He nodded. “The spirit follows the flesh, it would seem, and also the pain. If I wish to become my own immortal creation, my body must lead my spirit to its eternal home. Since I am still … experimenting … I move my flesh piece by piece.” He looked thoughtfully over at the creature on the table. “More and more,” he murmured, almost to himself, “it is a test of the strength of my own will. How much of myself can I carve away, and still remain in control?”

“Carve away?” Jessica repeated faintly, and he snapped his attention back to her.

“Yes. I will even allow you to watch,” he said with a smirk.

“No, thanks,” she said, shrinking back, and he wheezed a laugh.

“You will watch,” he said, then gestured to the animatronic girl. “Keep an eye on her,” Afton said.

“I have many eyes on her.” The girl went to a cabinet and took out another IV bag: before she closed the door, Jessica caught a glimpse of more like it, and a shelf of what looked like vacuum-sealed cuts of meat. Her stomach flipped, and she swallowed hard.

Jessica started to squirm in her seat; there was a hissing sound coming from somewhere, and a smell of burning oil began to fill the room. The table where the mass of metal rested was beginning to glow orange at its center, and the mass on the table seemed to move slightly, although only out of the corner of Jessica’s eye. Jessica snapped back to attention and turned toward Afton.

He appeared to be asleep: his chest rose and fell with slow breaths, and his eyes were closed; his eyelid draped loosely over the steel rod in the center of his missing eye, the thin skin hanging into the empty socket. The girl nodded, and moved to the table. Jessica swallowed, the rotten smell swelling around her. She had ceased to notice it, her nose tuning it out, but now it was everywhere, thickening the air with its miasma. An operating theater … he’s harvesting the kids for organs, transplanting them into himself?

Jessica looked around the room, calculating—the scalpels were too far away to grab, and they wouldn’t even scratch the animatronic girl’s paint. If she ran, she would be dead before she was halfway to the door. Jessica forced herself to watch.

The animatronic girl went to William Afton’s side, then checked the monitor again with care. She unbuttoned his pajama top and splayed it open, revealing his chest, and the mass of scars that had covered it since before he went by the name “Dave.” The girl tugged the waist of his pants an inch lower, so that his torso was fully exposed, then nodded, took off her gloves, and replaced them with new ones. Then she took up one of the scalpels. Jessica looked away.