From The Ashes | The 100 S5 [Bellarke]

|9| We The People

6 years and 3 days after Praimfaya

Octavia walked into the bunker's control room flanked by Indra and Kane. Hope burned bright and taunting in the aura of the room, every eye alight with it; the feeling was more contagious than a disease.

"Talk," she said to Graham, their new head of engineering. He was the one who had radioed with the message that he might have stumbled across a way out. "What did you find?"

Graham was about the same age as Bellamy, with wild blonde hair that never stayed out of his eyes, no matter how many times he pushed it back. Octavia thought that he would have cut it by now, but obviously not. But he was a damn good engineer, and so if he said there was a possible exit, he had everyone's attention.

"So, I was talking to one of the native Polis residents," Graham said, pulling a digital blueprint of the bunker on the large wall screen opposite of the door. "And nearby caves were mentioned, and it turns out that they" – he tapped something on the panel in front of him, and the blueprint zoomed in to one of the smaller rooms on the third level – "could intersect with the bunker wall here."

"Which means we could drill through and make a back door, given that the caves are still intact of course," Jaha said, his voice pensive. He wasn't Octavia's favorite member of their diverse council of leadership for the bunker, but he was a good strategist.

"Absolutely," Graham agreed, nodding. His hair flopped and he reached a hand up to push it back, and Octavia smirked faintly as the wild locks just fell right back.

"This sounds pretty solid," she said. "But I assume there's a catch, right?"

"Yes, unfortunately." Graham shrank the blueprint again so that the entire bunker was shown in simple, digital lines. "A lot of our power lines and systems are built into the walls we'd have to drill into. If we did this and it was a bust . . . we'd have ruined our chances of survival down here. System failure would happen in, oh, three to four months."

"Is there any way to test this?" Octavia asked, but halfway through her question, Graham was shaking his head.

"Not without an outside pair of eyes," he said quietly. "If we had contact with the Ring survivors, mayb–"

"But we don't," Octavia interrupted.

She closed her eyes, her hand finding the handle of the sword sheathed at her hip and gripping the leather-wrapped hilt comfortingly. She heard the murmuring voices of the other council members as they discussed and debated this new information they'd been presented with, but she tuned them out.

She was unusually good at that, which helped in times like this when she needed to be alone with her thoughts.

But a voice broke through her pensive meditation a minute later, Jaha's words practical but uncomfortably blunt at the same time. Octavia was all for the cold truth, but the once-Chancellor had a way of delivering hard facts with an emotionless, robotic view. It was like his time as Alie's prophet had erased all of his compassion and kept the survivalist logic, leaving him even more ruthless than he had been on the Ark.

"We can't tell the people about this," he said, and Octavia gritted her teeth as she had no choice but to agree with him.

She opened her eyes, fixing Graham with a resolute, commanding gaze.

"This knowledge is considered classified," she said, carefully transferring the same gaze from person to person until all in the room knew the weight of her decision. "If anyone shares this with those outside this room, it will be viewed as treason."

"If the people knew about this chance of freedom, there will be chaos," Kane added, his diplomacy softening the sharp edges of her choice. "We can't risk their safety, because there will be those who would want to drill through the walls, no matter the consequences."

"So . . . we're not going to drill?" Graham asked cautiously. "Look, I know it's not a very good chance, but it's still a chance . . . right?"

"We're talking about certain life versus potential death here, Graham," Kane replied. "It's not that simple."

"Either way, we're going to need time to think about this," Octavia said. "Graham, I want to you run as many tests as you can" – she held a hand up against his incoming protests – "even if you've done them. Run them again. Double check and then check again. We need to know everything about this."

"Got it," Graham said, but his brown was drawn.

"As for the rest of us . . ." Octavia took a breath. "We'll meet again as soon as Graham has more information for us, and go from there."

After the others had left the room, Octavia leaned against the center desk, her palms braced against the cool wood surface.

Her hope was now tempered with the choice that lay in their future. She wanted to risk their lives because this was the first real chance at freedom they'd had, but the price of failure was one she couldn't pay.

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Hey, whaddya know? More Wonkru! There's going to be a bit more of them from now on with this new plot arc intro for them -- will there be rioting? Will they take the risk to drill or not?

Vote and comment!