When you finally rise, his hand lingers a moment longer than it needs to. “If you need more time…”

You shake your head as a sudden possessiveness grips you. “We wait too long, someone else might come along. That salvage is ours.”

Pragmatism visibly wars with concern on his face. “Alright. But don’t go pushing yourself.”

Harper takes point, sweeping the corners as you move out of the corridor and into the atrium proper.

The Norfolk Public Residence Cluster yawns upward. Over a hundred stories of concrete stacked tight as circuitry, the walls chocked with the husks of a thousand identical apartments. Rust creeps down the walls like old blood, and the air carries the sour tang of corroded metal and rot. Once, the place must have thrummed with the lives of over twenty thousand souls packed like sardines in a ration can; now, only silence breathes here.

You tilt your head back, following the vertical maze upward until the floors where the sun doesn’t shine blur into shadows. Every balcony is a narrow throat, every window a blind eye. The immensity of it presses down until your own breath feels too loud. Too alive.

You wonder what it was like to live here – boxed in concrete, waiting for the next ration drop or available work shift. All the while praying for no welfare riot or water famine, even as the news extoled life among the stars and Outer Colonies.

Those thoughts are set aside as both of you approach the Watchtower entrance, at the strongest concentration of corpses. Harper kneels down at one of them, a desiccated husk of a man in riot armor.

“…friendly fire?” he mutters, tracing the edge of a fist-sized hole burned clean through the man’s abdomen. Rust-colored stains streak along the helmet’s ear guards like dried tears. “Same wounds as the others.”

Your modem pings the door’s control node. The lock releases with a reluctant clunk, and the reinforced slabs grind apart just far enough for one person to slip through.

A breath of stale air escapes the gap – hot, chemical and rotten. It hits you like a gut punch. Even through Harper’s scarf, he doubles over coughing and gagging, while bile creeps up your throat again. The stench of cooked polymers, putrefying flesh, and stagnant fluids fold together into something foul and clingy.

Inside, the dim emergency lights stutter to life, cutting thin lines through the dark. The beams catch on brass casings and toppled barricades, on handprints smeared down walls and bodies slumped in the positions they died. Some expired at their posts, heads destroyed by self-inflicted gunshots; others died crawling towards the exit. Roaches scatter, skittering over cracked tiles and the bones beneath as they make a mad dash for the exit.

The Watchtower is no longer a command or administrative center.

It is a tomb.

“Oh, God,” breathes Harper, eyes watering. “Poor bastards never made it out.”

>>Roll 1d100 Loot Check.
>Best out of three.