The whole place feels haunted, is what it feels like. Brigitte has walked through ghost towns before — a whole German village on lockdown, with people hidden away from the gangs tyrannising them — but here there isn’t even the watchful flicker of villagers peering through curtains, disappearing behind shuttered windows. There’s no one.

Brigitte has been brooding in the corner of the inn (extremely unlike her) until someone familiar enters, and then relief quickly flickers across her face; she rises and crosses the room to meet them halfway, like a little echo of how she’d once accidentally charged across the inn to greet him. “Oh, thank god, you’re still here—” Though if there’s anyone who could take care of themselves out in the wilderness, it’s probably Maine, and she suspects she needn’t have worried.

And then her gaze skips past Maine’s bulk, to the blond man who entered with him. And there’s no doubt, really, that they came in together: there’s something in the way they’re moving, how one falls into lockstep behind the other, and instinctively covers the angles the other one can’t, that has the feel of a well-synchronised machine. (A twinge of familiarity. A synchronicity she misses.)

“Hi,” she says, with a flash of a smile for them both, and an instinctive glance back at the man in the lead.