Shade's Children Read online

“Will they climb up?” asked Ella. Ferrets hated heights and would never go beyond the first or second floor—unless forced to by a superior.

  “Yes!” exclaimed Ninde, her sleepiness vanishing in an instant. “They know we’re here, and they have orders to search the whole building, right to the top.”

  “Even the roof?” asked Drum. He had his sword out and was honing the edge with a pocket stone, almost as if the Ferrets were seconds away rather than minutes.

  “I think so…” faltered Ninde. “There is a very strong compulsion on them. It must have come from an Overlord, not just a Myrmidon Master.”

  “Shit!” exclaimed Ella. She raised the witchlight higher, looking around at the dusty desks that surrounded them, searching for something useful among the blank computer screens and neatly ordered piles of meaningless paper. “We should have picked a taller building.”

  Gold-Eye followed her gaze, wondering what she was looking for. He’d seen many rooms like this, and they rarely had anything worthwhile in them. Clothes sometimes, and sweet food wrapped in shiny metal cloth. But nothing of any real use.

  “Power cords,” Ella said suddenly, pointing at the thin gray cables that ran behind some of the desks, connecting computers and lights to plugs in the wall. “Drum, Ninde, find the longest cords you can—cut them away from the computers if you have to. Just make sure you unplug them first. There could still be power here.”

  Drum and Ninde moved quickly to the task, and Gold-Eye moved to help also. But Ella stopped him with a quickly upraised palm.

  “Gold-Eye. Can you see anything in the…what was it…soon-to-be-now?”

  Gold-Eye shook his head. “It comes. I not happen it.”

  “You can’t control it,” Ella said, mouth showing her disappointment. “Pity. It could have been useful. Just help get the cords then.”

  Still a bit sleepy, Gold-Eye went over to Ninde and watched her pull the plugs out of the wall and then out of the machines, sawing with her sword if they wouldn’t come out. Since he had only his sharp-pointed spike, Gold-Eye assisted her by holding the cord taut to make it easier to cut.

  They were sawing through one of the last cords when Ella suddenly thrust herself between them and pushed them toward the fire stair that led to the roof.

  At the same time a crash reverberated through the room, accompanied by a furious hissing.

  “Up the steps! Go! Go!” shouted Ella, turning back to the lower fire door, where Drum was frantically heaving a desk up against the shattered door. Half off its hinges, it was being further forced open by something large and sinuous, like a long, black-furred worm. Halfway along its length, paws like overlarge human hands were ripping chunks of wood and cement filler off the side of the door as easily as if they were pulling petals from a rotting daisy.

  Drum held the desk against the door with one hand while extending the other, open-palmed, to Ella. She put one of the sawed-off cords in his hand, careful to keep the exposed wires forward. Then she ducked down and plugged it in—and Drum thrust it around the desk and into the Ferret.

  Sparks blazed across the rippling flesh of the Ferret, the golden glow of the witchlight lost in a sudden blue-white glare. The creature shrieked with pain, spraying foul-smelling spit from its fanged mouth. Then it was gone, retreating back down the stairs.

  Drum pushed the desk back, forcing the door into its frame, and cautiously looped the still-sparking cable around the door handle, which hung by a single screw from the ruined door.

  “Might work again,” he said as he headed for the roof stairs. But Ella didn’t answer, letting him get ahead while she circled back every few steps to watch for a sudden rush from the Ferrets below.

  A steel trapdoor opened onto the roof from the top of the stairs. As soon as Ella came through it, Drum slammed it shut with a deafening crash of metal on metal and slid the bolts home.

  The roof was flat save for an air-conditioning unit that perched like a hunchback in one corner. That provided a bit of a windbreak, but it was still cold. A wind had come up to clear the fog, and the sky was clear, lit with stars and the reflected glow from those parts of the city where the streetlights still worked. The Overlords maintained power and light in much of the city, shutting it on and off from time to time for no apparent reason.

  Part of their games, perhaps, in the same way that they controlled the weather. Bringing in fog from the sea; raising winds; shunting storms from one side of the city to the other, all for use as backdrops in the battles they played out with their creatures.

  When those creatures weren’t employed hunting escapees from the Dorms…

  “We’ve got a few minutes,” said Ella quietly. Only Drum noticed the telltale shiver of apprehension in her left hand.

  “First we need to get these cords tied together into a rope long enough to reach across the street.”

  “What!” exclaimed Ninde, looking out over the roof at the adjacent skyscraper, its dark bulk towering over their current building. “I am…not going to climb across a five-floor drop on an electric cord!”

  “That or the Ferrets,” said Ella firmly. “So start tying. Sheepshanks, I think. Gold-Eye, do you know any knots?”

  Gold-Eye shook his head. The automated schools in the Dorms had taught him reading, writing, and arithmetic, for the Overlords liked a reasonably agile brain as raw material for their creatures. But he’d forgotten a lot of that, in the struggle to survive—and knots had never been part of the curriculum.

  “Okay, see if you can find something like a brick or pipe to throw—we’ll have to smash a window for Drum to send the rope through.”

  Gold-Eye grinned to show he understood and started to look about for anything useful. A pile of half-seen stuff in the shadows under the air-conditioning unit looked interesting, so he headed over to make a closer inspection.

  As he passed the trapdoor, it shook, bolts rattling. Then it began to bow outward, and the steam-hiss of an angry Ferret came through. But the trapdoor and bolts were solid steel and they held—for the moment.

  “Hurry up!” said Drum as Gold-Eye passed. His eyes were on the trapdoor, sword held at the ready.

  Gold-Eye shuddered and sprinted the remaining few yards. In the starlight he could see several pieces of steel pipe that would make good window breakers.

  If anyone could throw them across the gap, he thought, as he dragged one back to where Ella and Ninde were almost finished tying the rope together. He hoped they knew their knots. It was a long way to the ground.

  “Good work!” said Ella, taking the pipe and hefting it easily in one hand. Then she walked right up to the edge of the building, the toes of her boots meeting the edge of emptiness that marked the five-story drop to the street.

  The building across from them was all glass and steel, stretching up at least twenty more floors.

  Lots and lots of glass. Floor-to-ceiling windows, the blinds still drawn back to catch sunlight that wasn’t there.

  Ella looked at the window immediately opposite for a moment, imagining how it might have been. With the lights on, and people bustling behind the glass, clutching papers, talking on the phone…

  Her parents had both worked in buildings like this. She had dim memories of going up in the elevators, of looking out through a window just like that one….

  The bolts on the trapdoor suddenly screamed in protest. Gold-Eye and Ninde both let out strangled, frightened yells…and Ella threw the pipe as hard as she could toward the window.

  It flew true, glittering with reflected stars, smashing through the window in a blaze of shards. Clouds of smaller splinters followed the big shards down, strange snow falling from starlight into shadow.

  “Drum!” shouted Ella, holding out one end of the rope. “Think it across!”

  “Throw it first,” said Drum, that clear, almost angelic voice still seeming out of place in his great body. “It’s much easier.”

  Even before he finished speaking, Ella was throwing the end of the rope, hurling a
loop of it out toward the gaping hole where there once had been a window.

  Halfway across, the rope end suddenly faltered and hung suspended, like a snake waiting to strike. Then it lunged forward, through the hole, to lash about in the room beyond.

  Gold-Eye could no longer see it, so he watched Drum instead and saw the sweat burst out on his smooth face, beads glittering, running together to form rivulets that soaked his shoulders, turning green cloth to black.

  His hands were twitching too, fingers crossing and circling in a strange arabesque—and Gold-Eye realized that Drum’s hands were mimicking what his mind was doing. Tying the rope to something in the room across the street.

  “It’s secure,” he said finally, hands falling flat to his sides. He looked terribly weary, as if he’d just run for miles with something fearful at his heels.

  “Thanks,” said Ella, but it was an automatic, perfunctory expression. She was already tying the rope at their end to a sturdy antenna mounting, and checking the tension. Unfortunately, the makeshift rope seemed to have a tendency to stretch.

  “We’ll have to go hand over hand,” she explained. “But use your feet as well for safety. Then, at the end, you’ll have to swing down into the room. Be careful to aim for the center of the hole. And remember to swing forward…or it’ll be a very long drop. Ninde, you go first.”

  “I will not!”

  “Shut up and get your hands on the rope,” commanded Ella. “Can’t you hear those Ferrets? They’ll be through—”

  Even as she spoke, the trapdoor sounded with a sickening boom, and one of the restraining bolts screeched, stretched…and let go.

  Held only in one corner, the trapdoor buckled inexorably upward, to show the white teeth and red eyes of the Ferret below, brilliant against the darkness of the steps. Drum stepped toward it, thrusting with his sword, and it ducked back down, the trapdoor falling shut behind it.

  Without another word, Ninde launched herself onto the rope, twining her legs around it and pulling herself along with her hands.

  “Like a rat on a hawser,” muttered Ella, but she seemed to be saying it to herself. So Gold-Eye didn’t ask her what a hawser was. He already knew about rats.

  “Gold-Eye! You’re next!”

  Gold-Eye knew better than to argue. He’d seen what Ferrets could do to people. Did do to people.

  Thinking about that got him halfway across before he even realized that the rope was swaying, the knots stretching, the ground swimming into focus so far below.

  Then he made the mistake of stopping and looking down.

  For a split second the idea of a possible fall seemed almost attractive. It would be an easy end, better than having his blood slowly drunk in some dark Ferret nest till there was just enough to keep his brain alive for use in the Meat Factory.

  Then the rope jerked, and the sudden fear of a real fall gave him the impetus for the second half of the crossing, and in just a few seconds he was swinging onto the carpet in the new building. Where Ninde sat on the floor, looking surprised that she’d made it.

  There seemed to be a brief argument on the other side, ending with Ella furiously swarming across the rope. She came far faster than Gold-Eye and had barely swung in when she was testing the knot at the end and yelling at Drum.

  “Come on!”

  Drum was the real test of the rope. He pushed himself off with slow deliberation, looking like a cable car on maximum load…and the rope stretched and sagged still further.

  He was two thirds of the way across when the Ferrets came boiling up out of the broken trapdoor, moving together in a sinuous wave of spitting, hissing death. There were five of them, each as long as a car, but no wider round the middle than Gold-Eye or Ninde. Something between a snake and a stretched-out rat, with only their paw-hands evidence of human origin. That, and their clever minds.

  Rearing up a safe distance from the edge (for not even an Overlord could make them face such a height) they hissed together, showing long mouths with their rows of tiny teeth—and the two sharp fangs at the front. Hollow fangs, for drinking blood. Human blood, if they could get it. Otherwise, they resorted to rats, cats, and dogs…or each other.

  The rope held.

  “Right,” said Ella wearily as Drum swung into the room. “Let’s get six or seven floors higher up, in case they have another go before dawn. We could all do with a bit more sleep before we start back.”

  VIDEO ARCHIVE—INTERVIEW 1906 • GOLD-EYE

  I am Gold-Eye.

  Ninde is angry because Shade does this video now, without months’ wait. He not say why.

  I remember Dorms. But not getting out. Petar and Jemmie took me.

  Petar did something. Here. No scar like Ella, but no lump for monitor. It went away.

  Petar said he was brother. My brother.

  Older, bigger. His job to look for me. He said.

  Jemmie was his friend.

  Myrmidons took them. The window too small for Petar and Jemmie. Petar push me through. Shout to run, hide.

  Wingers fly them away. I saw in the soon-to-be-now. The Meat Factory took them in.

  No more Petar and Jemmie.

  Only Gold-Eye. Running and hiding.

  Like Petar said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Shade’s secret home was a submarine. Soon after the Change it had come away from its mooring and drifted in between two old, long, wooden finger wharves. Now the bow was wedged under the decking of one wharf, and the stern trapped against the other. Sand had built up on the seaward side, locking it in place.

  Shade’s children came and went via a torpedo tube in the bow, safely out of sight under the wharf. They could then wade between the piles up to a storm-water tunnel that led into the city’s network of drains.

  The drains had the advantage of being hidden from Wingers, Trackers, and Myrmidons, but it was always a gamble between two perils. Too much water in the tunnels meant a quick death by drowning—but a dry tunnel was nearly always infested with Ferrets. Even in their dormant stage during the day, they would still wake long enough to kill a careless human.

  Gold-Eye, Ninde, Drum, and Ella arrived under the wharf in midmorning. Exhausted from the night before and sodden from the neck, armpits, or waist down (varying according to their height) from the drains, they were not pleased to see that the tide was high.

  “The tube will be shut,” Ella said wearily. “We’ll have to wait a few hours for the tide to go down. It looks like it’s on the turn.”

  “Wait where?” asked Ninde. Like the others, she was hugging the rim of the storm-water tunnel, the water cascading around her legs before swooping down the short drop into the sea.

  “Here,” replied Ella. “Or we can swim out to the Sub and hang on. Stand or float. Your choice.”

  “I’ll stand,” muttered Ninde, in a tone that hinted things should have been better organized.

  They stood in miserable silence for another three hours. Gold-Eye almost fell off at one point, his leg muscle suddenly cramping and giving way, but Drum pulled him back and pushed him upstream. After that, Gold-Eye just sat in the water, letting it wash around his shoulders and under his chin.

  Finally Ella judged that the tide had receded enough for the torpedo tube to be accessible. She jumped down first, checked that the water came up only to her waist, and signaled the others on.

  The Submarine was much bigger than it had looked from the drain outfall. Its hull loomed up above Gold-Eye five or six times taller than Drum—a giant black cylinder that had forced itself under the wharf, twisting and warping the planks so that lines of sun shone through the gaps, falling on Gold-Eye’s upturned face and glittering across the sea.

  Ella led them right up to the rounded nose of the Submarine, where four round hatches could be seen outlined in bright-yellow paint. Danger warnings and safety and maintenance procedures were stencil-typed next to them; flakes of rust around three of the hatches proclaimed that this maintenance had long been neglected.

 
The fourth hatch was rust free, and this was the one that Ella reached up to and knocked on with the hilt of her sword, creating a hollow, metallic boom that vibrated through the hull and into the water. Gold-Eye felt its buzz around his knees.

  The knock was answered by a hiss of compressed air, and the hatch slid open just a crack, a metallic tentacle suddenly springing out. Made up of hundreds of silver rings, it writhed in the air for a second, then turned so the end of the tentacle was facing them. A lens glittered there, and Gold-Eye had the curious sensation that it was somehow looking at him.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ella, noticing that he was unconsciously edging away. “It’s only one of Shade’s Eyes. He’s just checking to make sure we aren’t creatures.”

  True to Ella’s explanation, the tentacle hovered in front of each of them in turn before wavering back to take another look at Gold-Eye. It looked at him from all sides before it seemed to be satisfied and withdrew back into the Sub.

  After it disappeared, there was another burst of compressed air, and the hatch slid completely open, revealing a narrow cylindrical passage, apparently lined with mattress foam.

  Ella reached up into the passage and pulled down a heavy, knotted rope, letting it fall into the sea with a loud splash that sprayed everyone on the few places where they were still dry.

  “Ella!” squealed Ninde, and even Drum seemed displeased, stepping back half a pace with a scowl momentarily passing across his face.

  “Sorry,” apologized Ella. “Still, hot showers and clean clothes soon. Ninde, you can go first.”

  Ninde needed no encouraging this time. Ignoring the knotted rope, she used Drum like a ladder, climbing up him and stepping off his shoulder as if he were a piece of furniture. Then she was wriggling her way down the tube and out of sight.

  Gold-Eye was next, though he used the rope. He was surprised to find that the tube was wider than it looked from down below. He’d wondered how Drum would fit, but even his bulk would slip through all right—despite the thick padding that made it more comfortable to crawl along.