Shade, the title character, is actually the personality of a human; the sole adult survivor of the Change, now stored within a computer. This is secreted aboard a submarine run aground in its dock. Shade has been gathering children to his steel haven, providing a home, and education via salvaged videos and other materials. Shade's Children are also well trained as scavenger units, usually working in teams of four. The teams are tasked with retrieving supplies, useful technology, and intelligence on the Overlords. The children move around underground, using the remains of the networked arteries that once served city. By stealth and luck they evade the Overlords' hunting minions; Myrmidons, Myrmidon Masters, Wingers, Screamers and Ferrets. Shade's prime objective is to discover the source of the Overlord's powers, and his ultimate goal is to reverse the effects of the Change. An event which will banish the Overlord's back to their own dimension. But, as more children's lives are spent following his orders, those left begin to wonder about their mentor's true motives, and ultimately, his sanity.

Ella is the oldest girl, a veteran of many missions for Shade, and team leader, Drum, the oldest boy, is the muscle of the team and an escapee from the dormitories, where he was being prepared for use as a Myrmidon; a hulking, human-shaped soldier. These two are complimented by Ninde and Gold-Eye, a girl and boy blessed with Change talents. Ninde, can trigger a state in which she is able to hear the thoughts of others nearby, and Gold-Eye gets random precognitive visions of the soon-to-be-now. When a mission goes wrong, and one of their number is captured, the others break Shade's rules, and using his experimental stealth technology set out on a mission impossible; rescue their team-mate from the Meat Factory. Meanwhile, due to his reckless use of captured Overlord technology, Shade's hiding place finally comes to the attention of his enemies. It is then that the ghost in the machine must decide whether his own survival has priority over his stated aim.

Nix, inventive as ever, paints an enticing picture. Who are the Overlords? How, exactly, was the Change engineered? If the entire Earth is affected, why are there only a handful of Overlords, confined to a relatively small sector? What, aside from murderous combat games, is the purpose of the Overlords and where do they come from? Nix serves up far more questions than he does answers. It wasn't that every last plot element needed explaining in depth, but having had my interest piqued, I was expecting more. In a similar vein, Nix's characters are closer to adequate than they are to riveting. Ultimately, they meant no more to me than they did to Shade: expendable, replaceable tools, to be used unraveling the deeper mysteries. If the devil is in the detail, then the detail here is sometimes lacking, and I felt that the book's early promise never quite came to fruition.. That said, Shade's Children is a very readable, cinematic novel, and one that entertains from beginning to end.