“I couldn’t agree more,” Valya said.

IN A MATTER of days, the forbidden machines were reassembled, checked, and activated. Valya found herself with similar duties to those she had carried out in the isolated caves on Rossak — but this time, her eager sister was by her side. Valya had requested special permission from the Mother Superior, and she trusted no one more than Tula … in certain matters.

Valya had spent the past year making sure her sister knew exactly how Vorian Atreides had wronged House Harkonnen, and Tula was equally determined to punish the aloof, long-lived war hero. The young woman’s determination pleased Valya very much.

Valya was strong enough to balance the two driving goals in her life: She could not rest until she had destroyed her brother’s murderer, the man who had brought ruin upon her entire family. That was her personal obsession. But in the larger picture, Valya could change the course of human history, and evolution, if she were to guide the Sisterhood. She had never been one to settle for small ambitions.

Now, she and Tula worked in the main bunker, combing through the breeding records. Sitting at a dual-control terminal with linked screens, they scrolled through billions of DNA samples to examine their own lineage and chromosomal linkages to other bloodlines. Raquella’s trusted Sisters worked at other screens nearby. Several Sister Mentats pored over the genetic analyses and compared them with their own projections made from the more cumbersome printed documentation.

Tula brushed a hand through her curly blond hair and leaned closer to the screen. “Are we really so closely related to the Corrinos?”

“They erased our names and pretend that history doesn’t exist, but our bloodline is separated from historical greatness by only a few generations. The Emperor can write his own version, but we know that Harkonnens and Butlers fought side by side against the thinking machines in the Jihad. But we lost everything after the Battle of Corrin, thanks to that accursed Vorian Atreides. To hide the shame, the Butlers changed their name to Corrino and deleted Harkonnens from their family tree.”

“Vorian Atreides,” Tula said. Whenever Valya heard the name, it burned like poison in her ears.

The two young women followed family connections, drawing an intricate lattice of bloodlines from the database. As they searched, they brushed their trails electronically behind them, which blocked any other Sister from seeing what they had been doing. Tracing back through centuries of detailed records, they ran deep searches on the Atreides bloodline, tracking unique markers dispersed across the League of Nobles and the Unallied Planets, all the way back to the infamous cymek General Agamemnon.

But Valya was not interested in ancient history. Rather, she wanted recent blood descendants that Vorian Atreides might actually still care about.

Since murdering Griffin on Arrakis, the man had vanished — which was not surprising for a coward and a criminal. Vorian seemed dead to history, but Valya hoped he wasn’t truly dead — not yet, because she wanted to see him hurt, and hurt deeply. He had to feel the pain he had caused House Harkonnen for generations. She wanted to twist the knife and make him watch the slow death of his family, his legacy. Only then would she kill him.

The records indicated that during his travels with the Army of the Jihad, Vorian had lovers on various planets. One of his discarded partners had been a young woman named Karida Julan from Hagal, who was said to have given birth to a child by him. But the record was sketchy, the data damaged … maybe even intentionally deleted?

While staring at the screen in front of her, Valya heard a clamoring of internal voices from her Other Memories, as if those ghostly presences remembered such ancient times. The cacophony made her head ache, but she blocked the noises away — she could make up her own mind!

According to new information Vorian Atreides had revealed when he resurfaced and presented himself at the Imperial Court, he’d married a woman named Mariella on the planet Kepler and had two sons and three daughters by her, and an unspecified number of grandchildren. That revelation had sent Griffin off in pursuit, hunting down the Atreides enemy on Kepler and then on Arrakis, where Griffin had died.

Valya already knew about the Kepler branch of the Atreides line, but Tula uncovered records that were more complete, and more relevant. In the latter days of the Jihad, Vorian Atreides and his longtime companion Leronica Tergiet had two sons on the planet Caladan, Estes and Kagin — and by now they had many grandchildren. The Atreides bloodline had been spreading like a disease.

Valya’s gaze settled on the names of two of Kagin’s descendants — Willem and Orry Atreides, brothers living on Caladan now, both of marriageable age … and similar to her beloved Griffin.

Sharp, clear images of the two young men appeared on the screens: patrician features, unmistakable Atreides noses and eyes. Valya looked at her beautiful younger sister, and they exchanged smiles. Both seemed to be considering the same interesting possibilities.

If the Atreides could only feel the same pain as her family had suffered!

“Maybe you should go to Caladan,” Valya suggested.

Just before noon, Prince Roderick stood in the central courtyard of the Imperial Palace and waited for his brother to emerge. Two weeks had passed since the disastrous rampage festival, and Emperor Salvador still insisted on additional security checks and guard sweeps. He often canceled an appearance on short notice, either through paranoia or simply indecisiveness. Salvador had always been fearful of illnesses, and now he saw assassins everywhere. The mob uprising had terrified him, shaken him to his marrow.

Salvador, though, had not lost a little daughter.…

Standing in the open air and sunshine, Roderick struggled to concentrate on his older brother’s safety. Many Landsraad factions and commercial interests carried blood feuds, wanting to kill the Emperor, for whatever reason. Still reeling from the death of Nantha, Roderick was barely able to function now, and he didn’t want to lose his brother, too. His universe seemed to be made of the thinnest glass.

Even after viewing images of the surging riots, Roderick could not fathom why they had occurred. Manford Torondo had triggered the mob violence, and knew exactly what he was doing, but what had the Butlerians wanted to accomplish with all that mindless destruction? And why poor Nantha? The little girl had been so perfect, so young, so delighted with the world.

It was impossible to reconstruct the sequence of events. While Haditha took their son and two older daughters to a baliset concert, the nanny had indulged little Nantha, as she had done so many times before. The nanny had requested additional security for the parade, a typical — and now, obviously, only symbolic — honor guard of four soldiers. The nanny and Nantha often went where they chose, always returning home laughing after their adventures. Roderick knew that his youngest daughter would have pleaded until she got her way.