Luminous Read Online Free

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