“You are beginning to have some concept of how far my family extends,” he said.

She turned, her mouth a prim line, but did not meet his gaze. He could see her accepting it, though, the realization which few humans could share as she had shared it: his singular multitude made all of humankind his family.

“You could have saved my friends in the forest,” she accused.

“You, too, could have saved them.”

She clenched her fists and pressed them against her temples while she glared at him. “But you know everything!”

“Siona!”

“Did I have to learn it that way?” she whispered.

He remained silent, forcing her to answer the question for herself. She had to be made to recognize that his primary consciousness worked in a Fremen way and that, like the terrible machines of that apocalyptic vision, the predator could follow any creature who left tracks.

“The Golden Path,” she whispered. “I can feel it.” Then, glaring at him. “It’s so cruel!”

“Survival has always been cruel.”

“They couldn’t hide,” she whispered. Then loud: “What have you done to me?”

“You tried to be a Fremen rebel,” he said. “Fremen had an almost incredible ability to read signs on the desert. They could even read the faint tracery of windblown tracks in sand.”

He saw the beginnings of remorse in her, memories of her dead companions floating in her awareness. He spoke quickly, knowing that guilt would follow quickly and then anger against him. “Would you have believed me if I had merely brought you in and told you?”

Remorse threatened to overwhelm her. She opened her mouth behind the mask and gasped with it.

“You have not yet survived the desert,” he told her.

Slowly, her trembling subsided. The Fremen instincts he had set to work in her did their usual tempering.

“I will survive,” she said. She met his gaze. “You read us by our emotions, don’t you?”

“The igniters of thought,” he said. “I can recognize the slightest behavioural nuance for its emotional origins.”

He saw her accept her own nakedness the way Moneo had accepted it, with fear and hate. It was of little matter. He probed the time ahead of them. Yes, she would survive his desert because her tracks were in the sand beside him… but he saw no sign of her flesh in those tracks. Just beyond her tracks, though, he saw a sudden opening where things had been concealed. Anteac’s death shout echoed though his prescient awareness… and the swarming of Fish Speakers attacking!

Malky is coming, he thought. We will meet again, Malky and I.

Leto opened his outer eyes and saw Siona still there glaring at him.

“I still hate you!” she said.

“You hate the predator’s necessary cruelty.”

She spoke with venomous elation: “But I saw another thing! You can’t follow my tracks!”

“Which is why you must breed and preserve this.”

Even as he spoke, it began to rain. The sudden cloud darkness and the downpour came upon them simultaneously. In spite of the fact that he had sensed weather control’s oscillations, Leto was shocked by the onslaught. He knew it rained sometimes in the Sareer, a rain quickly dispersed as the water ran off and vanished. The few pools would evaporate as the sun returned. Most times, the downpour never touched the ground; it was ghost rain, vaporized when it hit the superheated air layer just above the desert’s surface, then dispersing on the wind. But this rainfall drenched him.