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.”