CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

It was funny how you could live in a mess so long that you kind of forgot how bad it really was. Bonnie knew the craft room needed to be cleaned out before it could be repurposed, but he really didn't think it would take that long to get it ready. In fact, of the entire pizzeria, he would have thought the craft room was in one of the better, if not the best, condition. And he should know. Before switching to Autonomous Mode, he'd had to check on this room between every set and had a whole Easter Bonnie thing at that time of year that added up to almost four hours every day just telling the empty chairs how to make a paper flower basket and color a bunny mask. He thought he knew what it looked like in there. Turned out, he had no damn idea.

He dropped his boxes of parts off on the stage for Ana to sort through, swung by the janitor's closet in the break room to pick up some garbage bags, thinking five minutes to dump the junk, fifteen to wipe everything down, five more to move the tables back in and done. With any luck, he'd be able to tell Ana they were ready before she was even through her first box of salvage. Then he walked into the craft room and actually saw the job waiting for him.

Confusion struck first. Why was this the only uncarpeted room in the building to have all-black tiles instead of the black-and-white checkerboard everywhere else? Answer: it wasn't, there was just so much grime tracked in and stomped down that it looked black. The ceiling was stained and a few tiles had fallen. The walls were covered in layers of graffiti, distorted by scales of dried mold. The supply station had turned into Rat City. They'd shredded the neat stacks of construction paper and mask templates Bonnie remembered, and crawled through them, pissing and shitting and shedding and fighting and having babies and dying, leaving remnants of each of these life stages behind them until it had all congealed together. They'd chewed into the glue, which had then dried out in grey clumps cobbled with poop pellets and carcasses. The paint containers had cracked, bleeding rainbows out over the shelves and down the facing drawers, their colors dulled by dust and grime. And the glitter. Like Ana had said, good God, the glitter.

Fortunately, Chica had a much better grasp of the situation then he did. "Remember the Messy Messy Room Song," she told him. "Just pick one place to start, then pick one thing to do and do it until it's done."

Right. And since Chica was already clearing the floor, he guessed that put him on cupboards. He went to work, pulling out handfuls of rat nests and old art supplies and trying not to think about what he was touching while Chica picked up beer bottles and porno mags and rotting food remains, humming to herself the whole time, even when she got to the nasty old mattress and all the long little balloons crushed down under it.

"I don't know how you're doing that so cheerfully," he muttered, pinching up a mummified rat by the tail and dropping it into the bag with a shudder.

"It makes me happy to think Ana won't have to," Chica replied and yeah, okay, that helped.

About that time, the security camera came on and found them. It zeroed in on Chica at once, its little motor whining as its focus moved from point to point along her new silhouette, and far from ignoring it, Chica flared her crest at it, struck a few poses, and probably would have stuck her tongue out if she had one.

"Don't encourage him," Bonnie said, but he was grinning. He liked all of Chica's many moods, but he loved her sassy side. She didn't let it out much.

Soon after (very soon; the camera must have been following him), Freddy poked his head in to see why the lights were on in the craft room and was immediately conscripted into service because "more hands makes less work!"

"What are we doing?" Freddy asked, picking up the garbage bag and holding it open so Bonnie could shake a drawer empty.

"Ana wants a place to put the extra parts, so this is the auxiliary parts and services room," Bonnie explained and grinned, cocking his left ear expectantly. "What do you have to say to that?"

Freddy offered a bewildered shrug and a nod. "Does she need anything else?"

"Ha! I guess we'll find out, but not tonight. In other news, I'm getting a motorcycle."

"What?"

"You heard me. But don't worry your fuzzy head about it, big bear. I'll wear a helmet."

"I'll take the big-bear thing from Ana, but not from you," Freddy warned. "Mind your manners. Why isn't Foxy helping out?"

"Do you really need me to answer that?" Bonnie asked dryly.

Freddy grunted and watched him dump out another drawer before saying, "I could go get him."

"Yeah, not to be too much of a dick, but I'd rather you didn't. It's been a long trip and I think the best gift we can give each other on our first day back is some distance."

Freddy nodded, exchanging a troubled glance with Chica which Bonnie politely pretended not to see. "And Ana?"

"I'm going to be nice and say she's sorting parts on the show stage—"

The camera blipped off.

"—but really, she's taking a break for a bit."

"Good." Freddy took the bag over to the other end of the supply station and started emptying drawers himself. "I'm worried about her."

"Me too, but we're home now, so hopefully, things will start to get better."

The camera came back as he was speaking, which surprised him in a distracted sort of way. Bonnie knew they looked different and he understood how seeing them fixed up again would be compelling TV to the Purple Man in his current condition, but even so, he wouldn't have thought the Purple Man would want to stare at a bunch of animatronics, no matter how good they looked, when he could be looking at Ana instead and jerking whatever he had left to jerk while he aimed the stupid camera down the front of her shirt. Even weirder, the camera didn't just come back to stare at them some more, but came back and started immediately blinking on and off.

"What is that about?" Freddy asked, pausing in the act of bagging a handful of shredded paper and dead rats to look at the camera.

"Any hope the camera's malfunctioning?" Bonnie asked. "I mean, they're not going to last forever, right? And if some jackass keeps flipping through them, they're bound to—ow!" he yelped, clapping a hand over his eyes as the camera spun on him and blinked so fast that, even if it couldn't force a homing reset like it would if he were one of the Toys, his light receptors couldn't handle it and he got his first error alert since his reskinning.

"Just ignore him. He'll stop when he gets bored," Freddy said, turning his back to the blinking, which did stop, not because the dead man had gotten bored, but because he'd slammed both hands on the desk and yelled, "It means go find her, you useless metal assholes! The fucking Mangle is loose!" and then limped over to the open pipeshaft and screamed it a few times.

But his screams, deafening in his prison, were no more than a wordless hum through the air conditioning vent by the time it reached the craft room. They all heard it, but all thought they heard nothing but a helpless prisoner's frustrated fury at knowing they had been freed while he was still captive.

They ignored it and eventually the screaming stopped, too.

The work did go a lot faster with the three of them doing it. When Bonnie was done with the loose stuff, he went to Ana's workshop in the Quiet Room and poked around until he found a couple things he thought he could use to scrape up the glue and shit (and literal glued-down shit). He went at it a little too hard maybe, scraping up a lot of paint and the bottoms of some shelves and drawers where they'd softened, but whatever. By the time he finished that, Chica was done clearing too, so he got the mop bucket from the janitor's closet, filled it with a little water and a lot of cleanser, and just poured it out over the floor. Then he and Freddy got down on their knees and started scraping the sludge up for Chica to sweep onto a pizza tray and dump into another bucket. Then it was time to mop—floor, walls, cupboards…everything that could be scrubbed got a heavy dose of soap and elbow grease.

The camera stayed, mostly blinking at them, although it clicked away from time to time, probably checking on Ana in the dining room, but never gone more than a few seconds before it was back, blinking at them in a childish effort to annoy them, or so they thought.

At last, Chica declared they'd done all they could do. It was not a declaration of victory. While everything might be clean, there was a lot of damage that just couldn't be washed away. Ana might let them move parts in now, but Bonnie knew her pretty well, and he thought it was a hell of a lot more likely she'd want to fix it first. Could the supply station even be fixed at this point or would she want to pull out all those cupboards he'd spent half an hour scrubbing and build new ones? He was positive she'd want to replace the walls and she'd want to do the ceiling while she was at it, and as long as she was going that far, why not the floor? She'd be at it every day after work until Freddy literally had to order her to go to bed, and all day on the weekends, and in the meantime, the parts would just be sitting around the dining room, which would be fine for everyone except Ana herself, who'd see them an a monument to her own inability to get things done because she couldn't get started.

"We never should have let it get this bad," Freddy said and turned around, leading the way down the hall, now choked on both sides with bulging garbage sacks and stuff like the mattress, too big to be bagged, waiting for the truck to be emptied before it could be loaded up.

"As I recall, the whole point was to let it be as gross as possible so no one would ever want to stay here," Bonnie pointed out, following. "Looking at it like that, we did a great job."

Freddy grunted without humor. "Looking at it like that, we shouldn't be trying to clean it up."

"Well, I'm glad we are," Chica declared. "Every time there's a grand opening, every time we walk into a new building, it feels like starting over. That's always been a hopeful kind of feeling. For me, anyway. But walking in today was the first time I've ever felt even a little bit like I came home."

"I'm not sure I'd go that far."

"No? When I thought of this place while we were gone, I wasn't picturing it the way it was, not even when it was brand new. I saw…the Reading Room, the way Ana did it, with all the new shelves and the pink paint. It's always been my favorite room here, but it was just my favorite room in the building where I live, until Ana made it my room. It seems like such a small thing," Chica reflected, "but it makes such a big difference. I can't imagine that Ana would ever actually fix everything up and I don't think she should, even if she wanted to. I don't mind living in a messy home. The only thing that matters is that we have one and we're all here together."

The camera waiting up ahead for them switched off.

"I'm with him," Bonnie agreed. "You're not going to sing, are you?"

"Mind your manners," Freddy said.

"Well, what did you see?" Chica asked. "When you said you wanted to come home, what were you thinking of?"

"The stage," Bonnie admitted and had to laugh. "The new stage. I think the old curtain was there, but it was definitely the new stage, only it was finished. That's weird. How do you remember something that isn't even done yet?"

"You've been singing about the power of imagination as long as I have. You don't need me to answer that. What about you, Freddy? What were you coming back to?"

Freddy didn't speak, but he glanced up at the dark camera as he walked under it. That answered the question and pretty much killed the conversation.

By now the restaurant was 'open.' The remaining lights were all on and the usual morning soundtrack trilled out through the hidden speakers still in place. Bonnie couldn't hear anything through the music as they approached the dining room, but how much noise did it make, sorting through a box of parts? Everything seemed to be all right, so even when Freddy asked where Ana was, Bonnie's only response was a careless shrug.

"Bathroom, maybe. Or getting something to eat. Hey, Ana!" he called, leaning into the kitchen. He figured she had to be there, because that was what the camera was aimed at. She wasn't, but he spied one of her energy drink cans over on the counter. "She's around here somewhere," he deduced, walking into the dining room to see the stage for himself. Not much to see. It was just as he'd last seen it.

Just exactly as he'd last seen it.

"Huh," he said.

One word. Not even a real word, just a sound, but he must have said it in a special tone, because Freddy, already on his way to check the lobby doors again, stopped and looked back. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," said Bonnie, because he wasn't sure how explain what didn't seem right. "It's just…You know Ana. I was all for dumping this old shit out. She's the one who insisted it had to be looked at and…she didn't do it."

"She didn't even touch them!" Chica exclaimed, gratifyingly surprised.

And she hadn't brought any more parts in, so if she wasn't sorting and wasn't unloading and hadn't been helping them clean the Craft Room, where was she?

"Maybe she's asleep," Freddy said. "It was a long drive and an early start. She's tired."

"No way. It's barely after noon," he pointed out. "It doesn't matter how tired she is, Ana doesn't nap. She might go to bed a few hours early, but she never naps."

"She's done it before," Freddy said.

"Are you seriously counting that time she had heatstroke and nearly died as 'taking a nap'? Because that's about what it takes for Ana to go to bed in the middle of the day, especially if it means letting someone else do a job she thinks she should be doing."

The camera switched off, probably to check the Party Room.

"She's in Pirate Cove," Bonnie said in a low voice as soon as the Purple Man's eye was out of the room. "She probably went to get Foxy's help unloading the truck and…" Bonnie glanced at the stage again—just one box and a few loose parts, untouched, like she'd walked away from it the second Bonnie was out of the room. "…and he gave her about an hour's worth of better things to do. Come on, Chica, let's get the rest of the stuff in."

"Wait here," Freddy ordered and headed for the West Hall.

"Don't," Bonnie said at once. "Come on, they're…You know what they're doing."

Freddy paused, one hand on the door and the other clenched into a fist, and slowly turned back. "What is it you think they're doing, Bonnie? Because I think you're right. Ana wouldn't abandon work she's promised to do in order to go to bed, and if she wouldn't do it to go to bed alone, she certainly wouldn't do it to go to bed with someone else."

"Okay, so that was bitchy of me. They're just talking. Still, leave them alone. They need to talk."

"Yes, they do. Is it likely to be a pleasant conversation?"

Bonnie uttered a short, harsh laugh.

"Exactly," Freddy said grimly. "Having had my share of unpleasant conversations with Ana, I can assure you, they don't last long. Now I don't know how long she's been with him, but if it's been longer than five minutes, she's done talking and he won't let her leave. As much as I do not want to get involved in this, I will not tolerate those tactics. Wait here."

Off he went.

Bonnie followed him just into the hall and watched long enough to make sure Freddy would at least check the Party Room before storming into Pirate Cove. He did, but only opened the door and shut it again—a cursory check at best. Bonnie waited for Freddy to get all the way to the end of the hall ("YOU LOOK LIKE AN INQUISITIVE CHAP!" said headless Tux. "Shut up," said Freddy), and as soon as he was out of sight, Bonnie went to check the Party Room himself.

The camera was on in there and pointed helpfully at the stage, ready to light it up as soon as Bonnie drew the curtain, but like Freddy, Bonnie didn't need to. Her daypack and the big black garment bag were both dropped together just inside the door. He picked them up and took them over to the stage, since he was already here and might as well look. The camera eagerly whined as he approached the curtain; he made sure he didn't give the Purple Man so much as a peek at the floorboards of Ana's private space, but he looked and Ana's bed was empty.

There were plenty of other places she could be. The pizzeria was huge, full of dark corners and empty rooms. Just because she wasn't here didn't mean she was with Foxy. It would be weird enough if that was what he really thought, but even weirder, he wasn't sure he did. He wanted to go look for her. How stupid was that? He was just as bad as Foxy always said he was—everything was Ana-this and Ana-that, and if he didn't see her for a whole hour, then obviously she was in danger and needed him to find her. He was pathetic.

As soon as Bonnie turned away from the stage, the camera switched off. He could see it at the end of the East Hall, flicking on and off, probably jumping back and forth between that one and the one at the end of the West Hall, trying to anticipate which way Ana would run once Freddy freed her from Foxy's cabin. Bonnie was not susceptible to flashing lights the way the Toy animatronics had been, but the effect in the dark hall certainly did nothing to defuse his growing unease. He returned to the dining room and sat down on the main show stage, hands on knees like a kid having a Time Out, telling himself over and over how dumb he was being while he waited for Freddy to come back and say she was gone.

Why was he so sure that was coming? He had no real reason to think so, but he did and the certainty was so strong that if Freddy came back and instead said he'd found the two of them naked and screwing a hole through the wall of that stupid fake pirate ship, his first reaction would probably be a whoop of relief. Something was wrong. Something was really, really wrong and all he could do was sit here and wait to find out what it was.

Chica sat with him for a little while, but anxiety made it hard for her to hold still and within a minute, she was up and looking for something to fuss over. She ended up in the Gift Shop, pacing along the shelves where all the parts that had been left behind before they'd gone off on their MechaTech Vacation were spread out and half-sorted. He could hear her moving things around, unnecessarily organizing things that were just going to get shoved in a box and carried down the hall to be sorted out again in the Craft Room anyway, but if it made her feel better, who was he to complain? Not to mention the Gift Shop had those prize display windows looking out into the lobby, and if you were standing in the right place, you could see all the way down the West Hall.

Sure enough:

"Freddy's coming," Chica said.

"Alone, or…?"

"Just Freddy." Chica's head tipped, her new crest of pink feathers flaring and falling nervously. "He looks upset."

"Upset like he just walked in on something he wishes he hadn't seen?"

"Upset like angry. I don't like this, Bonnie. This feels wrong."

"I wish you hadn't said that," Bonnie sighed. "I was hoping it was just me."

The camera on the show stage wall snapped on, heralding Freddy's return, but instead of watching the West Hall door, it immediately panned around to point at the kitchen.

Bonnie looked, half-expecting someone to be there in the camera's spotlight, but the kitchen doorway was still empty.

Chica left the Gift Shop and joined Bonnie at the stage, hesitating a, "What's wrong?" when Freddy banged into the dining room.

"They're not in the Cove," Freddy growled. "I even checked his cabin. There's no sign of either of them and she's not in her room. We're going to split up and search the entire building. Chica, you take the activity rooms and the arcade. I'll check the staff areas. Bonnie, you just look wherever you think she'll be. You know her best. If you find her, apologize and come get me. If you find him without her, bring him to me, but if he won't go willingly, do not fight it out, just come get me."

"I notice you looked at me when you said that," Bonnie observed with sour humor.

"I have to look somewhere. Don't take it personally. Believe me, I'm much closer to losing my temper than you probably are, because I don't think we're going to find them. Strike that," he amended. "I don't think we're going to find her."

The camera began to switch on and off again, making the affixed light blink rapidly.

"She wouldn't leave without saying something," Chica protested.

"Not unless she was very, very angry," Freddy agreed. "And that's why we're going to look for them, on the off-chance that they've just found a quiet corner to talk in and have lost track of time, rather than simply assume Foxy picked a fight with her on our first day back after everything she's done for us, because if that's the case, so help me God, I'll throw his inconsiderate ass in the freezer for the rest of the year. And then I'll march all the way out to wherever it is she lives and bring her the hell home."

Like an angry exclamation point to this threat, something fell in the kitchen.

Bonnie even knew what it was. The sound was instantly familiar to him, despite having not heard it in years: one of the removable side panels to the pizza oven had just fallen off its supports and hit the floor. There was no mistaking that reverberant crash, followed by that seemingly endless gong-like tone as the panel wobbled on its leisurely way to lying flat. And the oven had been designed for a busy kitchen. Those panels didn't just slip off on their own and even bumping into them didn't often knock them down. You practically had to push up on the things from below to get them loose.

The obvious explanation was that someone was crouched down behind the tray return window, eavesdropping, and the obvious person to be doing that was—

"Foxy?" Freddy called.

No answer, although the camera finally fucking stopped blinking, so that was nice. It stayed on, though, shining its light on the empty doorway and whining to itself as the lens strained to move further than its mounting bracket allowed.

"Answer me and that's an order," Freddy snapped.

But there was no answer, so it couldn't be Foxy, which meant—

"Ana, is that you?" Bonnie asked.

The fallen panel clattered, an oddly flat and clumsy sound, like she wasn't trying to pick it up as much as shove it over, but this was closely followed by Ana's, "I'm fine," so it should have been okay.

It should have been, but Bonnie's ears went up and every nerve he didn't have tightened. If he had all day to think about it, he couldn't have explained his reaction. All he knew was, he heard her say, "I'm fine," and something in the way she said it brought him up off the stage like he was fired from a catapult and sent him running for the kitchen. Before he got there, before he got even two running steps, he heard the sound some deep-down part of him was already listening for. He didn't know how to describe it in words, but it conjured a definite picture, that of a crawling human collapsing into a puddle of its own blood. Like the fallen oven panel, it was not a sound he'd heard often, but often and distinctive enough that he could never mistake it.

The next thing he knew, Freddy had bulled past him, giving Bonnie the strange, dreamlike experience of deja-vu for the first time: years ago, while a couple of assholes were blowing Swampy's eyes out with firecrackers and Bonnie was frozen on stage knowing he was next, Freddy had come out of the kitchen so violently, he'd ripped one of the swinging doors clean off the frame. Now he did it again, only this time, from the other direction. He hurled the door blindly away without stopping. It hit Swampy right in the middle of the animatronic's one-man-jugband solo, shearing off what was left of his head in an explosive shower of plastic and wire. The music kept playing though. The show must go on.

And while Bonnie was noticing that in way too much detail, he heard a new sound, scarier even than the wet slap of a limp body on wet tiles: a bearish roar, not even trying to be a word, shot through with the high manic reel of the Toreador March played at full volume. And if there was anything left of him that didn't know what he was going to find in the kitchen, it died there in the broken remains of a plastic alligator and a kitchen door.

Bonnie walked the rest of the way, feeling eerily like he was back in his old body. His sensors were on and all of them working fine, but he was numb inside this hollow shell. He had become what so many kids always said he was—a ghost inside this machine, not walking but only moving machinery from one place to another.

He reached the doorway and waited there while Freddy raced around the oven to the sink with Ana in his arms. He looked at the blood trail splattering and smearing its way in from the store room to the dented panel on the floor. He listened to Ana say she was fine over and over, and like all the sounds tonight, she said it in a familiar way, reminding Bonnie of all the yee-haws and howdies and jumping jackrabbits that had come out of him whether he wanted to or not. She wasn't talking to them. He wasn't even sure she knew they were there. Her hands groped at Freddy and the sink and the empty air interchangeably. She couldn't stand and she wouldn't sit still on the counter where Freddy put her. Freddy had to hold her up with one hand, spraying her with water from the overhead hose with the other, trying to see where the blood was even coming from, because it was everywhere, everywhere, and she spit it out and swallowed it and choked on it and said she was fine.

"What happened?" Freddy demanded, probably not for the first time, but Bonnie wasn't sure when he'd stopped that staticky roaring and started using words again. "Ana, don't fight me. Where are you hurt?"

"I'm fine. I'm fine."

"Ana, where are you?" Chica asked in a loud, clear voice. "Do you know where you are right now? What's my name, Ana? Do you know who we are? Freddy, look at her eyes. Are her pupils the same size?"

"I can't find her other eye," Freddy grunted, washing his paw over and over her face but somehow never wiping the blood away.

The whole world got a little darker. Bonnie went over and picked up the oven panel, hanging it carefully back on its supports so no one would step on it. All the blood that had collected in the dents and scratches now began a downward slide. He could almost see a picture in it, the way people could imagine familiar shapes in clouds. It captivated him, like he'd never seen blood in his life, like Ana wasn't right there pouring buckets of the stuff…

"I can't tell where it's coming from," Freddy was saying. "There's too much of it. Ana, where are you hurt? How did this happen?"

"No!"

"Ana, are you aware that you are not making sense?" Chica asked. "Can you please try to answer my questions? Can you tell me what year it is?"

"I'm fine!" Ana insisted, yelling it now, spraying blood across Freddy's fur, but it rolled away and left him clean. Yoshi's special sealant. Hydrophobic and oleophobic. Big words that Bonnie guessed meant blood-proof. "Let…Let go of me! Let me go! I'm fine!"

"Stop fighting me," Freddy said.

"Stop fighting me!" she shouted back at him.

"She must have slipped on the ice and hit her head," Chica said. "She's either in shock or has a concussion or both. Freddy, she needs a doctor."

Ana's struggles became wilder, less effective and more violent. "No! No doctors!"

Freddy stopped trying to wash her off and just fought to hold on to her. "Listen to me, Ana. You need to go to the hospital. Can you hear me? You've hit your head and you could be seriously injured."

"No, I didn't!"

"Ana—"

"I did not!" Ana yelled, but took a few hard breaths (splattering Freddy's face and chest with more of those almost-pretty red beads that rolled away and turned into blood on the floor) and visibly fought her way back to a more lucid headspace. "Stop talking at me like I don't know what the fuck I'm saying! I'm fine! I didn't hit my fucking head, I got bit!"

For a second, just a second, everyone and everything went quiet.

Then Freddy said, "Where's Foxy?" and Bonnie had to close his eyes again just to prove he still could.

"I don't know," Ana spat crossly. "How the hell should I know? Wait, are you…? It wasn't him, for Christ's sake! Why would Foxy bite me?"

"What are you saying, then? What else could have bitten you?" Freddy leaned in again to try and inspect her wounds, only to have Ana stumble away, slapping and shoving at him. "Ana, hold still!"

"Healthy coyotes don't attack full-grown humans," Chica said fretfully. "You have to go to the hospital now, Ana. You have to. It could have been sick."

"It wasn't a coyote! It…Damn it. It was Foxanne. Or Polly Pull-A-Part, or whatever her name is now."

Bonnie opened his eyes, but the world stayed dim and out of focus.

The Toreador March began to play, slowing to a distorted groan before it shut off entirely. "I can't think about that right now," Freddy said in a detached tone. "Ana, you're going to the hospital. Right now. Would you like to call or shall I?"

"I'm not going!"

"And I'm not asking."

"You can't make me!"

"Oh, you are so wrong," Freddy growled and thrust out one arm, snapping open the wrist compartment where he kept his phone only to have Ana lunge and slap it shut. The sound struck like an actual slap, too loud, while the sound of their voices arguing grew dim and hazy, like the shimmery air that hung over the desert in the summertime.

Bonnie was going black.

And Ana was right there, fighting and shouting. If he went black, he'd lock on her in a heartbeat, the last heartbeat she ever had. He'd kill her.

With effort, Bonnie closed his eyes and in the darkness, collected all that was left of his fading self-awareness and focused on the one thing that mattered: Ana.

It helped.

He said her name. It helped even more, although he was still deep enough that he didn't immediately connect him saying her name with her hearing it.

At the periphery of his narrow senses, he was aware that she'd stopped yelling, but the quiet had no significance until she said, "I can't, Bonnie."

If saying her name brought him halfway back from the black, hearing her say his was the open hand that pulled him the rest of the way into his own skin. He opened his eyes and saw the world in color, turned his head and saw her, beautiful in her blood and bruises, with Freddy's arms still enclosing her—half a restraint and half a shield. He could barely see her face through the tattered curtains of her hair where it had torn free of her braid, but she must have been watching, because when he put out his hand, she took it, however unhappily. As soon as Freddy released her, she stumbled forward and let him bring her close against his heart.

"I can't," she moaned, muffling her words in his fur. "They're going to ask me what happened. What am I supposed to say? I can't explain this!"

"How is that even a consideration?" Freddy demanded. "Tell the truth, for all I care, but go! Now! Not helpful?" he snapped, presumably at Chica, who was murmuring beyond the edge of Bonnie's perception. "Do I look like Helpy the Funtime Bear at Helpy's Daycamp for Toddlers to you? I don't have time to be polite about this. Look at her!"

"Look at me," Ana echoed and began to cry.

"I am, baby girl. I see you. I see a whole lot of blood and I see so much hurt, but it's the stuff I can't see that's scaring me. You need to go to the doctor, okay? Because if it's too much for you to explain, then it's way too much for you to just wash away. You're going to the doctor."

"I can't," Ana said again, but she quieted to sniffles. "Even if I wanted to, I can't. I don't know where my keys are."

"They're in your pocket, baby," Bonnie said.

"No, they're not. I threw them away. I had to…to make some noise. I don't know where they are now. I threw everything in my pockets out in the parking lot somewhere," she mumbled.

The camera whined out in the hall as down in the basement, the dead man sat up fast from his relieved slump and said, "What? She what?"

"I lost them," Ana said, the full impact of that action only just beginning to hit her. "They're gone. I threw them away. Oh. Oh, what the fuck is wrong with me? What have I done?"

"Okay, baby, don't worry about it. I'll go find them. Stay right here until I get back, okay? Chica and Freddy will help you get cleaned up."

"I don't need help. I don't need a babysitter! Take them with you!"

"I would, if I wasn't so sure, like a thousand percent sure, that you were going to run the instant you were alone in this room. I'm sorry, baby," he said as Ana glared at him, "but we both know that's what you're thinking."

"This is horseshit. It's not that bad. Head wounds just bleed a lot. I'm fine!"

"Hey, if you say so. I don't know doctor-stuff. All I know is, if I come back and you're gone, I'm going to freak right the fuck out and I don't know how that's going to end, but there's a non-zero chance it ends with my neural net frying. So do this for me, okay?"

She looked at him, her eyes wide and wet and so blue against all that blood, then dropped her eyes and just stared at the floor between her own bloody boots. Her shoulders slumped. "Please don't look at her when you go out there," she said dully. "I don't want you to see her. I don't want you to see…what I did to her."

"I won't, baby girl," he promised. He went to the store room, stepping over and around her blood as best he could, but it was everywhere and after all, it didn't matter if he stepped in it or not. It came right off him. It just stained everything else.

He did look at Mangle. He looked for a good, long time—at the bloody handprints and bloody streaks left by kicking feet to prove it hadn't been just a jump attack, but a real prolonged fight. The pieces of Mangle's body formed an almost artistic contrast to all that blood. The glass was so sparkly. The metal was so shiny. The plastic was so white.

The plastic…Mangle's skin…was white.

Bonnie tipped his head back and looked at the sky until he was sure he wasn't going to go black. It took a while. The wind picked up; he couldn't feel it, but he could hear it blowing junk around on the roof. Not a lot. Just a little tip-tip-tapping sound coming closer until it stopped, as whatever it was up there was blown into the corner above his head. After that, there was nothing at all to keep him company except the edge of the tempting black, creeping closer.

He couldn't stand here all day and wait for the risk to drop. Every minute he was out here, Ana was in there, and she had to get to the hospital. At last, he pulled the cart with Ana's big toolbox on it into the storeroom and put it against the wall, and finally climbed down the flydock stairs and started searching for Ana's keys amid the ice and shards of glass and the mechanisms of Mangle's broken heart.

He found the other keys first, the ones he couldn't touch. As close as he was to going black, he didn't dare look at them too long, so he made a flag with a dead branch, a dirty scrap of fabric that used to be a Chica plushie once upon a time, and a miraculously intact beer bottle and marked the place where they lay while he kept looking.

The keys themselves proved almost invisible against the dirty ice on a gloomy day, so it was actually the bright red buttons on the little plastic remote thingy that finally caught his eye. Bonnie picked it up and a couple dozen keys spread out over three interlocking metal rings came with it. He checked to make sure one of them fit in the lock on the driver's door (blood on the grille, bloody smears on the hood of the truck, blood splattered over the hubcap on the front tire). One did, so he went back inside.

Ana had moved from the kitchen sink to the dining room, although to judge by her bloody boot-prints, she'd at least walked in there on her own feet. Now she sat on the show stage, stubbornly sorting through the box of used parts while Chica daubed at the side of her head, not trying to clean her up as much as just stop the bleeding, and Freddy stood protectively over her, doing his best to unobtrusively block her from the camera's view.

"Found them," Bonnie said, giving the keys a jingle.

Ana, Freddy and Chica all looked around at the sound.

The camera didn't.

"You ready to go?" Bonnie asked.

He was so damn close to the edge that he was beyond feeling much emotion, so he couldn't be surprised when Ana merely nodded and stood up, but if he was fooled, Freddy sure wasn't.

"When you get to the hospital," Freddy began, "you are going to take a picture with your phone and send it to mine to prove you went there. I want to see that little plastic bracelet they give you on your wrist. I want to see the bandages. And if I don't see those pictures within a reasonable time frame," he continued, speaking right over Ana's first furious protest, "I am calling for an ambulance myself, and I'm going to tell them that you were injured by an animatronic at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. They will probably come here looking for you and they will find us instead."

Ana, silent, stared at him.

"I will absolutely risk my life to force you to save yours," Freddy told her quietly. "Do not test me. Go."

Thin-lipped, Ana snatched the keys from Bonnie's hand and staggered out. Chica followed her, imploring Ana to slow down, be careful, take her hand—all good advice that Ana ignored, and when Ana snapped at her to leave her the hell alone, Chica did, hovering in the kitchen doorway and tapping her fingers.

The camera didn't follow her. It stayed fixed on the empty place she had left behind.

The sound of the truck's engine reached his mics and receded.

Hearing it, Chica ducked her head and despairingly said, "She shouldn't be driving."

"I know," said Freddy. "But I had to get her out of here before Mangle comes back. Even in these new bodies, it won't be an easy fight. I can't protect her."

"You don't have to," said Bonnie. "Mangle's dead."

Chica gasped, but Freddy took that in with remarkable calm, saying simply, "Are you sure?"

"Pretty damn sure. Ana broke her battery case."

"Is there any sign of Foxy?"

"Foxy?" Bonnie echoed, like Freddy had asked if there were any sign of SuperBunny or Santa Bear.

"On the ground," Freddy said through a few slow distorted notes of the March. "Did Mangle find him first?"

"Oh. No, he's fine. Yeah, I'm sure," he added, seeing Freddy about to speak. "No way she could have taken him down without leaving…you know. Pieces. I don't know where he is, but I'm sure he's fine."

Unsurprisingly, Freddy went out to see for himself. Chica took a few steps after him and a few towards Bonnie, unable to decide who needed her most, and finally went to the stage to collect the bloody towel Ana had left behind. She began to clean up.

That seemed like a good idea, so Bonnie went and got the mop bucket, stepping out of the camera's spotlight.

It didn't follow him. This had to be the most exciting thing that had happened since the power had been restored and it was like the Purple Man wasn't even paying attention.

"I don't understand," Chica said when he came back and started sloshing soapy water around. "How could she have survived that?"

Bonnie heard a stranger's laugh come out of him. He stopped working to close his eyes and push the black back a little more before he answered, "I have no idea. I should say she's a fighter and all that like there was never any doubt, but…" Words failed him. He closed his eyes again, just to make sure he still could. "Dumb luck, I guess. A whole lot of little moments when everything was riding on luck of the draw and she pulled aces every time. Ought to buy a lottery ticket. Do you think they still do the lottery these days?"

"That's not what I meant. I meant Mangle. How did Mangle manage to pull herself out of the quarry and crawl all the way back here?"

"She didn't," Bonnie said calmly. Well, not calmly. He wasn't calm, but he was close enough to feeling nothing that he could pretend that meant he was calm. He closed his eyes again—just checking—and kept mopping. Freddy was coming back. He could hear his footsteps in the kitchen and that was good. He wanted Freddy to hear this. Nothing was going to come of it—nothing ever did—but he needed Freddy to hear this.

"What do you mean?" Chica asked.

"I mean Mangle didn't crawl out of the quarry."

Chica stopped cleaning to stare at him, perplexed. "How can you be sure?"

"Because I did. And when I fell in, that stuff got everywhere, inside and out. Ana was scrubbing at me all night long with all kinds of soaps and brushes and sprays and everything, and I still had the stains until Yoshi literally took my skin off. Okay? But Mangle's skin is just as it always was. She's dirty, but she's not stained. She didn't crawl out of the quarry," he said again and suddenly grabbed up the mop bucket and threw it at Freddy, who had reached the doorway and was just standing there, listening. "She never went in!" he shouted as soapy, red-stained water spilled down Freddy's new fur and puddled on the floor, leaving Freddy clean and dry and as emotionless as a statue of himself. "Tell me I'm wrong! Tell me that son of a bitch hasn't just been hiding her all this time!"

Freddy didn't tell him he was wrong. He didn't tell him he was right either. He said, "You're going in the freezer now, Bonnie."

Bonnie threw up both arms and stomped away in a wide, aimless circle. "Of course I fucking am! Because why would you ever punish him for fucking us over when you can just punish me for getting mad about it?"

"I'm not punishing you," Freddy said quietly, not calmly. "I'm protecting you. Please go to the freezer. Chica, go with him."

"No," said Bonnie, before Chica could agree. "I'd better be alone. I'm too close."

"Kiddie Cove, then. Take a book. You may be there awhile."

Chica nodded, backing toward the West Hall. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I don't think I ought to think about that too hard right now. Ana will be calling," Freddy continued in that same distant, dangerous tone. "I need to stay present until I hear from her, so God help me if Foxy shows his face…before then," he finished, looking back with a frown at the camera, which had just gone dark.

Even at the time, Bonnie noticed that it didn't just switch off. It panned back to its default position, pointed straight ahead and aimed at the floor first. Which meant whoever was manipulating it from the basement hadn't switched to another camera, he'd let it time out. And what else could that mean except that the dead man who had been watching them through the security system every second of every day since the power had come back on had found something more important to do down there? In hindsight, Bonnie knew that was the moment, their last chance to do something to prevent what was coming (although even in hindsight, he didn't know what). But he had other things on his mind. They all did. So the camera timed out and none of them even said anything about it. Freddy was the only one who even looked at it, and then he went to the gym to watch the road and Chica got a couple books from the Reading Room on her way to Kiddie Cove and Bonnie put himself in the freezer and down in the basement, the Puppet put the master control keys in the dead man's hand.