Caitlyn rose from her chair as her daughter burst into the bedroom. She could feel his gaze on her: the way her head would not turn without the entire body moving with it, the creaking protest of her knees, the slow-motion change of the expression in that perfect face, the awkward way she hugged her daughter, bending from the waist with her back impossibly straight: a doll with frozen joints. “You can see him in a little bit. Go on with you, now.” Moira stared at the man in the bed for a moment, then laughed and ran from the room.

“She’s cute. Looks like you. Your sister?”

Caitlyn turned-slowly, carefully, her whole body making the motion-to find Green regarding her curiously. “Her máthair. Mother.”

She saw him blink in genuine astonishment. “I’m not just saying this, but you sure don’t look old enough to have a child that age. What is she? Nine? Ten?”

“Ten in another month.” She couldn’t keep the sadness from coloring her voice. Whatever the man might be thinking, looking at her, he kept it to himself.

“Where the hell am I?” he asked.

“You don’t know?” Green shook his head slowly. Caitlyn waited to see if he would say more; he didn’t. “You’re on Rathlin Island,” she told him finally, “just off the coast of Northern Ireland. And I’m curious how ’tis that you came to be on Rathlin, seeing as you don’t know where you are. I take it you didn’t come over on the ferry. You don’t know about Rathlin, do you?”

She saw his hesitation again. “No, I don’t. I… I was on a ship, a pleasure craft, just me and a few friends I was visiting, coming out from Scotland. The storm… I guess it was too much for the boat…”

“And your friends? What happened to them?”

“Gone,” Green answered. “Lost.”

Caitlyn gave him slow nod. “I have soup on. You look strong enough to dress yourself. There’s a chamberpot under the bed if you would be needing it, or you can use the bathroom just off the kitchen. I’ll let you get yourself ready while I put the bowls on the table. You can come on in and eat with the two of us, or I can bring it in here.”

“I’ll be out,” he said. “Just give me a few moments.”

Another nod. Caitlyn left the bedroom, feeling his gaze on her as she walked out with the stiff-legged gait of a marionette.

The man emerged from the bedroom by the time Caitlyn, with Moira’s help, got the soup to the trestle table. He sat, wearily, and she ladled out a bowl for him, passing it across. She could feel the heat radiating from him. “Would you be wanting some milk with that, Gary?” she asked.

“Sure. Sounds good. I-” He stopped. At the end of the table, Moira giggled.

“’Tis Gary, not John, isn’t it?” Caitlyn asked.

Muscles clenching in his jaw, he nodded. The spoon in his hand reddened like the glowing filament on an electric stove. “You knew all along?”

“The radio,” she told him. “I was listening to the BBC. There was a news reports about a plane fleeing from the authorities in the States that had come over Ireland and gone down not a dozen miles out from here. The man said the passengers might have parachuted out of the plane, and were dangerous folk: a man who claimed to be former U.S. Senator Gregg Hartmann, who looked like a great yellow caterpillar, and a nat woman with blond hair named Hannah Davis. The pilot, they said, was a black man.” Caitlyn paused. “They gave his name, too, and you don’t look to be a yellow caterpillar or a woman.” She glanced at the bowl in front of him. “I’d tell you your soup’s getting cold, but I doubt that’s a problem for you.”

“What are you going to do now?”

Caitlyn would have shrugged, but it wasn’t something her body could do. “I’m going to eat my soup, and make certain my daughter eats hers. Then I’m going to wash the dishes.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. But that’s all that’s going to happen.” She paused. “You’re not a danger to me or my daughter, Gary. I can see that, just looking at you. And you are on Rathlin.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know enough.” A faint smile touched the corners of her lips and vanished. “Eat your soup,” she said.

“You really should,” Moira interjected, her voice serious and earnest as only a child’s can be. “Máthair makes very good soup.”

The man nodded.

“You’re sweating,” Moira told him.

He touched his sleeve to his forehead. “It’s a bit warm in here for me,” he said. The spoon sizzled as it touched the broth.

After lunch, Caitlyn went outside and stood in the sunlight, her eyes half-closed. She could hear the sea pounding relentlessly against the cliffs; to the northwest where the ruins of Robert the Bruce’s Castle were hung in moss and vines. Gulls swung over-heard in the rare blue sky, calling in the harsh voices. A few minutes later, she heard the door to the cottage open and shut again, and footsteps crunching over the gravel walk. “What did you mean, that I was on Rathlin?”

Caitlyn swiveled her entire body to turn to him. “You don’t know about Rathlin? The Belfast Infection of ’62?”

He lifted his shoulders. “I heard something about Belfast, I think. Not a lot.”

Caitlyn nodded. “I suppose it wasn’t much compared to what happened in New York the first time. Still, the outbreak was a nasty one. No one knows where it started or why, only that most of Belfast was affected. Five thousand or more people drew the black queen and died in the first day; people fled the city in droves during the panic. Afterward, the government decided that they if they wanted to bring the people back to the city, they had to show Belfast was clean and safe. They didn’t want the jokers staying around to create yet another Jokertown-that wouldn’t look good. One of the politicians got the bright idea that maybe they should just move the jokers out. Relocate the resulting Jokertown to an island. And, oh yes, make sure that they were sterile and couldn’t produce more monsters. So they moved the hundred or so inhabitants who once lived here on Rathlin and brought in the jokers, and of course the relocation and sterilizations were all ‘voluntary’…”

Caitlyn tried to give her smile a sardonic twist. “They brought maybe three or four hundred of us in before they were stopped-too many protests from the United Nations, Jokers Amnesty International, the JJS, and nearly every human rights organization. But they also didn’t move us back. To make it look better, they gave us some limited self-government.” She laughed, a sound with an edge of bitterness. “You Yanks did the same thing with your Native Americans, putting them on reservations. Officially, we’re part of the UK. Unofficially, they leave us alone and try to forget us. Eventually, Belfast got its Jokertown anyway. Most of us already here on Rathlin-the Relocated-stayed. Why not? This is our island now. There are less than two hundred of us left; we’ve gained a few people over the years who came here, but we’ve lost far more.” She paused. “Not many left. Most just died.”

“You must have come here later.”

She shook her head. “I was with the initial group. I was sixteen, then.”

The man was staring at her, and she could see him doing the calculations behind his eyes. “Thirty-three years ago… You can’t possibly be forty-nine.”

“Touch me,” she said to him. When his eyes widened, she laughed. “Go on: my face, or my arms.”

His hand reached out to her cheek. She nearly flinched, expecting his skin to be hot, but it felt nearly cool. He stroked her cheek, pressing once. She knew what he saw, what he felt: a slickness like hard rubber that would not easily yield to the press of his finger-tip. Like touching a doll’s face.

The touch, though, was nice, and his hands were gentle and his chocolate eyes sad, and the baritone of his voice was rich and deep like a cello. Almost ten years, it’s been. An entire decade since you’ve been held and kissed and loved… She tore the thought away as Gary ’s fingers dropped from her face. You can’t think that way. You can’t.