34
Hassan had to pull me up from my knees, so sure was I that we’d made a terrible mistake. If we’d done what I feared we’d done, then the world might be lost to us. For seven years, since I’d first heard about ‘the man from Atlanta,’ C.R.C. had been our secret ally on the inside, our greatest hope, and for four of those years, since I’d first heard the name whispered around the campfire in Paris, the Basilisk had been our greatest adversary. Now, unless the truth was way beyond me, I had learned that they were—or had become—one and the same.
And that we had been lured to Philadelphia to set them free to run the world.
He and Agnes dragged me away, and we left the chamber by the same door Hassan had entered. “Where were you?” I asked him.
“I was in the clockworks,” he said, which is
