He nodded. He kept nodding, a small mechanical nod, the nod of a man agreeing with a sentence he had been sentenced with.
The curtain moved. Garrison Yancey put his face around it, his reasonable conference-room face, with the reasonable little crease between the eyebrows.
"Captain? Sorry. Are we—is somebody going to deal with this? Because I'm just looking at the time."
Gunnar did not look up from the jumpseat.
"Sir," Billie said, "I need you to take your seat, please. The captain will be with you in a moment."
"I was just asking—"
"Sir. Your seat."
He went. Over his shoulder Billie saw Amberly coming up the aisle from the back, fast, her eyes wide, and behind Amberly, unfolding himself to his full height in the narrow aisle with his crossword folded in one fist like a newspaper you were going to swat a fly with, Hendrik Vandermolen in his red Nebraska windbreaker.
"I tried to tell him to wait," Amberly said, a little breathless, to Billie, past the curtain. "He said he heard somebody tell the lady in 2A to get off. People in the back were saying it. Somebody in the twenties was holding a phone up, filming the front through the gap. Oh my gosh. He just got up."
"It's all right," Billie said.