History calls it a mystery. The truth is that something was watching from sixty feet beneath Roanoke Island, and when the colonists carved CROATOAN into a post and vanished, the things in the caverns were only just beginning.

Two hundred years later, a fourteen-year-old enslaved girl named Sally Hemings steps onto French soil expecting freedom and finds a war instead. The creatures who evolved from dinosaurs while humanity was still learning to walk have woken beneath the capitals of the world, and they are dying: four thousand left, unable to breed, convinced that the soft, swarming mammals above them are either tools or threats. Thomas Jefferson has been taken. A silent Culper Ring agent who answers only to a number pulls Sally into the dark to get him back. And a young Troodonian commander named Daniel is learning, to his horror, that everything his Council taught him about human beings is a lie.

Revolutionaries is alt-history with teeth: Franklin and Jefferson and a girl the history books reduced to a footnote, fighting a hidden war beneath the Age of Revolution. Nobody here gets to be only a hero. Everyone makes the least bad choice they can imagine, and one of them walks out of the desert wearing a dead man's face, practicing a human smile.