Naria's Wolves

Chapter Four-Episode Three

“I got the automated alert on my unit,” she panted, trying to catch her breath in the dusty air. “What happened?”

Caelum shook his head, looking back at the collapsed tunnel structure amidst the organized chaos of shouting men and grinding machinery. “The granite veins in this sector are just too brittle. One wrong calculation, one minor vibration, and the whole roof comes raining down. Not only that, we’ve already lost far too many good men to these damn collapses,” he growled, his jaw clenching tightly. “Any more of this, and we literally won't have a workforce left.”

“Then why are we still actively digging here?” Inara demanded, tears welling in her eyes as she watched a battered worker collapse in exhaustion nearby. Behind her, she could feel Celeste and Kade standing frozen, stunned into a rare silence. Fiona pressed her massive, solid frame firmly against Inara’s legs, offering a silent anchor of support.

“We’ve been trying to survey the perimeter to see if there’s anything salvageable behind the fault line. But at this rate, we’re going to have to officially call the expansion off,” Caelum sighed, a profoundly weary, broken sound. “The real nightmare is that this brittle stone completely surrounds Naria’s perimeter. If we keep pushing the boundaries, we risk a total collapse.”

His sharp gaze snapped over, locking onto her fearful golden eyes. “Do you know what a total collapse actually means, Inara?”

“Is... is this not a total collapse?” she asked shakily, terrified of the answer.

He shook his head grimly. “This is a localized tunnel collapse. A total collapse is Naria itself.”

“Meaning the ceiling of the world gives way. All of Naria would be entirely crushed,” Kade breathed, the scientific horror of the statement draining the remaining color from his face.

Inara’s throat felt like it had been glued shut. She had known the situation was bad, but she had no idea the entire civilization was dangling by a thread over an abyss. And above them, in the pristine upper tiers, her family was acting like everything was perfectly fine.

“Caelum!” a gruff, booming voice barked through the smog.

Inara instantly recognized Orion’s powerful tone as the older man strode into the clearing. “Thank goodness you’re out safely, son.”

“I’m fine, Dad,” Caelum greeted, wiping a layer of dark granite dust from his forehead.

Orion’s eyes then landed on the trio, widening in sudden astonishment. “Inara. You’re actually here.”

“I am,” she said, forcing every ounce of aristocratic courage she possessed into her spine to keep from trembling.

Behind Caelum, the rescue workers who hadn't been trapped were finally beginning to drag the victims out of the black mouth of the cave. Some of the forms were completely lifeless in their arms. Inara forced her eyes straight ahead, desperately trying not to break down at the sight.

“I’d normally tell you that a girl from the upper city shouldn't be exposed to this,” Orion said, looking over at the broken, battered men covered from head to toe in thick gray dust, sweat and blood mixing freely on their torn gray uniforms. “But... honestly, seeing you here might be good for their morale.”

Most of the workers had ditched their heavy gear in the heat of the rescue, though a few still wore their cracked helmets, their headlamps slicing beams through the airborne particulate to search for signs of life.

“I didn't come here for a photo op,” Inara told Orion, her voice growing stronger as she looked around at the devastation. “I came to find out exactly what happened. I want to understand the truth of what’s going on down here.”

Orion sighed heavily, the sound ragged and worn. “The truth is that we’re failing miserably to find a suitable expansion vector for Naria. And we can’t simply build upward. Doing that risks destabilizing the structural grid of the hologram that gives us our night and day. Not that it’s going to matter if we can’t figure out a solution soon,” he gruffed, running a heavy hand over his face.

“Not only that,” Caelum added quietly, “but the sheer power it takes to run that giant holographic sky makes the upper levels hot. Pushing closer to it risks overheating the residential sectors. Naria simply doesn’t produce enough cooling power to offset it up there.”

“And heat rises,” Inara muttered, the terrifying physics of their cage locking into place.

Orion nodded grimly.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“We collect and salvage what equipment we can, get our injured men fixed up, and bury the dead,” Orion told her softly.

His sharp grey eyes cut across the atmospheric chaos. Nearby, a group of rescue workers slowly stepped away from the cave-in, their shoulders slumping as they gave up on the souls they couldn’t reach behind the giant, impenetrable walls of fallen stone. By the time the heavy rigs could even begin to cut through the density of the fault line, the trapped crew would completely run out of oxygen—assuming the brittle granite didn’t crumble further and crush them first.

Anyone left behind that dark, suffocating wall was already condemned to the shadows. Inara felt a violent wave of grief crash over her, a desperate urge to scream at the absolute cruelty of their reality.

“Go home, Inara,” Caelum told her gently. He rested a grime-stained hand on her trembling shoulder, squeezing with quiet reassurance. “There’s nothing more you can physically do here today.”

Inara wanted to be stubborn. She wanted to fire back an angry refusal, to insist that she was staying to dig with her bare hands until the job was done. But looking at the hollow expressions of the rescue crew, she knew he was right. There wasn’t a single thing her presence could change. She couldn’t save the dead, and she couldn't reach the dying.

She turned her gaze directly to Orion, fresh tears stinging the corners of her eyes, though her voice didn't waver.

“You tell your men—every single one of them, and their families waiting at home—that they will be fully compensated for this,” she growled, the raw authority of her position finally bleeding through her grief. “I am personally taking charge of their accounts. They will not have to worry about a single medical bill, a single funeral cost, or a missed paycheck. Do you understand me? I will take care of them.”

“Inara—” Caelum began, his eyes widening at the staggering financial promise.

But Orion cut his son off with a sharp raise of his hand. His steel-grey gaze locked onto Inara, filled with a sudden, deep respect. “I will deliver the message. Thank you, Inara.”

Inara offered a tight, solemn nod. With the weight of the underground world resting squarely on her shoulders, she turned back toward the transit station. Flanked by Celeste, Kade, and a silently vigilant Fiona, she finally headed home.

~*~

Morning arrived entirely too sharp and far too fast. Inara wanted nothing more than to sink beneath the heavy blankets and stay in her comfortable bed for the rest of the day, last night’s terrifying events pressing down on her chest like a boulder.

When she had finally stumbled through the front door late last night, she had been instantly ambushed by her family and a barrage of frantic questions.

“What in the hell were you doing down there?” her father had barked, his voice filled with angry disbelief.

“Are you okay?” Scarlett had asked, her eyes wide with genuine concern as she took in the traumatic look on her sister’s face and the thick layer of grey granite dust clinging to her hair.

“My dear, what on earth were you thinking? That was extremely dangerous,” her mother had chided calmly, though she easily read the severe distress radiating off her daughter.

“You’re out of your mind! What if you’d been hurt?” Silas had growled, stepping threateningly close. Rowan had remained blissfully silent in the corner, while Fiona let out a low, dangerous growl when Silas pressed his luck.

“I’m fine,” Inara had snapped, her teeth clicking together in a sudden burst of sharp irritation.

Her family had gone dead silent all at once. An outburst of open anger from her was so rare, so surprising, that it sucked the air right out of the room.

“I’m going to take a shower and go to bed,” she’d mumbled, her throat tight. “Goodnight.”

It was only after she turned on the wall-mounted holographic display in her bedroom that she realized why her family had swarmed her the second she walked in. There she was on the screen: teary-eyed but standing straight and unflinching, exchanging firm words with Caelum and Orion. Behind her, Kade and Celeste were frozen in disbelief, while Fiona pressed firmly against her legs in silent, unyielding support.

“And here we see Inara Ashwood live at the disaster site, dutifully showing her unwavering support to Orion and his successor at River Rock Company,” the polished news anchor had chimed.

“I really hope they don’t twist this into something it’s not,” Inara had growled to her empty room before stripping out of her ruined clothes and retreating into a scalding hot shower.

And now, the morning light filtered through the blinds while the news report—which she had forgotten to turn off—played on a silent loop. A rerun of last night’s broadcast showed her walking away from the collapsed shaft, a fierce, terrifying determination set in her golden eyes despite the tears she had fought so desperately to suppress.