For the last thirty seconds, Mara had done the only thing she knew how to do when everyone around her began to panic.
She refused to join them.
She looked.
Vane took three strides and gained no ground.
The earth moved beneath him. His body advanced. The distance did not diminish. Space behaved less like something crossed than something poured endlessly between two points.
Ashe tried to reach him and failed in exactly the same way.
Isole's hands began to glow, gold gathering against her palms, before she caught herself and crushed the light back into nothing.
Mara watched all of it with the same flat, methodical clarity she brought to a ledger at the end of a disastrous month. Strip away the noise. Ignore what everyone wanted the numbers to say. Find what they actually meant.
Every person trying harder was making it worse.
This was not a monster.
It was not a wall.
It was a measurement.
