"Long time," Brigitte says, with the kind of dry humour that she doesn't get to display often. The kind of bemused understatement that she and her teammates had always levelled at each other when they had to process something that was too big to process otherwise.

"So you must've joined when you were, what, eighteen?" She's been having trouble trying to pinpoint Maine's age. Older than her, she's pretty sure, but he looks younger when one of those rare smiles creeps onto his face.

She's not even actively prying now, but that curiosity surfaces anyway, this head-tilting interest in the man's world and life, similar to her own world by slight degrees. The Second Crisis had started up when she was eighteen, though it had taken her a couple more years before she picked up a wrench and went out into the field in a battered van rumbling across the European countryside, mopping up messes where they went, wherever they could.