Gerald looked over his shoulder. His face said he was out of options. "Get in."
The engineer stepped over the threshold and went immediately to the instrument panel, scanning. His hands moved across the controls with the economy of someone who'd spent decades knowing exactly where things were. He found the autopilot disconnect, looked at its status, looked at the altitude, looked at the vertical speed indicator.
"Autopilot's fighting a trim fault," he said. "Captain's weight on the yoke made it worse. Now it's trying to correct for a false input." He reached for the trim wheel.
The plane responded, nose coming up slightly, descent rate decreasing. But the moment he tried to hold the correction, something in the system pushed back: the trim wheel resisted. He turned it again, harder. The aircraft steadied for four seconds, and then the nose dropped again, more sharply this time, and the master warning tone changed pitch.
A new alarm joined it. Zariah identified it before either Gerald or the engineer said anything.
"That's engine two," she said.
The engineer's head came up. He looked at the N2 gauge for the left engine: it was unwinding. "I can't hold both," he said. He wasn't speaking to anyone specific; he was speaking to the problem. "I can't manage the trim fault and a failing engine from this seat without a pilot's input. I don't have the control authority from here." He turned to Gerald. "Is there a deadheading pilot on the manifest?"
"No."
"Any passenger with flying experience?"
A two-second silence.
Zariah stepped through the cockpit door.
Nobody moved for a moment. The alarms were still going. The altitude was still unwinding. The aircraft was doing what an aircraft without proper management does: it was slowly, persistently trying to depart from controlled flight, and the only thing standing between organized descent and something much worse was a partially functioning autopilot and one engineer who'd already said he couldn't hold it alone. The plane didn't care that the person stepping forward was 12 years old.
Zariah stepped up to the right seat—the first officer's seat—and looked at the panel. Her eyes went across it in the pattern she'd trained: attitude indicator, airspeed, altimeter, vertical speed, engine instruments, electrical panel, fuel state. Six seconds of scanning, the way her father had drilled it: not reading individual numbers yet, just taking the picture.
The picture was bad, but it was not unrecoverable. Not yet.
"Get him out of the seat," she said. She meant the first officer. Her voice came out flat and functional. "He's too close to the controls."