Maya found the watchtower by the evening and her reaction was considerably less contemplative than Sera's.
She came up through the hatch and stood on the platform and turned in a slow circle taking in the four block view in every direction with her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open and then looked at Michael like he had personally built the entire city for her to look at from above.
"This is incredible," she said.
"It's a watchtower."
"Michael it's a watchtower on top of our building in the middle of the apocalypse." She turned another circle. "You can see everything."
"That's the point."
She stopped turning and looked north in the direction Sera had been looking earlier. Her eyes found the hospital without him pointing it out which told him something about how she processed information. "Is that a hospital?"
"Yeah."
"Have you been in it?"
"Not yet."
She looked at it for a long moment and then looked at him with an expression that was working up to something. He recognized the expression. It was the one she wore when she had an idea she knew he wasn't going to immediately agree with.
"Don't," he said.
"I haven't said anything."
"You have the face."
She pointed at him. "You don't know my face."
"Maya."
"I'm just saying a hospital run would be more valuable than the pharmacy was and we know where it is now and—"
"When the base is ready," he said.
She opened her mouth.
"When the base is ready," he said again.
She closed her mouth and crossed her arms and looked back at the hospital with the expression of someone adding something to a list they were maintaining. He was fairly confident the list was called [things Michael said no to that I'm going to bring up again later] and that it had been started approximately four days ago.
[Bond Event — Rooftop: Maya. +1 Bond Point. Current BP: 4 — Maya.]
---
Shin came up to the watchtower the next day.
Her leg was well enough to go through stairs now, Dr. Kang's cautious approval given that morning after a proper examination, and she'd been moving around the apartment with carefully for the past two days clearly waiting for exactly this clearance.
Michael was doing a pulse sweep from the platform when he heard the hatch and turned around and she was pulling herself up through it with one hand on the frame and the other gripping the ladder and the concentration of someone who was not going to let a healing leg be a reason to stay below when there was a roof to stand on.
He didn't offer to help because he could tell that would be the wrong move.
She made it up and straightened and looked out at the city and took a long slow breath of open air that said more than any comment would have about what twenty nine days of being inside had felt like.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," he said. "How's the leg."
"It's fine," she said in a tone that meant it was fine enough and she was done discussing it.
He nodded and looked back out at the city and she stood beside him and looked out too and it was quiet for a while.
"Thank you," she said after a while.
"You said that already."
"I know." She looked at him. "I mean for all of it." She gestured at the platform, the building, everything below them. "For this."
Michael looked at her with a surprised expression for some moments before smiling.
"It's not finished," he said.
"It doesn't need to be finished to be something," she said simply.
He looked at her and she looked back and she had the kind of steady warmth that didn't make a show of itself and he was starting to understand was just who she was.
[Bond Event — Something Worth Having: Shin. +1 Bond Point. Current BP: 3 — Shin.]
---
That evening Michael sat on the platform alone after everyone else had gone back down and ran the full pulse sweep across all six blocks and counted signatures and mapped patterns and thought about the hospital and the blocks beyond it and the city beyond that.
The Tier 2 progress bar was at eighty four percent. The greenhouse was going up tomorrow and two more upgrades after that and Tier 3 would be opened.
Tier 3 meant creating the clinic Dr. Kang had been patient about and expanding the barracks and better equipments that would help them survive longer.
He looked south toward the lower part of the city where the first outbreak reports had come from, where the density of Rotter signatures on the pulse was thicker than anywhere else, and thought about what was sitting in the middle of all of that.