Naria's Wolves

Chapter Four-Episode Two

“What do you mean?” Kade asked, his amber eyes narrowing as he instantly began tracking her sudden shift in thought.

“My mother is the one who engineered this entire transition. She’s the one who put me in this position,” Inara explained rapidly, the words tumbling out as the pieces started clicking together. “What if she knew exactly what Ryker found? What if she knew all along?”

“s**t,” Celeste chimed in, her tail twitching with sudden excitement behind her. “That would mean she placed you exactly where you needed to be to ask the dangerous questions without facing immediate backlash. Or, at the very least, she made you legally untouchable to a certain extent.”

“Damn. That woman really is a powerhouse,” Kade mused, a look of genuine respect washing over his features. “If that’s the real reason she wanted you at the head of every major corporation the family owns, maybe this was her own calculated way of playing the game.”

“Game?” Inara questioned, a cold knot tightening in her stomach.

“Oh, you sweet, naive soul,” Kade cooed gently, his voice dripping with affection as he squeezed her shoulder. “Anyone in a position of supreme power is playing some kind of game, sweetheart.”

“Well, it’s a game I’d rather not play,” Inara groaned, burying her face in her hands.

“Sounds to me like you’re the pawn,” Celeste grimaced, her white ears flattening slightly in sympathy.

“She’s not a pawn,” Kade chided sharply, throwing Celeste a warning look. “She’s in training.”

“I am not in training for whatever twisted game is being played here!” Inara huffed, crossing her arms defensively.

“We’re getting off topic,” Kade said smoothly, brushing off Celeste’s comment before the argument could escalate.

Inara shifted in the booth, leaning down slightly to nudge the massive, warm frame resting by her shins. “Fiona,” she whispered. “Do you know anything about this? Did Mom ever mention anything to you?”

From beneath the table, Fiona shifted, her dark head rising slightly as she gave a quiet, measured shake of her head. “I do not,” she admitted in a hushed, reverent tone. “Your mother kept her deepest strategies entirely to herself.”

“I doubt she ever voiced her ultimate plans to anyone,” Kade agreed, looking thoughtfully out at the pulsing neon dance floor. “A chess move of this magnitude? She wouldn’t have told a single living soul until the trap was snapped shut.”

“This is too much,” Inara grumbled, pressing the palms of her hands against her temples as a headache began to throb behind her eyes. “Can we please just slow down for a second? What I just said was a wild theory, not an absolute fact. We don't know anything for sure yet.”

With those words, thankfully, Kade navigated them out of the warehouse. The moment they stepped into the open air, Inara felt like she could finally breathe again. While sneaking into what she would consider a highly restricted area had been a thrill, she was mentally shot. The one thing she truly loved about Kade was his uncanny ability to always know exactly when she had reached her limits.

Suddenly, a sharp, unfamiliar alarm began blaring from Inara’s wrist unit.

She flinched violently at the sound. The contrast between the deafening, bass-heavy thud of the rave a moment ago to the profound quiet of the crumbling ruins around them was vast, making the little alarm feel like a gunshot in the silence.

“What the hell is that?” Celeste asked, her eyes narrowing warily at Inara's wrist.

“I think it’s part of the new system,” Inara answered, her fingers flying across the interface as she desperately searched for the source of the noise. “Lucien’s assistant told me at the Gala that they were making some direct modifications to my administrative accounts.”

She spotted a strange application pulsating with a soft, bioluminescent glow in perfect time with the chime. It was a high-pitched, annoying frequency that made her eye twitch—though she supposed that was entirely the point of an emergency alert.

Inara tapped the glowing icon, which bore the prominent insignia of the River Rock Company. Instantly, a translucent emergency bubble popped up in front of her face, flashing a blinding, urgent red.

It was a critical warning for a fresh tunnel collapse.

Inara’s fur stood straight on end.

“Another one?” Kade asked, his smooth voice dropping into a hushed, strained register.

“I’ve officially lost count of how many there have been just this week,” Inara whispered, a cold dread wrapping tightly around her heart. At this terrifying rate, they weren’t just going to keep losing people—Naria would never be able to expand if they couldn't establish basic structural stability.

“Is that a sector map?” Celeste asked, pointing a sharp finger toward a tiny, blinking display in the bottom right corner of the warning box.

Inara tapped the map to expand it. Sure enough, a precise location marker pinned the exact tunnel number. Below it, a data feed listed the total headcount of the crew currently trapped inside, with Caelum’s name highlighted in bold text as the primary overseer.

Inara’s breath hitched. She checked the coordinates. It wasn't terribly far from their current position, especially if they caught the express transit train running through the nearby sub-station.

“I’m going,” she said, her voice shaking but carrying a sudden, fierce undercurrent. “I have to see it for myself. I have to find out why these tunnels are failing.”

“We’re going with you,” Kade said firmly. Before she could protest, he closed his hand over hers, his warm amber eyes locking onto her golden ones. “You are not facing this alone.”

“Let’s move,” Celeste added with fierce determination, her spotted leopard ears twitching as a massive wave of adrenaline flooded her system.

It didn’t take them long to locate the transit sub-station, hidden about a mile from where the warehouse rave had been thumping. Inara had never actually ridden on one of the lower-tier lines before. Under any other circumstance, she would have recoiled at the dilapidated conditions—the thick grime coating the walls and the sheer, run-down state of the transit car—but right now, the aesthetic horrors would just have to wait.

“It’s two stops from here,” Inara said, her voice dropping to a low, tense murmur.

“Isn’t Caelum Orion’s son?” Kade asked. He nodded toward the small emergency hologram floating delicately in the air beside Inara’s shoulder. She had left the projection active; it was a live, terrifying feed of the disaster site updating in real-time as they hurtled through the dark transit tunnels.

“He is,” Inara breathed, her fingers tightening around the safety rail. “I just hope he’s okay.”

“I’m sure he is,” Celeste assured her, placing a grounding hand on Inara’s shoulder.

The transit car was blissfully empty, leaving the four of them in total isolation. Inara knew the last thing she needed right now was prying eyes watching her rush headfirst into the deep sectors of Naria.

“Most of the time, overseers don’t get down into the actual physical labor themselves, so there’s a very good chance Caelum wasn’t inside the shaft when it gave way,” Kade noted, his amber eyes scanning the technical specs on the warning screen. “From the looks of this data feed, the crew assigned down there wasn’t very large to begin with.”

“It’s even smaller than the crew from the last collapse, I think,” Inara murmured, mostly to herself. “I wonder why.”

“Honestly? I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that kind of work if that’s all I ever heard about on the news,” Celeste said, her tone laced with heavy sadness. “They’re probably severely understaffed down here, and that can never be a good thing for safety.”

Kade nodded grimly. “Exactly. The fewer people they have working the line, the more likely these men are to cut critical corners just to meet a corporate deadline. It’s almost certainly one of the main reasons we’re seeing an exponential spike in unstable tunnel reports.”

“That is going to have to change,” Inara whispered, a fierce, protective determination cutting through her fear. “Whatever I have to do to fix this, I’ll do it.”

“You need to make an accurate assessment first,” Kade reminded her gently. “But I love where your head is at. Let’s find out exactly what we're dealing with first.”

Despite the warnings, Inara was entirely unprepared for the sheer devastation that greeted her when she stepped off the transit platform.

The air was thick and choking. Men were running frantically back and forth between the yawning, caved-in mouth of the tunnel and the heavy machinery stationed on the perimeter, executing a mad dash against the ticking clock. Giant mechanical arms on the excavation rigs groaned violently, grabbing and scooping up boulder-sized chunks of dark granite in a desperate attempt to hollow out the shaft and retrieve the souls trapped inside.

Inara forced herself to look away from the dark stains of blood marring the bottom of the rubble pile, focus shifting entirely to tracking down Caelum.

“Holy s**t,” Celeste breathed, her leopard ears pinning flat against her skull in sheer shock.

“That’s an absolute understatement,” Kade whispered.

“Caelum!” Inara called out frantically. Spotting his distinct, dusky blond hair near a huddle of workers, she sprinted through the dust toward him. Fiona bounded right behind her, acting as her ever-present shadow.

“Inara?” Caelum turned, his face twisting in complete shock. “What in the hell are you doing down here?”