“Thank you.” He stood up. “I should clean this mess up.”
*****
“So how can you speak English?” he asked, a few hours later. And read it too, apparently, since she had picked a book out of a bookcase and seemed to have no trouble understanding it, if he could draw conclusions based on how quickly she was turning the pages.
Shayla looked up at him and smiled. “I would be a poor scout indeed if I did not learn your languages before coming to your planet. What would I have done if there had been an emergency and I needed to communicate with someone?”
“Wait. You speak all of our languages?”
“No,” she flipped a hand at him. “Of course not. You have hundreds, if the database is to be believed. Only the major ones.” Her eyes lost focus. “Mandarin. Spanish. Hindi. Arabic. Bengali. And English,
