A/N: I'm a day late for the new chapter, sorry! But it's a long one. With plenty of Paul for those who missed him in the last chapter. ;) (And a cliffhanger at the end that I'm pretty proud of, hehe) As always, let me know what you think, and I'll be back in a few days with the next one!

Chani sat in a corner of the small stilltent they had settled into, taking inventory of the supplies she had aligned before her. Cans of food, literjons of drinking water, gauze and clean bandages, jars and vials of medicine. The three remaining auto-injectors in their plastic casing. Her weapons, all perfectly cleaned, loaded and ready to use. Her thumper, Maker hooks, paracompass and sand compactor, and Paul's fremkit, containing a second set of them. Everything one needed to survive in the deep desert for an extended period of time.

The desert was her home, just as much as Sietch Tabr was. She knew it, and how to navigate it. She had always felt comfortable there.

But not like this. Not under these circumstances. The problem, she thought, wasn't the desert. It was the complete uncertainty of the situation, all the variables she had no control over, all the things that could go wrong.

And, above all, her utter powerlessness to do anything if they did.

She glanced at Paul, who was leaning with his back against his fremkit in a half-sitting position, watching her, his hoarse breathing the only thing that broke the silence. Seeing him sit up, awake and alert, gave Chani some sense of reassurance. Now more than ever, she needed the company – and surely it meant he was getting better, too. He still looked terrible, but certainly better than he had the past two days, which he'd spent mostly half-delirious with fever. Whenever he'd been lucid enough, Irlo had tried to give him something to eat, but he'd been too sick to keep anything down.

Now may be a good time to try again, Chani pondered. Paul needed food and water to regain his strength, and she needed to eat, too. She had too much on her mind to really feel hungry, but her growling stomach acted as a good reminder. Outside, the night had probably fallen by now, even though the layer of sand covering their tent made it impossible to distinguish daylight from darkness. The only light was that of the glowtubes hanging from the tent poles over their heads, dimmed to a minimum to save the batteries. Chani would have to recharge them at some point, and sooner or later, set up a new windtrap to capture some more moisture. The recycled water from their tiny tent, added to their reserves, was enough to sustain them for now, but she needed to be prepared. Just in case.

An hour earlier, she had left the stilltent to survey the surroundings, making sure once again the tent was entirely camouflaged in the sand and that no Harkonnen ship, 'thopter or armed troops were in sight. But everything had looked calm – neither Harkonnen nor Fremen activity disturbed the stillness of the vast plains around them. The world was shrouded in an eerie, unsettling silence.

Chani opened a can of food, one that could be eaten cold. Using the portable stove meant going back outside, and in the event that any Harkonnens were still in the area after all, she didn't want to risk being seen. She poured the contents of the can into two tin bowls, a whiff of Spice and saguaro filling her nostrils.

She handed one of the bowls to Paul, who eyed the food warily.

"Thanks", he said.

"If that doesn't make you hungry, I don't know what will", Chani teased in a light tone, cuddling up next to him. It earned her a tired chuckle. Paul pushed himself up into a straighter position and took a spoonful of food. Tasting it herself, Chani was pleased to note that even uncooked and straight from the can, it wasn't too bad. She reached for the tube at the neck of her stillsuit and sipped some water. She had put her suit on after the Fedaykin's departure, and wasn't planning to remove it for the time being. The suit made her feel safer, more ready – ready for what, she wasn't sure. Just in case.

They ate in silence, Chani quickly finishing her dinner while Paul, to her satisfaction, forced himself to eat most of his. After a while, she put her empty bowl down and rested her head on his shoulder, overcome by a sudden wave of fatigue. She couldn't remember the last peaceful night's sleep she'd had. It was too long ago, that much was certain.

She had only just shut her eyes when she felt Paul suddenly jerk forward. She lifted her head and looked at him in confusion. If possible, his face had turned even paler than it already was – in the dim light, his skin looked an unhealthy shade of green. His stomach didn't seem to be handling the food as well as she'd hoped. He took a series of shallow, controlled breaths, eyes closed – then abruptly turned away from Chani and vomited on the ground. Chani scrambled to her knees and laid a hand on his back, brushing his hair out of his face with the other. Doubled over, he waited for the nausea to pass, an arm wrapped around his chest.

"Ow, shit. I'm sorry", he mumbled. He wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand. Chani raised an incredulous eyebrow.

"Are you apologising for being sick?"

Paul responded with a groan. Chani grabbed him carefully by the shoulders and pulled him into a hug. He slumped into her, burying his face in the fabric of her robe. She felt him shivering in her arms.

"You okay?" she asked.

He nodded groggily. "Yeah".

"You're lying."

"Yeah."

She rolled her eyes, a faint smile on her lips. They remained sitting there for a long moment, both unwilling to break up their embrace. Eventually, Chani eased down onto her sleeping bag, Paul following her movement until they were lying down side by side. His breathing gradually evened out as he fell asleep, exhaustion winning over. Chani reached out to her equipment, grabbed her crysknife and slid it under the small pillow sewn into her sleeping bag. Just in case.

Then she allowed herself to drift off to sleep, too.

• • •

Paul's eyes followed the small drops of moisture rippling through the filtration tubes on the stilltent's ceiling above him. It reminded him of observing raindrops coursing down a windowpane: it had a calming, almost hypnotising quality to it. Watching the drops move along the mesh canvas, he came as close as he could to that floating, trance-like awareness his mother had taught him, permitting him to focus beyond the here-and-now and the bodily sensations associated with it. It never lasted for very long, though, before his body pulled him out of this state, brutally bringing his awareness back to the thing he was trying to escape in the first place: pain.

That nagging, ever-present, all-encompassing pain.

He had become a lot more conscious of it during the past two days, now that he'd managed to fight off the fever and he was lucid again. The fever had dropped overnight, forty-eight hours before. He knew it was a good sign, and had seen relief wash over Chani as she noticed it, but he couldn't help but feel two ways about it. On the bright side, his brain no longer conjured up the confusing nightmares that had plagued him in his half-delirious state, sometimes punctuated by vivid hallucinations. The downside was that the fever, at least, had allowed him to spend most of his time unconscious; now it had broken, the pain had crept back into the foreground, and mostly kept him from getting any sleep at all.

It was tenacious, offering no respite. Irlo's medicine took the edge off for a couple of hours, but never to a point where he could push the pain in the back of his mind and just ignore it for a while. Lying still hurt. Breathing hurt. Coughing felt like someone ripped his ribcage open, still accompanied by specks of blood. Each movement sent a new wave of agony through his chest and thigh. But moving was important. Moving meant his injured nerves and muscles still functioned the way they were supposed to. He hadn't been too sure of it at first, when his right leg stubbornly refused to do his bidding, but a bit of patience and endurance had proven him that the bullet hadn't caused any irreparable damage. He could move the leg – it just hurt like hell.

His mother's Bene Gesserit training, he knew, had given him all the necessary tools to manage pain better than most – if anything, Reverend Mother Mohiam's Gom Jabbar test had taught him as much. However, the perfect mind-body coordination required for that particular kind of training proved to be nearly impossible at the moment – his mind may be clear enough to do its part, but his body simply wasn't cooperating. It was still too weak from blood loss and infection to respond adequately to the brain's commands.

Paul glanced over at the last injector-pen and its valuable dose of pain medication, lying on the ground beside him. Chani had successfully rationed the few remaining injectors over the past few days, which he was now grateful for – even though it had taken all of his restraint not to use them up, all at once, consequences be damned. The idea of the pain being gone, even for a short while, had been terribly tempting.

He wondered vaguely what sort of remedies Dr. Yueh, the Atreides family's former Suk physician, would have had at his disposal – how he would have treated the injury had it happened back on Caladan. It wouldn't have happened on Caladan, a little voice in his head reminded him. The use of bullet-firing guns, along with all other fast-moving projectile weapons, had long been rendered obsolete by the use of protective shields. Here on Arrakis, the Harkonnens had been clever enough to adapt their arsenal to shield-less fighting, resorting to the use of ancient, but no less deadly, artillery.

He shifted his attention back to the tent's walls, and to the piece of paper that was pinned to one of them. Nine little vertical lines were drawn on it – Chani's makeshift calendar to keep track of time, isolated from the world in their small stilltent. Nine days had passed since the Fremen's raid on the Harvester and the death of their teammates. Nine days he'd spent here, in the middle of nowhere, unable to leave the perimeter of that tent. It began to feel more and more like a prison, with its low ceiling, stale air and dim lighting in which day couldn't be distinguished from night.

Nine days since the attack, and almost three days since Stilgar's surviving Fedaykin had left the camp to lure the Harkonnen forces away. Neither himself nor Chani knew what conclusions to draw from the Fremen's prolonged absence. Paul tried to convince himself everything was running smoothly out there in the deep desert. He trusted Stilgar's ability to lead his fighters safely, wherever they were.

He forced himself not to consider the alternative – that something had gone very, very wrong, and that the Fedaykin may, in fact, not be returning at all. He knew the thought had crossed Chani's mind more than once, too, but they had reached an implicit agreement not to talk about it, instead hoping for the best. What was that old Bene Gesserit saying? Hope clouds observation, he quoted to himself. Well, damn that. Right now, they needed hope. Hope was what kept them going.

Chani had left the stilltent about half an hour earlier to check the area, as she had done every six hours since the Fremen had gone. Equipped with her sand compactor, binoculars and maula pistol, she'd climbed out of the tent, allowing Paul to get a brief glimpse of the morning sun before the sphincter door was closed again. After scanning their surroundings and enjoying a bit of fresh air, she'd probably return with the same grim expression as the times before: no Fedaykin on the horizon, no one signalling them from a distance. They were alone.

Since he had no one to talk to, he may as well do something productive, Paul thought, hoisting himself up into a sitting position with a grunt. The dressings on his leg needed changing, and now that he could, he intended to do it on his own. He removed the linen bandages wrapped around his thigh and gingerly peeled off the gauze underneath it. The wound on the front side of his leg was less than two centimetres long, a small, stitched-up scar where the bullet had entered the body. He took as deep a breath as his lungs would allow and bent his knee to peek at the back of his thigh, biting back a cry of pain as every fibre in his body screamed in protest. By comparison, the wound looked a lot messier. In seven months of fighting gun-wielding Harkonnens, he'd seen enough such injuries to know that bullets didn't exit the body nearly as cleanly as they entered it. Several rows of sutures held together the torn flesh, leaving a pattern of jagged scars larger than the palm of his hand. Now that the infection had cleared, the surrounding skin wasn't hot to the touch anymore, and the wounds themselves looked a lot better. Still, Paul grabbed the jar containing Irlo's ointment and applied some on them – whatever the medicine's exact properties were, it seemed to have been efficient so far.

He tied a clean bandage around his leg, then forced himself to flex, stretch and lift it a few times, slowly getting his muscles back to work and testing his body's limits. He stopped the exercise when he felt himself shaking from the exertion, sweat beading on his forehead. He relaxed the tension in his body, slowed his breathing and took a long sip of water from one of the tent's catchpockets. After a moment of hesitation, he took the last auto-injector out of its casing and sank the needle into his left thigh to administer the painkiller. There was no point in keeping it any longer – he might as well use it when he needed it.

The faint hissing sound of a sand compactor came from behind the door, telling him Chani was on her way back to the stilltent. Her silhouette soon appeared behind the half-translucent fabric of the door. She zipped it open and peered inside the tent. Judging by the weary look in her eyes, Paul guessed she had nothing new to report.

"Hi", Chani greeted with a smile. She slipped through the narrow entrance, removed her mask and headgear. Paul squinted at the sudden brightness of the sun coming in through the opening, nearly blinding after hours spent in the dim light of a low-energy glowtube. The sun stood high in the sky, indicating it was around noon. Despite the scorching temperatures of Arrakeen midday, the outside air felt invigorating.

"Why don't we leave that open for a moment?", he suggested, pointing at the entrance. "Feels good to get some fresh air in here."

"I don't know about fresh, but sure." Chani crawled up to Paul and kissed him, a gloved hand on his cheek. She smelled of sand and Spice, her skin warm against his. "It's not like there's anyone around that may see us, anyway." He heard the frustration in her voice. She flicked a glance at the empty injector-pen on the ground.

"You took it?" she asked. "Good. Perhaps we'll both be able to get some quality sleep."

Paul frowned. "Why wouldn't you be able to sleep?"

"Because I can't sleep when the man sharing my bed tosses and turns all night", she answered affectionately. There wasn't an ounce of accusation in her voice, but Paul couldn't help but feel somewhat guilty nonetheless. He shook his head.

"Chani, you need to rest. Why didn't you do anything?"

"Like what? Hit you over the head, knock you out cold for a couple of hours?"

He chuckled. Truth be told, it almost sounded tempting.

"That's an idea", he said. "Or you could just move your bed over there…" – he gestured toward the back of the tent – "…give yourself a bit of space."

She took his chin in her hand and turned his face toward her, her all-blue eyes meeting his.

"Not an option, Paul Atreides", she grinned. "I need you right next to me."

"I do, too. But you can't –"

He was interrupted by a sudden gust of wind blowing into the tent, making the open door flap against the canvas wall. The wind carried a whirl of Spice-saturated sand into the confined space.

He caught a strong whiff of it, and then it was all around him, orange particles dancing in the sun like tiny glittering snowflakes.

The heady scent of cinnamon.

A high concentration of pure, unrefined melange making his breath catch, his heartbeat accelerate, his head spin –

– and his mind expand.

The Spice-induced vision overrode his reality with terrifying clarity.

The rocky formation where their camp had been, and the small bump in the sand where their stilltent was hidden, frosted in pale moonlight. The black shapes of Harkonnen soldiers, armed with swords and stunners and lasguns, slowly closing in on the tent. The beeping sound of a thermal detector, getting quicker and quicker as they approached. A crackle of static, then words exchanged in Harkonnen battle language over the radio. The sound of their harsh breathing through the filters of their ventilated suits.

A gloved finger pointing right at the concealed entrance of the tent. Another finger on a lasgun's trigger, ready to fire. A lifted sword. One, two steps closer.

"Usul. Usul!"

Chani's voice snapped him out of the vision, pulling him back to the present. Her eyes were fixed on his, filled with worry and confusion.

"What is it?" she asked. "What just happened?"

Paul blinked, stared at her in silence, his mind processing what he had just seen. His mouth was dry, his heart pounding. They're coming.

When he spoke, his voice came out even, matter-of-factly, as if the shock of the revelation had already given way to cold, analytical resignation.

"Chani", he said, "I think we need to get out of here."

To be continued in...
Chapter 8: On the run