The watchtower was created some few days later and some serious changes took place.
It was not something that was flashy and you could point out at first glance but just in a simple way that good infrastructure always changed things.
Before the watchtower Michael's awareness of what was happening outside the building was limited to the perimeter pulse range and what Sera could see from the viewport on her tiptoes at the right angle.
After the watchtower he could see four blocks in every direction from a reinforced observation platform on the roof with a pulse relay that extended his Territory range further than anything he had access to before.
He had built it in the morning while everyone was doing their usual routines and by afternoon Sera was already up there and hadn't really come back down.
He climbed up to check on her around the middle of the afternoon and found her sitting on the platform edge with her legs hanging over the side and her axe across her knees looking out at the city like she was thinking about something.
She didn't look at him when he came up. "You can see the hospital from here."
He looked in the direction she was facing. Three blocks north and one block east, a mid sized general hospital with its upper floors visible above the surrounding buildings. The windows were dark and two of them on the upper floors were broken out but the structure looked intact.
"Medical supplies," he said.
"More than the pharmacy. If the dispensary is intact and the storage rooms haven't been hit." She paused. "Dr. Kang would know what to look for."
"Dr. Kang is not going on a supply run."
Sera looked at him sideways. "She's going to argue that."
"She can argue it from inside the building."
The corner of Sera's mouth moved. "Good luck with that."
He looked out at the city from the watchtower platform and it was a different experience to looking at it from the viewport six floors below. Up here the scale of it was visible in a way that the window hadn't allowed. Block after block of empty streets and dark buildings and stopped cars stretching out in every direction until the city faded into grey distance. No movement except the occasional Rotter shuffling somewhere far enough away to be a blip on the pulse and nothing more.
It looked enormous and empty and completely indifferent to the fact that five people in one building were trying to hold something together inside it.
"How far does the pulse reach now?" Sera asked.
He checked. "It goes six blocks in every direction at full extension. When I hit the Tier 2 relay upgrade, then it would push it to ten."
"What does that cost?"
"Materials I don't have yet. It will take two more days probably."
She nodded and looked back out at the city and he sat down beside her on the platform edge and looked out with her and for a while neither of them said anything and the city just was what it was around them.
"There are people out there," Sera said quietly. "Somewhere in all of that."
"Yeah."
"More than we've found."
"A lot more probably."
She was quiet again.
"We should think about expanding the search radius," she said. "Once the base is more stable. Go further than two blocks."
"That's the plan," he said without thinking.
She looked at him. "The what?"
"The next phase," he said smoothly. "Once Tier 2 is complete and we have proper defenses and enough supplies to support more people."
She held his gaze for a second like she wanted to say something but bit her lips and decided against it. "How many more people are you thinking?"
"As many as we can keep safe," he said.
Sera looked at him for a moment and then back at the city and something in her expression went quiet.
She didn't say anything else about it.
[Bond Event — Shared Horizon: Sera. +1 Bond Point. Current BP: 6 — Sera.]