“I hope there’s enough ventilation here for that barbecue,” I said. “Otherwise you and the Boy are going to wind up dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Don’t worry about us.” The tallest of the kids stepped forward. He was missing an eye, or so I guessed, because he had a bandana tied over one socket, which made it look more than ever like Captain Hook should be making his appearance soon. “How do we know it’s really you?”
“Other than the fact that I found the place? I don’t know. Try asking me my mother’s maiden name.”
One-Eye frowned. “We don’t know that.”
“Neither do I, so we’re even. Look, I brought money, and I’m in a hurry. Can I please see the Boy?”
“Hey,” said one of the other kids in a lazy voice I was meant to hear, “if he’s got money, why don’t we just take it off him?”
“Shut the fuck up,” said One-Eye quickly. “You don’t know what you’re messing with.” He turned back to me. “I’ll see if he’s ready.”
Something whispered through the room then, a scratchy little sound that made the hairs on the back of my neck get up and look around. It took me a moment to make out the words: “No, it’s all right. Bring him in.” It sounded like a ghost, and not the healthy, lively kind like the Sollyhull Sisters, either.
He was sitting in the corner of a room off the main tunnel. I’d actually gone past his door. The only light was from a dry-cell emergency lantern near him, which cast his distorted shadow high across the walls. He barely filled the wheelchair. He’d lost weight since the last time I’d seen him, and although I was certain only that the Boy was somewhere between nine and fourteen years old, I did know that he shouldn’t be getting smaller at his age.
The Broken Boy swung his head to the side so he could see me better. Just the angle at which his neck bent was painful to see. Cross Stephen Hawking with a singed spider and you have some idea. Except for his skin, which is pink and healthy as the hide of a newborn mouse. And his eyes, which are even more alive, alive-oh. “Hi, Bobby. Good to see you.” His voice was softer than I remembered, more air, less weight. “Long time.”
“Yeah. Well, I’ve been out of the Harps for a while now, you know.”
“That didn’t stop you the last time.”
Didn’t really want to get into that. Tell you another time. “Can you help me out, BB?” I suddenly felt bad. “Are you up to it?”
“Me?” The head lolled, the chest heaved. He was laughing. Quiet as it was in that cement tomb under the freeway, I couldn’t actually hear it for a bit. “Never better. Run faster, jump higher. Satisfaction guaranteed.” Then those bright eyes fixed on me again. “You don’t have to worry about me, Bobby.” A sentence that could just as easily have been finished, “because there’s nothing you can do.” Which was true: the gray areas between my team, the other team, and ordinary human folk are full of people like the Broken Boy, growing and dying like weeds in the cracks of a sidewalk.
“Okay, but I’ll have to explain for a bit first . . .”
“Money?”
I dug it out of my pocket, took off the rubber band. “I remember the drill. Nothing bigger than twenties. Your helpers can handle them up to make ’em look less new. They look like they’d be good at it.”
For a moment, as I held out the cash, his Tyrannosaurus arms almost seemed to be trying to reach for it out of old reflex, but then he called One-Eye (who was apparently named Tico) to take it from me and put it in the box. Tico swaggered out as if he’d made all that money himself. The Boy watched him go.
“They’re good kids,” he said from the vast height of the two or three years he had on any of them. “They take care of me.” And for just a moment I could hear the child he might have been if his gifts or his past had been different; the lonely, sick kid who wished he could go out and play with the others. Kind of like getting punched in the stomach, that was.
A moment later Tico returned with two of the other kids and began to get the Broken Boy ready. As they strapped him to his apparatus, which was really not much more than a rusty old home fitness gym they must have dismantled up in the real world and put back together down here, I found myself wondering for a moment about where they had all come from, what strange tangle of stories had brought them here together. Boy was the strangest of all, of course, but I knew almost as little about him as I did about any of his pint-sized minions. Even Fatback hadn’t been able to track down his real name. By the time any of us heard of him, he was already this tiny, messed-up kid with a very strong gift, selling that gift to support himself and a rotating gang of urchins.
Of course, no gift comes without a price tag, and the one the Boy paid was pretty steep.
First the kids wound his limbs and torso in elastic bandages, the kind weekend athletes use on a sprained ankle, until he looked like a joke hospital patient from a comedy sketch. Next they tied him to the exercise machine with surgical tubing. I was pleased to see they did it gently, with the reverence of priests preparing a holy shrine. They left slack in each connection except for the one around his forehead. The Boy’s eyes followed them, showing white at the edges, but I could tell he was calm. After all, he’d been through all of this more than a few times already.
“Hey, Bobby,” he said, “Kayshawn, the one who brought you in from the checkpoint?” His voice was so quiet I had to move forward to hear him. “He came to me because he wanted me to teach him how to dance. He heard of me, see, but he thought I was ‘Breakin’ Boy.’”
“Breakin’ Two, Ectoplasmic Boogaloo,” I said, apropos of nothing except the vague anxiety I always felt watching the Boy do his thing.
Tico came in from the other room with a can of Sterno burning on an old china plate. “But you don’t dance so good, huh, boss?”
“You’re tripping,” said the Boy. “I dance really, really good. But none of you can see me doing it.”
Tico squinted his single eye as he poured something powdery from his fist into the Sterno, then set the plate down on the floor in front of the exercise machine, making the Broken Boy look more than ever like some distorted heathen idol. The can began to spark and smoke a little, then the orange flame began to cool into blue. Tico backed away and crouched against the wall with the others, a rapt little congregation.
“Tell me what you want to know, Bobby,” the Boy said. “Then I’ll show you my dance.”
I’d seen it. It was pretty impressive. Two thousand bucks’ worth? That depended on what I walked out of here knowing. So I told him about Smyler and how I’d watched the murderer burned away to carbon in a magical angel net, and how more recently he’d tried several times to stab me.
“Strange one,” said the Boy slowly. The flame was entirely blue now, the room cold to the eye as a 1940s gangster film. “Strange . . .” Other than the flicker above the Sterno can, the only movement was the Boy’s head as it pulled in short jerks against the tubing that held him, as if his body had decided to escape while his brain was busy talking. “Strange to think . . . who’s buying? Who sells . . . ?” He trailed off. His eyes had rolled up beneath his lids. “She makes seashores with a sea shell,” he said then, as calmly as discussing the weather, but the way he spoke made him seem very far away. “She masks. No—he must . . . ? Mastema? Makers with more of the tiny tiger bright light. Paper white light. White when you . . . while you—”