She was out of her seat before she had decided to be.
The man from 14C was down in the aisle, half on his side, one leg still hooked under the armrest, and a woman in the middle seat was saying sir over and over as though it were a treatment. The cabin lights came up in stages. Someone screamed in a small, embarrassed way and then apologised for it.
"I'm a doctor," Zara said. "Move, please. Move."
They moved.
Grey. That was the thing you learned to see and never unlearned: not pale, not white — grey, with the lips going a colour that had no name in any language she spoke. She pressed two fingers to the side of his throat, feeling for a pulse, and found nothing. She put her cheek an inch from his mouth and felt nothing.
"He was talking," the woman said. "He was talking to me."
"Get his legs into the aisle. You — " a young man in a hoodie, twenty maybe, the only person on the plane whose hands weren't shaking " — pull the armrest up and hold his head there. Just there. Don't let anyone stand on him."
She tore the shirt. Buttons went somewhere. Under it the chest of a man who was fit and thirty-four and had no business being on this floor, and a scar under the right collarbone that was years old and not surgical.
Heel of the hand on the sternum. Other hand over it. Elbows locked.
She started at a hundred and ten and let the count go somewhere far away in her head, because that was how you kept it, and she said, in a voice she recognised from every bad night of her professional life — flat, unhurried, slightly bored — "Cabin crew. Defibrillator. Now. And the medical kit, the big one, the one you're told never to open."
They brought both in ninety seconds, which was good. She would tell them so later, and one of them would cry.
The pads went on. Analysing. The machine's calm woman-voice, the one designed in an office by people who had never once heard it over the top of a stranger's chest. Shock advised.