She trembled. Removed her hands. Stood there, in her bra and panties, her body exposed, her skin pale and soft and covered in ink from my pen.
I wrote on her abdomen. The soft curve of her belly — the skin yielding beneath the nib, the flesh warm. I wrote the resonance frequency calculations across her stomach, the notation running from hip to hip, dipping into the hollow of her navel. She gasped when the pen circled her belly button.
"The distributed network requires a central anchor point," I said, writing. "In the human body, that's the navel. The mana circuits converge there during fetal development — it's the original connection point. If you're building a resonance field in a corpse, you start there."
She nodded. Her eyes were on the notation. Her lips moved. She was reading — translating the symbols into concepts, processing the information, her brain running so fast that the embarrassment was being crowded out by intellectual hunger.
