Rumour claimed that both of Beth’s defensive skills would max out at the end of Stage 3. It was a mild and not unexpected disappointment. Her skin-shield already protected her from mild and moderate slashing damage continuously, and extreme damage for four and a half seconds every nine. It wouldn’t protect her from stubbing her toe, but as long as she had a moment to realise that she was at risk, she was virtually invulnerable to infection. Additionally, her knockback would shove an infected ten meters away and would stun them for over ten seconds. She didn’t, realistically, need anything more than that.

  There was no rumour about the inner space skill maxing out, and she had reached Stage 6. Beth reported her advancement to Stage ‘3’. She took care to always level up her inner space immediately before and after heavy skill use, keeping the times when she was at an ‘odd’ skill level to as few hours as possible.

  It was a significant stage improvement. Time control. She could already set each space to run at anything from twice standard time to half. By Stage 7, it would allow all the way down to no time passing at all. Perfect storage, with no spoilage whatsoever. Beth had already moved in her perishable supplies, but it was a pity she had received it after the harvest was mostly over. When that ability became public knowledge, the demands for inner space users would sky-rocket.

  With the mainland out of reach, Helen and Beth had returned to the allotment clearing team. Their replacements remained as well, since they had nowhere else to go. With two extra people, they could now keep to their schedules. There was no pressure to work overtime, even if they had been willing to risk working in the dark. Beth didn’t have any excuses. She had plenty of time to shop for Christmas presents.

  There was a traditional Christmas Market in the main part of the town, but The Square offered better value for money. It had done its best to be festive. Every support rope exhibited some kind of mismatched bunting or hand-made bauble or short string of sunstone shards. They had mulled wine, as well. Mixed with fennel and pennywort rather than cinnamon and clove, but it was still warming. The shoppers, hidden underneath winter coats and scarves, were somehow brighter and happier.

  Except for the inevitable protestors. Beth paused to observe them when she noticed they’d split into two groups. Despite the taunts both were throwing at each other, Beth couldn’t determine what had caused the split. Looking at them closely reminded her of Seb’s description of them as a self-solving problem. He hadn’t been predicting this apparent schism, but he’d still been right.

  They were slowly starving themselves to death.

  The humanity-only people were easy to mock, but Beth found herself respecting them in that half-defensive way some meat lovers treated vegans. There was something disturbing about the actions of the aliens. Refusing to take part at all was probably the right thing to do. Beth trained the skills and ate the supps because it was personally convenient to do so, not because she agreed morally. Humanity-first had the conviction to endure hardship to live up to their ideals.

  But they were dying for it without once even inconveniencing the aliens.

  In a corner behind them, almost totally obscured, was a jar with a painted wooden sign – donations for widows and orphans. It looked ancient; left over from before motorboats and desk jobs. Beth didn’t know if skills would be enough to keep gender equality intact in the new world without motorboats and desk jobs.

  Beth shook herself. She couldn’t solve everything. She could barely solve anything. Other people might have more serious problems than having a mildly embarrassing father, but she still had to find presents.

  She browsed. Someone had transformed a tablecloth into some rather pretty scarves. One would do for Catherine. She paused at a stall selling wine. That wasn’t a bad idea for the de la Haye parents, but not from here. She would rather give her money to Helen. The de la Haye’s might not appreciate the indignancy of home-brewed alcohol, but Beth suspected they wouldn’t be much more impressed with the local wines with hand-written labels on display either. That was fine. The gesture was enough.

  Alistair, under the circumstances, was extremely awkward. She had sent him that hot-water bottle already as an early Christmas present with absolutely no expectation of having to face him about it. Did she give him another present, or not? In the end, she decided to pick up an attractive but inexpensive carved wooden comb. Perhaps he’d be kind enough not to mention the hot-water bottle at all if she wasn’t foolish enough to bring it up herself.

  While she was there, Beth checked again for sunstones, hoping to supplement the desk lamps she’d already bought for her father and brother. Unfortunately, it seemed those were still being hoarded by the military. Melanie had been complaining for weeks about not having a reliable supply for the henhouse. Beth shrugged to herself. She had done what she could.

  The first of the winter celebrations was one Beth had never encountered before. For the winter equinox, the high school allotment committee had organised a traditional celebration of the Long Watch in the canteen. Beth had been allowed to bring Calley as part of Beth’s Christmas present to her. Calley bounced in place whenever she forgot she was supposed to be very adult.

  Calley would be working on her tablet weaving, while Beth had agreed to help crochet granny squares from reclaimed yarn for someone else’s project. Melanie was the star attraction of the evening. She’d commissioned a pedal operated spinning wheel and had purchased some of the very plentiful raw wool. A small group of people had gathered around her. Beth let Calley go over to try for herself while Beth joined Gwen and George at a long table for more sedate activities.

  “Does your family have anything special planned for Christmas day?” asked Gwen.

  “We’re going to visit my brother’s girlfriend’s family,” replied Beth.

  Beth was careful to be vague. She was conscious of how many people could overhear and didn’t want to get into details about who her older brother was.

  “Really?” said Gwen in sympathy.

  “I know,” said Beth. “I don’t know what Peter even said to convince them to invite us.”

  “It might just not be a very important day to them,” said George.

  “What, Christmas?” asked Beth.

  “No, the 25th,” said George. “They’re an old family, right? Some of them still celebrate ‘Old Christmas Day’ instead. The 6th of January.”

  “I thought the 6th of January was Epiphany. Do people prefer to celebrate that here?”

  “Some people do, I think,” said George, “but that’s not what I meant. The date is a co-incidence, actually. They’re celebrating Old Christmas Day. The day it would be the 25th if we were still using the Julian calendar and not the Gregorian.”

  “Wait, what?” demanded Beth.

  George laughed. “Oh yes, if you think people are resistant to change now, let me tell you about our ancestors. The change was forced on us by those foreign rulers, you see, back in 1750-ish. But they could force us to use the new calendar in official documents, but they couldn’t force us to pretend eleven days didn’t exist in our day-to-day lives. Seriously, what kind of nonsense did they expect us to put up with? And so, Christmas moved.”

  Beth had to pause her crocheting as her shoulders shook too hard. The ridiculousness of it just tickled her fancy. Every time she almost calmed down, a new wave of absurdity overwhelmed her.

  Then a detail nagged at her. “Eleven days is the 5th of January.”

  George counted aloud. “Twenty-five plus eleven is thirty-six, minus thirty-one… huh. Five.”

  “Is December thirty days long?” suggested Gwen.

  “No, it’s definitely thirty-one,” said Beth. “Did they move the calendar twelve days?”

  “Must have, I guess,” said George with a frown.

  “Well, actually…” provided a woman from next to them with a smile. “It was eleven days, and Old Christmas Day was on the fifth. But then the Gregorian calendar had a leap year in 1800, and the Julian didn’t, so it slipped another day.”

  Beth abandoned her crochet entirely to press a hand to her mouth, trying to keep the noise down so that people wouldn’t stare at her giggling like a maniac.

  “Then shouldn’t it be on the 7th of January?” asked another spectator. “There was another missing leap year in 1900.”

  The woman shrugged with a wry smile. “Yes, in theory, but no one was actually using the old calendar by 1900. The old families were just celebrating on the wrong day to prove some sort of point.”

  Gwen said, “Quite useful. You get to buy your Christmas presents at the January sales.”

  The woman agreed with a laugh and turned back to her own conversation partners.

  Another change, since Beth didn’t imagine there would be much in the way of sales this year, but speaking of presents…

  “How’s the wishing tree?” Beth asked George. “Any cards still not taken?”

  Beth had already turned in the two presents she had prepared. She had been a little saddened at how little the kids wished for, but knew there wasn’t much more people could have given.

  “No cards left,” said George, “but there’s still presents that haven’t come back. We don’t know which ones are just late, and which ones won’t come back at all.”

  “You think they won’t?” asked Beth. “Aren’t people only supposed to take a card if they’re sure they can get hold of it? And if it turns out they can’t, surely they can just bring the card back.”

  “We ask that of people yes, but…” George spread his hands. “There’s always someone who forgets, or leaves it too late and is too embarrassed to admit it, or never intended on following through in the first place.”

  That stripped away the last of Beth’s mirth. She must have looked excessively horrified, because Gwen patted her hand.

  “Some people just want the praise for seeming to be generous, without the inconvenience of actually being generous. We just have to work around it and have a bunch of emergency gifts for the kids that would otherwise miss out.”

  “It used to be even worse, with social media,” said George. “People would film themselves taking the card, and film themselves picking up the present, but then dump both somewhere before checkout. At least now, some of those people can get away with just claiming to have fulfilled one without messing with the cards.”

  Beth bit back exclamations of how terrible that was. They all already knew.

  “Well,” she said instead, “Let me know if you need more emergency gifts. I could probably put together another package, even if it won’t be exactly what they asked for.”

  “Thank you,” said George. “We’ll keep you in mind.”

  “And the Christmas lunch?” asked Beth. “Is there anything I can offer?”

  George was hosting four children that had literally no-where else to go. Not a single family member, or friend of the family, or family of a friend, to invite them.

  “No, unfortunately, I can’t accept anything,” said George. “We have to be careful. I need to be able to verify that every piece of food came from my garden or show a receipt of where I bought it.”

  Beth nodded in agreement. Two people from the High School alone had already been stripped of their allotments and banned from ever applying for another, and they had simply been distributing their excess zucchinis to their neighbours. It wasn’t worth the risk.

  “And, well,” continued George, “I mean, I don’t want to make too big a deal of it, either. The kids are going to be in mourning. I don’t want them to feel obliged to pretend to be happy.”

  Beth looked away. Grief had become a different thing since the infection in some ways, with everyone seeing so much more of it. But in others, it was the same splinter trapped under the skin, flaring to fresh pain at every unexpected bump. No-one was unscathed. Everyone had someone who had died. This would be their first Christmas without their parents, aunts, uncles, or siblings. Even Beth, who had come away relatively unscathed. The Long Watch ended on the anniversary of Uncle Alex’s death.

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  The next day, after Beth had caught up on some sleep, she joined the throngs at the commemoration wall. She added some artificial flowers and tidied up Uncle Alex’s display. She was finished too quickly. She wished she had something more she could do. Light a candle. Say a prayer. Go on a multi-day pilgrimage. Some external gesture that would release the internal emotions that were rotting inside her.

  Instead, she had to return home and pretend to be happy.

  Preparations for visiting the de la Hayes took them all the way through to Christmas morning itself. The cabbage and crab side dish, baked apples, roasted chestnuts and heavy butter and potato puddings. Things that could be kept for weeks or even given away. The same amount of food, if not quite the same variety, as they would have made had they been celebrating in private.

  “It’s embarrassing,” her father complained. “It makes us look like low-class yokels.”

  “It’s more embarrassing if we don’t,” said Sophie, unusually sharply. “I’d rather be considered unsophisticated than a freeloader.”

  Perhaps her father was as surprised as Beth at Sophie’s resolution, because he let it go after only a few more grumbles.

  The de la Haye house was just as pristinely pretty as it had been the last time she’d visited. The decorations were restrained, but the live Christmas tree was loaded down with sunstones. Beth tilted her head. Each sunstone on that tree could instead have been used to coax two dozen eggs from Melanie’s chickens. It was a ten-gross-of-eggs Christmas tree. Beth swallowed air to prevent her expression from giving her thoughts away.

  Mrs de la Haye accepted the dishes with a ‘you shouldn’t have’, but no actual resistance. Sophie shot Beth’s father a ‘told-you-so’ glance that he pretended not to see.

  The gift-exchange that started the day was precisely as awkward as Beth expected it to be. Her presents were received without fanfare. The twins received cards detailing the pre-negotiated – and separate – functions she would take them to without surprise. Sophie received pest-stones that promised to discourage mice from over-wintering in the loft without excitement. Her father and Peter received desk lamps without spare sunstones.

  The de la Hayes were gracious about the gifts they received and gave inoffensive gifts in return. The parents gave them all a box of sunflower-seed ‘chocolates’ each. Some people swore it tasted like the real thing, but Beth was inclined to suspect it had just been so long that they had forgotten what the real thing tasted like. But it was fat, and it was sugar, and that was enough to make it a rather extravagant gift.

  Peter and Catherine gave her a book. It wasn’t a genre she normally read, but in the post-internet world, no-one could afford to be picky.

  Alistair gave her a backpack that was larger and sturdier than the one officially provided for scavengers. She tried it on and it was excellent at distributing the weight across her hips. It was, however, a bizarre gift to give someone with an inner space skill. Did that mean he was unaware of her registered skills? It was perhaps excessively self-centred to assume that he had looked up her details and intentionally given her a gift she could only use as camouflage. It probably had nothing to do with the hot-water bottle. She had hoped to avoid the awkwardness of discussing it aloud right up until he took her aside.

  “And thank you for the previous gift, as well,” Alistair said.

  Beth hated how she could feel her ear-tips burning. “I saw it while scav— salvaging and remembered what you said about missing having one. I hadn’t intended on mailing it to you. There was this guard at the pier—”

  Beth stopped herself from explaining further. It didn’t matter. Instead, she finished off with “I hope it didn’t cause you any problems.”

  “No, not at all,” he said. “Everyone was very jealous. I was the envy of the base for the day.”

  “Oh, good,” said Beth faintly. That sounded horrific.

  A raised voice interrupted. “Everyone! Lunch is ready!”

  “We’d better—” she said in relief, gesturing towards the dining room.

  Alistair let her escape.

  The meal matched the decorations. Goose and pork and fresh vegetables and preserved fruit, all beautifully presented. Their own crab and braised cabbage was tactfully present, but it had been re-plated to match the rest of the table. The dinnerware was celadon with delicate gold rims, the type of set purchased by people who didn’t have to wash their own dishes.

  Beth helped herself to some crab. She thought of the saying about crabs in a bucket – that they would pull each other down. There was always someone to object that the crabs weren’t trying to keep the others down. It was instead a protective instinct to keep others from being swept away in a storm. But she’d never seen anyone explore the other side of the saying. It didn’t matter whether the crabs worked together or worked apart. The owner of the bucket would make sure all the crabs ended up on the dinner table regardless.

  After some light conversation, Beth recovered from her mortification and was willing to risk speaking to Alistair again. At an appropriate opportunity, she said, “Our allotment will soon be asked to start clearing some of the abandoned farms.”

  Forced re-ruralisation would start at some point, but she had no idea when. Or what criteria would be used to force people to move. Sometimes, having The Book was worse than nothing. All the stress of knowing and none of the solution of how to stop it. Theo had been unforthcoming about the matter, and he wasn’t an information source she could afford to put pressure on. Alistair wasn’t either, to be entirely honest, but it should be fine to make a small attempt.

  “Is that so?” asked Alistair.

  The tone was not promising. It was so unpromising as to be suspicious. If Alistair had been genuinely uninformed and uninterested, he would have been too polite to be that obvious about it.

  “Any theories about what they intend to do with those farms once they’re cleared?” tried Beth anyway.

  “I must imagine they have some volunteers who will make use of them, somehow,” he said. “It won’t be a military affair, at any rate. We have our own people who clear areas we wish to make use of. We try not to mix operations or responsibilities with the civil side.”

  Beth raised an eyebrow. That was a little much. “Isn’t the military preparing the salt flats down near Greenmouth?”

  “It is,” said Alistair, with a nod to acknowledge her point. “In that instance, we’re the only ones who have the expertise. But we will be handing it over to civilian control once it has been established.”

  And then they could send people who refused to work on the wheat farms to almost-literal salt mines. The conversation spilled out from the rest of the table, and Beth lost her chance to press any further. Beth restrained herself from saying anything else undiplomatic all the way until the end of the meal when she was forced to watch Peter and Catherine play “No, you; no, you” with the last of the roast pork.

  “The etiquette for taking seconds still confuses me,” she said, trying to sound warm and inclusive rather than accusatory. “There’s only so much excess, so only some people get to take more. But when are you allowed to accept? People can’t keep endlessly declining, can they? It would never get eaten.”

  “I suppose,” said Alistair. “We try to give it to the person for whom it means the most.”

  That wasn’t a bad answer. Reasonable. Considerate. “But who decides that?”

  “Presumably,” said Alistair, “that’s what we use the rounds of declining to figure out.”

  “It’s a simple matter of politeness, Beth,” interrupted her father. “Younger people wait for older. Hosts for guests. Juniors for seniors.”

  And wasn’t that a convenient ranking, seeing as it put her father on top?

  “When we were younger,” said Alistair mildly, not turning to look at Beth’s father, “none of the adults would take seconds until all the children had all they wanted.”

  Mrs de la Haye laughed. “That was no great sacrifice, Alistair. It doesn’t take much to satisfy a child. And if it was anything we didn’t wish to share, we just waited until you weren’t around.”

  “The truth comes out!” he said melodramatically. “All these years of being lied to!”

  “You had a hard life,” agreed Mrs de la Haye. “But in this case, the easiest is to simply split it. Please do so, Catherine, and stop making a fuss.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Beth couldn’t tell who, among them, was only speaking about literal leftovers. Still, she rather felt she’d lost that round, and without making the point she’d hoped to.

  After the meal, the younger generation was once again encouraged to play poker while the adults chatted at seating behind them. Beth didn’t know why she was surprised when Peter proposed they play with real money, and she didn’t know why he was surprised when she refused to break the law. Alistair settled the matter by handing out an equal number of chips to everyone and reminding Peter they’d be playing against fourteen-year-olds.

  Beth played indifferently, letting Alistair direct the winnings as amused him. She surreptitiously judged the time. Another half an hour before she could leave, she thought. After she’d folded an especially bad hand early, she caught a very particular tone in her father’s voice. A tone that was enough to make her stomach churn even without any further context. Beth turned her head to one side to hear better.

  “… tasks that can only really be done by people you can fully trust. There’s nothing that can truly compare to the reliability of family.”

  Was her father asking for a job? Beth looked across at Peter. He was pretending to be very interested in his cards, but the cardboard warped under the stress of his fingers. Beth looked back down and subtly tilted her head.

  “Oh, I do agree,” said Mr de la Haye. “Hired staff can often be so very unreliable, can’t they? I mean, lovely people, most of them, of course. But they just don’t have the same aims, at the end of the day, do they? But still useful in their place.”

  “And in places where they aren’t useful—” started her father.

  “Oh, yes,” said Mr de la Haye, cutting him off. “We are extraordinarily fortunate to have an extensive family present here on the island. My father is still healthy and as sharp as a tack. We joke that he has an entire battalion of grandchildren and grand-nieces and -nephews to deploy.”

  Who would probably be gathering in twelve days’ time to celebrate their own personal Christmas in deliberate indifference to the standards of the rest of the world. Not this little play they were putting on for Beth and her family.

  Beth was tilting her head in each direction in turn to hear the conversation behind her. She was a spectator at an invisible tennis match, and she wanted both sides to lose. She couldn’t find the sympathy she should have for her father’s desperation that brought him to beg for a job from the de la Hayes. She couldn’t find the grace to forgive the de la Hayes for bragging about their nepotism either.

  She knew they were hardly evil in their actions, but was she really meant to excuse their corruption because other people were even worse? The meal, the gifts, the skill-based lighting and heating weren’t subtle. Everything was evidence of how the powerful had come through the apocalypse with barely a ripple to their day to day lives.

  Why was it the rich remained rich, while people like her Uncle Alex had been shot?

  Her father said, “I am glad we can rely—”

  Mr de la Haye cut him off again. “Yes, always good to have appropriate support.”

  Beth could feel her own face heat again in second-hand embarrassment. Her father was just… couldn’t he hear the contempt in Mr De la Haye’s voice? Beth found herself wishing that Mrs de la Haye would suggest they divide the job in half and stop making a fuss.

  Mr de la Haye put an end to the conversation by standing and moving away. Very shortly after that, they were encouraged out the door. By the time Alistair had dropped them off back at home, Beth was glad to be gone but nervous about being trapped with her father in the mood he was. His first target was Oakley, and the mess Oakley had left lying around. Beth let it continue for a while, but it became obvious that Oakley wasn’t able to just ignore it as he usually did.

  “Dad,” she interrupted when her father paused, “did you enjoy talking with the de la Hayes? Did they have anything interesting to say?”

  It wasn’t the most elegant redirection, but he was probably too upset to notice or care. She wanted to remind him of the actual targets of his anger, so he’d stop taking it out on Oakley. But she also needed to know why her father was suddenly looking for another job. The Book had taught her that ignorance wouldn’t serve her.

  “Those snobs?” he said, taking the bait. “No. I don’t know why I even tried talking to them. Poor Peter, having to deal with them all the time. You’d think they’d have some decency, but no, they were so full of themselves. No family feeling at all.”

  Well, that was uninformative. “That’s a pity. What aren’t they willing to do?”

  “Never mind,” said her father, “it doesn’t matter. It was a bad idea anyway. What’s your work schedule like?”

  And she was none the wiser. She would have to try again from another angle. Perhaps give it a little more time though. Wait, her work schedule? He’d never asked her about that before. Not even once.

  “Ah, it depends. Why?”

  He couldn’t want to—

  “On nothing much. I just need to increase the loan, and that needs your signature.”

  —he did.

  “I thought things were going well,” objected Beth.

  “Oh, it is going well,” said her father, with no appreciation of irony. “It’s just a short-term complication.”

  She thought back to the conversation she had overheard. Perhaps her father hadn’t been asking for a job. Perhaps he’d been asking for a different type of favour.

  “A complication the de la Haye’s refused to deal with?” asked Beth, her voice faint.

  “Not exactly,” said her father, but Beth could hear the evasion. “But it really is too much that they aren’t willing to do even the slightest of favours. They’re more than willing to waste their influence on complete nobodies, but when it comes to us? All of a sudden ‘Captain’ Alistair is concerned about appropriate procedure. Like that ever mattered to them before.”

  That wasn’t even the interaction Beth had overheard. Her father must have tried more than once, with different targets. It was even more serious than she had realised.

  Beth pretended to commiserate with him, and finished with, “I’m sure with how brilliantly you’ve done for yourself, you should be just fine without their favours. Or any more loans.”

  She had a great deal of practice in saying things like that without sounding sarcastic.

  “I should have,” agreed her father, clapping his hands. “If only we hadn’t run into that scamming bastard. But he can just wait. We’ll get him.”

  “Scamming bastard?” prompted Beth.

  “Some quitter that couldn’t make a success of the opportunity blamed us for his failure. He claimed we ‘misrepresented our business’. Just because he wasn’t trying hard enough.”

  “Couldn’t you just ignore him, then?” she asked.

  Not that Beth thought the ‘scammer’ was necessarily in the wrong. But they could hardly be the first person to complain. Just one person didn’t seem like it would have prompted this level of response from her father.

  “If the world was just, I would be able to. But that… that person ended up being married to one of our suppliers. And that supplier didn’t even have the basic integrity to separate their private life from their job. They totally ignored right and wrong and personal responsibility. They took all our money and refused to give us what we bought. They’re claiming they’re just garnishing the damages we owe. Absolute nonsense.”

  “Now you need a loan to purchase those supplies again?” asked Beth.

  Beth supposed that was the kind of unexpected short-term circumstance in which loans were justified. Her father had been paying off what he thought was the loan every month.

  “And let them win?” asked her father, incredulously. “No, we aren’t letting them get away with it. My business partner knows people who can make sure we get our supplies and damages. But we have to pay them in advance.”

  Beth again suspected that the partner’s connections were organised crime. Her father could end up in debt to them whether or not they ‘took care’ of his problem. Although she supposed that at least in those circumstances, she wouldn’t have to explain where any money came from.

  “Why don’t you report them to the authorities?” she asked.

  “That won’t work, will it? Not without the proper connections. Which it turns out I don’t have. Those— Oakley! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Oakley had committed the ultimate sin of folding a blanket incorrectly, and that took all of her father’s attention. Calley eventually managed to re-direct him again with a question about supper.

  Beth didn’t think revisiting the conversation would help, in the short run. She needed to plan. Her father didn’t make any further mention of the loan, but Beth knew it was because he couldn’t imagine needing to get her permission. If she hadn’t insisted on separate registrations, the loan would have been taken out without even a word to her. Like she wasn’t even a real person. Just an addition to him. The exact reason why The Book constantly predicted she would end up as a farm labourer.

  She hated it. None of her choices were anything she wanted to live with.

  The most humiliating thought she had in all of it, was that maybe she should have helped her father get that favour from the de la Hayes after all.