Jen: acolyte of the Sisterhood School

Sister Jen was a fierce, unpredictable acolyte in training at the Sisterhood School on Wallach IX, one who rarely revealed her emotional core. She studied to become a Truthsayer of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood under Valya Harkonnen and Tula Harkonnen, and though she was openly skeptical of the order's willingness to spend the lives of its own, she proved one of its most capable students. When nightmares afflicted every other acolyte in the school, Jen alone remained untouched, and that singular immunity drew her into the most closely guarded secrets of the Sisterhood.

Training at the Sisterhood School#

Jen studied at the Sisterhood School alongside the acolytes Lila, Emeline, and Theodosia, learning the disciplines of the Truthsayer under Valya Harkonnen and Tula Harkonnen. Her instincts were sharp. In one exercise the acolytes examined a preserved brain and were asked to judge what manner of man it had belonged to. Theodosia and Emeline were certain he had been a criminal or a sociopath, but Jen said he was a survivor, and she was correct. Tula used the moment to teach the class about the small bodily signs a Truthsayer learned to detect.

Her irreverence was just as sharp. During a later lesson, in which the acolytes faced a prisoner and had to determine whether he spoke truth or lies, Valya challenged Jen directly, asking why she was there at all if she believed people so easy to deceive. Jen answered with a story: her parents had sold her to a man who made his money peddling the flesh of children, and she had killed him, and then her parents. Then she admitted she had invented the whole of it. The tale was a lie, but not an empty one. One night Lila asked Jen why she had truly come to the school, saying she knew the story was false yet sensed some truth beneath it. Lila herself had been raised within the Sisterhood and never knew her parents. Jen told her not to worry, for the past would find her.

The death of Kasha and the sacrifice of Lila#

When word reached the school that the Truthsayer Kasha had died, the acolytes gathered to talk over her death. Jen wondered aloud how such a thing could have happened, and Theodosia voiced her suspicion that it had been an assassination, urging the others to keep their guards up.

The Sisterhood's answer was to reach into the past through Lila. Jen watched as Lila spoke with Emeline about martyrdom, and Emeline told the younger girl that human life was sacred, so that giving it was honorable. Jen then went to Lila herself with a harder truth as she saw it: the order was using Lila as a pawn, valuing the Sisterhood as a whole and not the girl as an individual. Lila answered that she valued the Sisterhood too and believed in its mission. Jen replied that it was hard to have a mission when you were in debt. In the end Jen stood with Emeline and watched as Lila was poisoned in the attempt to reach her Other Memory.

Lila did not wake. Sister Avila brought the acolytes in to see her and told them that sacrifices were required in service of the Sisterhood's mission, and that Lila was one of many such sacrifices. Jen was unmoved by the piety. She believed Tula had taken advantage of Lila's desperation to learn where she came from. The acolytes took turns saying their goodbyes.

The nightmares#

Not long after, a shared affliction crept through the school. Jen woke one night to the sound of every other sister moaning in her sleep, and found Emeline's bed empty. She reached the sleepwalking Emeline just before the girl drew a blade across her own throat. Every acolyte in the school was suffering the same nightmares, every acolyte except Jen, and she and Emeline reported what had happened to Tula. When Emeline began turning Truthsense upon Tula in her distress, it was Jen who snapped her out of it before the acolytes returned to their studies.

Tula sought the shape of the affliction. She gathered the acolytes and had all of them except Jen take spice, then draw what they had seen in their nightmares. The drawings began differently for each girl, then converged until all of them were drawing the same things. When Tula called for them to wake, they did not respond, breaking free of the trance only minutes later on their own. Emeline looked upon her drawing and declared that God was watching them and judging them, and that the reckoning was there. Afterward, Jen studied all of the drawings herself.

The terror in the school went unanswered by its teachers, and Jen's patience broke. During a lesson in which Sister Avila trained the acolytes to redistribute heat energy, Jen confronted her, demanding to know what protection any of it offered against the nightmares. Avila told her she was out of line, but Tula entered and acknowledged that they were dealing with a grave situation, then called Jen out of the room. Jen feared she was to be expelled. Instead Tula told her that, as the only acolyte free of the nightmares, she was the one best suited to help.

Keeper of the storeroom#

Tula led Jen down to the storeroom and showed her its secret: Lila, alive, screaming and in terrible distress. Together they calmed her, and Tula explained that she had found a way for Lila to survive her ordeal, though it would take time for the girl to learn to cope with the voices of the ancestors within her. Tula left Jen to watch over her.

When Lila woke, she told Jen that she had already seen what filled the acolytes' nightmares, and Jen realized the one speaking was not Lila at all. It was Raquella, speaking through her descendant. Jen assisted as Raquella examined samples of Kasha's brain and identified a virus that attacked the amygdala, the fear center. In the quiet that followed, Jen was left to watch Lila as she slept, and she put her question to Tula plainly: had Lila been sacrificed for the Sisterhood's gain? Tula answered that they all had to make sacrifices. Jen did not believe Tula had made any sacrifices at all. When Lila next woke as herself, she told Jen she had felt Raquella moving through her and asked whether they had gotten what they needed. Jen said it seemed they had, and praised her bravery.

Dorotea unbound#

Jen's vigil ended in betrayal. Lila woke fighting against her restraints and begged Jen to loosen them. Jen finally agreed, but as she leaned across to free the far side, Lila injected her with a sedative. It was not Lila who acted but the ancestress Dorotea, who had taken hold of the girl's body as Raquella had before her. Jen woke to find herself the one in restraints. After a few deep breaths she pulled her hands free, dislocating her own thumbs to do it, then went to find the sisters, telling them there was no time to explain and that Lila had to be contained.

Emeline answered only that Jen was as bad as Valya and Tula with her secrets. Jen explained that Tula had saved Lila's life, but that Lila was plagued by her ancestors and made unstable by them, and it was this that made Emeline realize the one they had been speaking to was not Lila but Dorotea. Dorotea told the assembled sisters that every Sister loyal to her was gone, for Valya had erased them. She led them to the site of her own death and declared that the Harkonnens had lied to them all about the history of the school, and that it was time they learned the truth. From there she took them to the storeroom, where she destroyed the thinking machine Anirul.