Luminous (3 page)

I’d like to know too.
She shrugged. “I told you.”

He threw up his hands. “Fine. Let’s move on for now. Everything you know, every detail, no matter how small, is important, even if you think it’s trivial. We’ll start at the beginning. When and where did you first encounter this Jack and Jill?”

“On the street,” she said.

“Of Charlton City?”

“No, not this city.”

He ran his hand through his thick, dark hair. “Look, if this is the way this is going to go, then I’ll move on to arresting you for breaking and entering. You want that?”

“I’m not—” But she was. Evasion was habit now, to cover the holes in her memory. “Right. Keep asking. I’ll do better.”

“You were on the streets of…?”

“Queen City,” she said. “I accidentally sliced my hand. Jill ran the clinic and I went to get fixed up. I also heard she gave kids who needed it a place to crash, no questions asked.” That’s what her vague memories told her, anyway.

“Back up,” James said, writing in his notebook. “Give me the name of the clinic that Jill was running.”

She frowned. “Um, I think it was the Forest Heights Free Clinic. Something like that. It was definitely in Forest Heights, though.”

“Street address?”

No idea.
“I’m not sure.”

He very deliberately put down his notebook and pencil. “Did I mention I need every detail you can remember, no matter how trivial?”

“Look, cop, you try remembering after
years
of being stabbed with needles and given painkillers and anesthetics so often that you can’t even string two words together and then being tossed into a room until you recovered so it could start all over again.”

That sounded bitterer than she wanted. She felt tears well up in her eyes. No more of that. She wasn’t some dumb kid being used as a lab rat anymore. She was
Noir
now. She had power. She had freedom. Fuck self-pity.

He picked up his notebook again. “Understood. You really don’t remember.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, so let’s walk through what you can remember,” he said. “And, again, try ‘Al’, not ‘cop’.”

“Whatever.” She swallowed and started talking about her ordeal, the words unexpectedly spilling out to him. Maybe it was because he shared her need to get Jack off the street. Maybe it was knowing that her words could save someone from what she’d been through. Or maybe it was just nice to sit in a safe room and speak to a human being who was really listening.

“The first time Jill gave me a shot, she said it was for tetanus. I didn’t argue. The second shot was supposed to be some sort of inoculation. She said I might get sick a little. I got so sick that I threw up a bunch of times and then passed out.”

Never, ever would a doctor touch her again. “I woke up in the laboratory, strapped down to a table. After that, it all gets foggy. Eventually, I got out.”

“Noir, I know this can’t be easy. Just tell me whatever you remember.”

She clenched her jaw. More pity. No, wait, maybe something more. He hadn’t exactly pitied the survivors of the bank massacre. He’d been
kind
to them.

She looked at him, seeing the person and not the cop for the first time. He wasn’t like all the callow pretty boys she’d seen preening on the streets. Al was rugged and solid. He got shit done. In the bank, everyone else had been too afraid or shocked to do anything. In five minutes, Al had had the video of Jack wrecking the place up and running.

She paused, cleared her throat and started talking again.

“Some days, it was a matter of an IV drip. That always zoned me out but at least it didn’t hurt. Other days, she’d inject me with stuff and I’d feel like I was going to die. And she hooked me up to a zillion monitors. I had wires going all over me.” At first, she’d been embarrassed to be naked all the time. After a while, being naked had been nothing next to the rest of it.

“Describe the medical devices you can remember,” Al said. “Big, little, boxy, circular, tall, short, whatever you can remember. Manufacturers’ labels would be a huge help.”

She described the machines in more detail. Even The Torturer, as she’d come to call it, the machine that sent electric currents through her every ten minutes for a week straight. At least, that first week was all she remembered or wanted to remember. She hugged herself tight and heard her voice run down to a raspy whisper.

“Jill said The Torturer was some sort of thing to track nerve-to-nerve messages. I think she fucking got off on it.” Noir could still hear Jill’s clipped words as she noted the results of the “experiment”: “Subject Six, tracking sciatic nerve transmission.” Jill had never called her anything but “Subject Six”.

“She probably did. How did you get away?”

“When I could think straight, I looked for a way out. Most of the time I was so weak, I couldn’t stand even in my little room. One day, I just wished hard that I was invisible, that she and Jack wouldn’t see me. I wanted so bad not to be pulled into the lab again.” At first, Noir thought she’d gone over the edge. “And I woke up this way. Crazy, right? Who just turns invisible? But I’d seen Jack transform from a relatively big guy to a monster, and I knew Jill was doing genetic research. Jill was fascinated by my transformation, but even she was surprised. Me, I stopped caring about why and started caring about getting out. After all I went through, escaping was as easy as walking out an open door right in front of Jill when she thought I safely locked away somewhere else.” Noir rubbed the armrests. “It took me about a month to feel normal after I got out of there.”

“Then you went after them.”

“Damn straight. It took me another two months, but I finally got a lead that they moved here, to Charlton City. But I couldn’t find where. I couldn’t find them before Jack went into the bank.”

“Maybe you were just in time, Noir. There’s still a life at stake. What you just gave me could help save him.”

Al, I could kiss you for that.
She leaned back in the chair. She wouldn’t mind kissing him. He had those nice broad shoulders. And muscles—she shouldn’t forget the muscles he was hiding. “I hope so.”

“Just a few more questions. How big was this place where you were held? Total square footage and the number of rooms?”

“Why do you need to know that? Jill’s not in that place any longer.”

Al put his pad down. “People repeat patterns. If Jill has moved to Charlton and she’s interested in the same kind of research—and given she grabbed a living subject, I’ll bet she is—she’ll look for a similar facility. We start looking at out-of-the-way locations that match the original profile and we’ve got a place to start and a chance to get to the teller in time.”

“Oh.” Noir shook her head. “I’m sorry, I’m lousy at describing it.”

“Can you see it in your head?”

“Some.”

“I’ve got a better idea. Stay right there.”

He disappeared down the hallway. She guessed he was going into his office. That’s where she’d hidden to put her clothes on after she’d followed him inside. She’d been lucky it had been dark so he hadn’t seen the bundle of clothes wrapped up in her cape that seemingly floated in midair. Though how he could find anything in that mess of his office, she had no idea. Even his old typewriter was covered in books. Not a man big on technology. He enjoyed being on the street, looking into things personally at ground level, she guessed. She liked that about him.

She liked a lot of things about him.

Al returned with a spiral-bound sketchpad and flipped it open.

“You describe it to me, I’ll draw, and we’ll see if we can get close to what it looked like.”

She smiled. “Let me. I can draw pretty well.” She had started drawing just two days after her escape, filling a notebook she’d stolen with images from her memory. Whoever she had been before, she knew being an artist had something to do with it.

“Good, because I suck at it.” He held out the pencil.

She cleared her throat. “If I’m going to be completely accurate, I’ll have to take off my gloves so I can have better control of the pencil.”

“That’s fine.”

“And I have to take off the mask. I’ll be able to draw in the finer details without the black mesh over my eyes.”

“Whatever you need to do.”

She wondered if he’d be so quick to agree after he started speaking to a head he couldn’t see. She removed her gloves without looking at him. She flexed her hands once before reaching up to remove the hat and face mask.

She knew she looked like a headless, handless body in a horror movie.

“Well,” Al drawled. “That must save on the makeup costs.”

She laughed for the first time in a long time. “Not one of my main worries, no.”

He held the pencil toward her again. This time, she took it. Al stood up. “I’m getting you some water. You’ve been talking a long time.”

“Okay.” She hadn’t been talking that long. He probably was just being kind again. She sat back in the chair with the sketchpad on her lap. The pencil flew over the paper as if it had a mind of its own. She knew she was good at this. She wished she remembered where she’d learned it.

She hardly noticed when Al set a glass of water on the coffee table in front of her. She was aware he’d left the room again but she was so engrossed in her drawing that she didn’t think about what he was doing until she smelled eggs cooking.

She looked up from her nearly finished sketch to the entranceway of the small kitchen area. “That smells great.” Her stomach rumbled. She chugged the glass of water.

“Somehow, I figured you hadn’t had much to eat.” He stirred the scrambled eggs. “I’m not sure whether it’s closer to dinner or breakfast, so I went with breakfast. You can eat, right?”

“Yeah.” She stood up and displayed the sketchpad. “This is done.”

He blinked at her for a second and cleared his throat. “Great. Bring it here, grab a plate, then you can tell me about it.”

She did exactly as he asked, setting the sketchpad on the kitchen counter and picking up a plate. Her stomach growled. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” He looked at the plate she held for a few seconds. “You’ve got a good grip, right?”

“Sure.” She guessed he was weirded out by the plate seemingly floating in air. She had to admit, it had taken her some time to get used to it. Al wasn’t doing so bad.

He dumped a mound of eggs onto the plate she held out.

“Forks are in that drawer near the sink.”

She reached in, took a fork and leaned against the counter. She started eating right then and there, while the eggs were piping hot. She shoveled forkfuls into her mouth and finished them off in less than a dozen bites.

When she set the plate on the counter, she finally noticed that Al was holding the sketchpad but he wasn’t looking at her sketch. He was staring at her.

“That’s a hell of a thing, Noir.”

“Yeah.” She put the empty plate into the sink.

“I’m assuming you liked the eggs, since you certainly scarfed them up fast.”

She froze. “I thought we were in a hurry?” She couldn’t tell if he was criticizing her or not.

“Easy. I take it as a compliment to the chef.” He reached up a finger and brushed something off her cheek. “You have some egg right there.”

She felt her face grow hot. It was probably bright red right now. For once, she was glad she was invisible so Al wouldn’t see her blush.

“Sorry,” she mumbled. It was just that she wasn’t used to anyone touching her. Yeah, that must be it. It wasn’t like she could feel anything for anyone. Jill had battered that out of her. She put fingers on her face right where Al had touched her. It had made her feel human again. Al made her feel human.

He put the pan in the sink and motioned her back to the living room. He sat down on the couch, sketchpad in hand, and pointed to the spot next to him. “Let’s go over this together. I want to understand it before we leave.”

She sat down close enough to him that their hips were almost touching. He pulled a pair of black-rimmed glasses out of his blazer pocket. “Eyes are going on me. Let me tell you, Noir, forty is not the new thirty.”

She snorted. “You don’t look forty.” His body sure as hell didn’t scream “forty”.

“I’m getting too close to it for my comfort, that’s for sure.” He pointed to the main laboratory area on the sketch. “So, are these dimensions to scale?”

She put her finger on the sketch. “I drew everything in proportion, but I’m not sure of the exact width or length.” She traced it with her fingertip. “The biggest piece of equipment, something she had for blood testing, was here.”

“Uh…” Al cleared his throat. “I can’t see where you’re pointing.”

“Right.” She should have put her gloves back on. She gently took Al’s finger and helped him trace the same area that she just had. She felt herself blushing again as she held his hand. His fingers were thick and warm.

“Ah, got it. Thanks.” His voice sounded a little rough.

He leaned back and studied it once more.

“Shouldn’t we get going? Clock’s ticking on our missing teller.”

“Like I said, stumbling in the dark isn’t going to do us any good.”