Intuition was the highest form of knowledge, antecedent to all teaching, not reliant on reasoning. Jane had great respect for this inborn wisdom, as it had saved her life on several occasions. She intuited now that things were not going as well as they seemed to be, that a threat impended, soon to blindside them.
On the second floor, she and Luther hurried along the south hall, throwing open doors, searching room to room. Some spaces were unfurnished. There were also suites in which children obviously lived but in which they could not at the moment be found.
In the third suite, Jane saw something that halted her—a pair of sneakers by the side of a bed.
Luther stepped out of the bathroom. “Nobody here.”
“Are there shoes in the closet?” she asked.
He pulled open that door, switched on the light, leaned across the threshold. “Clothes but no shoes.”
Where are the children? Jane had asked Seth Donner.
In their rooms upstairs.
How can you be sure?
I’m aware of their locaters.
Locaters? What locaters?
The locaters in their shoes.
She remembered a pair of sneakers in the first furnished suite. They had been left beside an armchair. And in one of the other suites, a pair had stood by the bathtub.
In the hallway, Luther opened a door and said, “Not furnished,” and Jane went past him to the next suite, where a pair of sneakers stood to one side of the door, as if they had been taken off just before the kid departed.
“They’re making a break for it,” she said, “if they haven’t broken out already.”
As she ran toward the stairs, intuition hounded her. Some great peril was almost upon them, but she didn’t know what it would be or from where it would come.
She remembered something else Seth Donner had said: Ever since the upgrade.