REVOLUTION: The Juice Chronicles Book 2

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The jet cut through the night, Las Vegas a smear of light behind them somewhere. Dak slumped into the leather and watched the dark below, his head still loud from the last few hours. Kya sat next to him, hand on his knee. Agnes sat across the aisle with her hands folded, posture as tailored as her suit.

Dak broke first.

“So what the hell is going on, Agnes? After two years? You just show up?”

Agnes’s gaze stayed fixed past the window. “The situation has become untenable, Pok. You are aware of what Caleb was involved in. The movement to live openly. And the need for your Juice product.”

Two years and still calling me a pok.

Pythsarian slang. Not exactly a curse—they had real ones—more like a classification. The way someone would say livestock if being polite about it.

He’d gotten used to it the way a man gets used to a back tooth that aches in cold weather. Still landed wrong. Didn’t surprise him anymore.

Two years of quietly pretending the whole thing hadn’t happened. Murphy. Caleb. Von Erich walking out of that mansion with the storage drives. Shyanne recovering. Chang getting worse before he stopped getting worse.

Dak telling himself the bleeding was over, and mostly believing it.

“Is Caleb okay? Did he send you?”

“As I was saying. The covert revolution among Pyths has reached a boiling point. The volume of accidental deaths has surged. Humans not being wiped. Remaining undetected is no longer possible. Royalty must bend.”

“Got it. Not sure what that has to do with me. But got it.”

“There is no avoiding it now. An inevitable confrontation with Pythsarian royalty is coming. And it will be catastrophic.”

“You mean that Duke dude? Von Erich?” Dak’s brow furrowed.

“Not exactly. Although rumor has it, he is involved. The word I have is that Vaunt is rather cross with him. He should never have allowed you to live. With or without your Juice.”

Von Erich. The name sat in Dak’s stomach like bad fish. Eastern Duke. The man had stood in Caleb’s mansion and taken his son, Isaac. He’d smelled Dak and called him tobacco and vomit. Like Dak was a mildly interesting rock he didn’t have time to pocket.

“Vaunt? I don’t recall Caleb ever mentioning that name.”

“Elijah Vaunt.”

Dak glanced at Kya. She leaned in close. “King of the states.”

He sat with that a second. The Pythsarian world ran on tiers. Old bloodlines, accumulated centuries, archaic traditions that had never bothered to end. Von Erich was designated as a Duke. He’d nearly dismantled everything Caleb had built in North Carolina. And it was accomplished with a few verbal commands.

If a Duke could do that, a King was something Dak didn’t have working language for.

“Whoa. Shit. One of the big dudes, huh.”

“Must it ask so many questions, Miss Michaels?”

“Shhh, Dak. Let her talk.”

“As I was saying,” Agnes continued. “The revolution has aroused the attention of royalty.”

He’d known something was brewing. Caleb had tried to explain it. But Dak hadn’t realized how close to the edge they really were.

“And where does that leave us? What does it have to do with Juice?”

Agnes turned her sharp eyes on him. “Everything. Pyths are divided. As you know, some believe it is time to reveal ourselves to humanity. To live openly among them. Others… specifically those aligned with the royal family… will do anything to maintain the status quo. Your Juice. To us, it was never a scientific curiosity. It is a key to tipping the balance.”

“But they wiped Chang’s memory. There is no Juice.”

“Pay attention, Pok.” She snapped it. “The reality of the revolution is at hand. Or its demise. The long-feared confrontation with royalty is imminent. We must prove the validity of our cause, once and for all. Or face being decimated by the King.”

Dak shook his head. The weight of it landed slow.

“Chang’s memory was wiped. And that Duke prick took the computer drives. There’s no way to reconstruct Juice, Agnes. Even if I wanted to.”

“Nothing is impossible,” Agnes said, sharper. “You know that. Caleb is considering… something drastic. To restore what Bartow destroyed. It is not a simple procedure. The damage was not clean.”

Dak froze.

“You can’t be serious. You know what that would mean.”

“I do. So does Caleb.”

“Chang would have to relive everything.”

“And so would Caleb. It is not a pleasant procedure. Tolerating festers like Kevin Chang is challenging enough without sharing intimate thoughts. It is quite distasteful.”

“He’s not a fester, Agnes.”

“Oh? He can barely function.”

“I live with a Pyth. Your slang insults are getting old.”

“A fester is foot dirt. Caleb’s plan requires merging with one. I find it disagreeable.”

“But he’ll relive everything. Even the torture from Bartow’s men.”

“True. The fester will recall every thought. Every experiment.”

“And every failure, Agnes. It’s not controversial. It’s cruel.”

Dak thought about the last time he’d seen Chang in any kind of normalcy. Talking about specific gravity to no one in particular, like his brain had found a safe corner and intended to stay there.

Bartow, one of Caleb’s competitors, had gone inside Chang’s head. Caleb had later assessed the damage. What he found inside—what was left—what he described to Dak was scattered, unsavory and meandering.

Whatever Chang had been before—the quiet genius who enjoyed recreational drugs and still fabricated multi-million dollar ideas—that version hadn’t come back.

Now Agnes was talking about cracking him open again.

“I am aware.” A pause. “The stakes do not bend to sentiment. Caleb has weighed it. He has decided.”

“Just like that?”

“Caleb knows the conflict that follows will mean significant losses. Both Pythsarian and human. Countless casualties.”

“Humans, too?”

He heard it before she finished the sentence. His parents. Ann and Gordon Kent, in Hanging Dog, with zero awareness that any of this existed. As far as they knew, Dak had been at a ski cabin recovering from a pulled muscle when the whole thing went sideways. That was the story they’d been fed.

He hadn’t told them anything different. To protect them. Mostly that was true.

Agnes did not pause. “If you recall, in your own human wars, the loss of cattle and horses is considered inconsequential collateral damage. Even if you survive our conflict, Pok—because of your affiliation with my family—chances are your parents and everyone else you know would perish. The future of our world, and yours, depends on what you and Chang created.”

Kya squeezed his knee. He grappled with it. Too much. Too sudden. Old fears mounting.

Shyanne had taken the worst of it. A kid. His kid. In a room somewhere with people he still couldn’t think about directly. She’d come out of it, which was the only mercy in the whole situation. Jillian had done something to her memory. Smoothed the edges and planted a cover story about a fall at school.

Dak didn’t know how well it had held. He hadn’t asked, because asking meant discussing what had been underneath it.

Chang had been a different kind of damage. No visible injuries. A man who’d had his mind walked, memories trampled and stamped out. A man who hadn’t come all the way back. He’d still show up. Still talk. But there were pieces missing.

Two years.

He’d kept telling himself the bleed-out was done. The product was gone. The fortune he’d almost touched—gone.

What remained was a tanning cream Caleb predicted would turn a profit, and it did. A daughter who was healing. A woman sleeping with him who’d turned out to be something other than what he’d thought.

He’d tried to file all of it under closed.

Agnes had reopened the file.

She’d shown up unannounced and dumped a garbage truck full of memories on him.

He sat with it.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” he said, voice low under the engine hum. “Not again. I don’t know if I can put him through that. Or handle what comes after. We’ve been down that road. It didn’t end well.”

Agnes leaned forward slightly. “Your comfort is no longer relevant. Nor is Chang’s. What approaches is survival at species scale.” She held his eyes. “That is what Caleb is weighing.”

“Yeah. Your species. Not mine.” He heard it the second it left his mouth. “Sorry, Kya. Didn’t mean that.”

“I’ll let that one slide, human.” Kya winked. “Good thing I love you.”

“You need to consider what you are willing to sacrifice,” Agnes said. “And what you are willing to fight for.”

“Yeah. You’re right. It’s a lot to unpack. You kinda came outa nowhere and dumped a ton o’ shit on me.”

The cabin shifted. A small lurch. The kind that meant the pilot had started doing his job. His voice came over the speakers, calm and bored.

Approach to Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta.

The cabin went quiet again. Dak’s mind kept moving the way it always did when there was nowhere useful to put it. Cycling through the same handful of things without solving any of them. Chang on a table somewhere reliving a year’s worth of hell. His parents in Hanging Dog not knowing enough to be scared.

Kya’s hand on his knee, steady and warm, which was the only part of the last two hours that hadn’t felt like something terrible was attached to it.

A King who had apparently decided Dak was worth noticing.

He’d walked away from all this Pyth stuff. Left it behind.

It hadn’t stayed behind.