Read Ouroboros 2: Before for Free Online Page A

been anyone else, she wouldn’t be alive.
    He swallowed again. Then he managed to shake his head. ‘You’re overstating things. Anybody else could have done what I did.’
    ‘ Except for me,’ she laughed lightly, but if the move had been intended as carefree, it wasn’t. She looked unusually small in that moment, and she finally unhooked her hands from in front of her, and brushed the fingers of her right hand over her left palm. ‘Maybe if I had been somebody else, things would never have gotten this far. I mean, a real cadet, someone not as useless as I am, wouldn’t have made the same mistakes. They wouldn’t have touched the blue orb in that statue room,’ she picked over her words slowly, as if she were trying to hide her emotion, ‘they wouldn’t have kept everything to themselves. They would have figured out what was going on sooner, and they would have gotten the appropriate help before it was too late.’
    She no longer looked at him. Instead, she stared at some innocuous patch of dirt on the cold, grey, stone floor.
    Without thinking, he stepped right in front of her, breaking her gaze. He dipped his head down, until she looked up into his eyes. He simply shook his head. ‘This is not your fault. And you did everything you could to stop this. People didn’t believe you,’ he stabbed a finger at the ground as he spoke, unable to keep his passion from poisoning his calm resolve. Though he wanted to speak with authority, he ended up talking with an unmistakable note of frustration instead. ‘You are the last person who can be blamed for this.’
    She pressed her lips together, but didn’t say anything more. Instead, she dropped her gaze and stared at her left palm.
    Again, without thinking, he grabbed it and held it in his own hand, covering that faint dancing blue glow with the girth of his palm and fingers.
    She was a cadet and he was a lieutenant, and he really had to stop touching her. Okay, you were permitted to engage in bodily contact when it was necessary, like when you were tackling somebody out of the way of an enormous Barbarian. But the point was, he had to stop touching her in moments like this.
    Emotional, poignant, almost scary moments. Moments that stretched like time shouldn’t, and that practically vibrated around him with strange, unknown promises.
    It took a lot of effort, but he finally dropped her hand and stepped back, reinstating their personal space.
    She was still staring at her hand, but there was the slightest of smiles warming her cheeks. ‘Okay,’ she whispered.
    ‘ Okay?’ he croaked, completely unsure of what she was agreeing to.
    ‘ Okay, so maybe it wasn’t all my fault, and maybe I did try hard to let people know what was happening. But,’ she took a steadying breath, ‘I still don’t think you’re normal. And thank you, for not being normal,’ she added, awkwardly.
    He opened his mouth, but he couldn’t say anything.
    He wasn’t sure whether he should thank her, argue further that he was normal, or tell her it was time to change the subject of this conversation.
    But she made the next move. ‘I guess now that we both have disguises, we can’t put it off any longer. We should . . . go out.’
    Briefly, he took that to mean something else, and blinked hard, but soon realized what she meant. Nodding his head entirely too quickly, he cleared his throat and tried to straighten up. ‘I think you’re right. We can’t waste any more time.’ He closed his eyes and sighed. ‘I can’t believe I just said that. We are about to go out on an unknown alien planet, and mingle with the inhabitants. We are so screwed.’
    ‘ The Academy teaches that a good cadet never gives up,’ Nida said as she shifted past him and towards the door. The heels of her shoes clicked against the hard stone, and the elegant skirt she wore swished around her ankles. She turned over her shoulder, her new white hair cascading around her. ‘So, come on. If Commander Sharpe were