It’s ready.” A soft voice rang out in the dark.

“I’ll tell you when it’s ready,” said the man slumped in the corner, studying a monitor intently. “Raise it a few more degrees,” he whispered.

“You’ve said before that might be too much,” she said from the opposite corner, leaning over a table. The light shimmered off her contours as she carefully examined what lay before her.

“Do it,” the slumped man said. The woman touched a dial, then recoiled suddenly.

“What is it?” he demanded. He didn’t take his eyes off the monitor. “Raise it two more degrees,” he ordered, his voice rising. For a moment, the room was silent. Finally, the man turned toward the table. “Is there a problem?”

“I think it’s …” The woman trailed off.

“What?”

“Moving,” she finished.

“Of course it is. Of course, they are.”

“It looks like it’s … in pain?” she whispered. The man smiled.

“Yes.”

A bright light flashed on abruptly as a sudden noise resounded from the center of the room. Red, green, and blue lights flashed in sequence and a cheerful voice erupted from the speakers embedded in the walls, filling the room with song.

Every light shone down on him: the sleek white-and-purple bear. His joints clicked with every pivot; his eyes jolted back and forth randomly. He stood about six feet high; his rosy cheeks like two balls of bright cotton candy, and he wielded a microphone with a head like a shimmering disco ball.

“Shut that thing off!” the slouched man shouted, getting to his feet with obvious difficulty. He moved slowly toward the center of the room, leaning heavily on his cane. “Get back, I’ll do it myself!” he screamed as the woman retreated to the table in the corner. The man pried a white plastic plate off the chest of the singing bear, and reached inside the cavity, extending his arm all the way into the opening and pulling at whatever he could find. As he disconnected the wires inside, first the eyes stopped turning, then the eyelids stopped clapping shut, then the mouth stopped singing and the head stopped turning. Finally, with one last jostle, the eyelids clamped shut and the head dropped to the side lifelessly. The man stepped back, and the heavy plate of the bear’s chest cavity swung shut with a clang, as the animatronic bear filled with the sounds of servos and wheels, broken and disconnected, unable to move or function. Spurts of air burst from between the seams of his body casing as the air hoses misfired.

The sound came to a stop, the echoes from it lingering for a moment before dying away. The man turned his attention back to the table and lurched to it. He looked down, studying the writhing figure that lay there for a moment. The table’s surface was glowing orange, and the hot metal hissed. He took a syringe from the woman’s hand and thrust it into the squirming thing forcefully. He drew the plunger up, holding the needle steady as the syringe filled with molten substance, then finally pulled away with a jolt. He staggered back toward the bear.

“Now, let us put you to greater purpose,” he said to the glowing syringe. The man again pried open the heavy chest plate of the standing, broken bear, then carefully inserted the syringe he held directly into the chest cavity and began to press the plunger down. The cavity snapped shut, too heavy for the frail man to hold open, and he fell backward clutching his arm. The syringe clattered to the ground, still nearly full. The woman rushed to kneel by his side, feeling his arm for breaks. “I’m fine,” he grumbled, and glanced up at the still motionless bear. “It needs to be heated more.” The hissing sound continued as the figure turned on the table, pushing off plumes of steam as it rolled on the hot surface.

“We can’t heat it more,” the woman said. “You’ll destroy them.”

The man looked up at her with a warm smile, then jerked his eyes back to the bear: he was now looking down at them, his eyes open wide and tracking their subtlest movements. “Their lives will now have a greater purpose,” the man said contentedly. “They will become more, just like you did.” He looked up at the woman kneeling over him, and she looked back, her glossy painted cheeks gleaming in the light.

*  *  *

John let himself into his apartment and locked the deadbolt behind him, sliding the chain into place for the first time since he moved in. He went to the window and fiddled with the blinds, then stopped, pushing back the impulse to close them and seal himself away completely from the outside world. On the other side of the glass, the parking lot was still and silent, cast in the eerie light of a single streetlamp and the blue neon sign of a nearby car dealership. There was an unfamiliar whirring sound coming from somewhere, and John watched the parking lot for a moment, not sure what he was expecting to see. The sound was gone soon after anyway, and he went into the bathroom to splash water on his face. When he came back into his bedroom, he froze: it was the sound again, this time louder—it was in the room with him.

John held his breath, straining to listen. It was a quiet noise, the sound of something moving, but it was too regular, too mechanical to be a mouse. He flipped on the light: the noise continued, and he slowly turned, trying to hear where it was coming from, and found himself looking at Theodore.

“Is that you?” he asked. He stepped closer and picked up the disembodied rabbit’s head. He held it to his ear, listening to the strange sound emanating from inside the stuffed creature. There was a sudden click, and the sound stopped. John waited, but the toy was silent. He put Theodore back down on the dresser and waited for a moment to see if the sound would begin again.

“I’m not crazy.” John said to the rabbit. “And I won’t let you, or anyone else, convince me that I am.” He went to his bed, reaching under the mattress with a suspicious glance at the toy rabbit, suddenly feeling watched. He took out the notebook he had hidden there, and sat back on the bed, looking at its black-and-white cover. It was a plain composition notebook, the kind with a little place on the front for your name and class subject. John had left that blank, and now he traced the empty lines with his finger, not really wanting to open the book that had sat, untouched, beneath his mattress for nearly three months now.

At last he sighed and opened to the first page.

“I’m not crazy,” he spoke to the rabbit again. “I know what I saw.”

Charlie. He filled up the first page with nothing but facts and statistics, of which he knew embarrassingly few, he realized. He’d known Charlie’s father, but not her mother. Her brother was still a mystery. He didn’t even know if she’d been born in New Harmony, or if there was some other town before Fredbear’s, the diner they had discovered that first time they all returned to Freddy’s. He had painstakingly written out their shared history: childhood in Hurricane, then the tragedy at Freddy’s, then her father’s suicide. She had moved in with her aunt Jen after that. As he wrote that down, John realized that he had never known where Charlie and Jen lived. Close enough to Hurricane that she had driven rather than flown there for the dedication of Michael’s memorial scholarship, nearly two years ago, but it seemed odd that she had never even mentioned the name of the town where she now—and then—lived.

He flipped through the pages; they grew less and less sparse as he had continued, the details filling in more and more as he called them over and over to mind. He had scribbled whole scenes of memory: like the time he put gum in her hair, thinking it would be funny. Charlie had stared at him with an impish look on her face as their first-grade teacher cut it out of her hair with little blue-handled safety scissors. Charlie had managed to retrieve that clump of hairy gum from the trash when no one was looking, and took it outside with her during recess. As soon as they were out the door, Charlie grinned at John. “I want to give you your gum back,” she said, and the afternoon became a game of chase, as they careened around the schoolyard, Charlie determined to shove the hair-encrusted piece of chewing gum back into John’s mouth. She had not succeeded: They were caught, and both given time-out. John smiled as he read the scribbled version of the story. It had seemed important to start with their childhood, to ground himself in the Charlie-that-was, and the John-that-was, as well. Now he sighed, and flipped ahead.

In the later pages, he had tried to capture everything about her: the way she moved, the way she spoke. It was hard; the more time passed the more the memories would be John’s memory of Charlie and not Charlie, and so he had written down as much as he could, as fast as he could, starting three days after that night. There was the way she walked, self-assured until she realized someone was looking at her; there were the non sequiturs she tended to toss out every time she got nervous around people, which was often. There was the way she sometimes seemed to sink into herself, as if there were another reality going on inside her head, and she had stepped momentarily outside this one and into somewhere he could never follow. He sighed. How do you check for that? He flipped the notebook over: he had started a different set of thoughts from the back.

What happened to Charlie?

If the woman at Carlton’s party, the woman who had appeared so suddenly at the diner, was not Charlie, then who was she? The most obvious answer, of course, would be her twin. Charlie had always referred to a boy, but Sammy could easily be short for Samantha, and the memory Charlie had confided in him, of Sammy being taken from the closet, was a kidnapping, not a murder. What if Charlie’s twin was still alive? What if she had been not only kidnapped by Springtrap, William Afton at the time, but raised by him? What if she had been shaped and molded by a psychopath for seventeen years, primed with all the knowledge Springtrap could glean from Charlie’s life, and now she had been sent to take Charlie’s place? But why? What would be the point of that? Afton’s fixation on Charlie was disturbing, but he didn’t seem capable of anything so elaborate—or of caring for a human child long enough to brainwash her.

He had written out a dozen other possible theories, but when he read them over now, none really felt right: They either fell apart upon scrutiny, or, like the imagined Samantha, they made no real sense. And in all cases, he could not match them to the Charlie he had met earlier that night. Her sorrow and her bemusement had seemed so real; picturing her face now raised a dull ache in his chest. John closed the book, trying to imagine for a moment the situation reversed: Charlie, his Charlie, turning from him, insisting that he was not himself—that he, the real John, was dead. I’d fall apart. He would feel the way Charlie had looked tonight, pleading, hugging herself as if it was all she could do to hold herself in one piece. He lay back on the bed, holding the book to his chest, where it sat, heavier than its weight. He closed his eyes, clutching the book like a child’s toy, and as he drifted to sleep he heard the sound from Theodore’s head again: the whirring, and then the click.

*  *  *

The next day, John woke up late and filled with a rootless dread. He glanced at the clock, realized in a panic that he was late for work, and almost simultaneously recalled that there was no more work, a reality that would have consequences soon enough, but not today. All he had to do today was meet Charlie. The dread swelled again at the thought of it, and he sighed.

Late that afternoon, as he dug through his dresser for a presentable shirt, someone knocked at the door. John glanced at Theodore.

“Who?” John whispered. The rabbit didn’t answer. John went to the door; through the front window he saw Clay Burke standing outside staring at the door, apparently politely ignoring the fact that he could see right into John’s apartment if he wanted to. John sighed and slid the chain off the latch, then opened the door wide.

“Clay, hey. Come in.” Clay hesitated on the threshold, glancing at the interior that was too sparse to be a mess. John shrugged. “Before you judge, remember that I’ve seen your place look worse than this,” he said, and Clay smiled.

“Yes, you have,” he said at last, and came inside.

The noise from Theodore’s head started again, but John chose to ignore it.

“What is that?” Clay asked after a few seconds. John waited to answer, knowing the sound would stop soon, and after a moment it did, with the same click as before.

“It’s the rabbit head.” John smiled.

“Right, of course.” Clay looked toward the dresser, then back at John as though nothing was out of the ordinary. Considering what they’d been through in the past, it really wasn’t. “So, what can I do for you?” John asked before something stranger could happen. Clay rocked on his heels momentarily.

“I wanted to see how you were doing,” he said lightly.

“Really? Didn’t we have that talk yesterday?” John said drily. He stood again and grabbed a clean shirt from his dresser and went into the bathroom to change.

“Yeah well, you know, you can never be too sure,” Clay said, raising his voice to be heard. John turned on the faucet. “John, what do you know about Charlie’s aunt Jen?”

John turned the faucet off abruptly, jarred out of his petulant mood. “Clay, what did you say?”

“I said what do you know about Charlie’s aunt?”

John changed his shirt quickly and came back out into the bedroom. “Aunt Jen? I never met her.” Clay gave him a sharp look.

“You never saw her?”

“I didn’t say that,” John said. “Why are you asking me this now?” Clay hesitated.

“Charlie became very eager to see you again when I mentioned that you had seen Jen that night,” he said, seeming to choose his words with care.

“Why would Charlie care if I saw Jen or not? For that matter, why do you?” John reached past Clay to grab a belt hanging off the foot of the bed, and began to slip it through the loops of his jeans.

“It just made me realize that there is a lot we don’t know about that night,” Clay said. “I think your conversation with Charlie tonight can help fill in those gaps, if you ask the right questions.”

“You want me to interrogate her?” John laughed without humor. Clay sighed, frustration leaking through his habitual calm.

“That’s not what I’m asking, John. All I’m saying is, if Charlie’s aunt was there that night, then I’d like to ask her a question or two.” John stared at Clay, who just looked back at him placidly, waiting. John grabbed a pair of socks and sat down on the bed.

“Why are you suddenly coming to me, anyway?” he asked. “No one’s believed anything I’ve said so far.”

“It’s what we found at the compound,” Clay answered, more easily than John had expected. He straightened.

“The compound—you mean Charlie’s dad’s house?” Clay gave him a level look.

“I think we both know it was more than just a house,” he said. John shrugged and said nothing, waiting for him to go on. “Some of the things we found in the wreckage were … they didn’t mean much to anyone else, but what I saw—some of the things I saw down there were pretty scary, even though most of it was buried under concrete and metal.”

“‘Scary’? Was that the conclusion of your entire team, or just you?” John said, not bothering to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. Clay didn’t seem to hear him, his eyes fixed on a point between them. “Clay?” John said, alarmed. “What did you find? What do you mean, ‘scary’?”

Clay blinked. “I wouldn’t be sure how else to describe it,” he said. John shook his head. “I will say this,” Clay said harshly. “I’m not ready to close the book on the Dave/William Afton/whatever else he was calling himself—”

“Springtrap,” John said quietly.

“I’m not ready to close the book on that case,” Clay finished.

“What does that mean? You think he’s still alive?”

“I just think we can’t make any assumptions,” Clay said. John shrugged again. He was out of patience—out of interest, almost. He was sick of intrigue: Clay withholding information, trying to protect them—as if keeping secrets had kept any of them safe, ever.

“What do you want me to ask her?” John said plainly.

“Just get her to talk to you. It’s been wonderful having her here again, don’t misunderstand, but it seems like she’s holding something back. It’s like she’s—”

“Not herself?” John said with an edge of mocking.

“That’s not what I was going to say. But I think she might know something she hasn’t told us yet—maybe something that she hasn’t felt comfortable sharing.”

“And she might feel comfortable sharing it with me?”

“Maybe.”

“That feels morally ambiguous,” John said wearily. From the dresser, the whirring noise started again. “See? Theodore agrees with me,” he said, gesturing toward the rabbit.

“Does it always do that?” Clay reached for the rabbit’s head, but before he could touch it, Theodore’s jaw snapped open and the head jerked in place. John startled, and Clay took a quick step back; they both watched, transfixed, as the sound went on, though the head did not move again. The sound it was making became a distorted murmur, louder and softer, at times almost mimicking words, though John could not even begin to make them out. After a few minutes, the head fell silent again.

“I’ve never seen it do that before,” John said. Clay was bent over the dresser, his nose almost touching Theodore’s, as if he could see inside.

“I need to go soon,” John said shortly. “I don’t want to be late, right? For this new open and honest relationship that I’m starting with her.” He made brief, accusing eye contact with Clay and went briskly to the door. “Don’t you need to lock it?” Clay asked as John brushed past him.

“It doesn’t matter.”

*  *  *

It was still light out when John got to St. George, and when he looked at the dashboard clock, John saw that he was over an hour early. He parked in the restaurant lot anyway and got out, glad for the opportunity to walk around and burn some nervous energy. He had avoided St. George, the town where Charlie and Jessica had been in college—Jessica probably still is in college, he thought with a pang of guilt. I should know basic stuff like this.

He walked past a few storefronts, heading semiconsciously for the movie theater he had been to with Charlie the last time he was here. Maybe we can go see a movie. After the dinner-and-interrogation. John stopped short on the sidewalk: The theater was gone. Instead, two gigantic clown faces grinned at him from the windows of a gleaming new restaurant. The faces were almost as large as the wide front door, painted on either side, and above them was a sign, in red and yellow neon letters: CIRCUS BABY’S PIZZA. The neon lights were on, glowing uselessly in the daylight. John stood motionless, feeling like his sneakers had fused to the parking lot. A group of kids rushed past him on their way in, and a teenager bumped into John, breaking him out of his daze.

“Just keep walking, John,” he muttered to himself, turning to move away, but he stopped again after only a few steps. “Just keep walking,” he repeated in a sterner tone, and turned to face the restaurant defiantly. He approached the front door and pushed it. It opened into an empty vestibule, a waiting area, where smaller versions of the clowns out front smiled crazily from the walls, and a second door read WELCOME! in painted cursive letters. There was a familiar smell in the air: some particular combination of rubber, sweat, and cooking pizza.

John opened the second door, and noise exploded. He blinked in the florescent lights, bewildered: Children were everywhere, screaming and laughing, and running across the floor, and the jingles and blips of arcade games sounded discordantly from around the room. There were play structures, something like a jungle gym to his left, and a large ball pit to his right, where two small girls were throwing brightly colored balls at a third girl, who was shouting something he could not make out.

There were tables set up in the center of the room, where he noticed five or six adults talking to one another. Occasionally they’d look over their shoulders at the chaos surrounding them, at the stage in back of the room, its red curtain closed. A chill went down his spine, and he looked around again with a terrible déjà vu at the playing children and complacent parents.

He started toward the stage, twice stopping just in time to avoid tripping over a game of tag. The curtains were brand-new, the red velvet plush and gleaming in the light, and trimmed with golden ropes and tassels. John slowed his pace as he got closer, the pit of his stomach tensing with an old, familiar dread. The stage floor was about level with his waist, and he stopped beside it and glanced around, then carefully grasped the thick curtain and began to pull it back.

“Excuse me, sir,” a man’s voice came from behind him, and John straightened like he’d touched a hot stove.

“Sorry,” he said, turning to see a man wearing a yellow polo shirt and a tense expression.

“Are you here with your children, sir?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. The shirt read CIRCUS BABY’S PIZZA, and he was wearing a name tag that read STEVE.

“No, I …” John paused. “Yes. Several children. Birthday party, you know. Cousins, so many cousins, what can you do?”

Steve was still looking at him with raised eyebrows.

“I have to go meet someone … somewhere else,” John said. Steve gestured to the door.