Read Shade's Children Online

Authors: Garth Nix

Tags: #Dystopia, #Science Fiction, #Fantasy, #Young Adult, #Adult, #Horror, #Children, #Apocalyptic

Shade's Children

To my family and friends

Contents

Chapter One

Gold-Eye crouched in a corner under two birdshit-caked blankets, watching…

Chapter Two

There was no time for discussion at the top of…

Chapter Three

‘Wake up!”

Chapter Four

Shade’s secret home was a submarine. Soon after the Change…

Chapter Five

“So you are. I will come down.”

Chapter Six

Shade didn’t say anything for a moment after Drum left.

Chapter Seven

After a single, bewildering night in the Submarine, Gold-Eye found…

Chapter Eight

“They’re alive!” said Ninde, sounding very surprised. “I think.”

Chapter Nine

They didn’t stop running until they were a hundred yards…

Chapter Ten

“I’m Ella. Who are you?”

Chapter Eleven

“We have to get out,” said Drum. “There’s an Overlord…

Chapter Twelve

The far row of cars included several electric runabouts still…

Chapter Thirteen

The sick bay was all gleaming stainless steel. Stainless-steel cabinets…

Audio Archive—Pickup #277:
Torpedo Lock 4 • Sam Allen

Chapter Fourteen

Gold-Eye stopped outside the hatch that led to the four-bunk…

Chapter Fifteen

The Overlords started changing the weather on the afternoon before…

Chapter Sixteen

The eastern tower had a riveted steel door leading onto…

Chapter Seventeen

They heard the grenade explode when the boat was just…

Chapter Eighteen

The robots had already cleaned and racked their equipment. The…

Chapter Nineteen

They never got to manhole twelve on Northwest Eight—because that…

Chapter Twenty

“Gold-Eye, go to the other end of the bus and…

Chapter Twenty-One

“Sleep dust!” shouted Gold-Eye, pointing up at the slowly falling…

Live Transmission—Rat-Eye Delta:
Meat Factory Reconnaissance

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ella had just touched the switch to bring Drum’s shelf…

Chapter Twenty-Three

They were only a few feet behind the Myrmidon line…

Chapter Twenty-Four

“He’s alive!” cried Ninde. She threw her arms up in…

Chapter Twenty-Five

The first set of Deceptor batteries ran out as they…

Chapter Twenty-Six

They had to use the Deceptors only once, in the…

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The cache was located a hundred yards into a railway…

Chapter Twenty-Eight

If Shade had been expecting a dramatic response to his…

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Despite Shade’s assurances that it was unnecessary, they kept a…

Chapter Thirty

Three days after meeting Shade in the Eastern Line tunnel,…

Chapter Thirty-One

A Myrmidon threw itself on the grenade a second before…

Chapter Thirty-Two

It was Drum’s pack that Ella had salvaged. Still done…

Chapter Thirty-Three

There was a map in the police car—a paperback road…

Chapter Thirty-Four

There were seven Overlords sitting on seven thrones in the…

Chapter Thirty-Five

Ninde and Gold-Eye had no idea how long they’d been…

Chapter Thirty-Six

The Myrmidons didn’t take them back to the cell. Instead,…

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Gold-Eye was just about to give up and breathe in…

 

A razor blade gave me freedom from the Dorms. A small rectangle of steel, incredibly sharp on two sides. It came wrapped in paper, with the words
NOT FOR USE BY CHILDREN
printed on the side.

I was eleven years old then. Eight years ago, which means I am probably the oldest human alive. Five years past the time when the Overlords would have wrenched my brain out of my skull and used it in one of their creatures.

Actually, I guess Shade is the oldest human around. If you can call him a human.

Shade would say that it wasn’t the razor blade that gave me freedom. It was what I did with it. The object is irrelevant; my action is the important part.

But that blade still seems important to me. It was the first useful object I ever conjured—or created, or whatever it is I do. I remember when I first realized what a razor blade was, staring at that faded page of newspaper I found. The newspaper that had lain in a wall cavity for forty, maybe fifty years, long before the Overlords decided to use the building as a Dormitory.

And there, in black-turned-gray on white-turned-yellow, an advertisement for razor blades with a picture perfect for me to put in my head.

It took three months of practice for me to build that picture into something real, a hard, sharp object to hold in my hand. Then one day, it wasn’t just a thought. It was there in my hand. Real. Sharp.

Sharp enough to cut the tracer out of my wrist. To make escape a possibility…

Well, I did it. Only one in ten thousand gets out of the Dormitories, according to Shade. Most can’t find anything to cut the tracer out or don’t have the wits to disable it in some other way.

Even when they do find something sharp, most don’t have the guts to slice open their own wrist, to reach in and pull the capsule out from where it nestles between veins and bone.

Even now, when I look at the scar, I wonder how…. But it’s done now. I’ve been free for eight years….

I don’t know why Shade wants to record this. I mean, who’s going to see it? Who cares how I got out of the Dorms?

Of course, I really do know why Shade records. And who’s going to see this video.

I’ve been here with Shade for three years. But he’s been around for nearly fifteen—ever since the Change. There’s been a lot of children in this place since then.

I’ve seen their videos, but I’ll never see them. You sit in the dark, watching their faces as they talk through their brief lives, and all the time you wonder what got them in the end. Was it a Winger striking out of the sky? Trackers on their heels till they dropped and the Myrmidons came? A Ferret uncoiling in some dark hole where they’d hoped to hide?

Now you’re watching me…and you’re wondering…what got her?

CHAPTER ONE

Gold-Eye crouched in a corner under two birdshit-caked blankets, watching the fog streaming through the windows. Sixteen gray waterfalls of wet air cascading in slow motion. One for each of the windows in the railway carriage.

But the fog had only a small part of his attention, something his eyes looked at while he strained his ears trying to work out what was happening outside. The carriage was his third hideout that day, and the Trackers had been all too quick to find the other two.

They were out there now, whistling in the mist; whistling the high-pitched, repetitive notes that meant they’d lost their prey. Temporarily…

Gold-Eye shivered and ran his finger along the sharpened steel spike resting across his drawn-up knees. Cold steel was the only thing that could kill the Overlords’ creatures—some of the weaker ones, anyway, like Trackers. Not Myrmidons…

As if on cue, a deeper, booming noise cut through the Trackers’ whistles. Myrmidon battle sound. Either the force behind the Trackers was massing to sweep the area, or they’d encountered the forces of a rival Overlord.

No, that would be too much to ask for—and the whistles were changing too, showing that the Trackers had found a trail…. His trail…

With that thought Gold-Eye’s Change Vision suddenly gripped him, showing him a picture of the unpleasantly close future, the soon-to-be-now.

Doors slid open at each end of the carriage, forced apart by metal-gauntleted hands four times the size of Gold-Eye’s own. Fog no longer fell in lazy swirls, but danced and spiraled crazily as huge shapes lumbered in, moving to the pile of blankets….

Gold-Eye didn’t wait to see more. He came out of the vision and took the escape route he’d planned months before, when he’d first found the carriage. Lifting a trapdoor in the floor, he dropped down, down to the cold steel rails.

Back in the carriage, the doors shrieked as they were forced open, and Gold-Eye both heard and felt the drumbeat of Myrmidon hobnails on the steel floor above his head.

Ignoring the new grazes on his well-scabbed knees, he began to crawl across the concrete ties, keeping well under the train. The Trackers would wait for the Myrmidons now, and Myrmidons were often slow to grasp what had happened. He probably had three or four minutes to make his escape.

The train was a long one, slowly rusting in place between Central and Redtree stations. Like all the others, it was completely intact, if a little timeworn. It had just stopped where it was, all those years ago.

Not that Gold-Eye knew it as a form of transport. It was just part of the fixed landscape to him, one of the many hiding places he moved among. Gold-Eye didn’t have memories of a different time, except for the hazy recollection of life in the Dorms—and his escape with two older children. Both of them long since taken…

At the end of the train, he got down on his belly under the locomotive, steel spike clutched in his fist, white knuckles showing through the ingrained dirt.

Peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep…

The Trackers were on the move again, spreading out to search. It sounded like a trio on each side of the train, coming toward him.

Gold-Eye pictured them in his head, trying to get his Change Vision to show him exactly where they were.

But the Change Vision came and went when it chose, and couldn’t be controlled. This time it didn’t show him anything—but a memory arose unbidden, a super-fast slide show of Trackers flashing through his mind.

Thin, spindly stick-humans that looked like half-melted plastic soldiers. Bright, bulbous eyes, too large for their almost-human eye sockets. Long pointed noses that were almost all red-flared nostril…

They could smell a human out with those noses, Gold-Eye knew. No matter where he hid.

That thought was foremost as Gold-Eye listened again. But he couldn’t work out where the Trackers were, so he edged forward till he was almost out from under the train and could get his knees and feet up like a sprinter on the starting blocks. It was about thirty yards to the embankment wall. If he could cross that open space and get up it, the Trackers would go past to look for an easier way up—and Myrmidons were very slow climbers.

At this time of day that left only Wingers to worry about, and they would be roosting in City Tower, avoiding the fog.

Then the Trackers whistled again, giving their found signal—and Myrmidons boomed in answer, frighteningly close.

With that boom, Gold-Eye shot out like a rabbit, jinking and zigzagging over the railway lines, frantic with a terrible realization.

The Myrmidons had crept through the train!

He could hear their boots crashing onto the gravel around the tracks as the huge creatures jumped down from the lead carriage, the bass shouts of their battle cries joining the frenzied whistles of the Trackers.

Heart pounding, face white with sudden exertion, Gold-Eye hit the embankment at speed, reaching head height before he even needed to take his first hold. Then, as his feet scrabbled to take him higher, he reached out…and slipped.

The fog had laid a film of moisture on the old stones of the embankment, and in his panic Gold-Eye had run to one of the hardest spots to climb. His fingers couldn’t find any cracks between the stones….

Slipping, his feet touched bottom, and he added his own wail of despair to the awful noise of the creatures behind him.

Soon the Myrmidons would surround him, silver nets shooting out to catch him in their sticky tracery. Then a Winger would come to take him away. Back to the Dorms. Or if he was old enough…straight to the Meat Factory.

As Gold-Eye thought of that, bile filled his mouth. Then he turned to face the Myrmidons and hefted his steel spike.

“Kill me!” he screamed at the tall shapes approaching through the fog. “Kill me!”

The Myrmidons stopped ten yards away. Seven of them—a full maniple. Seven-foot-tall, barrel-chested monsters with long arms ending in spade-shaped hands. Six-fingered hands, with thick, oversized thumbs.

These Myrmidons wore gold-and-green metal-cloth armor that was all spikes and flanges, heavily decorated with battle charms and medals, sparkling even through the fog. Crested helmets enclosed their heads, and black glass visors hid their faces.

If they had faces. They certainly had mouths, but they were silent, now that their target was trapped. The Trackers were quiet too, clustering in their trios behind the line of Myrmidons. Their work was done.

I’ll make them kill me, Gold-Eye thought desperately as the Myrmidons—toying with him now—raised their net guns. He tensed himself, ready to lunge, hoping to strike one behind the knee, to irritate it enough that it would kill unthinking….

“Hey, you! Shut your eyes and
duck
!”

It was so long since Gold-Eye had heard a human voice that he almost didn’t understand, till a fizzing, sparking object sailed past his head and bounced toward the Myrmidons.

He ducked, curling himself into the embankment, face pressed against the wet stone. For a second nothing happened save the massed growl of the Myrmidons’ surprise.

Then there was a brilliant flash, smacking his eyes with red even through closed eyelids, and his bare neck with sudden heat.

At the same time something hit his back, and he flinched.

“Grab the rope!” called the voice again. “Hurry up! The flash will only hold them for a few seconds.”

A rope! Gold-Eye uncurled and saw the knotted end hanging above him. His eye followed the rope up the embankment, up to the fog-wreathed figures on the road above the railway.

Humans. Three of them. All older and larger than he.

For a moment he hesitated, glancing back at the blindly groping Myrmidons. Then he started to climb.

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