SHADE’S CHILDREN
GARTH NIX
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?
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