Serendipity (Book 1 of the Dana Halliday series)

LONAVAT. SUPERHERO NAME. UNDELAYED.

The Bruttar had a jagged laceration that extended along the inside of his upper arm and halfway across his chest. Since his arms were nearly twice as long as mine, it was quite the wound, exposing the pale reptilian muscle beneath. 

"Natalya was trapped in the back of the shuttle." Lonavat grimaced as I swabbed a great quantity of dried blood and debris from the wound. "I had to pull part of a metal door apart."

We were in one of the more private treatment rooms. I had offered to use a local anesthetic, but he declined, saying that it didn't work well enough in his species to make it worth the initial burning of the injections. I closed the long wound as I would any reptile's: rather than trying to get the edges of the scaly skin flat together, I everted the edges, rolling them out into a ridge and using skin staples for expediency's sake. The scales on his arm were larger than the ones on his face, and the scales on his chest larger still, the size of silver dollars.

Lonavat watched the process from the corner of his eye, stoic other than occasionally clicking his lips at the pain.  "That looks very good. Exactly how I would have done it."  His lips were more rigid than a mammal's, which accounted for the odd way he made some sounds.

"I've, um, worked on animals with similar skin," I said. "How long will it take to heal?"

"I will leave the staples in quite a while. Until the skin has shed several times."

"How does the shedding work?"

Lonavat pursed his strange lips and looked away. I thought I'd offended him, but then he laughed, a rather ravenlike croaking sound. "In several large pieces, over the course of a few days. Once every few months."

"I'm sorry if that was, uh, a delicate subject."

"It's the source of vulgar jokes, you know? But I'm a medic, it's fine."

"Gotcha. Earthers aren't any better, I suppose." I snipped a stray shred of skin with scissors. He didn't react. "Can I ask you something else?"

"You may ask, of course." There was a hint of amusement in his mammal-like eyes.

"I met a Bruttar, on Galileo's Outpost. He looked different than you, and I was just wondering, you know, if he was a different...culture, race, whatever?"

"Did he have blue skin? Black? Red?"

"Black."

Lonavat nodded. "We have four distinct ethnicities. I am of the Prechoru. The black-skinned ones are the Arradan. It doesn't matter much to us anymore, though, other than different languages and some differences in culture."

"I suppose," I ventured, "that after what happened to your homeworld, things like that wouldn't matter as much."

"One would think so, yes?" His face was a little too exotic for me to read well on such short acquaintance, but I thought the amusement had turned sardonic. "It did unite us, in the end. Some of it had to do with resentment toward the Oploki."

"Yeah?"

"It is rumored that they could have prevented the comet from striking our planet, and chose not to."

"What do you think?"

Lonavat chortled, the same deep croaky sound as before. "I have no opinion."

*     *     *

We went back into main treatment. Natalya was still asleep, and Anatoly was too, slumped over with his cheek resting near her hand.

Lonavat touched his shoulder, and the young man sat up with a jerk. The Bruttar spoke softly in Russian, and my Earwig relayed, "You should go lie down and sleep properly."