“I saw you through the window,” he said, and the accent was decidedly American. His eyes closed, then he opened them again with an effort. “I can help…” He took a step into the room, almost falling, then another and another, walking past them toward the fireplace as Caitlyn hugged Moira to her, watching and wondering what she would do. I haven’t checked the phones; they may be down too, and besides it would take Constable MacEnnis forever to get here in this weather…
The stranger crouched in front of the fireplace. He reached out a hand toward the small stack of peat. Caitlyn cried out with mingled wonder and fear.
Flame surged around his fingers, the peat hissing in the blazing heat of it and finally catching fire. He left his hand there, in the dancing blue flames, and Caitlyn saw the flesh blistering and charred to gray-white.
He collapsed.
Caitlyn saw his eyelids flutter. She waited, and when the man’s gaze found her, she brought the glass of water to his cracked, dry lips. He drank gratefully, muscles moving in his long throat. “Better?” Caitlyn asked. He nodded. “What’s your name?” she asked then.
He hesitated, and she saw his eyes narrow. “John,” he said. “John Green.” His head lifted up, looking around the small room. His hand brushed the bed underneath him with a metallic rattle.
“Sheet metal,” Caitlyn told. “I doubt it’s very comfortable for you, but you scorched my best sheets, and I was afraid you’d actually set the bedding on fire, as impossible as that seems. But maybe not for you, eh?” She kept her voice carefully neutral. “When I first felt your skin, I thought you were burning up with the worst fever I’d ever seen. You were sweating terribly. I was sure you’d die. But then I saw your hand healing as I watched, and your breathing was quiet. You slept easily, yet the fever never left you. And you’re still sweating, though there’s a chill in the air. So you’re an ace, are you, John Green?”
“I’m nothing like an ace. That’s for damn sure.” The man gave a hoarse chuckle, grimacing as he pushed himself up. The blanket-actually an old horse blanket Caitlyn kept in the car; she wasn’t about to risk her good comforter on the man-fell around his waist. He seemed to realize for the first time that he was naked under the blanket, and he pulled the edge of it back up around himself. “My clothes?”
“Washed and ready for you.” She cocked her head at him with a faint smile. “Soaked through and muddy, they were. You didn’t want me to leave them on, did you?” He was staring at her, and she knew what he saw. The face that looked back at her every morning from the mirror was striking: flawless milky skin under curls of bright red hair, wide and round eyes that were the green of rich summer grass, full lips that seemed to easily smile. “You’re a rare beauty, Caitlyn Farrell, that you are,” her father had told her, years ago, and she’d blushed at the words even as she’d hoped desperately that they were true. “The image of your máthair, when she was young…” Her father had died during the ’62 Infection, or at least that’s what they’d been told-one of the thousands who had drawn the black queen. He’d been at work and neither he nor his body had ever returned home. And her mother… she’d been with her mother the night the virus spread over Belfast, and she’d watched in terror as the virus tore her mother’s body apart, as the woman screamed in terror and pain. Her mother had always loved knitting and sewing; the virus had drawn needle-sharp spines from her bones, lancing through her flesh at all angles, tearing and ripping, leaving her snared everywhere in a nest of hundreds of ivory porcupine quills that stabbed at her own flesh and that of those who would try to care for her. For twenty more agonizing years, she would live that way.
Caitlyn had first thought that the virus had somehow left her unaffected. She’d been wrong…
“Máthair!” Moira called from the other room, and she heard her daughter’s running footsteps. “Is the burning man awake yet?”
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.”