If he was to rescue his sister, Gurney Halleck knew he had to act alone.

He planned carefully for two months, aching to move, knowing Bheth was suffering every moment, every night. But his scheme would be doomed to fail if he didn’t take every possibility into account. He obtained crude maps of Giedi Prime and laid out his route to Mount Ebony. It seemed very far away, farther than he had ever traveled in his life.

He was tense, fearing the villagers would notice his activities, but they staggered through their days with gazes downcast. Even his parents said little to him, noticing nothing of his moods, as if their son had disappeared along with their daughter.

Finally, as prepared as he was ever going to be, Gurney waited until darkness. And then he simply . . . left.

With a sack of krall tubers and vegetables slung over one shoulder and a harvesting knife tucked into his belt, he made his way across the patchwork fields. He hid from roads and patrols, sleeping during the day, traveling under the wan moonlight. He doubted searchers would come after him. The Dmitri villagers would assume that the troublemaker had been snatched away in the middle of the night by Harkonnen torturers; with any luck, they’d be afraid to report his disappearance at all.

Several nights, Gurney managed to slip aboard unmanned cargo transports that crawled westward across the landscape, heading in the correct direction. Their hulking forms levitated along without stopping, all through the night. The transports took him hundreds of kilometers, allowing him to rest and brood and wait until he could find the military compound.

During long hours, he listened to the throb of suspensor engines that dragged produce or minerals to processing centers. He longed for his baliset, which he’d been forced to abandon back at home, for it was too bulky to carry on his mission. When he had the instrument, no matter how much the overlords took from his family, he could still make his own music. He missed those days. Now he just hummed to himself, all alone.

Finally, he saw the looming cone of Mount Ebony, the stark and blackened remnant of a volcano whose cliffs had broken off at sharp angles. The rock itself was black, as if covered with tar.

The military compound was a jigsaw puzzle of evenly spaced buildings, all square, all undecorated. It looked like an insect warren established uphill and upwind from the slave pits and obsidian mines. Between the fenced-in slave pits and the regimented military encampment lay a hodgepodge of buildings, support facilities, inns . . . and a small pleasure house to entertain the Harkonnen troops.

So far Gurney had made his way undetected. The Harkonnen masters could not conceive that a downtrodden laborer with little education and few resources would dare to strike out across Giedi Prime on his own, would venture to spy upon the troops with a personal goal in mind.

But he had to make his way into the place where Bheth must be imprisoned. Gurney hid and waited, observing the military compound and trying to formulate his plan. He came up with few alternatives.

Still, he wouldn’t let that stop him.

A lowborn, uneducated man could never hope to pass himself off as someone who belonged there, so Gurney could not infiltrate the pleasure house. Instead he chose a daring raid. He grasped a metal pipe taken from a refuse pile and held his harvesting knife in the other hand. Stealth would be sacrificed for speed.

He charged through a side door of the pleasure house and ran to the administrator, a crippled old man wired into a chair at the front table. “Where’s Bheth?” the intruder yelled, surprised to hear his own voice after so long. He thrust the point of his blade under the old man’s sinewy chin. “Bheth Halleck, where is she?”

Gurney reeled for a moment. What if Harkonnen pleasure houses never bothered with the names of their women? Trembling, the old man saw death in Gurney’s blazing eyes and the scars on his face. “Chamber twenty-one,” he said in a croak.

Gurney dragged the administrator, chair and all, into a closet and locked him in. Then he raced up the hall.

A few surly customers stared at him, some half-dressed in Harkonnen uniforms. He heard screams and thumps from behind closed doors, but he had no time to investigate the atrocities. His concentration focused only on one thing. Chamber twenty-one. Bheth.

His vision tunneled down to a pinpoint until he located the door. His audacity had bought him a little time, but it would be only moments before Harkonnen soldiers were called. He didn’t know how fast he could get Bheth out and into hiding. Together, they could race across the landscape, vanish into the wilderness. After that, he didn’t know where they would go.

He couldn’t think. He only knew that he had to try.

The number was scribed on the lintel in Imperial Galach. He heard a scuffle inside. Using his muscular shoulder, Gurney battered the door. It splintered at the jamb and caved in with a heavy thud.

“Bheth!” Letting out a wild roar, he rushed into the dimly lit chamber, knife in one hand, metal club in the other.

From the bed she gave a muffled cry, and he turned to see her tied up with thin metal cables. Thick grease had been smeared over her breasts and lower body like war paint, and two naked Harkonnen soldiers lurched back from their activities like startled snakes. Both men held strangely shaped tools, one of which sparked and sizzled.

Gurney didn’t want to imagine what they’d been doing, had forced himself not to contemplate the sadistic tortures that Bheth endured daily. His roar became a strangled cry in his throat as he saw her— and froze in shock. The vision of his sister’s humiliation, the tragic sight of what had happened to her in the intervening four years, doomed his rescue attempt to failure.

He hesitated only an instant, his jaw dropping. Bheth had changed so much, her face drawn and aged, her body wiry and bruised . . . so different from the silken seventeen-year-old he had known. During the fraction of a second that Gurney stood motionless, his angry momentum stalled.

It took the Harkonnen soldiers only a heartbeat to leap from the bed and fall upon him.

Even without their gauntlets, boots, or body armor, the men pummeled him to the floor. They knew exactly where to strike. One of the men jabbed a sparking device against his throat, and his entire left side went numb. He thrashed uncontrollably.

Bheth could only make wordless, breathy sounds as she struggled against the wires that held her to the bed. Oddly, he noticed a long, thin scar tracing a white line along her throat. She had no larynx.

Gurney couldn’t see her anymore as his vision turned crimson. He heard heavy footsteps and shouts thundering down the halls. Reinforcements. He couldn’t get up.

With a sagging heart, he realized he had failed. They would kill him and probably murder Bheth, too. If only I hadn’t hesitated. That instant of uncertainty had defeated him.

One of the men looked down, lips drawn in a rictus of fury. Spittle ran from the left corner of his mouth, and his blue eyes, which might have been handsome at another time, on another person, glared at him. The guard snatched the harvesting knife and the metal pipe from Gurney’s limp hands and held them both up. Grinning, the Harkonnen soldier tossed the knife aside— but kept the pipe.

“We know where to send you, lad,” he said.

He heard Bheth’s odd whispering again, but she could form no words.

Then the guard swung the metal pipe down on Gurney’s head.