Even surrounded by other villagers, Gurney Halleck felt completely alone. He stared into the watery beer. The brew was weak and sour, though if he drank enough of it, the pain in his body and in his heart grew numb. But in the end he was left with only a throbbing hangover and no hope of finding his sister.

In the five months since Captain Kryubi and the Harkonnen patrol had taken her, Gurney’s cracked ribs, bruises, and cuts had healed. “Flexible bones,” he told himself, a bitter joke.

The day after Bheth’s abduction, he’d been back in the fields, slowly and painfully digging trenches and planting the despised krall tubers. The other villagers, looking sidelong at him, had continued to work, pretending nothing had happened. They knew that if productivity declined, the Harkonnens would come back and punish them even more. Gurney learned that other daughters had been taken as well, but the parents involved never spoke of it outside their families.

Back at the tavern, Gurney rarely sang anymore. Though he carried his old baliset with him, the strings remained silent, and music refused to issue from his lips. He drank his bitter ale and sat sullenly, listening to the tired conversations of his mates. The men repeated complaints about work, about the weather, about uninteresting spouses. Gurney turned a deaf ear on all of it.

Though sickened to imagine what Bheth might be enduring, he hoped she was still alive. . . . She was probably locked inside a Harkonnen pleasure house, trained to perform unspeakable acts. And if she resisted or failed to meet expectations, she would be killed. As the patrol sweep had proved, Harkonnens could always find other candidates for their stinking brothels.

At home, his parents had blocked their own daughter from memory; without Gurney’s painstaking attention, they would have let Bheth’s garden die. His parents had even performed a mock funeral and recited verses from the battered Orange Catholic Bible. For a while, Gurney’s mother lit a candle and stared at the flickering flame, her lips moving in a silent prayer. They cut calla lilies and daisies— Bheth’s favorite flowers— and laid out a bouquet to honor her memory.

Then all of it ceased, and they moved on with their dreary lives without mention of her, as if she had never existed.

But Gurney never gave up.

“Don’t you care?” he bellowed one night into his father’s seamed face. “How can you let them do this to Bheth?”

“I didn’t let them do anything.” The older man seemed to stare right through his son, as if he were made of dirty glass. “There’s nothing any of us can do— and if you keep trying to fight against the Harkonnens, they will pay you back in blood.”

Gurney stormed out to sulk in the tavern, but the villagers there offered no more help. Night after night, he grew disgusted with them. The months passed in a blur.

Sloshing his ale, Gurney suddenly sat up at his table and realized what he was becoming. He saw his blunt face in the mirror each morning with a gradual awareness that he had stopped being himself. He, Gurney Halleck— good-natured, full of music and bluster— had tried to reawaken the life in these people. But instead he’d been transformed into one of them. Though barely in his twenties, he already looked like his aging father.

The drone of humorless conversation continued, and Gurney looked at the smooth prefab walls, the streaked window plates. This monotonous routine had not varied for generations. His hand clenched around the flagon, and he took stock of his own talents and abilities. He couldn’t fight the Harkonnens with brute strength or weapons, but he had another idea. He could strike back at the Baron and his followers in a more insidious way.

Feeling renewed energy, he grinned. “I’ve got a tune for you, mates— the likes of which you’ve never heard before.”

The men smiled uneasily. Gurney held the baliset, strummed its strings as brusquely as if he were peeling coarse vegetables, and sang out in a loud, blustery voice:

We

and

For

and

We

and

For

and

Our

our

and

For

while

As the stanzas continued the listeners’ eyes widened in horror. “Stop this, Halleck!” one man said, rising from his seat.

“Why, Perd?” Gurney said with a sneer. “Do you love the Baron so much? I hear he enjoys bringing strong young men like you into his pleasure chambers.”

Bravely, Gurney sang another insulting song, and another, until finally he felt liberated. These tunes gave him a freedom he’d never before imagined. The onlookers were disturbed and uneasy. Many got up to leave as he continued to sing, but Gurney would not be swayed. He stayed until long after midnight.

When finally he walked home that night, Gurney Halleck had a spring in his step. He had struck back at his tormentors, though they would never know it.

He wouldn’t get enough sleep going to bed at this hour, and work would begin early in the morning. But that didn’t bother him— he felt recharged. Gurney returned to the darkened house where his parents had long since retired. He set the baliset in his personal wardrobe, lay back on his pallet, and dozed off with a smile on his lips.

Less than two weeks later, a silent Harkonnen patrol entered the village of Dmitri. It was three hours before dawn.

Armed guards battered in the door of the prefab dwelling, though the Hallecks never kept it locked. The uniformed men lit blazing glowglobes as they marched in, knocking furniture aside, smashing crockery. They uprooted all the flowers Bheth had planted in old pots outside the front door. They tore down the curtains that covered the small windows.

Gurney’s mother screamed and huddled far back on the bed. His father lurched up, went to the door of their chamber, and saw the troopers. Instead of defending his home, he backed away and slammed the bedroom door, as if that could protect him.

But the guards were only interested in Gurney. They dragged the young man from his bed, and he came out flailing wildly with his fists. The men found his resistance amusing, and flung him facedown on the fireplace hearth; Gurney chipped a tooth and scraped his chin. He tried to get back to his hands and knees, but two Harkonnens kicked him in the ribs.

After ransacking a small closet, one blond soldier came out with the nicked and patched baliset. He tossed it on the floor, and Kryubi made sure Gurney’s face was turned toward the instrument. As the Harkonnens pressed their victim’s cheek against the hearth bricks, the guard captain stomped on the baliset with a booted foot, breaking its spine. The strings twanged in a discordant jangle.

Gurney moaned, feeling a greater pain from that than from the blows he had received. All the work he had put into restoring the instrument, all the pleasure it had given him. “Bastards!” he spat, which earned him another pummeling.

He made a concentrated effort to see their faces, recognized a square-featured, brown-haired ditch-digger he’d known from a nearby village, now resplendent in his new uniform with the low-rank insignia of an Immenbrech. He saw another guard with a bulbous nose and a harelip, a man he was sure had been “recruited” from Dmitri five years before. But their faces showed no recognition, no sympathy. They were the Baron’s men now, and would never do anything to risk being sent back to their former lives.

Seeing that Gurney recognized them, the guards dragged him outside and beat him with redoubled enthusiasm.

During the attack, Kryubi stood tall, sad, and appraising. He ran a finger along his shred of mustache. The guard captain watched in grim silence as his men punched and kicked and beat Gurney, drawing energy from their victim’s refusal to cry out as often as they would have liked. They finally stepped back to catch their breath.

And brought out the sticks . . .

At last, when Gurney could no longer move because his bones were broken, his muscles battered, and his flesh covered with clotting blood, the Harkonnens withdrew. Under the harsh glare of clustered glowglobes, he lay bleeding and moaning.

Kryubi held up his hand and signaled the men to return to their craft. They took all the glowglobes but one, which shed a single flickering light upon the mangled man.

Kryubi stared at him with apparent concern, then knelt close by. He spoke quiet words meant only for Gurney. Even through the pain-fogged clamor in his skull, Gurney found it strange. He had expected the Harkonnen guard captain to crow his triumph so that all the villagers could hear. Instead, Kryubi seemed more disappointed than smug. “Any other man would have given up long ago. Most men would have been more intelligent. You brought this on yourself, Gurney Halleck.”

The captain shook his head. “Why did you force me to do this? Why did you insist on bringing wrath down upon yourself? I’ve saved your life this time. Barely. But if you defy the Harkonnens again, we may have to kill you.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps just kill your family and maim you instead. One of my men has a certain talent for gouging out eyes with his fingers.”

Gurney tried to speak several times around broken, blood-thick lips. “Bastards,” he finally managed. “Where’s my sister?”

“Your sister is not of concern right now. She is gone. Stay here and forget about her. Do your work. We each have our job to do for the Baron, and if you fail in yours”— Kryubi’s nostrils flared—“then I must do mine. If you speak out against the Baron, if you insult him, if you ridicule him to incite discontent, I will have to act. You’re smart enough to know that.”

With an angry grunt, Gurney shook his head. Only his anger sustained him. Every drop of his blood that spattered the ground he swore to repay with Harkonnen blood. With his dying breath he would discover what had happened to his sister— and if by some miracle Bheth remained alive, he would rescue her.

Kryubi turned toward the troop transport, where the guards had already seated themselves. “Don’t make me come back.” He looked over his shoulder at Gurney and added a very odd word. “Please.”

Gurney lay still, wondering how long it would take for his parents to venture out and see whether he lived or not. He watched through blurred vision and pain-smeared eyes as the transport lifted off and left the village. He wondered if any other lights would come on, if any villagers would come out and help him, now that the Harkonnens were gone.

But the dwellings in Dmitri remained dark. Everyone pretended not to have seen or heard.