“This is a dossier with the details of all the known rogue cultivators operating within a 50-mile radius of the mansion,” Belinda explained as she flicked through the pages. “Agent Fallon informs me that local intelligence has picked up a known villain within ten miles of the mansion. They’ve intercepted his communications and decrypted some fragments of it. Apparently, he’s headed in this direction, and he’s not alone.”

“Intelligence tracked him? What kind of intelligence?” I asked.

“Ghost drones,” said Belinda shortly. “Airborne cameras attached to spirit vectors that patrol areas of interest and pick up unique mana signatures from known bad actors. They’ve been tracking this guy… ah, here’s his file.”

She found the page she wanted and opened it up, stepping back to give us a clearer look.

“They call this guy the Technomancer,” she said grimly, gesturing at the documents. “He’s into all kinds of bad shit, pushing heavily addictive hallucinogenic potions in the slums, getting naive young cultivators hooked and then using them for his sick experiments. He’s got links with hacker collectives, illegal artifact smuggling, magitech exploitation rings, you name it. There’s even a rumor that he’s in touch with a coven of mana vampires, though that’s unconfirmed. Take a look, but be warned—it’s not pretty.”

I leaned over to look at the pictures pinned to the white sheet of paper. Belinda had been right to warn us. They were not pretty.

Kyrine caught her breath as she leaned over beside me to look. “Oh, the poor things!” she said.

I turned the pages over slowly, one by one. Each page had a different photo, each photo depicting people who had been subjected to horribly cruel experiments. Many of them were youths who’d been modified with arcane tech. My stomach felt hollow as I looked at pictures of men and women in their late teens and early twenties, with rune-inscribed chrome plates screwed into parts of their faces, some with mechanical limbs coming out of chests or backs, and one guy who looked as if he’d had an eye removed and replaced with some kind of mechanical scanning system. Others were hooked up to machines which were clearly draining their life force to power some other system. The people were bloody, as if the operations had only recently been carried out. The ones who still had eyes looked vacant, as though they’d been doped to the high heavens before being afflicted with the Technomancer’s surgical tools.

“Fuck,” I growled, feeling anger rise in my gut. “Everyone knows cyborg technology is still in its infancy. This… this couldn’t be expected to work. No one should be doing these kinds of experiments on people.” I turned to Belinda. “And you’re saying the guy who makes these experiments is on his way to the mansion? Now?”