The desert is not always the safest place to hide.

—Zensunni saying

When the investigator reported to Griffin that he had been unsuccessful in finding any information about Vorian Atreides, the man demanded payment nevertheless. Griffin refused, citing their oral agreement. When the man pressed the issue and threatened him with a projectile pistol, Griffin broke his wrist with a crisp blow, and took the weapon away from him.

“I have my own leads to follow,” he said.

Leaving the whimpering man behind, Griffin went to the Arrakis City headquarters of the Combined Mercantiles spice-harvesting operations. Encompassing two square blocks, the building looked like a fortress. Considering the upheavals, feuds, and competing melange operations on the desert planet, perhaps it was a fortress.

Still unsettled by this world’s rugged violence, which he had encountered twice now, Griffin did not relax his guard as he continued to search. He refused to touch the contingency funds he had set aside to buy his passage back home, but he would spend the rest of his money, exhausting it in an attempt to find Vorian Atreides and achieve the result that honor demanded.

Revenge pays its own debt, his sister had said.

And when he finally returned to Lankiveil, he could focus on putting the house in order and expanding their commercial dealings, seeking to set the family on a steady course.

The previous day, he had recorded a lengthy message for Valya, describing his progress and his hope for the imminent completion of his quest. He wanted to reassure her how hard he’d been working. Recording the message focused his thoughts and fueled his desire to continue, even so far from home.

For sentimental reasons, he recorded another brief letter to the rest of his family on Lankiveil, though he did little more than tell them he was healthy and safe, and missed them. By the time he got home, he was sure his certification as a Landsraad representative would be waiting for him. At the end of the letter, he gave his father several assignments—to send inquiries to Salusa about acquiring office space near the Landsraad Hall, to negotiate short-term construction projects with inland laborers who came to the coast each spring, and to invest in whale-fur futures on a particular harvesting fleet—though he didn’t know if Vergyl would follow through on any of it. Griffin paid a fee to dispatch the messages to Rossak and Lankiveil, aware that they might be months in transit.

He went to the headquarters of the spice operations and asked several clerks for information on a possible employee named Atreides. In response, he received only uncaring shrugs; a bored-looking woman merely told him, “When people come to Arrakis, they don’t want to be found.” Flustered, Griffin paid to peruse the personnel records on the many spice crews that worked in the desert for Combined Mercantiles, and the clerk gave him a dauntingly large and disorganized set of record books.

He spent the better part of that day combing the lists for one specific name. The logbooks were incomplete, some organized by date of hire, others grouped by crew locations. Only three volumes listed the names in alphabetical order. The work crews were paid in cash or water, and very little record was kept of other financial transactions.

If Atreides was using an alias, Griffin might never find him, but the self-important man was not the sort of person to hide his identity. Did he have any reason to?

While Griffin pestered them with questions, the Combined Mercantiles clerks were preoccupied by a disturbing new report, that a spice crew had been ambushed out in the desert, the equipment destroyed and every one of the workers killed. The loss of the crew and machinery would typically have been written off as due to weather or sandworm attack, but an eyewitness had reported that the harvester was attacked by armed men. Combined Mercantiles immediately increased the security alert and redoubled military escorts on their desert operations.

Perhaps the victims had been Vorian’s crew, Griffin mused, which gave him some measure of hope. Valya would never be satisfied if the man perished without first having to face a Harkonnen and suffer for the pain he had caused, but Griffin was not sure how he felt about that himself. He had never killed anyone before.

He spotted a desert woman leaving the headquarters and hurried to query her. She was hardened, weathered, and covered in dust. Her blue-within-blue eyes were bird-bright as he stopped her. She sneered at his offer of a bribe. “Information is not a thing to be bought or sold, but to be shared, or withheld—as I see fit.”

The woman brushed past him, but he persisted. “I’m looking for a man named Vorian Atreides. He’s somewhere on Arrakis, but I don’t know where to look.”

Her brows drew together, and she fixed a breathing mask over her mouth. She seemed anxious to go. “What do you want him for?”

“I need to speak with him about a personal matter. He knew my family a long time ago.”

She didn’t seem to believe him, had a strange, agitated look on her face. “I have never heard of the person you seek. You’re wasting your time.” He thanked her as she hurried out into the street, showing no more interest in him.

*   *   *

THE DESERT’S QUIET emptiness gave Vorian a sense of serenity, especially at night. He missed his contented nights in a familiar bed with Mariella, yet felt comfortable among these Freemen, though they remained wary and suspicious of him; he doubted they would ever accept an outsider, even if he spent the rest of his life here.

From the other desert people, he’d heard tales of the tribulations endured by the Freemen, the generations of slavery, how their ancestors rioted on Poritrin and stole an experimental spacefolder ship for a mass exodus from the League Worlds, only to crash here on Arrakis. They joined with the descendants of a legendary desert outlaw, Selim Wormrider. All that history, unknown and unwritten, was fascinating to Vor—the rest of the Imperium was entirely unaware of it.

He liked to sit outside under the stars. He looked up now as the two moons drew close in the sky, the lower and faster satellite approaching its cousin. The Freemen had set out innovative dew collectors among the rocks, condensing a faint trace of moisture as the atmosphere cooled. Most of Sharnak’s people were asleep, and those on sentry duty ignored him.

As he pondered these things, his eyes spotted a flicker of movement in the shadowy rocks below. For an instant, moonlight exposed a pair of figures, which vanished again into black obscurity. Alert, he tried to convince himself that he had seen a pair of evening scouts sent out by Naib Sharnak. Who else could possibly be out here, and how would they survive?

Sitting motionless, he studied the rocks for a long moment, caught another moving shadow, then crept back inside and closed the cave’s moisture door as he looked for one of the camp guards.

By now he had grown accustomed to the wealth of unusual smells and common background noises of people crowded together with very little comfort or privacy. The tunnels were dark and silent, but he found one of the sentries, a sour-faced man with a patchy beard. The man seemed annoyed at the interruption of his nocturnal wanderings.

“I saw something outside,” Vor said. “You should find out what it is.”

“There is nothing out there but rocks and sand—and Shai-Hulud, if you are unfortunate enough to see him.”

“I saw two figures out there.”

“Only ghosts or shadows. I have lived in the desert all my life, offworlder.”

Vor bristled, spoke loudly. “Once, I commanded the entire Army of Humanity, and fought more battles than you could imagine. You should at least look into it.”

Hearing voices, another sentry came up, one of the young men who had been dispatched to investigate the spice-harvesting site. For days now, Inulto had listened to Vor talk about Arrakis City, Kepler, and Salusa Secundus, all of which were equally exotic to him. He seemed inclined to believe Vor, and said, “Come, we’ll wake up Naib Sharnak and let him decide.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” said the sour-faced sentry. “I forbid it.”

Inulto scoffed, showing little respect for the other man. “You forbid nothing, Elgar.” Ignoring him, the scout led Vor to Sharnak’s quarters, muttering in a sarcastic tone, “Elgar thinks he’ll be our Naib one day, but he can’t even lead the tribe when only five of us are awake.”

They called at the curtain, and Naib Sharnak came out, blinking and grumbling. His dark, gray-shot hair, normally braided, was spread out in a flowing fan, rumpled by sleep. However, before Vor could tell the leader what he had seen, shouts came from down the stone corridor, and a piercing scream.

Sharnak was instantly awake, yelling to rouse his people. The men and women of the caves bounded out of their sleeping chambers, calling their fellows to arms; they had not forgotten being preyed upon by slave hunters, even after generations of relative peace.

“Give me a weapon!” Vor shouted. Inulto had only one knife, but Sharnak kept a pair of the milky-white daggers. Grudgingly, he handed one to Vor, and the three ran down the corridor.

The moisture-seal door had been broken open, and two bodies lay on the stone floor. Vor ran toward the flurry of fighting inside the tunnel just in time to see Elgar, looking panicked. One of the intruders grabbed him from behind, tugged on his hair, planted a knee in his back, and snapped his spine. The attacker then discarded him, tossing the body to the floor.

Vor stared at Andros and Hyla. They saw him and smiled. “Oh, there you are,” the young man said.

“Who are you?” Rage filled Vor, and he held the knife in front of him, though he remembered the minimal effect weapons had on these two. “How do you know me?”

Andros and Hyla were not concerned about the dozens of Freemen fighters who came to face them. The young woman took a step forward, casually placing her heel on Elgar’s broken spine. “You are Vorian, son of Agamemnon—don’t you recognize us?”

The young man said, “We know what you did to our father and the rest of the Titans … how you betrayed us all.”

Hyla stepped forward. “But blood runs strong and thick, and you are our brother. Maybe we can find it in our hearts to forgive you.”

Brother? Vor felt as if an asteroid impact had rocked his entire world. He knew that General Agamemnon had kept sperm samples from centuries ago, before he had discarded his human body. Hoping to find a worthy successor, Agamemnon had used surrogate mothers to bear sons for him, all of whom he’d found inadequate. Vorian had been his best hope, and later his greatest disappointment. Vor could not deny that these two appeared to share the Atreides genes, but one was a daughter.

“Come with us,” Hyla said, “and we’ll decide your worth.”

“Or should we kill all these others first?”

With a brave and foolish yell, Inulto threw himself toward Andros, slashing with the dagger. The moment he moved, Hyla dismissively reached out and caught the young man’s throat with one hand. Inulto flailed, stabbed with his knife as she crushed his larynx and tossed him on the floor like a broken doll. Her skin and her brother’s flickered with quicksilver. The knife cuts on her arm went only as deep as the topmost layer of skin, with hardly any blood.

As soon as Hyla killed Inulto, five of the desert men rushed forward, howling. The twins fought them like a pair of dust-devils, breaking bones, smashing skulls, crushing opponents against the walls.

“Stop!” Vor yelled, then turned to Sharnak. “Tell your fighters to back away. I’ll go with them. I never wanted any of your people hurt.”

But the leather-skinned Naib looked furious. He shouted to two fighters, “Restrain Vorian Atreides. Keep him away from those two.”

As the desert men grabbed his arms, Vor struggled, but they were very strong. “Let me fight my own battles, damn you!”

“No—because that is exactly what they wish,” Sharnak said. “They can’t have you. And if you are in league with them…”

Now the Freemen warriors attacked the twins in force, and proved to be far more difficult opponents than a weary spice-harvesting crew. Through sheer ferocity, they drove Andros and Hyla back as they hacked away at the quicksilver-impregnated skin. One fighter managed to slice just beneath Andros’s left eye, nearly gouging it out.

The momentum of the onslaught pushed the twins back toward the broken moisture door. They looked furious, still intent on capturing Vor and obviously appalled at their failure.

“We will spill your blood across the sand and dump your bodies—even Shai-Hulud will spit you out,” the Naib shouted to them.

“You are unworthy opponents,” Andros said with a sneer.

Vor was determined not to let these people fight for him, but he could not break free. At least eight desert warriors lay broken and probably dead on the cave floor, but the rest showed no sign of backing away, and more came running from the deep tunnels. The brother and sister hesitated as if calculating the odds, then reacted at the same instant, making the same choice.

Their last glance at Vor was filled with promises and threats. Ignoring the Freemen who had fought them to a standstill, the bloody twins retreated through the moisture lock and vanished like a whiff of steam from a hot rock.

Naib Sharnak shouted, “Find them. Kill them!” But Vor knew it would be no use. He had no idea if the twins had a vehicle or aircraft, or if they had somehow crossed the desert on their own, but he would not underestimate them.

The Naib breathed hard, and his voice carried a murderous tone. “I will have satisfactory explanations, Vorian Atreides, or I will have your water.”

When the warriors released him, Vor calmly faced the tribal leader. Long ago, he had pretended to side with the cymek general so that he could betray him and save humanity. He had taken his father’s preservation canister and dumped the twisted brain out of a high tower, so that it splattered on the frozen cliffs below. After that victory, Vor had thought there would be peace, but obviously the stain of the Titans wasn’t completely eradicated.

Now, the desert people were outraged and stunned that a mere two opponents could cause so much damage, and Vor realized he needed to tell what he knew. “I’ll give you all the explanations I have, about who I am and what I’ve done in the past, but I doubt they will be enough.”