Moving.
The movement had a quality that reached the watching students before any detail of it was visible — the specific quality of movement that belonged to someone who was not managing anything, not adjusting their pace to account for anything, not responding to any external demand on their attention. The loose, unoccupied movement of a person who had finished something and was walking away from it.
The smoke parted.
Leana walked out of it.
Her clothes were intact. Not cleaned, not undamaged in the technical sense — the fabric carried the evidence of a fight that had redistributed the dirt and debris of a corridor during a two-hour engagement — but intact.
She was not bleeding. Her pace was even. Her posture was the same posture she had carried into every training session and every field deployment and every interaction with her students that any of them could remember.
She looked the way she looked.
The students stared.
