Siona followed him with an uncharacteristic docility. Doubt had done its work. She had read the stolen journals. She had listened to the admonitions of her father. Now, she did not know what to think.

“What is this test?” she had asked Moneo. “What will he do?”

“It is never the same.”

“How did he test you?”

“It will be different with you. I would only confuse you if I told you my experience.”

Leto had listened secretly while Moneo prepared his daughter, dressing her in an authentic Fremen stillsuit with a dark robe over it, fitting the boot-pumps correctly. Moneo had not forgotten.

Moneo had looked up from where he bent to adjust her boots. “The Worm will come. That is all I can tell you. You must find a way to live in the presence of the Worm.”

He had stood then, explaining about the stillsuit, how it recycled her body’s own waters. He made her pull the tube from a catchpocket and suck on it, then reseal the tube.

“You will be alone with him on the desert,” Moneo had said. “Shai-Hulud is never far away when you’re on the desert.”

“What if I refuse to go?” she asked.

“You will go… but you may not return.”

This conversation had occurred in the ground-level chamber of the Little Citadel while Leto waited in the aerie. He had come down when he knew Siona was ready, drifting down in the pre-dawn darkness on his cart’s suspensors. The cart had gone into the ground-level room after Moneo and Siona emerged. While Moneo marched across the flat ground to his ’thopter and left in a whispering of wings, Leto had required Siona to test the sealed portal of the ground-level chamber, then look upward at the tower’s impossible heights.

“The only way out is across the Sareer,” he said.

He led her away from the tower then, not even commanding her to follow, depending on her good sense, her curiosity and her doubts.

Leto’s swimming progress took him down the dune’s slip-face and on to an exposed section of the rocky basement complex, then up another sandy face at a shallow angle, creating a path for Siona to follow. Fremen had called such compression tracks “God’s gift to the weary”. He moved slowly, giving Siona plenty of time in which to recognize that this was his domain, his natural habitat.

He came out atop another dune and turned to watch her progress. She held to the track he had provided and stopped only when she reached the top. Her glance went once to his face then she turned a full circle to examine the horizon. He heard the sharp intake of her breath. Heat haze hid the spire’s top. The base might have been a distant outcropping.

“This is how it was,” he said.

There was something about the desert which spoke to the eternal soul of people who possessed Fremen blood, he knew. He had chosen this place for its desert impact—a dune slightly higher than the others.