It was a ritual long foregone.

Since the disastrous events of 1997, there had been no Christmas at Site-43. At least, not officially. People still celebrated in their own, private ways, but they knew better than to hang mistletoe or otherwise decorate their spaces. Something in the air made it dangerous to be both festive and alone beneath the soil of Ipperwash.

That didn't stop the Survivors from gathering in Udo's dorm, of course. One thing they could be sure of was that none of them would grow attached to any of the others, if they weren't already. A year of seeing altogether too much of each other made certain of that.

But since it was the only thing they could be certain about anymore, the ritual was observed.

McInnis was serving eggnog at the kitchen island. Wettle was filling his beard, and sometimes his mouth, with shortbread crumbs. Nascimbeni and Ibanez were arguing the finer points of obscure rural tradition. Harry was watching them all, bemused, recording the moment with his eyes. Lillian was pretending to be asleep, though the occasional quick of the mouth betrayed her.

Udo was lost in thought.

It had been months. They were all more or less used to it by now. She'd long since stopped examining her actions day by day. Everything checked out. She still liked the things she'd always liked. Hated the things she'd hated. All her reactions made sense, except where they didn't make sense because of aspects of her personality which, themselves, made sense. She was her, and if she'd come to know the others enough to judge — and she felt she had — they were them, too.

So why.

"You're doing it again," Lillian murmured, so quietly that no-one but Udo could hear.

"Doing what?"

"Thinking about it." Lillian's left eye snapped open, and she fixed it on Udo. "Don't."

Beside Udo on the couch, Harry looked over. She ignored him, just as she ignored Lillan. She watched McInnis pass Nascimbeni a little tray of cheese and crackers, noting that he hadn't had anything to eat or drink himself yet. Probably hates getting crackers on his sweater.

"Don't what?" said Harry.

Udo sighed. "Don't think about why."

He scowled, and looked away. To some extent, they were all thinking about it. Except Wettle, of course.

Thinking about why they'd done what they'd done.

On September the 8th, 2003, every one of them had felt drawn to the stations they'd kept a year prior. The Breach had recurred, and as though on autopilot, they'd all run through the motions just precisely the same as they had before.

And none of them knew why.

"It's a 2003 mystery," Harry muttered. "Let it stay there."

"And old acquaintance be forgot?" Udo asked him.

He clammed up.

Allan sat down in his chair. Nascimbeni plunked himself down in his preferred recliner, and Ibanez sat down on the arm. Wettle looked up from the floor, absolutely littered with pulverized biscuit.

The Director was holding a glass. He held it up; Udo wondered if he'd actually drink from it, after the toast. "To absent friends?" he suggested. "And to us?"

"Assuming those aren't the same things," Udo whispered to herself as she raised her own glass. From the way Lillian's eyelids fluttered, she'd heard that, too.

It was a time for making new rituals.

In years to come, they might do things differently. Spend the time with their families, if ever they acquired such connections beyond the present group. Or else see and be seen, in the flesh, by their legions of builders and dreamers. For today, a broadcasted message of hope and succour would suffice.

For tonight, they would celebrate in their sanctum.

"Pass the," Sokolsky cried. He waved his hands vaguely, making grasping motions at nothing. His feet were up on the U-shaped table, and his chair was balanced precariously.

"The," Harry repeated. "The, the."

"The," Sokolsky agreed. Harry examined the array of treats on offer, shrugged, and slid a bowl of pistachios in the bald man's direction.

Not all of them were there, of course. Van Rompay was out with LeClair. Eileen was with Carter. But the rest of them were enjoying the fruit's of a very, very hard year's labour.

Harder than that, for some of them.

As the night wound on, they found each other one by one. The seven. They stood in a semicircle near the Administrator's seat; Wettle sat down in it, much to Allan's apparent amusement. The rumpled replicator didn't seem to notice.

"How are we feeling tonight?" Allan asked them, making eye contact with each.

They knew what he meant.

It had been just under three months since they had failed to resurrect the dead, and here they were, celebrating Christmas. "Easter is going to be particularly hard," Harry quipped, and he was surprised to see that he meant the levity. None of the others looked particularly stricken, either.

"It's not a better world," Nascimbeni murmured. He was going to duck out early; his son and granddaughter were waiting in J&M for the start of the technicians' after-party. "But it might end up that way."

Harry glanced across the room at his wife, gaily chatting it up with Thilo Zwist. He'd almost lost her again. And if he had…

If he'd lost her then, on September the 8th, he'd never have known what else he'd be losing. She wasn't showing, not yet, but it was only a matter of time now.

"I miss my parents," Udo whispered.

"I don't miss anybody," Del said as if the previous sentiment hadn't been expressed.

"This maudlin shit misses the mark," Lillian snorted. She caught a pistachio in the air, shucked it, and flicked the shells back at Sokolsky. He cackled. "Tonight, we drink. Tomorrow, Earth receives her kings and queens again."

"Not that," McInnis smiled. "Never that."

"I mean symbolically," she hiccoughed. "You know. Rituals and all."

"There's no place in the budget for ritual."

Karen Elstrom spent most of her time these days with her arms crossed. Sometimes McInnis thought it was just to keep herself warm; she kept turning down the thermostat in Admin and Oversight, insisting that some day the mysteriously still-hot geothermal plants would catch up with the state of the universe and shut off, and he was sure she wasn't eating enough to boot. She looked thinner and thinner every day.

"There are considerations beyond budget," he reminded her. "We're going to need to keep up morale for a long while. A very, very long while."

A version of himself he no longer remembered having been, who had thought himself an immigrant from a better reality, had thought a year would be sufficient. Acting on impulses and information no longer available to him, this other self and his partners in cognitive dissonance had believed a miracle cure would make the madness disappear. When that hadn't happened, and the impulse to even try had faded the next day, they'd been left with a serious conundrum.

How could nearly a thousand people live in an utterly dead world?

He still wasn't sure Karen understood. "Christmas, in this context, isn't about resources. It isn't even about hope. It's about breaking up the day-to-day. If there is privation now, and privation later, and nothing but privation between…"

He trailed off every once in a while, in their little talks, to let her interject. She hated, hated to interrupt him, and he refused to monopolize the discussions that way. She took the chance. "Privation is where we're at, if we don't want to starve to death in under a decade."

He sighed. "Karen. The situation is desperate, that's true. But the difference between desperation and despair is enough to end a species. We need to keep their spirits up. If that means tolerating Paul McCartney and hanging up a few garlands, it's worthwhile."

"Nothing is worth 'Wonderful Christmastime'," she snarled. "And anyway, sir, with respect, keeping up morale is more your department than mine."

"It will not always be so," he said, and he let it hang in the air without explaining further.

Her eyes widened.

He waited.

She deflated, only slightly, leaving her still far more upright than most coat racks. "Fine," she grumbled. "I'll see if hydroponics has any of those failed winterberry bushes, and you can have your damn garlands."

Ritual was all they had left in common.

Nascimbeni knew it was the right day the moment he walked into Sam's. The bar in Grand Bend was packed wall to wall with Foundation researchers and agents and technicians past and present, all of them whooping like they were calling down a meteor. He hated it instantly, but that was a key component of any cultural experience, he'd found. It had to be loud, painful, and brief.

He wasn't expecting to be here more than an hour.

All six of them were at the bar. Allan looked comfortable, which of course he wasn't. Ibanez was already completely smashed, which would either make the night go much smoother or bring it to an early, screeching halt. Blank and Okorie were sitting together, which didn't cross his threshold for 'interesting', but he supposed it was something. Wettle was on the floor, picking at the wood shavings and fashioning a beard for his beard. They were sticky enough to stick, or perhaps he was. Lillihammer was standing on the bar, doing karaoke. She didn't have a mic, and there was no music, but that didn't stop her.

Nascimbeni pulled up beside the former Chief of Security, and gestured at the others. "Anything new?"

She burped in his face.

He nodded, and leaned across the bar to catch Okorie's eye. "How many this year?"

The woman's amber eyes were smouldering; she, too, had already partaken then. "About a hundred."

Nascimbeni whistled. "Almost everybody."

And then he tried to say something more, but his jaw and his lip did something strange, and a strange sound came out of him, and he turned away to stare into the hooded ceiling lights.

It had only been a year, after all. This was normal. Ngo had assured them all it was normal. She'd set up a practice in Grand Bend, and half of the survivors — and most of the so-called "Survivors," a term that now meant nothing to them — were now regular patients.

Some nights he didn't have the nightmares anymore. Didn't think about the silent, shuttered tomb beneath their feet which they would never see again.

He tried to play off the sudden outburst as a casual leaning back on the bar. Addressing Blank now, he called out over Lillihammer's caterwauling: "Any luck on the job front?"

The archivist snorted into his tomato juice. "Department of History doesn't want me. Might try my luck at 91. Udo's parents, well, you know."

Nascimbeni nodded. Most people's parents were a little more clingy, now. Lost time and a worldwide rash of unexplained disappearances would do that. "Not like there's much left here for you, right?"

Lillihammer kicked a glass clean across the bar. It exploded on the far wall, to general applause.

"Present company excepted," Nascimbeni remarked mildly.

Wettle muttered something under the bar, and Nascimbeni leaned down to face him. "What?"

"Happy New Year," the plastered buffoon muttered. "Whoever you are."

"I'll drink to that." Nascimbeni raised a finger, but there was already a beer in front of him. Ibanez burped in his direction again, and he nodded thanks before twisting off the cap. "Here's to whoever we are, now."

Udo performed the ritual, but it was Ibanez's idea to try.

She proposed it be the entire facility, to mask her intentions. If the canny thaumaturge knew better, she was canny enough to hide her tells.

Site-43 rose again from the desert sands.

It wasn't perfect, of course, and it wasn't everything. Recreating the world's largest underground space in any medium was a Sisyphean task, even for someone who could move boulders with her mind. But it was close enough for their purposes.

Allan would be meeting the ASC for wine at Intake Point-94. Ibanez wondered if the mage would try creating a silicon lake serpent to complete the effect. Harry and Lillian would be in his dorm room, watching movies — or rather imagining they were, under the influence of a few choice cognitohazards Udo had sifted from the rubble the previous month. Wettle would sit this one out; he didn't have any particularly fond memories of 43, and anyway was convinced he'd put his foot through a soft spot in the sand and go plummeting to his pain.

Ibanez was going to see him.

He was the only figure Udo had crafted for this tremendous sparkling playset. He sat on the catwalk in the Cavern, beer bottle in hand — a real one, sans label, glassblown by the micamancer herself — and waited for her.

She sat down beside him, and he offered her a bottle of her own. She took it.

Both bottles were empty, but she pretended just fine. Went through the motions, like he was doing.

She didn't know why she cared. She'd hadn't been involved with the man before the year leading up to his death; besides a brief fling after the Breach, they'd basically been strangers.

But the echoes in her mind of that possession, of the things she'd done, the god they'd killed, the hole in her heart when she'd found him dead…

A sharp pain in her hand, and she saw that the bottle had broken in her fist. Saw the blood.

"And to all a good night," she growled.

The simulacrum of Nascimbeni didn't answer. She watched it until the illusion finally faded, carrying them all softly back to an empty reality.

"I think a little shakeup in the ritual would be nice," said Lillian, and then she really was Lillian.

She tried to gasp, but her mouth wouldn't open that far, that fast. The world was red and striated, as though glimpsed through a saffron marble. Her left arm was numb… No.

No, it wasn't numb.

She should have fallen to her knees, but she couldn't. She felt weak, weaker than she had ever felt before, but she remained upright. She could do no other.

Her arm and her legs were gone.

Every inch of her remaining body ached like an abrasion burn. Her hair was like bamboo stabbed into her scalp. Her eyes ground against their sockets as she stared frantically at nothing.

Merry Christmas, said the voice in her head, as she tried and failed again to scream.

The clink of glass.

A shared smile.

"Rest ye merry gentlemen."

A chuckle. And no dismay.