The Tleilaxu invaders had instituted a brutal curfew for anyone not assigned to the late work shift. For C’tair Pilru, slipping away to attend the hushed rebellion meetings was just another way to thumb his nose at their restrictions.

At the freedom fighters’ irregular, carefully guarded gatherings, C’tair could finally remove his masks and disguises. He became the person he once had been, the person he remained inside.

Knowing he’d be killed if caught, the short, dark-haired man approached the meeting place. He clung to oily night shadows between blocky buildings on the cavern floor, making no sound. The Tleilaxu had restored the projected sky on the cavern ceiling, but they had reconfigured the sparkle of stars to show the constellations over their own homeworlds. Here on Ix, even the heavens were wrong.

This was not the glorious place it should be, but a hellish prison beneath the surface of the planet. We will change all that. Someday.

During more than a decade of repression, black marketeers and revolutionaries had built their secret network. The scattered resistance groups interacted to exchange supplies, equipment, and information. But each gathering made C’tair nervous. If they were caught together, the fledgling rebellion could be snuffed out in a few moments of lasgun fire.

When possible, he preferred to work alone— as he had always done. Trusting no one, he never divulged details of his surreptitious life, not even to other rebels. He’d made private contacts with rare off-worlders at the port-of-entry canyon— openings and landing pads in the sheer cliff wall where carefully guarded ships hauled Tleilaxu products to waiting Heighliners in orbit.

The Imperium required vital items of Ixian technology, which were now manufactured under Tleilaxu control. The invaders needed the profits to finance their own work, and they could not risk outside scrutiny. Although they could not seal Ix completely away from the rest of the Imperium, the Tleilaxu used the services of very few outsiders.

Sometimes, under the direst of circumstances and at great risk to himself, C’tair could bribe one of the transport laborers to skim a shipment or snag a vital component. Other black marketeers had their own contacts, but they refused to share that information with each other. It was safer that way.

Now, slipping through the claustrophobic night, he passed an abandoned manufactory, turned onto an even darker street, and picked up his pace. The meeting was about to begin. Perhaps tonight . . .

Though it seemed hopeless, C’tair continued to find ways to strike against the Tleilaxu slave masters, and other rebels did the same. Infuriated that they could not capture any saboteurs, the masters made “examples” out of hapless suboids. After torture and mutilation, the scapegoat would be hurled off the Grand Palais balcony to the distant cavern floor, where great Heighliners had once been built. Every expression on the victim’s face, every dripping wound, was projected on the holo-sky, while recorders transmitted his wails and screams.

But the Tleilaxu understood little of the Ixian psyche. Their brutality only caused greater unrest and more incidents of violent rebellion. Over the years, C’tair could see the Tleilaxu being worn down, despite efforts to crush the resistance with shape-shifting Face Dancer infiltrators and surveillance pods. The freedom fighters continued the struggle.

Those few rebels with access to uncensored outside news reported on the activities in the Imperium. From them, C’tair learned of impassioned speeches before the Landsraad made by his father, the exiled Ixian Ambassador— little more than futile gestures. Earl Dominic Vernius, who’d been overthrown and gone renegade, had vanished completely, and his heir, Prince Rhombur, lived in exile on Caladan, without a military force and without Landsraad support.

The rebels could not count on rescue from the outside. Victory must come from inside. From Ix.

He rounded another corner, and in a narrow alleyway stepped onto a metal grating. Narrowing his dark eyes, C’tair looked from side to side, always expecting someone to spring out of the shadows. His demeanor was furtive and quick, drastically different from the cowed and cooperative routine he followed in public.

He gave the password, and the grate lowered, taking him beneath the street. He hurried down a dark corridor.

During the day shift, C’tair wore a gray work smock. He had learned how to mimic the simple, lackluster suboids over the years: He walked with a stooped gait, eyes dull with disinterest. He had fifteen identity cards, and no one bothered to study faces in the shifting masses of laborers. It was easy to become invisible.

The rebels had developed their own identity checks. They posted concealed guards outside the abandoned facility under infrared glowglobes. Transeyes and sonic detectors provided a further bubble of protection— none of which would help if the freedom fighters were discovered.

On this level, the guards were visible. When C’tair mumbled his password response, they waved him inside. Too easily. He had to tolerate these people and their inept security games in order to acquire the equipment he needed, but he didn’t have to feel comfortable about it.

C’tair scanned the meeting site— at least that had been carefully selected. This closed-down facility had once assembled combat meks to train fighters against a spectrum of tactics or weapons. But the Tleilaxu overlords had unilaterally determined that such “self-aware” machines violated the strictures of the Butlerian Jihad. Though all thinking machines had been obliterated ten thousand years before, severe prohibitions were still in effect and emotions ran high. This place and others like it had been abandoned after the revolt on Ix, production lines left to fall into disrepair. Some equipment had been cannibalized for other uses, the rest turned into scrap.

Other pursuits preoccupied the Tleilaxu. Secret work, a vast project staffed only by their own people. No one, not even members of C’tair’s resistance group, had been able to determine what the overlords had in mind.

Inside the echoing facility, flinty-eyed resistance fighters spoke in whispers. There would be no formal agenda, no leader, no speech. C’tair smelled their nervous sweat, heard odd inflections in the low voices. No matter how many security precautions they took, how many escape plans they devised, it was still dangerous to have so many gathered in one place. C’tair always kept his eyes open, aware of the nearest exit.

He had business to conduct. He’d brought a disguised satchel containing the most vital items he had hoarded. He needed to trade with other scavengers to find components for his innovative but problematic transmitter, the rogo. The prototype allowed him to communicate through foldspace with his twin brother D’murr, a Guild Navigator. But C’tair rarely succeeded in establishing contact, either because his twin had mutated so far from human . . . or because the transmitter itself was falling apart.

On a dusty metal table, he brought out weapons components, power sources, communications devices, and scanning equipment— items that would have led to his immediate execution if any Tleilaxu had stopped to ask his business. But C’tair armed himself well, and he had killed the gnomish men before.

C’tair displayed his wares. He searched the faces of the rebels, the crude disguises and intentional dirt smudges, until he spotted a woman with large eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a narrow chin. Her hair had been raggedly chopped in an effort to destroy any hint of beauty. He knew her as Miral Alechem, though that might not have been her real name.

In her face, C’tair saw echoes of Kailea Vernius, the pretty daughter of Earl Vernius. He and his twin brother had both fancied Kailea, flirted with her . . . back when they’d thought nothing would ever change. Now Kailea was exiled on Caladan, and D’murr was a Guild Navigator. The twins’ mother, a Guild banker, had been killed during the takeover of Ix. And C’tair himself lived like a furtive rat, flitting from hideout to hideout. . . .

“I found the crystalpak you requested,” he said to Miral.

She withdrew a wrapped item from a sack at her waist. “I’ve got the module rods you needed, calibrated precisely . . . I hope. I had no way of checking.”

C’tair took the packet, feeling no need to inspect the merchandise. “I can do it myself.” He handed Miral the crystalpak, but did not ask what she had in mind for it. Everyone present searched for ways to strike against the Tleilaxu. Nothing else mattered. As he exchanged a nervous glance with her, he wondered if she might be thinking the same thing he was, that under different circumstances they might have had a personal relationship. But he couldn’t allow her that close to him. Not anyone. It would weaken him and divert his resolve. He had to remain focused, for the sake of the Ixian cause.

One of the door guards hissed an alarm, and everyone fell into fearful silence, ducking low. The muted glowglobes dimmed. C’tair held his breath.

A humming sound passed overhead as a surveillance pod cruised above the abandoned buildings, trying to pick up unauthorized vibrations or movements. Shadows smothered the hiding rebels. C’tair mentally reviewed the location of every possible escape from this facility, in case he needed to duck out into the blinding darkness.

But the humming device cruised onward down the length of the city grotto. Shortly afterward, the nervous rebels stood again and began muttering to themselves, wiping sweat off their faces, laughing nervously.

Spooked, C’tair decided not to remain any longer. He memorized the coordinates for the group’s next gathering, packed up his remaining equipment, and looked around, scanning the faces once more, marking them in his mind. If they were caught, he might never see these people again.

He nodded a final time at Miral Alechem, then slipped off into the Ixian night, flitting under artificial stars. He had already made up his mind where he would spend the remainder of the sleep shift . . . and which identity he would choose for the following day.