It happened in the kitchen, which seemed right, since most things that mattered in this compound eventually happened in a kitchen.
Lena had been cooking — properly cooking now, three years into learning from Kira, good enough that she'd started taking over certain dishes entirely, the way new cooks did once they'd earned a dish of their own. Hers was a bread — a specific, dense, slightly sweet bread that she'd apparently grown up eating, before Halcyon, before the suppression, from a childhood she rarely talked about.
She was kneading it when it happened.
Not dramatically. Lena would say, later, that it felt like nothing at first — just a warmth in her hands, the kind you might get from kneading anything for long enough. And then the dough, under her hands, did something dough didn't do
