Shade’s Children

Dedication

To my family and friends

VIDEO ARCHIVE INTERVIEW 1759 • ELLA

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 the 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 realised 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-grey 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 get 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 grey 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 hide-out 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 spiralled 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 time-worn. 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 towards 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 realisation.

The Myrmidons had crept through the train!

He could hear their boots crashing on to 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 armour 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 towards 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.

VIDEO ARCHIVE INTERVIEW 1802 • DRUM

Shade made me do this. He’s watching now, flapping his arms like a Winger.

I suppose that means I should say something.

INTERVIEWEE HIGHLY UN-COOPERATIVE.>

How did I get out of the Dorms?

I just read that. he held up a sign. Or made one, I suppose. Being a hologram.

NO BREAK IN VIDEO INTERVIEW.>

OK. I am going to talk. The Overlords took me out of the Dorms when I was eight.

NO BREAK IN VIDEO INTERVIEW.>

That is how I got out of the Dorms.

IN 3 MINUTES 12 SECONDS.>

I was taken to the Training Grounds. That’s where the big, strong kids go. Lots of exercise, food… and the drugs. Steroids. Shade explained those to me… what they do… what they’ve done to me… Then when you’re fourteen, they don’t just take your brain, they destring your muscles too. Muscles to put in Myrmidons…

IN 8 MINUTES 10 SECONDS.>

The tracer? That was easy to get rid of.

I moved it out. If I can see something or I know where it is and how big, I can… think… it somewhere else.

When it was gone, I strangled the Watchward and left. I was thirteen and ten months old. Sixty days to go.

NO BREAK IN VIDEO INTERVIEW.>

When? Three years? Five?

NO BREAK IN VIDEO INTERVIEW.>

I don’t count my birthdays. Not since then.

IN 2 MINUTES.>

I don’t want to say any more.

CHAPTER TWO

There was no time for discussion at the top of the embankment. Gold-Eye was pulled up and over the edge, without apparent effort, by an extremely large, heavily muscled man. Or perhaps a boy – for his face was round and hairless, totally at odds with his mammoth physique.

The other two were women – or rather a young woman and a girl. It took a second for Gold-Eye to realise they were female, since all three of his rescuers had close-cropped hair and wore baggy green coveralls cinched at the waist with wide leather belts festooned with pouches and equipment. Long, broad-bladed swords hung in scabbards at their hips and they all wore heavy black boots.

They looked organised and Gold-Eye felt suddenly alien in his strange collection of mismatched clothing, with his matted hair showing the dirt of many weeks. He hadn’t really been clean since the harsh washing rituals of the Dorms.

“Come on!” shouted the woman, grabbing him by the shoulder and starting to run. Gold-Eye stiffened, resisting, then lurched forward as the strong man almost picked him up by one arm. It was either run or have his arm ripped off.

“I run!” blurted Gold-Eye, picking up the pace. Immediately the others released him and he almost fell again before matching their stride.

“I’m Ella,” said the woman, speaking in short bursts as they ran. “That’s Drum.”

“And I’m Ninde.”

The girl was small, maybe only as old as Gold-Eye. Fifteen or thereabouts. Ella was much older, older than anyone Gold-Eye had ever seen, except in pictures. She looked as old as the women on the posters that were slowly peeling off the walls and billboards around the city.

Drum was harder to place, with a face as young as Gold-Eye’s on a body that was easily twice as massive. And he hadn’t said a word.

“The lane!” Ella called out, and the four of them suddenly changed direction, plunging down steps into a narrow alley where the fog lay even thicker, soaking up the light.

Halfway along they stopped so suddenly that Gold-Eye would have crashed into Ninde if Drum hadn’t held him with one enormous hand.

“Ninde?” asked Ella, her breath making the fog eddy around her face.

Ninde closed her eyes and her forehead wrinkled. A second later she started chewing slowly on the knuckle of her forefinger, then more quickly, till Gold-Eye thought she was actually going to break the flesh.

“There are Trackers in Rose Street.” Eyes still closed, she mumbled the words out over her knuckle. “But they have no orders. There is a Winger above the fog, taking messages west. I can’t hear anything else thinking clearly.”

“Thanks,” said Ella. “We’ll take a quick rest before moving on.”

She looked at Gold-Eye properly then and her expression changed, the way it always did when anyone saw his eyes. They weren’t normal human eyes at all, blue or brown or green irises against the white. His pupils and irises were gold, bright gold – and he knew this meant that these people would leave him right away. Or worse…

“Interesting eyes,” Ella said calmly. “Shade will want to see you! Must have been born right at the time of the Change. What’s your name?”

Gold-Eye frowned. He hadn’t spoken to anyone for a long time, or even thought in words. But at least she hadn’t hit him or tried to poke his eyes out with a knife, the way other people had.

“Come on,” said the one called Ninde. “Out with it.”

Gold-Eye looked at her, startled. All these questions made it hard for him.

“Your name,” explained Ella, talking more slowly. “Tell us your name.”

“Gold-Eye,” he muttered. There had been another name in the Dormitory, but no one had ever used it. He pointed at his eyes. “Gold-Eye. Because gold eyes.”

“Makes sense,” said Ninde. “I wonder what Ninde means? I’ll have to ask Shade.”

“Enough chat,” said Ella. “Let’s move. We’ll take the Ten West Tunnel at the back of Nancel Street.”

“Have we got time?”

Ninde’s eyes flicked up anxiously, as if to pierce the fog. Gold-Eye knew that look, the calculation of how long it would be till darkness. But the fog hid the sun, so there was no way of knowing when the Trackers and Myrmidons would go in and the Ferrets emerge from their dormant day…

Ella glanced at something metallic on her wrist. A watch, Gold-Eye suddenly remembered, long-ago classes in the Dorm coming back to him. Big hand for hours, little for minutes – or the easy ones just with numbers.

The big man – Drum – was also looking at his watch. He nodded but made a sign with his hand, large fingers scrabbling like a spider over broken ground.

“Just enough, if we hurry,” translated Ninde. “Come on, Gold-Eye!”

Then they were off again, jogging rather than running, emerging on to the road, keeping to the middle between the lines of stopped cars. The fog seemed to run with them, layers breaking and reforming, twining in and around the cars, around their legs and pumping arms.

At a crossroad, the fog gained colour from the traffic lights, one of the few sets Gold-Eye had seen that still worked, inexorably changing from red to green to amber and back to red again above the silent cars.

As the lights turned green, washing the fog and their faces with sickly colour, Ella froze. The others stopped too, except for Gold-Eye, whose momentum carried him an extra step. His footfall sounded loud in the sudden silence.

“What?” he whispered. Ninde covered his mouth with her hand and he could say no more, struck by the strangeness of someone else’s skin against his mouth. Her hand smelled of soap…

Then the lights flashed amber and Ella suddenly leaped forward, with Drum close behind her, their swords out, now streaking lines of red through the mists. Gold-Eye saw their reflections multiplied in the glass windows of the cars… many glaring red Ellas… many scarlet Drums… and then he saw the Trackers who were crouched behind a loaded truck.

“Shaaaaaaaade!” screamed Ella, and then she was standing over the lead Tracker and the blade screamed too as it cut through the air and into the Tracker’s neck, shearing through leather gorget and the gold service braids of a Senior Tracker.

It crumpled, head half off, but the bulbous eyes still stared, still followed Ella, as if even now it would report her to some Myrmidon Master or Overlord.

Gold-Eye stared too, unable to believe what he was seeing. People attacking creatures? You fought when you had to and tried to escape, but you never won.

Movement caught his eye again and he wished it hadn’t, as Drum’s sword came down and a Tracker’s head flew through the air and bounced off a car roof. The headless body staggered back and started to crawl away, feeling the ground with pallid, spider-like fingers.

Drum ignored it. Swivelling on his left heel, he cut the remaining Tracker down with his sword. It crumpled where it fell and bright-blue fluid, too thick to be blood, bubbled out from the stump of its neck.

Then it was all over – and the traffic lights turned green again.

“An old one,” said Ninde conversationally, removing her hand from Gold-Eye’s mouth. “They can go for hours without a head when they’re fresh. Mind you, they only crawl home – and I bet they don’t get fixed up. Just used for spare bits and pieces…”

“Ninde!” shouted Ella, striding back, cleaning her sword at the same time with a strip of cloth. “Bring Gold-Eye! There’ll be Myrmidons here any minute.”

Gold-Eye didn’t need urging, but as they started down the street again, he stopped and jammed his heels into the tar. Suddenly he saw Myrmidons. Two full maniples of them, all clad in deep-blue armour, a Myrmidon Master at their head. The Master was taller than the others, and his armour had spikes and ripples that moved over his shoulders and arms…

Ninde tugged at Gold-Eye’s hand and the vision faded.

“No!” he yelped as she dragged at him, using his free hand to point ahead. “Myrmidons!”

“There’s no one there!” exclaimed Ella, looking back angrily. “Drum…”

“There will be!” Gold-Eye spat urgently as Drum advanced on him. “I see them in the soon-to-be-now.”

“You what?” exclaimed Ella. “Damn. OK, Ninde, see if you can pick anything up.”

Ninde let go of Gold-Eye and started sucking on a knuckle. But this time her eyes flashed open in fright and she let go immediately.

“Two maniples… and a Master. They’re already on Nance Street. The Master knows we’re – ahh – look!”

The detached head of the Tracker was still staring at them. Its long tongue came out and lashed the road, slowly manoeuvring around so its bulbous eyes would have a better view.

“It has a mind-call,” said Ninde, sucking back on her knuckle. “A new one, stuck in its head, not the sort on the neck-chain.”