't open for a while, it seemed, so it was still on power-saver mode. What grey winter's light had managed to angle in through the loading dock door could not hook around a corner and across the kitchen to reach him, so he was mostly lost in the shadows. The security camera was apparently on in the other room, shining down on an empty stage as it had probably been doing for the last two weeks without any noise or movement to attract its attention. Ana could see nothing of its light except the way it faintly reflected over the lines of Freddy's new face, like a charcoal sketch on black paper. He was so still, not even blinking, but his ears continuously rotated left to right to left, like a radar receiver, hunting out sounds in a silent building.

Ana could understand wanting to savor that first moment of homecoming in privacy, so she had respectfully shut up on seeing him, as had Bonnie and Chica, but Freddy seemed content to stand there all day and at last, Chica moved over to the food-prep side of the kitchen and set her armload of loose parts on the counter with a clatter.

The reflected light on Freddy's face intensified as the camera in the other room tracked this new sound, but it couldn't find anyone from its position on the stage.

Freddy tipped an ear at Chica, then turned his head, watching her rummage through one of 'her' cupboards. "What are you doing?" he asked and followed with an understanding, "Ah," as she pulled out one of her aprons and gave it a few shakes to unroll it. "Do you need help with the drawstrings?"

"Nope!" Chica said happily and proved it, deftly tying them behind her back in a perfect bow. She ran her hands down the front and sides several times, which even Ana knew was less about smoothing out wrinkles than feeling the reality of her new figure. "How do I look?"

The camera snapped off, came back on in the East Hall and tried again, but the angle was even worse from there, and the cameras in the kitchen and store-room were broken for reasons Ana probably shouldn't be proud of. For the moment, the security system couldn't find them, but it was sure trying, snapping back and forth between positions so that it produced an almost strobe-like effect behind Freddy, who completely ignored it to give Chica a warm smile.

"Happy," he said. "You look very happy."

"I am. Is this all right?" she asked, looking down at her fluffy chest where it showed over the top of her apron. "It's not too much cleavage, is it?"

"That's entirely up to you," Freddy said, turning back to the dining room while the camera jumped between its limited points of view.

"Looks great to me," Bonnie added.

Chica beamed. "Thanks! I've never had any before. I'm not sure what the rules are."

"There's only one rule," Ana told her. "Whatever you're comfortable showing, that's how much you show, and if anyone else has a problem with it, that's their fucking problem, not yours." She paused, distracted by the camera's frenetic flickering. "That thing's going to break."

"Hope springs eternal," Freddy murmured. He turned away from the dining room and looked down at the thing Ana carried in her arms. His brows rose slightly, then drew together.

Reading confusion in his ears, Ana explained, "It's your old head," and shifted it around so he could see the face.

Freddy recoiled slightly. His frown deepened. "I can see that," he said slowly. "What are you doing with it?"

"Sorry," she said at once. She hadn't realized his aversion to being touched would extend to his old skins, but she supposed she should have. "I was just trying to get the truck emptied and it was the closest thing to the door. I'll put it down." Ana looked around the narrow aisle between the oven and the wall, but before she could find a place for it, Freddy was there to take it from her.

"I'm surprised you even brought it in," he said, looking it in its absent eyes. "I thought you'd just throw it away."

"Why would I do that?" she asked, stung. "It's not garbage, it's a piece of you. Don't you want to keep it?"

"Keep it?" Far from seeming reassured, he drew back and squinted at her. "Do you keep your old toenails?"

"It's not the same thing."

"If you say so." His gaze shifted to Bonnie and Chica. "Are you keeping yours?"

"Ew," said Chica and Bonnie backed her up with an emphatic, "Hell no."

"You don't get quite so attached to your skin when it is, by design, detachable," Freddy told her. "Feel free to get rid of them at your convenience, and speaking for myself, the sooner you do that, the happier I'll be. Particularly the head. Empty head-pieces…have bad associations for me."

Ana thought of Erik Metzger's 'collection' in the basement under Mulholland Drive and grimaced. "Yeah, of course. Sorry. Give it here." He did and she quickly walked it back to the store-room and put it on the nearest empty shelf with enough space to hold it. "Thing is, if the quarry's frozen over, it could be awhile before I can get rid of that old stuff. And it's plastic," she muttered to herself more than him. "Might float. I may need some more barrels. Sorry, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it's really not safe to just throw them in a dumpster…which is not very respectful either, now that I think about it."

"Again, I can't help but wonder how solemnly you lay your toenails to rest after clipping them," Freddy told her, already looking back at the doorway to the dining room, where the camera was still spastically jumping from one angle to the other. "I don't care how you dispose of them, as long as they're gone. Are you determined to unload the truck this instant?"

"I am filled with determination, big bear, but that doesn't mean you have to help," she said. "Go do your inspection."

"I'm not comfortable leaving you with that much work."

"It's not as much as you're probably thinking. You're fine," she assured him. "Go."

Freddy grumbled, pretending to consider it, then looked at Bonnie. "Don't let her work too hard," he ordered and turned to point a stern finger in Ana's face. "Eat something before you do anything else, do you understand me?"

"Yeah, yeah. Get out of here, Munchie Bear," she said, gently pushing his hand aside.

Freddy walked away, already in his patrolling stride. His voice rumbled back from the dining room in a smirking and oddly aggressive growl, "Yes, I see you. Yes, it's me. I hope you enjoyed your alone-time. It will never happen again."

Ana smiled back at Bonnie and Chica, who were exchanging glances of their own. "I think he's talking to the cameras," she whispered. "He must really be happy to be home."

Another shared glance, heavy with understanding that didn't include her.

"I think you're right," Chica said carefully as she gathered the loose parts back into her arms, "about both of those things."

"But I don't think they're connected," Bonnie added dryly.

"Hush."

Ana went to the doorway, hoping to catch a tender moment between Freddy and his favorite patrolling buddy, the closed-circuit camera, but Freddy wasn't big on tender moments and she got there just in time to see the West Hall Door scrape shut behind him. And while she was standing there, thinking bittersweet thoughts of the unlikely friendship that forms between lonely people and inanimate objects, the surviving lights began to come on all over the building. The pizzeria wouldn't 'open' for another hour, but the morning crew was scheduled to come in early to set up chairs and mix pizza dough. Now, instead of seeing just Bonnie's guitar on an empty stage like the cover of some emo album, she saw it all.

"Oh fuck me, I forgot all we left all that shit just sitting out everywhere in the dining room," Ana groaned, pressing the heel of her hand into her forehead.

"It can just go on sitting there for one more day," Chica assured her.

"And all night while I'm sleeping and the next day while I'm at work, so I can come home and still not want to deal with it, and before I know it another week will go by, and I still don't know where to put it. Why the hell haven't I thought about this?" she demanded. "I act like the Parts Fairy is going to flutter down out of Animatronic Candyland and do it for me."

"Or we could," Bonnie said with a shrug. "I know we haven't given you a lot of reasons to believe this, but we can actually clean up after ourselves." He paused, looking around and perhaps remembering what this room had looked like when Ana first discovered it. "I mean…we don't, obviously, but we can."

Ana shook her head. "It's not your job to pick up my mess."

"We could just as easily say the same thing," Chica pointed out, "but we won't, because we're a family and families don't keep score. You aren't picking up our mess and we aren't picking up yours. We're all in this together and the only thing we're picking up is each other. Now." She gave her arms a careful jostle, shifting the loose parts she carried without destabilizing their arrangement. "Where do you want these?"

Ana grimaced, but gave up. "I don't know. If they're used, then I guess I should just get rid…no," she interrupted herself, scowling. "I need to go through them."

"Why?" Bonnie asked. "We've got plenty of spares now. We don't need these."

"We do not 'have plenty'. We have an extremely finite amount of each individual piece and they all matter. I don't actually expect to find many I can salvage, but if I do, we're keeping them. I just don't know where," she sighed, looking around the dining room. "It ought to go backstage, but there's not enough room and Freddy doesn't want me back there anyway. Even if he let me, that means a trip to Lowe's that sure isn't happening tonight and then I've got to do the work and in the meantime, where are we putting this shit tonight?"

"How about the craft room?" Bonnie suggested. "It's bigger than backstage, plenty of cupboards and drawers built in for the little stuff. Plus, the lights still work, which is always a bonus in this place."

"Oh sure, and how is Freddy going to react when I ask him for another room?"

"You're cute," Bonnie drawled. "Ana, you just drove a million miles and dropped a shit-load of money on our new bodies. Pretty sure Freddy would give you the whole damn building if you asked."

Ana sighed, rubbing her face. "Fine. I guess just…dump everything in here for tonight while I go deal with that."

"Deal with what?"

"The mess, Bonnie. All those cupboard and drawers? Are full of chewed up crafting crap and mouse shit. You want that rubbed into your microcircuitry? Not to mention the glitter. Good God, Bon, glitter is a nightmare. No, I've got to scrape it out, scrub it out and dry it out before I can even start putting shit away." Out of nowhere, frustration bubbled up. "You know I love this place and I'm not trying to shit all over your first day home, but this is what it's like every time I come here. Everything I have to do means having to do something else first! It never ends because I can't…I can't get started!"

"You just love overthinking things, don't you? Here's what we're going to do. First, we offload the truck. The good stuff can go over there. The rest of it…goes here." Bonnie sauntered over and put the box he'd been carrying down on the stage, nodding at Chica, who stacked her odds and ends neatly around it. "You can look through it while me and Chica—"

"Chica and I," Chica corrected.

Bonnie rolled his eyes and pointed his thumb at her. "While me and this grammar fanatic clean out the craft room. Even if it takes all day, which it won't, and all night to put shit away, which it won't, it'll be done before you wake up tomorrow and realize what a big deal you made about nothing."

"I have to at least ask Freddy—"

"No, you don't," said Bonnie, already heading back toward the kitchen. "Freddy may be the leader of the band, but I am the king of the craft room and I say you can have it. If Freddy has a problem with that, he can talk to me, and I will bet you a hundred bucks against my left ear that the first thing Freddy asks once he finds out is if you need anything else. I got to say, I think you're doing him a little dirty assuming he's going to jump straight to getting mad."

Probably. Maybe she'd gotten so used to dealing with problems that she was becoming incapable of dealing at all unless there were problems. But she didn't want to say that (and from the way Chica was looking at her, she might not even have to), so instead she tried to take it back to humor, calling after him, "What am I going to do with your left ear?"

He leaned back in through the tray return window with a wink. "I think the real question is, what am I going to do with a hundred bucks? How much does a motorcycle cost?"

"Depends on whether you get one from Harley-Davidson or Hot Wheels."

"Oo, Hot Wheels! I like the sound of that one."

"I'll see what I can do," said Ana and gave in with a sigh. "All right, we'll do it your way, but fair warning, when Freddy demands to know what the hello I think I'm doing, I'm going to tell him it was your idea."

"Awesome. I never get credit for good ideas. Hey, Foxy!" he shouted, moving off out of sight. "Time to get off your ass and get shit done!"

"You're not really going to give him a motorcycle, are you?" Chica whispered, walking beside her.

"From Hot Wheels? Yeah, sure. I'll get two and the little loop-de-loop track they run on so we can race 'em."

"Loop…?" Chica's crest flared in surprise. "They're toys?"

"Shh! Yeah, but let the man dream a little."

The kitchen was noticeably colder than the dining room. The store-room was colder still and stepping out into the open air was like taking a punishing fist made of ice right to the lungs. Ana had to stop on the dock and adjust to the windchill while Chica went on ahead. Ana followed, comfortably envious of Chica's immunity to the cold, thinking nothing but how good it felt to see Chica walk with confidence instead of the limping waddle Ana had always known, right up until she walked up the ramp into the back of the truck and found Bonnie in it, alone.

"Where's Foxy?" she asked.

"I don't know. Took off." Bonnie flicked his ears, unsuccessfully trying to hide his annoyance with humor. "Color me completely unsurprised. No problem, we can do this without him."

Ana stepped back out onto the short ramp, shielding her eyes from the wind as best she could, but saw nothing but ice and asphalt in all directions. She cupped her hands around her mouth, shouted his name once, got no answer and, honestly, expected none. "Where is he?" she asked again, pointlessly.

"Pirate Cove, probably."

"No way. How could he get past us?"

"Easy, he ran up the back hall from the store room to the break room while we were in the kitchen. Trust me, he's already back in his cabin, laughing his ass off at us. Give it an hour and he'll swagger out and be all, 'I come to help ye with the shifting, mates!'" Bonnie growled in an uncomplimentary imitation of Foxy's piratey brogue. "'Oh, are ye already done? Ah well, off I goes, dum-dum diddly dum-dum!'"

"Be nice," Chica murmured.

"I am being nice, you have no friggin idea. Come on, Chica, is that all you're getting?" Bonnie teased as he loaded up on boxes of parts. "You got too used to being broken. You've got to start learning to carry your weight again."

"I am carrying my weight. Just because it's possible to carry twice my weight doesn't mean I have to," sniffed Chica. "I don't think Ana would appreciate it if we overloaded our stabilizers right after she got them replaced."

"Yeah, yeah. Safety first." Bonnie rolled his eyes, but put two of the boxes back down. "You big chicken."

"I'm a canary now," Chica informed him and went into the building with her crest high and her beak in the air, tailfeathers swishing under her apron's big pink bow.

Ana went for one of the boxes Bonnie had discarded, only to have Bonnie wedge himself in front of her.

"No, you don't," he said, exaggerating a severe expression. "You heard Freddy."

"He said I'm not supposed to work that hard, not that I can't work at all. And he only said it, it wasn't an order. And I don't take orders from him anyway."

"Come on, let a bunny flex his new muscles." His broad smile faded slightly and his ears lowered. "You're okay, right? It's the long drive and whatever happened at the other restaurant, but other than that, you're okay…right?"

Yes, of course.

Don't I look okay?

I'm fine.

Ana said, "I don't know."

He nodded, searching her face in troubled silence. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Jesus, I don't know. Who knows something like that?"

"Chica might."

"I don't want to be psycho-analyzed by a chicken."

"She's a canary now."

"Well, that's different. All the best therapists are canaries." She shook her head, letting her forced smile go. "I don't know. It's too soon, I guess. I don't feel like I'm home yet. I feel like I'm still driving, only I'm not getting anywhere."

Bonnie snorted through his speaker, nodding. "Yeah, I get that. I kind of feel like Yoshi's going to come barging in out of nowhere and catch us talking."

"Right? I don't feel…here yet. I don't feel anywhere. And I don't want to fix it, is that wrong? I don't want to do things about it or talk about it, I just want to wake up tomorrow and find out everything is normal again."

Bonnie's ears went crooked. He looked down at himself meaningfully and up at here again. "I hate to tell you this, but if you're looking for normal, you came to the wrong pizzeria. Things don't get 'normal' here, but," he added in a softer tone, "they can get better."

"It won't," she said sourly. "It'll be worse. It's always worse. You wait and see, Bon. If there's even one way to make things worse tonight, I'll find it."

Bonnie shifted the boxes onto one shoulder, freeing a hand to brush the backs of his knuckles along her cheek. She let him, leaned into it…and then she stepped away.

"Grab your stuff," he said lightly, turning to go. "Me and Chica will take care of everything else. All you got to do is sit on the stage and go through some boxes. After that, your calendar is completely cleared."

"Not really." She went out to the cab to collect her daypack, the plastic case with her fancy dress inside, and the box from Gallifreys. She held the latter up as she rejoined Bonnie, waiting by the dock steps. "I've still got to eat a pie in front of Freddy and watch cartoons with Chica."

"Fun. Got any big plans after that?"

"Yeah, actually. There's going to be a one-night-only homecoming concert on the main show stage later, headlined by the inimitable musical stylings of the legendary Bonnie the Bunny."

"Was that tonight? I got to have a serious talk with my agent. But yeah, sure," he said, leading the way into the building. "It's how I was going to spend the night anyway. Any requests?"

"It's your show, Mr. The Bunny."

"Don't tell me that or you're going to end up sitting through fifty songs about pizza."

"I wouldn't even care, as long as I finally get to see you play."

"One Fazbear Band's Greatest Hits Extravaganza, coming up. But I'm warning you right now, we're closing on a duet and you're going to do the dip."

"Dream on."

"A dip and a twirl."

He left her in the kitchen and went on his way down the East Hall toward the craft room. Ana put the pie in the cooler and took a Monster out. Frosty cold, not what she wanted on such a chilly day, but she drank it anyway, out of habit more than pleasure. She sipped it on her way to her room, tossing her pack and the dress through the door without going in. She wasn't sleepy, but she was tired, and if she let herself go to her room, she'd end up sitting on the bed, and if she sat on the bed, she'd lie down in it, and if she lay down, she'd fall asleep. It wasn't even noon yet. She wasn't ready to sleep.

She wasn't ready to put herself on the metaphorical bench and sort through used parts for salvageable ones either, so she made the first mistake and went back outside. All she had to do was bring her stuff in, Bonnie said, and while she was dead sure he didn't mean her toolchest when he said it, it was hers and she'd take care of it. Bad enough she had to let them do all the lifting and cleaning while she sat around doing nothing, but that chest was her responsibility and no one else's.

One last time, she stepped out onto the door, ducking away from the relentless slap of the wind as much as possible and reminding herself it could be worse, could be raining. Or snowing. Or worst of all, it could be warm. Mammon winters were nasty for a number of reasons, but at least the cold kept the smell down.

And speaking of smells, she could really use a shower. More and more, she regretted talking herself out of installing one here, but hey, she still had the camping shower stashed somewhere and it wouldn't take long to pull it out and put it back together. If she didn't have the energy for that (and she suspected she didn't), she could always just scrub up in the sink. And if she didn't have the energy for that, she could go to bed unwashed. It wasn't like anyone here could smell her.

But on the other hand, she had work in the morning and a shower might improve her chances of still having a job. Or, even better, a nice long soak in Aunt Easter's orgy-sized tub with the massage jets on, which would maybe make up for having to bed down in a sleeping bag in the front parlor. But on the first hand again, she did not want to drive this stupid truck up that steep, winding, and probably icy mountain road. But back to the second hand, she was going to have to do that anyway, if only to make sure the townsfolk hadn't torched the place in her absence.

Here, Ana's mind wandered, alternatively fantasizing about baths and beds (and maybe having a drink. Just one. To celebrate being home) while she banged around in the back of the truck, muscling the big toolchest free of the boxes that closed it in. Metal screamed on metal in short bursts as she heaved on it; she should really be wearing ear protection, but while Ana considered herself fairly safety conscious, especially around her equipment, the prevention of hearing loss in her old age was not one of her priorities. She didn't have to worry about the noise. Ana believed, falsely, that the only risk of discovery came from humans and it was too cold for anyone else to be out here today. She believed, rightly, that she was the only human around for miles. So what if she made some noise? The worst thing that could happen was an animatronic overhearing her and coming over to investigate. So Ana thought and ironically, she was right about that, too.

Ana finally got the toolchest strapped onto the dolly. She thought she got it on okay, but as soon as she got it out of the truck and onto the asphalt, she could hear something dragging. She stopped and checked, thinking one of the strap's ends had slipped and was rubbing up on the dolly's wheel, just begging to get snagged and cause a spill. But no, it all looked good.

She started pushing again and this time, got as far as the steps before she heard it again—a definite, almost rhythmic scraping noise. If it wasn't something on the wheel, what the hell could it be? Ana checked all around the dolly, then looked down at herself, in case she'd somehow hooked a loose cable or coil in the truck and was unknowingly dragging it around behind her like a trail of toilet paper.

Nothing.

Maybe it was the wind, blowing across a broken bottle or shaking through the trees just right. People justifiably groaned at horror movies when some jackhat tried to blame serial-killer sounds on the wind, but Ana grew up in Mammon and she knew the wind actually made some weird noises. And if that was a stupid thing to think, at least it was sensibly stupid. This was the real world, not a dumb movie or video game. What else could it be?

Ana hauled the dolly up the steps, too impatient to wait for Bonnie and his animatronic muscles to do it for her. He had other work to do and besides, she'd gotten it into the pizzeria by herself the first time she'd moved in. The ice made it a bit trickier this time, but most of the ice was over by the ledge. The steps themselves were pretty clear. She'd manage.

She couldn't hear the wind, or whatever it was, over the godawful clatter of the toolchest banging up the four concrete steps, but as soon as she was on the dock, she stopped to listen for it again, which was good, because if she hadn't stopped, if it hadn't been for that quiet, she never would have heard the tiny metallic ping that was the sound of a literal pin dropping.

She didn't know it was a pin at first. Her first thought was that an icicle had broken off in the wind, and her sensible reaction was to get safely under cover. She was just a little too far from the open doorway and did not dare to run for it on the patchy ice, but she did the next best thing and immediately flattened herself against the side of the building. She did not look up. Never look up to see an icicle, especially if they're falling. That was how icicles turned into 'eye-cicles.' She did everything wrong, in hindsight, but at the time, she really believed she'd done everything right.

And because she was standing there keeping her head down to protect her more vulnerable features from falling icicles, she noticed the pin. She couldn't identify exactly what it was, but it was some kind of securing pin, a good three inches long, ridged at one end and rounded at the other, but its most important feature at the moment was that it was bent in the middle and not by design.

"Shit!" Ana blurted, dropping to one knee to inspect the dolly. The toolchest, fully loaded, was well over the maximum hauling weight and she knew it. Hell, the stupid thing used to have wheels, but they'd broken off because she kept overloading it. She should have moved it drawer by drawer, but who had the time? Besides, everyone knew capacity guidelines were only general suggestions. If she was strong enough to move it, then it should be safe enough to move, right? Right. Now she had a busted dolly and she was damn lucky she hadn't tipped the whole thing over, although maybe if she had to spend half an hour picking up a 50-piece socket set in subzero temperatures, it would teach her the lesson so it stuck.

But all the cotterpins appeared to be in place. Likewise the nuts and bolts keeping the wheels on. The dolly didn't appear to have lost anything, but that pin, whatever it was, sure looked important. What the hell was it? And if it hadn't fallen off the dolly, then where had it come from? It hadn't fallen out of the sky.

As Ana crouched there, bewilderedly running her fingers along the axle, hunting in vain for the fitting where it belonged, something dropped onto her shoulder and bounced off onto the dock.

Still not an icicle. A rock. Roundish, reddish, about the size and general heft of a golf ball. Ana palmed the mystery metal bit and picked the rock up, looking around for the little shithead who'd thrown it, but even as she did, she could feel her brain's dormant danger-radar fire up and violently yank her thoughts into formation.

No one had thrown it. A thrown rock, even one this size, has a very different impact, no matter how playfully lobbed, than one that merely falls, as this one had done. And this was not part of the gravel-top roof. She'd laid those herself. There was nothing up there even remotely this size, this shape, or this color. In fact, the color seemed the most significant feature of all, being the same color—one might even say the unique color—of the desert enclosing Edge of Nowhere.

All these thoughts stormed through her mind in one instant and blew away, leaving her with one last thought ringing in the silence of its wake: Don't look up.

But of course she did, because if Ana Stark does nothing else, Ana Stark makes terrible choices.

She looked up and saw, black against the grey-white sky of Mammon's November morning, a wolfish head stretched out on an unnaturally long neck. A second head bobbed below it, fleshless, eyeless, but alive. She could see nothing of the body to which they were both attached, only a hulking silhouette without symmetry, nothing her mere mortal eyes could identify as a living thing.

She heard—like another pin dropping in the awful quiet of her frozen mind—Mr. Faust telling her there were monsters in Mammon. Real ones, not just evil and apathetic people, but monsters, and she hadn't believed him. And now here she was, about to be eaten by one.

Figured.

Then it shifted, swinging its head slowly side to side, so that the overcast sky behind it sketched a little light over its body, showing Ana not muscle and bone or scales or skin, but metal and plastic and wire, along with the ragged remains of clothing, dried weeds, a crumpled pizza poster…Was that the head of the sea monster toy from the playground? It was as if the pizzeria itself had puked up a mountain of trash and used the malignant power of its own urban legend to bring it to life.

'No, that's stupid,' Ana thought calmly. 'It's the Tangle. Blue missed one of them and it was smart enough to play dead until we were gone, but now it's here. It crawled out from under the fire and followed me home.'

Never mind that this made no more sense than a sentient restaurant golem. In that moment, she believed it. She had to. She was looking right at the damn thing and she'd seen enough Toy animatronic parts in the past two weeks to recognize them making up the internal framework of this bloated thing. It was the Tangle. It had to be the Tangle. There was nothing else it could be.

And then, belatedly, Ana's eyes adjusted enough to let her see that it wasn't a black wolf's head looking down at her at all, but that of a white fox. The same white fox from the poster that used to hang in the lobby. What was her name? Pull-A-Part Polly. Except it wasn't, not originally. Long before this place opened, the thing leering down at her now had been one of the new faces of another Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. This used to be Foxanne, Foxy's co-star back at Mulholland, at least until the Bite of '87, when she'd been taken off the stage and turned into the take-apart attraction for the bloodthirsty toddlers of Kiddie Cove, where she'd picked up another name. Not Foxanne anymore and not Polly yet. Mike Schmidt said they just called her The Mangle.

Ana didn't move and neither did Mangle, so maybe it was the wind or maybe gravity or maybe the hateful God that brought Ana back to this town, but something caused the short misshapen chunk of metal to slide out of one of the many holes in Mangle's body and just…drop away, clanging onto the top of the toolchest and bouncing off to hit the dock between Ana's feet, where it rang out like a goddamn dinner bell.

Mangle lunged. The crust of her massive body caught on the eaves, but she kept coming, tearing herself open and trailing garbage like guts as she scrambled down the wall, eerily silent save for the mechanical scratching of her claws and the snapping of her jaws.

In the same desperate logic that makes drowning men clutch at floating twigs to save them, Ana grabbed at the metal thing that had fallen out of Mangle. It felt heavy in her hand, rough with rust and weathered paint, but surprisingly solid. It had been a piece of the safety rail, she realized, before Mangle had torn it off like a licorice string and eaten part of it.

And if she'd eaten it once, she could damn well eat it again.

When those jaws came at her, blacking out the sky, Ana shoved the railing right into the monster's mouth, just like Captain Fox himself in the Tale of the Hand-Eating Dragon.

Mangle's neck recoiled on itself, nearly pulling Ana off the dock before she could get her hand free. Even as her head lifted away, her body continued to spill down from the roof, pulled by its own weight. A loose limb—she couldn't even tell if it was an arm or a leg—slapped Ana across the face harder than she'd ever been slapped in her life. It might not have knocked her down on a dry summer day, but she lost her balance on the ice and couldn't get it back again. A wild grab at the nearest post half-saved her; she flipped herself around so that she landed on her ass instead of on her face. She had a split second to flail goofily around on the slick concrete in an unsuccessful bid to get her goddamn feet under her and then Mangle fell on top of her. She saw it happening but couldn't get out of the way. All she could do was curl up and try to protect her head as Mangle thrashed, her endoskeleton tearing her trash-bloated body apart from the inside. At last, almost by accident, a clawed foot attached to her back managed somehow to catch at the piece of rail wedging her jaws open. She yanked it free, only to push it back into her mouth, entirely occupied with chewing it into something she could swallow and, for the moment, seemingly unaware of Ana trapped beneath her.

For the moment. But that moment was ending. She had to do something. Everything had a weak point. What was Mangle's?

Foxy said all the Toy models could be reset by bright flashing lights (a moment's panicky distraction: Wouldn't that have been good to know when she was facing off against Blue?), but even if Ana could get at her phone and work the flashlight app, Mangle didn't appear to have any eyes, so how could she be triggered by lights? What else? Think, damn it! It only took one bite and Ana would be dead!

'Get a grip,' Ana thought and almost laughed—that high hysterical bubbly laugh that meant you knew you were going to die. Or maybe she wouldn't. Not right away, anyway. Suddenly, as clearly as if he were right there beside her again in the filthy halls at Mullholland on that long night so many months ago, she heard Mike Schmidt's dry knowing voice saying, "It's amazing what the human brain can do without the frontal lobe."

Ana shoved that memory away, but it came back almost immediately, biting into her mind like Mangle herself would be doing any goddamn second, this time bringing a different voice with it. Erik Metzger's voice. Small. A little distorted by bad recording equipment. She'd been watching a video on Mike Schmidt's tablet. Foxy and Foxanne in the one of the party rooms at the Toybox, and as much as she did not want to remember any part of that awful video—not ever, but especially not now—the memory bludgeoned its way in until she could almost see him in his purple security guard's uniform, smiling that easy smile as he…

…as he held Foxanne's mouth shut.

'They can't open their mouths as easily as they can close them,' he'd said and even demonstrated, for as much as a demonstration was worth. Anything at all might have been responsible for Foxanne's restraint in that video. It might have been some piece of her programming, long since corrupted, or a mechanical failsafe, lost in her Pull-A-Part days, or it might have been just that it was Metzger himself holding her mouth shut. The animatronics couldn't even say his name, much less attack him. She was betting her life on a corrupted video clip of a psychopath's offhand remark from thirty years ago.

But it was all she had, so she went for it.

"Foxanne!" she shouted—tried to shout. It came out choked by her dead mother's punishing fist and crushed under the weight of the animatronic on top of her.

If she recognized her old name, Mangle gave no sign, but she did hear it and proved it by twisting in on herself, letting the last mouthful of metal shards fall indiscriminately from her mouth as she snapped at the source of the sound.

And when her jaws came together inches from Ana's face, Ana reached desperately up with both hands and grabbed Mangle by the muzzle, trapping her teeth together.

She hadn't realized how completely she expected Mangle to just open her mouth and bite off Ana's hands or head or, say, half her head, until she felt the adrenal swoop of astonishment when it didn't happen. The next thing she felt, of course, was the physical swoop as Mangle reared up, yanking Ana out from under the detritus of her own body, followed by the punch of a thousand bricks as she was slammed into the wall, pushed up it, shaken violently side to side, and then thrown down onto the dock again. Ana knew it was just a matter of time before she lost this fight, but as long as she could keep her grip, at least she couldn't get bit.

Of course, as the logical side of Ana's brain was quick to inform her, Mangle's teeth were not her only weapons. Even now, metal claws slashed wildly on every side of her, leaving deep furrows in the ice all the way down to the cement. At any moment, those claws could find her and flay her puny human hide open to the bone, even if it was just by accident. She'd lose her grip then for certain. If Ana was lucky, she'd be dead before the eating started, but she couldn't count on it. Nature was a callous bitch. Most creatures whose unhappy lot in life was to be eaten were alive when it happened. So if Ana did not want her last memories in this world to be watching Mangle try to pack one of her sagging pseudo-limbs with Ana's viscera, she had better think of something else.

Thinking was not where the problem was. She could not kill an animatronic with her bare hands and a great idea. She needed a weapon.

Ana took a chance, tightened her left hand around Mangle's muzzle and groped desperately for the toolchest with her right. Her fingers slapped the cart, fumbled around to the front-side, only to encounter a rough patch interrupting the cool metal surface. She'd taped the drawers shut for transport. Safety first. And even if she hadn't, what the hell was in the bottom drawer but her goddamn precision tools, neatly packed away in their custom-molded case because they were so fucking fragile they couldn't be kept loose? She needed the top drawer, with her hammer, but the top drawer might as well be on the fucking moon.

She was going to die here. This was really how she died.

And suddenly, the thrashing weight atop her was gone. Before Ana could even process its absence, Mangle's head was gone too, pulled out of her imprisoning hands in one mighty yank. For a brief uplifting moment, Ana thought she had been saved. She should have known better. She was in Mammon, where no one is ever saved. Mangle had merely rolled her heavier lower half off the dock, dragging the rest of her with it. When she tried to clamber back up, she impaled herself on the twisted remains of the broken safety rail and half a hundred brittle spears of ice. She kept coming anyway, her endoskeleton pulling itself out of the loathsome bulk encasing it with a wet crunching rip. She lunged at every sound, actually biting at her own body, tearing away mouthfuls of random junk, swallowing only to snap it up again as soon as it hit the ground.

If there had been a chance to run, Ana had been too dazed to seize it. She could only watch, helpless and exhausted, as Mangle ate herself down into a smaller, lighter, more agile form. This kept the monster occupied for now, but if Ana moved, if she even breathed too loud, Mangle would be after her again. The open door of the restaurant was right there; she could feel the draft blowing out of it, warm as living breath on her frozen face, but she didn't dare run for it. She'd be dead before she was even on her feet. Was it better to die like this, on her back? She didn't know. She guessed she'd find out.

The wind changed, as the wind always does in Mammon. Somewhere out in the parking lot, the neck of an empty bottle let out a low moan. Mangle raised her head to its full height, ears twitching, letting chewed-up garbage tumble out between her ribs, so close that some of it actually fell on Ana's shoes. She could see Mangle's control panel, practically in arm's reach. She had Faust's keys in her pocket. As soon as she pulled them out, Mangle would hear the jingling and be on her, but should she go for it? And do what exactly? There wasn't an OFF mode and what good would switching her to Autonomous really do? Mangle wasn't trying to kill her now because she was programmed to, not on a Wednesday morning. Some part of her, even if it was just the staticky blackness that had corrupted her CPU, wanted to kill her, and switching her to Autonomous mode might not do anything but make that easier.

But then Ana's eyes refocused, not on the dented control panel, but on the grungy box to which it was mounted. Crusted over by more than a decades' accumulation of filth, it was hard to even see the box and impossible to tell what it was made of, but Ana knew.

It was glass.

Safety glass, sure. Strong, durable glass, but just glass. Hit it hard enough and it would break.

Hit it with what? The pneumatic arm was in the back of the store-room; might as well be on the moon. She had tools that could do the job, all safely shut away in the taped-up drawers of her toolchest.

She looked at the safety rail, warped and dented. Chewed on. She'd had a piece of that earlier. It had felt rough but solid in her hand. What had happened to it? Oh yeah…she'd shoved it down the dragon's throat and the dragon had swallowed it. Where had it come out?

Ana scanned the dock around her, then as much of the lot below as she could see without moving, but while she found plenty of garbage of all kinds, she did not see any pieces of the safety rail.

'It's still in there,' she thought, looking at Mangle, who was visibly forgetting what she was listening for and beginning to sink back down into a prowling posture. In another second, her control panel and the battery case behind it would be closed off from sight, out of arm's reach, and this chance—if it even was one—would be lost.

Ana reached into her pocket and closed a silencing fist around whatever was in it—spare change and both sets of keys and gas station receipts—and threw it all out into the weed-choked parking lot. As soon as Mangle had lunged after the jangling patter of a dozen points of impact, she rolled onto her knees and clumsily jumped onto the dragon's back. Mangle reared and spun, snapping blindly, and by pure chance, her teeth closed on another jut of the safety rail. She savaged at it as Ana plunged her arm shoulder-deep into Mangle's guts, groping upward through knots of wires, plastic streamers, wads of insulating fibers and dead birds, until her fingers brushed against the rust-rough and twisted chunk of metal she remembered. It didn't come out easy—there was so much in there to catch on—and every passing second it got harder to hold on to Mangle's bucking bones, but with a last surge of effort, Ana ripped it out, shook it free of straggling cables and rotted cloth, got a better grip, and stabbed it back in, aiming for Mangle's heart.

At the first blow, Mangle abandoned the rail and reeled about, seeking this new attacker, her many limbs lashing out in all directions, but miraculously failing to find Ana. Another blow and another and another, as Mangle coiled around herself in confusion. In her contortions, she fell off the dock again, rolling like a crocodile, shoving Ana painfully across the broken asphalt into the side of the truck, and still Ana kept stabbing, putting all her strength into every swing of her arm. Mangle's neck in Ana's grip knotted like a dying snake, but she held on. Her endoskeleton trapped in Ana's locked legs heaved and twisted, but Ana wasn't thrown. At any moment, a flailing limb or snapping jaws could find her, so she made every moment count.

The battery case cracked.

She couldn't see it and couldn't hear it, but she thought she felt a softening of impact where there had been none. Another hit and she could feel the heat of an animatronic's unshielded heart blasting out of the hole she'd made. A few more wild punches later, the entire wall of the battery case gave way all at once. Now every swing of her arm hooked out mechanical gore—filaments as fine as spider silk, paper-thin cogwheels, rods and coils and lenses all glittering with glass dust—and when her crude weapon became too slippery for her bloody hand to hold, Ana threw it away too and started tearing things out by the fistful. Once. Twice. And as she drove her right arm back into Mangle's chest for the third time, Mangle's jaws closed on her left shoulder.

Time did not stop, but it seemed to slow, ensuring that Ana experienced the fullness of her failure. She could feel each tooth distinctly—the way they pressed in, deceptively rounded but with so much force behind them, tearing first through the fabric of her t-shirt and then through her skin, and then her muscle. She heard the scrape of metal on bone like it was coming from inside her own skull, and then the clarity of that moment snapped like a rubber band and she was flying, tumbling crazily into the grey sky, coming down hard on the hood of the truck and bouncing off—really bouncing, like a goddamn rubber ball—before faceplanting into the rippling ice-fall that curved off the loading dock.

The world went white, then grey, then bled back slowly to color as Ana lay heavy in her unresponsive body. She could hear her own hoarse breath like thunder in her ears, but beyond that, only a dull drone like the dialtone of an inactive phone. Mangle was still out there somewhere, but Ana's eyes inexplicably focused on the weathered scuff of concrete a few inches from her face and would not move. It had been painted once and some flecks of paint remained, hinting at a message that Time had long since erased. Keep Clear, maybe, or Loading Zone or No Smoking…or Freddy Lives.

'I can't die here,' Ana thought, her first clear thought, cutting through the numbing nothing that had been slowly blanketing her brain. 'Anywhere else, but not here. I can't make them find me dead on their fucking doorstep on the day of their happy fucking homecoming.'

Her logical side was quick to point out that she didn't have much of a choice. Mangle had pulled her fucking arm off. She was bleeding out. Even if Bonnie were to walk into the store room right now, she'd be dead before she could say goodbye to him.

Ana dragged her head up off the dock and away from the pink and white and metallic grey blur lurching toward her to look at her left arm. It was there. It was bleeding, but it was there and when she tried to wiggle her fingers, they all twitched. So not only did she still have it, but it still worked. She had no excuse now. She had an obligation to try and live through this.

God damn it.

She sucked in a breath, spat some blood and swallowed the rest, then clapped both hands flat in front of her and pushed the awful weight of the world away. She couldn't get up, but she rolled over, and fell onto her back just in time to see Mangle's head rise up over her and come snarling down.

There was no elastic sense of calm this time, no heightened perceptions, nothing but the teeth and the pain. She couldn't tell where she'd been bitten or how many times, but she had the small consolation of knowing the effects of Mangle's broken battery were already being felt; Mangle could bite into her arm, not through it. If she could just hold on…how long? Blue had lasted maybe three minutes, maybe even five. A lot could happen in that time.

And just as that thought touched Ana's mind, Mangle released her arm and lunged for her face.

Ana caught her, sinking her thumbs into the eyeless sockets of the fox's head, and at first, managed to shove her back, but not for long. Mangle's weight bore down on her and as her limbs began to tremble and fail, she only seemed to get heavier. It was only a matter of time until Ana's arms buckled, and once they'd bent, there was no straightening them. All she could see now, all her stupid eyes seemed to be able to bring into focus, was the ridiculous pink mouth at the end of that fang-filled muzzle getting closer, and how much it reminded her of her mother's messy lipstick when she was raging drunk, especially with Ana's blood smeared over it. Closer now and closer still.

'Close enough to kiss,' thought Ana inanely and turned her face away, neck straining to its meager human limits to push itself away further than the ground would let her go, trying to scream and managing only a choked exhalation even when the kiss came. Mangle's top teeth dug into her cheek, her lower teeth into Ana's temple. Slowly, her dying servos groaning with effort, her jaws began to close, and Ana could do nothing…nothing…to stop it. She heard the tearing of her skin, felt teeth on bone, saw the red eclipse as blood washed over her left eye. She could taste it, the blood in her mouth.

But Mangle didn't tear away the flesh she'd carved and eat it, or go in for another bite, and although it seemed to go on and on forever to her frantic heart, her relentlessly logical brain did not think it was a very deep bite or even a very long one. Mangle had torn a steel railing off its posts and eaten it, but now those same jaws couldn't even bite through Ana's face. She could feel the heat and hum of power conducted through Mangle's bones to prove there was still some life in her, but both were faint and fading more with each passing second. When Ana gave a weak push, she met only a tremor of resistance before Mangle's lower jaw went slack. The heavy head lolled and slid off to fall against Ana's bloody shoulder. Her body collapsed in sections, limbs wilting like flowers, trapping Ana under her endoskeleton. It didn't feel like being pinned under a corpse, no more than it felt like being buried under metal scraps. The weight of Mangle's body as she died was uniquely its own.

It seemed to take a long time before Ana had the strength to crawl out from under her, but it probably wasn't more than a minute. As she sat up, she watched Mangle twitch and writhe beside her, wondering how long that same minute felt to her. Time is a funny thing.

Ana's gaze dropped, drawn to one piece of debris among the many that had fallen out of Mangle's body in her last death-throes. She wasn't sure why. It was vaguely familiar, and stress had always brought out the attention to detail in her. She found herself incuriously trying to identify it. Why? No reason. Like the worn patch of concrete that had fascinated her when she hit the dock, it was as insensible an attraction as it was irresistible. What was it anyway? A little open-faced box with some mesh protecting whatever was inside, some electric points on the side and a couple wires…

…oh. A vocal coil.

She looked at it and she looked at Mangle.

What did she think she was going to hear? Static, fading away to silence so that she'd know for certain when she was gone? The hungry howls of a killing machine who still didn't know the Game was over? A last gasp of clear thought or maybe a dying wish, like Blue's? Did any of that matter now? No, but she did it anyway, because years ago, Rider had stood behind her out in the desert, holding her arms in both his hands and making her face the man kicking and crying and shitting himself at her feet, and he told her to watch. Listen. Own it. Did she think there was something badass and cool about dealing death and walking away, like in the movies where no one looks at the explosions they set off behind them? No. Dealing is for drugs and card games.

"You did this," he told her as she knelt reluctantly in the sand and reached for that grasping, bloody hand. "This man ain't losing his life, pony, you took it. If you don't have the stuffing to hear what he has to say about it, you had no fucking business doing the deed in the first place. You hear the man out."

And she had and it was terrible, a muddle of pleas and curses and crying for his mama that made it hard to remember the monstrous things he'd done and just see the man, but she'd done it then and every time since, and she did it now. Ana lifted Mangle's head and found the socket where the vocal coil had slipped out, and she plugged the fucking thing in.

At once, she heard sobbing, tinny and hard to hear through the damaged speaker, but easily identifiable as a human voice. A girl. Not a child, but young…younger than mere age can ever be…young as only terror and pain can make you.

"Foxy, where are you?" the little voice cried. "Oh it hurts! I think I'm bleeding…I'm really bleeding! Help me! Please help me! I can't see…Where am I? Foxy? Foxy! I don't know where I am. I can't find the stage. I'm trying…but I can't move. The show is starting and I can't move! Foxy! Say something! It hurts…Where am I? Where are you? I need to get to the stage. I can do the show right this time! I know I can! Please, help me, it hurts so much and I just want to go home! Foxy…You said you'd always stay with me…You said you'd help me…Where are you?…Please don't leave me alone…please…please…" Static, pouring out like blood, then, scarcely louder than Ana's own breaths, an old familiar song: "Come ye, lads and lasses…I can do it…down where the waves hit the rocks…Foxy? I can't hear the music...Come sit with me…by the shore…of the sea…and hear the ballad…of the Flying…"

Ana waited, but the speaker stayed silent, with not even a hum of dead air. Foxanne's bones shifted only when Ana pushed them the rest of the way off her legs and then lay as she left them in a tangled sprawl. Ana kept one eye on her as she got up, slipping twice and falling all the way down once, but nothing moved in all the world except the weeds in the wind. She found her hammer in the top drawer of her toolchest by touch and came back, lifting away the happy mask of the white fox face to rest her hand on the smooth dome of the exposed skull. Still warm, but she didn't think she could wait until it cooled. She had to finish this now, while she still could.

Ana raised the hammer and brought Foxanne's curtain down. Then she sat, holding the empty head in her lap, watching the clear fluid that had poured out of the braincase form abstract patterns in the pool of Ana's blood until the grey sun faded out of Mammon's sky and everything went dark.