In their fear, in their postures of dreadful expectation, the kids would have broken Jane’s heart if she’d had time for the more tender emotions. Even the biggest of them seemed terribly small, vulnerable, and their faces revealed that they were wounded souls.
She told them the half lie that she was FBI, and Luther told them the truth that he was a sheriff, and the kids were desperate enough to believe them without hesitation.
“We’re taking you out of here,” she promised.
A boy of about fourteen held up an electronic key. “We can use the Escalade.”
“No,” Luther said. “We’ll use one of their remotes to open the main gate, but if we take their vehicles, they’ll be on us like flies on sugar. We’ve got two cars. We can just about fit all of you in them.”
“We don’t have shoes,” one of the girls reported.
“Yes, we know why,” Jane said. “We’ve got to get on the road. We’ll buy shoes tomorrow.”
From outside, beyond the garage door, came the sound of engines in the driveway and the bark of brakes. More than one vehicle.
“I’ll go look,” she told Luther, and hurried into the house.
At the front of the residence, she made her way through the dark living room by the faint inspill of light from the foyer. She pulled aside a drapery and saw half a dozen vehicles in the long driveway, cars and SUVs, the drivers just now dousing the headlights on the most recent arrivals. Someone had been able to open the huge bronze gate. Another car pulled in from the county road and stopped, and the headlights went off.
People were getting out of the vehicles, men and women but mostly men. At least a dozen. To get here this fast, they must have come from the nearby resort. But in response to what call?
No one approached the door. They stood under the portico roof and arrayed along the driveway, murky figures lit little and low and at odd angles by the landscape lamps, more human shapes than human beings, their faces veiled in shadows. They were not restless, but stood like witnesses to some forthcoming and meaningful event to which they would one day testify. They didn’t appear to talk to one another, as if they knew why they were here and what they must do.
Jane suspected they were waiting for others who were en route from a greater distance, from the town of Iron Furnace, where it was Christmas all year long.
Although she stood in darkness, she sensed that some of these unwanted visitors were aware of her and staring at her. She let the drapery fall into place and hurried through the ground floor to Seth Donner’s room.
He hulked on the chair in which she’d left him, but he no longer stared at the vacant air where her face had once been. He stared instead at his hands resting together on one thigh. Nothing of his mood or thoughts could be discerned in his slack features.
“Seth, are you with me?”
The big man raised his head, and his gaze had no terminus, as if he looked through her to infinity. His eyes were intact, yet he seemed as blind as eyeless Samson brought to his death in Gaza. “Yeah. I’m with you.”
“Earlier you mentioned the locaters in the kids’ shoes. You said you’re aware of them at all times.”
“The kids are in their rooms now. Every one of them.”
“You said you’ve known where the children are at all times, ever since your upgrade.”
“At all times. Since December,” he confirmed.
“What upgrade are you talking about, Seth?”
He frowned. “Well, you know…the upgrade.”
“What do you mean by upgrade?”
His frown deepened, and he didn’t respond.
“Play Manchurian with me, Seth.”
“All right.”
“You said you always know where the kids are because of their locaters.”
“We all know. We don’t need to track them with an app anymore.”
“You once tracked them on smartphones?”
“Not anymore.”
“So how do you track them now?”
“They display.”
“The locaters display? Where do they display, Seth?”
He looked perplexed. “They just display.”
In the abandoned factory, before Randall Larkin rushed her and forced her to kill him, his face had shaped into an arrogant sneer and he had gloated, You’re dead already, you piece of shit. They’ll all know about you in the whispering room.
“Seth, what is the whispering room?”
“It’s just a room where we go.”
“A room in this house?”
He thought about it before he said, “No.”
“Where is the whispering room, Seth?”
He raised one hand and tapped his forehead, which beetled over his deep-set eyes. “I guess it’s here somewhere. I never really think about it. It’s just here somewhere.”
She was fitting it together piece by piece, and she didn’t like the picture that was forming.
The great house remained quiet. No windows shattering, no doors being broken down. Not yet.
“Is there something other than GPS displays in the listening room, Seth? Do you hear any voices there?”
“Sometimes a voice, just whispering real low.”
“Whose voice?”
He shrugged. “Anyone’s.”
“Do you ever whisper in the whispering room, Seth?”
“A few times.”
“Who do you whisper to?”
“Everyone.”
Her heart knocked, each beat as if struck from the taut skin of an aboriginal drum, summoning her deepest and most primitive fears. “Everyone in Iron Furnace—they hear what you whisper?”
“Yeah. They all hear.”
An upgrade to the nanotech control mechanism in their heads. A feature that linked them all through microwave transmissions.
They were no longer six hundred controlled individuals. They were that and more. They were a hive.
She thought of George, pouring water in the dining room. He had failed to hear the control command when Luther first spoke it, and he had attempted to flee. She’d called out to him and caught up with him in the hallway. During those seconds between when he had seen them with their weapons drawn and when he had come under her control in the hall, what had George said in the whispering room? At the least, he must have called for help.
“Seth, do you still have a smartphone?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the number?”
He gave it to her, and she repeated it several times, until she felt that she would remember it.
“Do you have your phone with you, Seth?” When he produced it from a pocket of his uniform jacket, she said, “Is it turned on? No? Then please turn it on now. Okay. Good. Leave the phone on and wait here, Seth. I’ll call you before too long.”
“All right.”
Her knees felt loose, her muscles slack, but they carried her at a run to the garage.