The evening after a clearing operation had a specific quality to it that Michael was learning to recognize.
It wasn't celebration exactly, not the loud obvious kind, more like the particular decompression of people who had been running on focused tension for six hours and had come back intact and were now quietly processing the fact of that.
The building felt different at seven in the evening than it had at six thirty in the morning when everyone walked out the gate, fuller somehow, more present, like the shared weight of the day had compressed something between all of them that hadn't been there before.
Yuna had been in the kitchen since four.
She'd commandeered the full kitchen operation with the focused authority of someone who had a specific vision and the actual ingredients to execute it for the first time since the world ended and was not going to waste either.
