Shade's Children (4 page)

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.

The tube ended in another hatch, which was closed. Gold-Eye hesitated for a moment, then knocked on it.

There were a few clanking sounds as the locking wheel spun; then it opened outward, revealing a large, well-lit chamber—and Ninde, wearing only her underwear and a large white towel wrapped turbanlike around her head.

Gold-Eye stared, then blushed and looked down as Ninde said, “Haven’t you ever seen a girl in a bikini before?”

“Only pictures,” he croaked, sliding out of the tube and onto the floor. Trying not to look at Ninde’s body, he looked everywhere else, noting the towels hanging on hooks on one wall and various baskets and boxes lined up on the other.

“We leave our outside clothes here,” said Ninde. “Get a bit dry and then report to Shade before we shower and eat. Come on—get those wet rags off.”

“Nothing else on,” muttered Gold-Eye. He was confused. The sexes were segregated in the Dorms, except at mealtime, and they always washed separately. Petar and Jemmie had washed together—and done other things as well—but that was all just a hazy memory of half-seen sounds and misremembered images. He didn’t know how he was supposed to behave.

“Here, I’ll help you,” said Ninde, coming up close and taking hold of one extremely grubby sleeve. “It’ll be interesting to see what’s under all this dirt….”

“Ninde!”

The voice was Ella’s, followed a moment later by the girl herself, leaping down from the tube like a dangerous cat.

“Leave Gold-Eye alone—and put your towel on. You know the rules.”

“I was just teasing,” said Ninde, letting go with a shrug.

“He’s been out alone for a long time,” said Ella, with a nod to Gold-Eye to show she wasn’t talking over his head. “Years, probably. He’s got to get used to people all over again. Think of him as being much younger than he is…at least for a while.”

“Yeah. Sorry, Gold-Eye,” said Ninde, complicating her apology by removing her towel with deliberate slowness and wrapping it around herself with equal deliberation. Then she tossed her head back and opened another hatch halfway, slipping through it even as it swung back and closed with a heavy crash.

“Too many films from the old days,” said Ella with a sigh. “Okay, Gold-Eye, we leave our outside clothes in these baskets for washing, and hang up our belts and swords for cleaning here. Shade has robots—little machines that can sort of think and do things—that do the washing and cleaning. Now, I’m going to turn my back and you turn that way, so we can get undressed. Imagine it’s just like the Dorms, only the wall between the boys’ and girls’ washrooms is missing.”

Gold-Eye obediently turned to face the wall and began to strip off the several layers of rags he used to think of as his clothes. At the same time, he fought off an urge to peek at Ella.

Just when he thought he might risk a look, a clanging noise announced the arrival of Drum. He’d taken a long time to come through, Gold-Eye thought—and was very noisy coming along the tube as well.

“Right, I’m ready,” said Ella loudly. “Gold-Eye?”

“Yes,” said Gold-Eye, quickly cinching the towel tight around his waist. It was a very big towel, going around him several times. Which was probably just as well.

“You go on,” whispered Drum as he lumbered down from the tube. “I won’t be long.”

“Right,” said Ella. “Gold-Eye, follow me.”

She opened the same hatch Ninde had gone through, spinning the locking wheel with one practiced flip of her hand. After Gold-Eye had stepped through too, she shut it behind them.

“One of the rules,” she explained, as they continued down a long, narrow passage, pausing every now and then to go through another closed hatch. “All hatches have to be closed behind you, just in case some creatures get in. We’re in the central corridor here. It runs the full length of the Submarine. There are hatches off to the sides, above us and below us. It’ll probably take you a while to work out where everything is.”

“Where now?” asked Gold-Eye.

“You mean where are we going now? To report to Shade. His headquarters are in what used to be the engine room, till his robots cleaned it out.”

She hesitated, then added, “Don’t be surprised by Shade. He’s not exactly alive…and not exactly human. Well, I suppose he is…anyway, you’ll see.”

This didn’t exactly reassure Gold-Eye. He felt anxious about the coming meeting, but the feeling was curiously overlaid with something he hadn’t felt since the long-ago times with Petar and Jemmie. The sense that other, more capable people were taking care of everything.

“This is it,” said Ella, pausing before another hatch. “Stand next to me and look up.”

Gold-Eye looked up, meeting the glassy gaze of another silvery tentacle slowly uncoiling down from the ceiling. It looked at them for a few seconds, then coiled back up again. A loud click from the hatch announced that they’d passed its scrutiny and the way to Shade’s headquarters was opening.

But Gold-Eye didn’t walk in. He stood where he was, just looking, till Ella gave him a bit of a push and he stumbled over the lip of the hatch and into the cavernous chamber.

The room took up almost the entire aft third of the Submarine. The space once separated by bulkheads and partitions and filled with engines, fuel tanks, and machinery had been opened up by Shade’s robots. Now it was a large open space. A dark space, with a single pool of light right in the middle, about thirty paces from the hatch.

Things the size of cats moved in the shadows and corners of the room, the light occasionally reflecting from their metallic sides. One scampered near the light and Gold-Eye saw it in its entirety—and shivered. It had a bulbous body, balanced lightly on eight segmented legs. Far too like a spider.

“Robots,” whispered Ella, seeing him shudder. “They’re safe. They work for us.”

The only visible furniture in the room—a broad, official-looking desk of dark-red wood and a padded leather chair—were right in the pool of a light.

Two three-seater couches faced the desk at oblique angles. Ninde sat on one, draping her legs across to take up two places. Hearing the others enter, she looked around and sat up straight.

“Where’s Shade?” asked Ella as she sat down next to Ninde. Gold-Eye sat too, on the same couch—but right at the front of the cushion, ready to spring up and run. He still didn’t like the look of this dark room, or the constant, peripheral movement of the spiderish robots.

“He didn’t want to talk to me,” sniffed Ninde. “He said he’d wait for everyone. I suppose Drum is coming sometime?”

“He’ll be along in a minute,” replied Ella, frowning.

Sure enough, a few minutes later a loud click announced the hatch opening again, and Drum entered the chamber. Unlike the others he wore a huge toweling robe that covered him from ankle to neck. Without saying anything, he walked across and sat on the empty couch, its springs groaning under his weight.

An expectant silence followed, broken only by the scrabble of the robots’ steely claw-legs on the decking.

Then Ella stood up and said, “Shade. We’re all here.”