The Initiative: Book One of the Jannah Cycle

by D. Brumbley

  “You…god, this is still unreal.” He turned her around beneath the hot water and put both his arms around her, one over her waist and one weighted heavily over her chest to hold her. His grip was like stone, fastening her back against him so that he could lean down and kiss her neck in a lingering caress.

  She closed her eyes again as he held her back against him. “You’re not joking. I never thought I would feel your cock against my skin. I also didn’t realize the rumors about your size were true.”

  He moved as if to illustrate the point she had made, but he let go of her so she could turn back around, his hands slipping over her soapy skin in the process. “Someday you’ll have to tell me where you heard those rumors. At some point, I had more women throwing themselves at me out of curiosity than gold-digging. It was a nice change for a while, but it got old.” The rumors were not, however, exaggerated, as Anna could see and feel for herself. He and his twin were pushing six and a half feet tall and built thick throughout their frames. Apparently the same build applied to their genitalia. “There’s all kinds of rumors out in the world. What I’m interested in is what I find out about you myself. Directly.”

  “We have time, don’t we? I don’t want to rush, I want to savor you. I want both of us to be better.” She ran her hand along the length of him anyway, because she couldn’t resist the opportunity once it was in front of her. She’d never had the chance before. “It’s going to be a tight fit.”

  “I’m not in a hurry.” He said with a low moan and a tighter grip along her waist. She could feel him instantly get harder in her hand, and from the way he was responding, it was clear he hadn’t touched a woman in a long time. “Though I could be persuaded to be in a hurry if you keep on like that.” He kissed her again with a grin, and reached behind him to grab some shampoo for her hair, since that had gotten some blood and dirt in it as well from the crash.

  “I couldn’t resist.” Anna responded breathily, since the harder he got, the more she ached for him. “I have to touch you. I need to.”

  He moved behind her to wash her hair, and though his thick fingers were rougher than she was accustomed to being with herself, he was thorough, and made certain to miss nothing, massaging along her scalp and down to the back of her neck as he worked at it under the jets. His hands ran down over the rest of her as the shampoo was rinsed away, exploring her with the same kind of need, his caresses punctuated by sighs and groans as she moved under his hands.

  “I need…” he started to say, but was still too distracted with his exploration of her, “I need to know you don’t plan on going anywhere. At least for tomorrow.”

  “Unless you tell me to go, I’m not going to leave, Logan.” She said firmly, since she wanted nothing more than to stay with him for the rest of her life. Shortened life or not, every second would be worth it with Logan. “I would spend every moment with you if I could.”

  Logan actually gave a deeper laugh at that, and leaned down to give her a kiss, even though both their faces were streaming wet from the shower. “I can’t imagine a world where I would ever tell you to be anywhere but right next to me, Anna. Not under any circumstances. Especially naked circumstances.”

  She kissed him again and continued to run her hands over his face several times. “Even to sleep? The only time we ever slept near each other was with a group. And not naked.”

  “More’s the pity.” He reached up to wring out her hair for her with strong but gentle fingers. He stepped back and took her good hand to spin her around, ostensibly to make sure she had gotten clean from head to toe. “If you want to go ask Larissa for some pajamas, be my guest. Otherwise, it’s either naked or one of my shirts for you. No point in getting a pair of my boxers, they’d fall right off you. Actually, on second thought, go ahead, grab a pair of those too.”

  Anna laughed softly, which felt almost foreign after the day they’d had. She stepped up into him to hug him anyway before he could wrap her up with a towel and separate them with a piece of cloth. “I’ll take one of your shirts, but I won’t wear anything underneath. I don’t want Liam or Larissa to know we’re here.”

  He rubbed her down once she was under the towel, though it was just another excuse for him to put his hands all over her. He grabbed a towel for himself once she was on her way to getting dry, but just toweled off the water from the shower and hung it back up rather than walk around in it. Clearly the man was comfortable walking around naked in his own suite.

  “They’ll know we’re here in the morning.” He promised quietly, walking beside her down the broad hall to his walk-in closet to find her a shirt. “This place echoes, no matter how hard I work to soundproof it.”

  When he tossed her a shirt, she brought it up to her face and took a deep breath. It smelled overwhelmingly of Logan’s excellent scent, and she finally pulled it over her head after the sniff. “This is a grown up version of getting to wear the letterman’s jacket I always wanted to steal.”

  “Back corner, if you’re ever in the mood.” He pointed to the far corner of the rack where the jacket had obviously been hanging ever since the last time they’d all actually gotten together for the last days of class. He took the towel from her once she had the shirt over her head, and threw it unceremoniously on the floor before smacking her ass with a nod toward the far side of the bedroom. “Come on. It’s been a hell of a long day, and I’ve been waiting about seven years to get you into bed. Move that ass.”

  “Really? Seven years?” She grabbed his hand and walked with him to his bed where she fell into it as quickly as she could without hurting her arm further. The shirt hiked up her thighs almost all the way to her waist before she scooted back toward his pillows. “I love how everything smells like you.”

  His bed was a king set squarely against the far side of the room from the door, but otherwise, the room was simple, and sparsely furnished. It was a different room than the one they’d played in as children, before his parents had died. It was also different from the one he’d had for most of his teenage years, since he had shared that one with Melanie. His things had been moved into the room, but there were still boxes in corners and one of his lamps was set on the pile instead of a table. The bed had grey sheets and no comforter on it, just an assortment of blankets that were strewn whichever way he had left them last.

  He stopped at the foot of his bed to look down at her in it before he went to join her, grabbing one of the blankets in the process. He pulled it up over them both and laid down next to her, grabbing the lone pillow to get it settled under both their heads.

  As soon as he was laying there next to her, she curled into him as if she had done it a thousand times. Anna turned onto her side and kissed his neck gently. “I love you, Logan.” She whispered against his skin, but the words felt so right that she didn’t even feel scared. It wasn’t rushed, it was just right. Years and years of loving him and she felt like she finally had the freedom to say it.

  It had been a long time since he’d had someone sleeping in the bed next to him, but he turned toward her so she could be pressed entirely against him, one of his arms around her shoulders and the other free to run over her side. “I love you too, Anna. It’s gonna take me a long time to say just how much, but I plan to take that time.”

  Anna pressed her face into his bare chest and closed her eyes so that she could savor every second, but she felt extremely tired. “Don’t go anywhere, okay? I’m falling asleep, but I don’t want to wake up alone.”

  “If you do, it’ll be because I’m either taking a leak or stealing breakfast for us from my own kitchen. Either way, I’ll be back quick as I can be.” His hands cemented the promise, wandering over her back and her side to lull her to sleep, even as the bottom half of their bodies wound around each other, bare and still warm from the heat of the shower. “I hope you have sweet dreams. And I hope you take them out on me.”

  7

  Having grown up on some of the smaller stations, the approach to Three was overwhelming to Mercu
ry. The three largest stations, those built first and most often expanded, were the backbone of the Orbital Consortium, but they were also worlds unto themselves as a consequence of housing so many people. Lesser stations were built as massive wheels, with a central anchoring hub and arms moving out like spokes to provide the room for habitation. The first three stations, on the other hand, had been built more like enormous cylindrical columns. It was as if two dozen copies of Station Nine had been welded together at the dock-hub, arms and decks jutting kilometers out into space. Small ships constantly buzzed around it, and large freighters were coming and going from the several open docking areas along its length. Lights and signs of life sprung from every piece of the station, shining in the otherwise-perfect darkness of the night sky out of sight of the sun.

  “Home sweet home.” Orion chuckled as they flew along the entire length of the station, a city of living technology so large it was easy to forget they were even in space.

  “Wow.” Mercury was in awe of the station’s sheer size, but she was still incredibly sedated after everything they had witnessed only hours before. “I thought Seven was big. This is monstrous.”

  “You’ve never been to the Big Three before?” He thought that was fairly surprising, given her level of education and the fact that her father was a government official. “You think this is big, you should see Prime. That place is like a whole planet to itself. But yeah, Three has kind of a lot going on.”

  “When I was very little I visited Two, but I don’t remember much about it.” She shrugged. “My dad didn’t take me to all his official events, he liked to keep work and family separate. And usually I was busy with my own studies.” She took in the sight with a sigh. “It will be good to get inside, take a bath and relax. I have a headache from the stress and nerves. I’ll have to request a small dose of medication to alleviate it.”

  “I’ve got some aspirin back in my unit you can have, if that works for you.” He reached back to squeeze her hand again, since they’d been forced to strap back in for deceleration and approach. “There’s some things you have to ask for here, still restricted by the system, but mostly it’s a matter of finding somebody who has what you want and then finding out what kind of price they want for it. Works out pretty well for us, though I know we get a lot of shit for it from the other stations.” They were clearly on their final approach, sloping down toward the end of the station that was pointed north, looking down on Earth below. Traffic of smaller vessels was much heavier the closer they got to the docks, but Orion seemed perfectly at home navigating between them to get to the section of the dock reserved for pods. It looked like there were thousands of them all in one place, clustered on outcroppings from the dock for storage and accessibility. Finding a place to lock in was easy, and he hadn’t radioed in to the dock authority to do it, aside from a verification of his clearance to land. Clearly they did things differently on the Edge.

  Once they were locked and he had verified their security, he unbuckled himself and turned to help her out of her harness. “Doing alright?”

  “I’ve felt better.” She admitted honestly and sighed in relief as soon as he helped her out of the harnesses again. “So you don’t have to run everything through the system to get what you need? Food? Medication and supplies? Hygiene products?”

  “The easy stuff we still mostly run through the computer.” He said with a shrug as he finished unharnessing her, then worked with the hatch to get them out of the pod they’d been in for the past four hours. They’d been talking nearly the whole time, about anything they could think of to keep their minds off what they had witnessed. “Basic rations, residential supplies, necessities like that, sure, go through the computer. But if you’ve got your eye on something that’s not strictly necessary to your survival, there’s always a way to find it. Just have to know the right people.” He got the hatch open to the docking corridor outside, and actually breathed a slight sigh of relief once they were out in it and he could stretch to his full height again. “Any guesses how much time they give us to ourselves before somebody comes to take our statement?”

  Mercury didn’t really get a chance to respond as they barely got into a hallway leading away from the dock before they were waylaid by officials. She frowned. “I knew it wouldn’t be too long. This, however, is quite punctual. I’m sure they’ll want to get our statements separately. We’re suspects until we aren’t, unfortunately.”

  “Fun. I’ve never been a suspect for something before.” He had tried to keep things as light-hearted as possible between them the entire way back from Nine, but it had been difficult at times. He squeezed her hand as they approached the officials, both of them silent as the dark uniforms with the body armor and sidearms of typical law enforcement met up with them. Orion had to wonder if their glare came as standard issue too. “Don’t let them keep you too long. I’ll see you afterward.”

  Mercury agreed with a nod, then gave his hand a parting squeeze before she let go and looked at the officials expectantly, though she wasn’t the type to be lighthearted like Orion. “Officers. I assume you want to speak to me about what I saw while leaving station Nine.” Mercury had no cause to lie or to be in any way antagonistic to the officers who were doing a job as they were commanded. “Where would you like to question me?”

  “Law station is two corridors over.” The man in the lead took her luggage and handed it off to a subordinate so it could be searched and inventoried. He and three of those accompanying him formed a ring around Mercury to escort her down the corridor, while Orion was taken the other direction.

  Station Three was a far cry from Seven. The bulkheads clearly weren’t cleaned as often, the glass on the doors was faded and cloudy, and the doors sometimes squealed in protest when they were opened. The noise was the strangest aspect of the entire thing, a dull roar that made itself a backdrop to every other sense. The law station where they stopped was filled with officers reviewing reports or goofing off with their own conversations in a far corner. The table in the interrogation room had been dented in a previous altercation, and the chair she sat in was uneven on the floor due to one of the legs being bent. A far, far cry from Seven.

  The officer who had handed off her bag was the only one who remained in the room with her. There were no windows or even an observation port aside from the single light in the ceiling and cameras in opposing corners. “Since you’ve come along willingly, Doctor, you have the right to begin interrogation with a formal statement. Please comment on what you witnessed of the cataclysmic structural failure that took place four hours ago on Station Nine.”

  Mercury folded her hands properly in her lap since she had a tendency to fidget, and keeping them folded would keep them still. She didn’t want to appear nervous. She had nothing to hide. “I went to Nine to meet with my match, Orion Al-Jabbar. My scans on the station can corroborate my location with my story, since I needed mapping assistance to find the meeting room. I waited in the room, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.” She knew she was telling him more than he asked to know, but she felt it was necessary to give him the entire rundown. “Orion and I hit it off nicely and decided to take the time to get to know each other further. When we left the room on our way to the dock, I noticed that it seemed busier than usual hallway traffic. There were a lot of technicians in a hurry as we walked out, more than I would hope or expect to see.”

  “How do you know they were technicians? Did you know some of them personally?” The man seemed incredibly at his ease on the other side of the table from her, leaning against the far wall.

  “Do I know technicians from Station Nine? You’re making a joke, right?” She replied with an extremely confused expression. “They were wearing technician uniforms, so I assumed they were technicians. My friends are doctors from Station Seven, officer. I spend my time elbow-deep in placenta, not fraternizing with technicians from an entirely different station.”

  “I rarely make jokes.” He said without otherwise responding to h
er incredulity. “You and Lieutenant Al-Jabbar left the station in quite a hurry afterward. Did the technicians make you nervous for some reason?”

  “Yes, they seemed nervous and rushed, which was concerning, but most of our hurry was due to how interested we were in spending some private time together. Lieutenant Al-Jabbar is a very attractive man, and I’ve never found myself as interested in physical intimacy as I was at our meeting.” She again saw no reason not to be honest about her reasoning. Clearly it didn’t matter to her to tell people that Orion made her aroused.

  The man looked her up and down with his own incredulity at that statement, and actually laughed once, though he kept watching her and slowly realized she was being serious. “Convenient that you two were so turned on you got out of that dock just ten seconds before the whole place blew.”

  “Convenient? Normally I think people say it’s luck. I don’t believe in luck. It just happens that we were leaving ten seconds before we would have died. It’s coincidence, and nothing more. I have nothing to hide from you, officer, so you can assume all that you want, you can search all you want, but you’ll find nothing in my personal correspondence, my relationships, my home, or anything else that will tie me to the atrocity that I witnessed earlier today. I’m a doctor. I save lives whenever I can, not end them.”

  The man was clearly enjoying how defensive she was getting so quickly. “Current estimates hold that five thousand, three hundred and ninety-four people died as a result of the failure earlier. If it does come out that you or the lieutenant were involved, that will be quite a lot of endings to answer for.” He went toward the door, giving no indication that she was welcome to leave. “Sit tight, Doctor. My superiors may have more questions for you based on your testimony.”