TIME WAS RUNNING OUT for Ethan. His foot was swelling up and the pain from it disturbed his sleep. The wound was red and puffy and a white, gloopy liquid oozed from it. It didn’t look good at all. What would happen if he didn’t receive medical treatment? On the Nova Fortuna the doctor would have given him a shot and covered the wound in healing gel. Ethan wasn’t sure what happened to infections that weren’t treated but whatever it was, it was happening to his foot.
Also, after his early success at creating a mutual, touch-based language with Quinn, progress had stalled. The patterns they’d agreed on included those for their own names and for numbers, water, food, yes and no (and, by extension, correct and incorrect) and parts of their bodies. Ethan now knew that soft pause soft-hard-soft
