The east stairwell was the worst kind of bottleneck, a narrow spiral built for maybe forty people moving calmly and currently packed with closer to two hundred moving anything but calmly, the crush building from both directions at once as students above tried to flee downward and students below tried to flee up and away from something else entirely.
Valerica reached the landing just as the first railing gave.
She caught it without thinking, gravity bending hard around the falling section of iron before it could drop into the crowd below, holding it suspended for the half second it took her to redirect its weight sideways into the stairwell's outer wall instead. It landed with a heavy, controlled thud rather than the scream of metal through bodies it would have been a moment earlier.
"Slow down," she called out, voice pitched to carry without shouting, the same clean command register she used for everything. "One at a time. The stairs will hold if you stop trying to break them."
