The two men fight in the desert, their whip-swords snapping in the air and discharging blue sparks when they strike against each other's pulsing energy shields. A ship hovers above them. One of the men is barely more than a boy, in a silver still-suit with the proud crest of some ancient house in relief on his chest. The other is tall and suited in gold, and with one blow he sends the boy sprawling. The boy scrambles to his feet. Across his shoulders he wears a dyed cloth, and it streams behind him like a cloak, bright green and bordered with pink. A gift from a native girl. Or perhaps he stole it, as his people steal everything. Suddenly the larger man has his blade to the boy's throat, and makes him kneel. He looms behind him, and Miryana thinks that he is going to rip the boy's head off. But he only takes the boy's helmet, and Miryana sees him, pale and young and still brown-eyed, indicating that he has not been here long. He knows that he is dead without the helmet of his still-suit. The other man spits, and Miryana's hands fly to her mouth in shock. Then, with the boy's helmet under his arm, he climbs the ramp of his ship and flies away. The boy drops down to his hands and knees, and water from his stillsuit spills out into the desert sand. He touches the wet sand with his fingers and holds them up, trembling. Then he sprawls back in the desert and, to Miryana's surprise, he laughs. He laughs, and then he stands, still grinning, running his hand through his brown curls, and doggedly begins walking. Miryana follows, a tiny girl in brown and orange scarves, moving lightly across the sand and leaving no trace. She decides that she will save him when he falls.

He slows his pace and Miryana realizes that he laughed and squared his shoulders and was brave because he made himself be so, and that he has no plan to justify his confidence. The sun is getting low, and the boy knows the desert, orienting himself so that he is walking toward a sietch that Miryana knows to be below the star Angetenar. He falls to his knees and takes the cloth in his hands. Miryana makes a disgusted sound. There was still some strength left in him when he fell. His mind gave in before his body. Nevertheless, she rushes to him and takes her literjohn, pouring drops of it into his mouth. He looks up at her, with his brown eyes. She has never seen such eyes up close, they are bright and sweet in a way that feels strangely familiar, although she has never seen such eyes before. She looks at this boy, with his pale skin and soft curls and does not know what to make of him.

"I'm glad it's you," he mutters in Arabic. Miryana tuggs at his armor.

"I'm not her," she says. "Come with me." He closes his eyes. She holds his right eye open with her fingers. "Come with me." He sits and she helps him to his feet. She gives him another sip of water. As the sun sinks lower he seems to straighten, and he smiles that false, brave smile and clasps his hands behind his back. "Tell me your name," he says, and the setting sun gives him a golden crown when she looks up at him. She gives no answer.

"Would you please tell me your name?" he asks in a quiet, schooled voice, with a coarse edge from dehydration.

"Miryana."

"Thank you, Miryana," he says, "for saving my life. Emmeric of House Alcibiades owes you a debt," and there is a playful glint in his eye that she does not understand.

"Harkonnen or Atreides?" she asks.

"Neither," the boy runs a hand through his hair. It is pale but scarred, and Miryana can guess at the callouses he must have from his sword. He fought well, but the other man outstripped him by a mile. "My people are merchants." A note of pride enters his voice. "Silk merchants, like the first explorers. But of course, all anyone wants is spice."

"Why come here?" asks Miryana. "To a planet at war with itself and besieged by the stars?"

"I came here without the knowledge of my father," he says. "I came here to stake my claim in the new Canopus. Spice is a controlled substance, perhaps the most tightly controlled in all the conquered worlds, but there are certain lucrative backdoors available to those who know where to look." He hesitates, but his boastfulness gets the better of him. "I will sell silk," he says. "And I will be paid, and the exchange will be entered into the books. But-"

"- the silk is spice," Miryana finished for him.

"The silk is spice."

"To whom do you sell it?"

"To the rulers of countries and cities and slums. To the lords of the underworld. Great houses can afford the proper channels. The men who own planets have no need of my services."

"Who was the man who tried to kill you?"

The boy shrugs. "A bounty hunter. Harkonnen's lackey, Atreides's, what does it matter?"

"Are you not afraid of him?"

"No. He was sent to kill me, and succeeded. The desert buries bones quickly, it will be a long time before he knows that he has failed."

"I meant Atreides," Miryana lowers her voice, respectful of the living legend. "Maud'dib."

"Pfft," the boy waves his hand dismissively. "That puffed-up carnival palm-reader? He is perceptive and clear-sighted, but I do not believe he can see into the future any better than a decent chess-player, who is always three moves in advance of his opponent."

Then they crested the dune and slid down into Miryana's sietch, where Emmeric was greeted and given a sleeping pallet in Miryana's brother's old room. He took a wife from a different sietch. At night she joins Emmeric, and he is wide awake, staring out into the darkness.

"I'm going to Khanjar," he tells her.

"I have never been to Khanjar. I have never seen a city." I have never seen anyone like you, she wants to add. I have never seen brown eyes and a bright, sweet smile like yours, and it is a marvel that you have survived this long, with your prideful folly and your boasting, but I want to see what you do next, little empire builder.

"Come with me."

Miryana gets up to leave, her ankle bracelets chiming softly.

"Please, come with me."

They leave two weeks later, after the boy marries Miryana. He drinks water that she has mixed with cinnamon instead of spice, and on their wedding night they sit across from each other in the dark and talk without being able to see each other's faces. She asks about the cloth, and the girl to whom it belonged. He replies that her name was Jannah, and that she lives no longer.

Khanjar is a crumbling illusion. Below the minarets and cupolas and graceful spires is a cesspool of neon lights and dirty streets and storefronts where hollow eyed boys and girls stand naked in the display windows. The city pulses and hallucinates and writhes under the weight of its people, and the prayer calls are drowned out by cries from salesmen and beggars. Miryana's hand, underneath her colorful scarves, is never far from the hilt of her crystknife. Miryana sees other Fremen, and they acknowledge each other with quiet glances before they disappear to their jobs and their mosques and their families. She follows her young husband along strange pathways, up rain gutters and through alleys, down rusted emergency exits on the sides of buildings, until they emerge onto a plateau where the air is clearer and the city spreads out before them, beautiful in the kind, golden light. Their airbus deposits them on the roof of a building made of cobalt stone, veined with white, and inside it is fresh and cool, like nothing Miryam has ever known. A tall fountain sprays water into the air, and Emmeric takes her hand as she recoils from the sight of such an unfathomable thing. But then she laughs at the absurdity, and she closes her eyes to better feel the moisture in the air on her face.

"What is this place?" she asks.

"Headquarters," Emmeric answers. "Of the most reputable silk merchandising enterprise in this corner of the universe."

He shows her the factories, where men and women sew silks that ripple, tantalizingly, like water. He shows her the warehouses where the bolts of colorful silk are stored. And he shows her offices and conference rooms, and the people whom they pass nod to him and call him Master Alcibiades. And then he takes her in a lift that seems to travel down forever, and they emerge onto a very different scene.

People carrying weapons move back and forth at a rapid pace, barking out orders. Heavy machinery moves large wooden crates, and an army class frigate hovers above the concrete floor of the underground hangar, ridiculously illegal for any civilian entity to possess. The boy is at home here, and the people trust him and follow him.

"This is my wife," he tells them, as she stands straight and proud beside him, looking with her blue eyes at the city-dwellers. "Speak to her as you would speak to me. What I know, she knows. And vice versa."

"My name is Miryana," she says, nothing more. As promised, Emmeric initiates her into his affairs, and soon she has gained a reputation as well. She is unscrupulous, like her husband, as they sell the drug and steal the drug and buy the drug from others. It is, she thinks, like being a general in the war. There are raids, little battles - turf wars - between rival factions, there are tactics and there is strategy and there is the danger, always, of death. She is still not sure what Emmeric wants, if it is just to build an empire that he can call his own, or if he shares the common human thirst for power.

"It is wrong," Miryana says one day, sitting across from her husband in a hotel room above Khanjar. The floor they are on revolves slowly, and Miryana looks out the window, enjoying the feeling of vertigo. "Since when do we sell the spice to such people? They have no cause and they bring death wherever they go. Was it not such people who killed your Jannah?"

He doesn't take the bait. "They sell their swords, and we sell spice."

"Your eyes are turning blue," Miryana says sadly.

On the day of the sale, Miryana is with Emmeric at a munitions factory in the lower district. The air is stale and metallic, and Miryana is acutely aware of the electrical impulse gun strapped to the inside of her thigh. 10 additional mercenaries are standing behind the man seated across from Emmeric at an improvised table made of plutonium casks, all with their guns trained at Miryana and her men. The moment approaches and Miryana moves closer to her husband. He senses her, and reaches for his own weapon. Then the room erupts into sound and fury, men scream as they die, and a white light at the enterance to the factory fills Miryana's vision with blue spots.

"Hide!" she shouts, "It's the police!" and then her husband, whose handsome, boyish face is all-too famous in this city, disappears, and Miryana takes his place, across from the dead men.

The captain of the city gaurd does not sit, but stands among the bodies with his hands on the back of the chair on the other end of the table. He is a serious man with a close-shaved beard. Miryana slides the packet of spice across the table towards him.

"Taste it," she says. "Take it to your people and test it. Cinnamon mixed with cobalt dye. The same we use for our silk," she smiles. "We have given you the…" she hesitates, wondering what the captain wants to hear. "the disprupters. Will you honor our arrangement?"

"Do not pretend," says the captain. "That the Silkspiders have suddenly developed a code of honor."

Silkspiders?

"I pretend nothing," says Miryana.

"Your husband's personal vendetta against these terrorists has happened to benefit us, but the fewer parties vying for control of the flow of spice, the better for peace. For our planet."

Something rises in Miryana, and before she can stop herself, she says, "I agree."

The captain's eyes harden, but he makes a one-handed gesture and his men gather the crates of dyed cinnamon and leave, and after that day the city police no longer hunt Silkspiders.

Emmeric is pale when he comes back to stand beside her. "They had a sniper on me," he says, as he walks among the bodies, pulling down their masks one by one. "I never told you about that day," he says distantly. "Jannah was a girl who smiled easily, who was kind to everyone - don't worry, my love, you eclipse her by a mile - but I was a child and she was a child, and she was my first true friend on Arrakis." One of the men is still breathing, and Emmeric slits his throat with his own crystknife. "Her sietch was raided for spice."

They have gained immunity from the police, but they have ruffled other, mightier feathers, and gained the attention of too many unwanted parties. Miryana has no way of knowing what percentage of the spice flow she and her husband now control, but she guesses that it is a large number, too large to avoid the scrutiny of the great houses on Arrakis. "We need a sale," Emmeric says to her one day, as they sit in the common area of one of the Silkspider sietches. "Things are getting too hot here."

They meet the Moonborn in a darkly furnished room in one of the city's twisting spires. He has told them to come alone.

The man transfers them the staggering number of credits with an ease and a lack of haggling that makes Miryana nervous. He looks almost unimpressed when she reveals her cache of spice, and Miryana wants to leave. He rubs a small portion of the bright blue dust between his fingers, and then he leans back and laughs, and Miryana realizes that it is already too late. Emmeric takes her hand and they spring towards the door, but somehow the Moonborn man, no longer the spoiled man with perfumed and oiled hair, but a soldier, is blocking their path. When they begin to fight, the boy and the girl against the warrior, she recognizes him as the golden man in the desert.

"House Atreides sends its regards, you criminal scum," he says, drawing his whip-sword.

"You lie," says Emmeric. "You are no longer a lancer of House Atreides. In fact, I am surprised that they suffered you to live, after your failure in the desert. You worm. You were bought for only a taste of spice, while your masters are rich enough to aerosolize it throughout their palaces."

"I was a lancer…" says the man, smiling wickedly. They circle each other slowly. "... of House Harkonnen."

"You call us criminals, Harkonnen?" says Miryana. "Are the great colonizer houses not simply criminals with an army and a fleet? Are they not the ones who take too much from this planet, who rob her of spice without even knowing how it is made? They destroy the land that makes them rich."

The lancer has been taking spice. Miryana realizes that his green eyes must be contacts, and that underneath are eyes like her own. He anticipates their blows and strikes, but he wants to take his time and enjoy the kill. He gives them no respite, and Miryana hears heavy boots in the hallway. House Harkonnen is coming. Miryana feels a bright trace of pain across her chest, and she falls to her knees, hearing her husband cry out in fury. The two men exchange a volley of blows, and Emmeric has the blade of his crystknife to the man's throat. The man laughs, and Miryana sees the trick he will use, the dagger behind his back. But Emmeric does something unexpected, and the glass window shatters as the knife goes through it. And then they are both falling through the city, towards the street below.

Gravity reverses, and before she passes out, Miryana sees the hatch of one of their own aircraft opening to receive them.

Days later, Miryana is sitting in the hangar with her back to the hot metal walls, suffering the cramps and agony of spice withdrawal in silence. For the first time, Emmeric sees the natural color of her eyes, as they have always been, behind the eyes of Ibad. They are close to true black, and they dull her strangeness. She looks young and curious and wild, like a rabbit or a foxkit. A creature of cleverness and speed. Then he realizes that the Fremen of Miryana's own sietch have never seen her dark eyes, and he feels strange, ashamed and bashful, as if standing unexpectedly before an unknown woman's nakedness.

He kneels in front of her in his silver armor. He cannot see her pupil, drowned in this dim light and those dark irises. "Close your eyes," he says, and she meets his gaze steadily, expressionless, and he feels foolish. Did he think that this Fremen girl would close her eyes and let herself be kissed? She does not cry out even in sleep, even as she sweats out the spice which has been in her blood since she was born, and he thinks for a brief moment that his only folly has been to live for anything but her.

They are orbiting Charon, a distant moon, near Emmeric's home planet. He paces the small ship restlessly, and sometimes he trains the ship telescope on Earth. He feels like a coward and a fool, fleeing like this across the universe, but he knows that turning back would be suicide. He thinks of his silk and spice empire, and of the power vacuum that will be created if they remain absent for much longer. Miryana's dark eyes follow him, and he feels ashamed. When the last of the spice has left her system, they descend on the blue planet, and it is spring where they land. He explains that Earth is the ancestral home of man, and he explains to her how the water cycle works. He shows her the ocean, and the dam inside her breaks and she laughs and wades into the surf, turning to look at him with wonder in her eyes. Miryana sees his restlessness, and she thinks that he is ambitious, like all his people. That ambition is to them what honor is to Fremen. But was that not something that drew her to him in the first place? Was that not something about him that she loved?

"You want to plant your own flag," she says one night. Her hair is wet and uncovered, and they have lit a fire on the empty beach. They have not gone into the cities, they have not gone to see Emmeric's father. "You want to plant your own flag on Arrakis."

He shakes his head. "I want what you want. What you have always wanted. For Arrakis to be free. I was a fool, and I could not clearly see the path I was to take. I do not want simply to glorify the name of my house, or to rule the underbelly of Khanjar. I want Arrakis to be free, and for the sietches to own the value of what they produce. I want to use the Silkspider sietches for a better purpose than to lining the pockets of a few men, protecting the spice and carving away at the monopoly of the great houses."

Miryana's heart is light as they leave the beach and the lighthouse and the rough, white sand, and she sees the planet fade into a bright blue star. "Are you sure he asks?" as they both look at the peaceful, blue planet on the ship's monitor. He would stay for her, and for the rest of his life he would pace the floor of their home and wonder if he could not have been a great man, had he tried harder. She puts her small, dark hand over his own.

"The spice must flow," she says, smiling wryly.

The accelerating forces grip her and she wants to laugh, as they plunge back into unknown dangers, heading home to the desert planet.