Felix blinked slowly at her. He stared at her with a squinched, incredulous look. "Are you sure you're not an alien?" he said, finally, after a long pause. "Because you look like somethin' out of a penny-novel and you're talkin' outright gibberish. You [i]kissed[/i] me and then you could talk." He pointed to his mouth, which was still sort of tingling from the experience, and he wondered if he was going to die now of some alien disease. "Yeah," he said slowly, straightening his spine, "you've got to be an alien. If you've never heard of Philadelphia, then I s'pose you've never heard of Pennsylvania, or New York, or the United States of America. You're not even from Earth, are you?"

He was taking it rather well, he thought. Before, he'd assumed that if he'd ever come face to face with an alien he'd drop dead from fright on the spot. But then, Rue wasn't a little green man with a spaceship: she was a cute girl with a tail. Big difference.

The trees parted ahead of them, and the tents came into view. Workers were hauling wood and posts and signs back and forth, a group of acrobats practiced catching one another, a pair of conjoined twins were singing a duet with music held out before them.

"As long as you're stuck here without your spaceship," Felix continued conversationally, "you might as well come along with the circus. Tonight's our last show, then we're packing up, off to Virginia. On the way you can look for this laboratory of yours -- or your spaceship. How'd you get in the woods? Can't you just go home the way you came?"