"Everybody off him. Hands off. Off."
The body jumped the way bodies do, which is nothing like films, which is small and ugly and unconvincing.
Nothing.
She went back down on him. Two minutes. Adrenaline from the kit, drawn up by a flight attendant whose hands she steadied with two fingers on the wrist, into a vein in the crook of his elbow that stood up for her when nothing else about him would.
Shock advised.
Nothing.
Somewhere above her the captain's voice was talking about Sofia, about a diversion, about ground time, and she stopped listening because the arithmetic of it wasn't hers. Hers was smaller. Hers was smaller. How long has this man's brain been without oxygen. How long am I willing to keep going. At what point does the person under my hands stop being a patient and become a body she is pressing on for the benefit of the people watching.
She had a rule about that. Twenty minutes, in a hospital, with drugs and hands and a machine breathing for you.
On a floor at thirty thousand feet, with a kit in a bag, she had no rule at all. So she used the London one, and the London one was: not yet.
At eleven minutes and some seconds, he came back.
Not gently. He came back the way they do — an enormous shuddering breath like a man surfacing from deep water, a sound the whole cabin heard, and then his eyes opened onto absolutely nothing, and his hand came up and took hold of her forearm with a grip that left four small bruises she would find in the shower the next morning and press, one at a time, to see if they still hurt.
"Hey," she said. "Hey. You're all right. You're on a plane. Look at me."
He looked at her.
For maybe four seconds he was nobody — no name, no coat, no watch, just an animal that had been dead and now wasn't, holding on to the thing nearest to it.
Then something came back behind his eyes and shut like a door.
"You'll be fine," she said. "Don't try to talk."
He said, hoarse, "Where are we."
"Over Bulgaria."
His hand tightened on her arm. "Don't let them land the plane."
"That isn't up to me."
"Doctor." His voice was a ruin, and even so it did something to the air. "Please. Don't let them land the plane anywhere but home."