A deep blue glow drifted slowly through the damp air.
Boer-or rather, Boer occupying that middle-aged pirate's body.
He stood still with his eyes closed. An expression of intense concentration now appeared on the face that had originally belonged to a stranger.
His right hand rested against his left chest.
Beneath his palm, through the coarse prison uniform, a heart was beating.
That heart did not belong to him.
It was the pirate's heart, the engine of flesh he had temporarily "borrowed." Now, Boer was doing something he had never attempted before.
He intended to "read" the complete microscopic structure of this ordinary human heart and replicate it within his own half-magnetized true heart.
His electromagnetic perception sank into the chest cavity.
His vision shifted.
It was no longer the world visible to the naked eye, but a universe on the nanoscale-
Myofibrils resembled precisely woven ropes, each arranged at a perfect helical angle. Between the sarcomeres lay Z lines, M lines, and H bands.
Those cold textbook terms now became living, three-dimensional structures, contracting and relaxing. Mitochondria resembled tiny power stations, their crista membranes folded into thousands upon thousands of layers. The spacing between every layer had to be accurate down to the atomic scale to maximize the efficiency of ATP synthesis.
Boer's "gaze" swept over it all.
His left half, transformed into magnetic skeleton-that equally magnetized heart-was now like a ravenous engraving plate, reading frame by frame and replicating point by point.
With every heartbeat, vast amounts of microscopic structural data were copied, transmitted, and written into that deep blue heart of energy.
Energy poured in.
But within the pirate's shell, another process was taking place simultaneously.
The heart being "read" was being incinerated.
It was not burning in the physical sense. It was something more thorough: the