Shade's Children

In the third of Garth Nix's books, Twenty Minutes Into the Future society has been toppled by an event called the Change, when everyone over the age of 14 suddenly disappeared. The remaining children have been rounded up and sent to prison camps called the Dormitories, where they wait in fear for their 14th birthday (referred to as a Sad Birthday), when the Overlords come to take them away, cut open their bodies and use their organs - especially brains - to build Creatures in the Meat Factory, which are then used in battles between the Overlords. However, some children manage to escape the Dormitories, evade the clutches of the Trackers, Wingers, Ferrets, Myrmidons, Myrmidon Masters, and the Overlords and find a safe refuge in an underground submarine controlled by an entity know as Shade, who appears to be the very last adult alive...for a given value of "alive". Some of these children have developed supernatural powers, known as Change Talents, as a side effect of whatever caused the Change.

Gold-Eye, who escaped and has been on the run, is rescued by one of Shade's Teams, which consists of his future teammates - Ella, Drum, and Ninde. Now the escapee children must come up with a plan to defeat the Overlords and return the world to as it was prior to the Change.

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Tropes used in Shade's Children include:

• Apocalyptic Log: Coincides with Dead Man Writing. The escaped children often make video-logs, knowing that their next mission may be their last, and the book's main stylistic quirk is having one before every chapter. There are also snippets of memorial lists, recorded footage, Shade's private musings and so on. It all adds up to one conclusion, which is that Shade is not as different from the Overlords as he'd like to believe. He just leaves the brains in when he sends children marching off to die.
• Applied Phlebotinum: The Change. Because of it, the adults vanished, the Overlords arrived, Shade came to power, the children gained their Talents, and the Creatures can exist. Ultimately, it's revealed there's some sort of unique radiation or energy field powering all the effects of the Change, and it has a source. Once the source is destroyed, all the reversible effects of the Change are undone instantly.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Some Creatures can send information directly to their Overlords using a 'mind-call', which is either a small medallion held to the forehead or implanted directly into their brains depending on how new they are. Shade uses robotic rats linked to his data banks to observe various goings-on.
• Bittersweet Ending: The cyborg children all die, the Change powers fade, no one will ever know where the adults went and half of the strike team in the final assault died of exposure to lethal amounts of Change radiation, but the Overlords seem to be gone for good and the radiation has dissipated, allowing humanity to return to normal at last, with time.
• Cat Scare: Quite literally.
• Child Soldiers: Inevitable, and arguably examining the effects this would have and morality of using them, even if there's no other option, is the point of the whole novel.
• Died Happily Ever After: Ella and Drum, Together in Death.
• Dimension Lords: The Overlords.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Several factions with distinct units only cosmetically different battling among each other for their own amusement, using the harvested resources (children) of a world they've found to build said forces? Sounds a lot like a Real Time Strategy game. It only highlights how sick the whole thing would be in reality, and implies some pointed questions about real-life colonialism.
• Due to the Dead: Shade has instituted a practice among his children that upon the report of a team-member's death, all present recite the name of the deceased and then two lines from 'For the Fallen' by Laurence Binyon, a poem traditionally read aloud over ANZAC memorials: At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them. As understandable as this seems at first, it may slowly dawn that these are children reciting a poem about fallen soldiers for other children...
• Dying as Yourself: All the Creatures seem to revert to human thoughts upon death.
• Eyes of Gold: Gold-Eye.
• Fangs Are Evil: Silver Sun, who has teeth filed to points.
• Fat Bastard: Red Diamond.
• For the Evulz: Pretty much the only in-universe reason the Overlords did what they did, unless you subscribe to Blue and Orange Morality.
• Giant Flyer: The Wingers. It is, apparently, actually physically impossible for them to fly, which is what makes Shade think there must be something powering them...
• Heel Face Revolving Door: Shade.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Overlords. They look like humans, but they communicate with telepathy (and have to learn human speech), come from elsewhere, see all beings outside their origin place as animals, and have no problem whatsoever with crushing the local population and using its children as raw material to make soldiers to play games with.
• Man in the Machine: Shade.
• Meaningful Name: Gold-Eye, because his eyes are...well, guess. The others speculate that he may have been born almost exactly at the moment of the Change.
• The Men And Women Behind The Monsters: The Overlords look exactly like human adults. Normal ones, for the most part. They are only more horrifying for it.
• Mercy Kill: During vivisection of a captured Creature, it suddenly reverts to human thought patterns and begs to be killed. It is obliged. The Change's reversion causing all the Creatures to drop dead instantly may be an example as well.
• Mind Screw: What is Shade? A robot entity trying to become human, or a human trapped inside a robot? Shade himself isn't entirely sure.
• Muggle Power: A possible explanation for the Overlords. The Overlords are positively shocked when they learn the children have powers...and then intrigued by what use they could have in their games.
• Only Fatal to Adults: The entire premise of the novel, although it's never explained how the Overlords made all the adults disappear or even why it was specifically children they needed to make their toy soldiers.
• Psychic Powers, overlapping with Personality Powers:
  • Precognition: Gold-Eye, a nervous and twitchy boy who sees danger in every shadow.
  • Telepathy: Ninde, an extremely extroverted and talkative girl who voices her own thoughts at the drop of a hat.
  • Telekinesis: Drum. Interestingly, he was a muscular child fed steroids to grow even more huge and now much stronger physically than the average telekinetic.
  • Conjuring/Creation: Ella, the leader, tactician and combat specialist; a very practical and pragmatic young woman who's trained herself to cope with the world as it is to the point where she fears being unable to adjust to the world as it could be, should the Overlords be defeated.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The Overloads do allow females to live for four additional years until their Sad Birthday (18th) due to breeding purposes.
• Redemption Equals Death: Shade. His last act ultimately and truly kills him after his mechanical body dies.
• Split Personality Takeover: Played with, then ultimately subverted. When Robert Ingman became Shade, he believed himself a being apart from humanity, a product of the Change, and therefore split between human and machine minds. As he starts to realise his Knight Templar tendencies and similarity to the Overlords towards the book's end, he tries to label these as belonging to his machine side and winds up giving every single conflicting impulse a different name. Finally, he accepts that Shade and Robert are the same and he was never split between anything; he's simply a human who acted with inhuman callousness toward the children he was supposed to keep safe, and his final act is to help defeat the Overlords, knowing he will cease to exist once they're gone.
• Teenage Wasteland: Aside from Shade, there are no adults around any more. Unless you count the Overlords. Which you shouldn't.
• The Big Guy: Drum. A very tragic example of the trope. The chemicals that built up his muscular frame also rendered him totally sterile and shrunk his genitalia. In a sense, he's been chemically castrated, and even refers to himself as a eunuch.
• There Are No Adults: With one highly technical exception.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else: The Overlords, while not a traditional example (since they may or may not actually be human) are described in this way - ordinary people you could have walked by in a supermarket without a second glance, no monstrous characteristics at all. Unlike their Creatures.
• This Is Reality: Ninde watches far too many movies, much to Ella's irritation. This leads to her making clumsy attempts to court Gold-Eye, such as pressing his head to her bosom. Of course, he doesn't catch on until he watches Shade's Sex-Ed film. They don't have sex onscreen, but they do have children in the Distant Finale.
• Tortured Abomination: Every one of the Creatures. Every single one. They're implanted with devices to keep their thought patterns suited to their roles, but these devices sometimes fail, and then there's a human child in the mind of a monstrous thing, unable to stop him or herself from attacking other Creatures and rounding up other children.
• Virtual Ghost: Shade.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Water for the Creatures. It doesn't injure them; they simply dislike it because it weakens their senses due to it disrupting Change energy, especially in large amounts, and it's much harder for them to track children in damp conditions. Shade's base is a submarine wedged beneath the docks that becomes submerged at high tide for this precise reason.
• We Have Reserves: No, not the Overlords; they're actually pretty careful with their tools and have their Creatures gather up any undamaged parts (and stray children) to use again. Shade himself, on the other hand, sent team after team after team of children to their gruesome deaths so that he could gather some scientific instruments to measure the effects of the Change and build himself a mechanical body. All for the greater good, he assures himself...