The baker's street had been Tessa Varn's territory for eleven days, which meant it had been free territory for eleven days, held by silence and bread.
The compulsory layer arrived there in the second wave, and it came specifically for the street that would not agree.
Four hundred occupied citizens turned onto the baker's street in formation. At their head, the pattern placed Tessa's own neighbors, the people whose bread she had fed through two winters.
The design of it was cruelty with a filing system.
The network did not send soldiers to the dissenters of this street. It sent their own families instead, holding whatever the pattern had put into their hands.
Tessa stood at her oven door with flour on her forearms and did not run, because running had never once occurred to her in eleven days.
"Get behind the ovens, all of you," she said to the twenty dissenters sheltering in her bake house. "This is my street, and I have wanted to say that sentence my whole life."
