She had been running since before the barrier cracked.
Not from the moment of the atmosphere shift. From slightly before it, the particular sensitivity of a practitioner who had spent more years in active combat than most of the students she was currently watching had been alive registering the approach of something significant before it had fully expressed itself to the field's general awareness.
She had been moving before the students stopped.
This was not teleportation. She did not have Elias's specific talent for collapsing distance, the fold in space that had put him at the corridor's mouth before she had covered half the ground. What she had was speed earned through decades of movement under conditions that rewarded it, and the specific kind of focused acceleration that came from knowing exactly where you needed to be and understanding the cost of not reaching it.
She ran.
