“There’s nothing here,” I said, but then I stopped. There was a man in the chamber, wrapped up in a cocoon and dangling about halfway up the wall. Only his eyes and nose were visible, and they blazed with fear, hatred, and a desperate hope.

I ran forward, reached up, and jerked the bound figure down off the wall. He fell like a dead weight, and I threw him over my shoulder before turning and handing my torch and my gun to Belinda.

“We need to get him out of here,” I said, heading for the exit.

When we were outside, Selena and Astrid came over to see what we had found. I grabbed my pocket knife and slit the cocoon material away from the bound man’s face, stripping it away from his malignant, thin-lipped face, his distinctive scar, and his shining, bald head.

“It’s you!” I cried, leaping backward in shock. From a sitting position, his hands still bound, he glared up at me. It was the leader of the PentaTech soldiers, the bald soldier who had escaped. The man whose face had been in the Technomancer’s file, responsible for all those horrible experiments.

“You’re the Technomancer!” I said accusingly, pointing my finger at him. His eyes widened in surprise, then he let out a hoarse laugh.

“I? The Technomancer?” he chuckled. “No, not I. I have not achieved anything like his triumphs. No, I am only the Technomancer’s apprentice, his willing chattel. You, you shall cower before the Technomancer when he comes. There will be no stopping him. He will stop Armageddon!”

The light of fanaticism was in the man’s eyes, and I stepped back. I was about to ask for opinions on what we should do with him—I was leaning toward taking him back to the mansion as a prisoner—when there was a high, mechanical whining from above the trees behind us.

We all turned instinctively and saw a small flying white thing, no more than a foot or two across. It had little helicopter blades at each corner to keep it afloat, and a camera on the front.

“A drone!” I said in surprise.

To my shock, our prisoner suddenly lurched to his feet. He stared up at the drone and shouted out, “I’m ready, master! Ready for the ultimate service! Hail the Technomancer!”

There was a sharp crack from the drone, and the bald man stumbled backward, blood fountaining from his forehead.

“He’s been shot!” I said, rushing over to him. The shot had hit him right above the left eye. He was stone dead. The drone, its job done, began to whine away.

“Not so fast,” I muttered, and flung an Ensnare spell at it. The magic tangled the drones propellers, and it came crashing down. Astrid limped over and gathered it up.