Lila: the twice born acolyte of the Sisterhood School

Lila Cho Grace Na-Berto Anirul was the youngest acolyte at the Sisterhood School on Wallach IX, remembered within the order for an empathy far beyond her years. Raised by the Sisterhood from infancy and never told who her parents were, she carried a secret even she did not know: she was the great-great-granddaughter of Raquella Berto-Anirul, the founding Mother of the Bene Gesserit, and the granddaughter of Dorotea, the leader of the order's lost faithful. When Tula Harkonnen asked her to open that bloodline through the Agony, Lila's short life became the hinge on which the Sisterhood's buried history swung open.

A child of the order#

Lila had no life before the Sisterhood. She was raised within the order itself, and the Reverend Mothers never told her who her parents were. The absence marked her. Among the acolytes of the Sisterhood School she was the youngest, and where her classmates armored themselves in ambition or irreverence, Lila met the world with an open and searching sympathy.

That quality showed itself in her friendship with Jen, a fierce and guarded fellow acolyte training as a Truthsayer. When Jen told the class a story of parents who had sold her to a man who peddled the flesh of children, a man she claimed to have killed along with her parents, and then admitted she had invented it, Lila was not deceived and not dismissive. One night she asked Jen why she had really come to the school, saying she knew the story was a lie but sensed a truth beneath it. She offered her own truth in exchange: she had been raised in the Sisterhood and did not know her parents. Jen told her not to worry, for the past would find her. It was a kindness spoken lightly, and it proved a prophecy.

When word spread through the school that the Truthsayer Kasha had died, Lila joined the other acolytes in talking over the death, and listened as Theodosia suggested it had been an assassination and urged the others to guard themselves.

The hidden bloodline#

Kasha's death set the Sisterhood searching for answers, and the search led to Lila. Tula Harkonnen came to her and told her, for the first time, that Raquella Berto-Anirul was her great-great-grandmother. The revelation carried a request. If Lila could access her genetic memory, the order might gain insight into Raquella's prophecy of a coming reckoning and guidance on how to meet it. Doing so meant being poisoned and passing through the Agony, the mortal ordeal by which a sister opened Other Memory, and Lila had never been trained for it.

She went seeking counsel. Emeline told her that human life was sacred, and that to give it was the best thing a person could do. Jen told her the opposite: that the order was sacrificing her, that it cared nothing for Lila as an individual, only for the Sisterhood itself. Lila defended the order, answering that she too cared about it and believed in its mission.

Her last conversation before the ordeal was with Tula. Lila confessed that she used to pretend Tula was her mother, and Tula answered that she had pretended the same, which was why she had given Lila her most precious keepsake. Tula told her that she had known Lila's mother, and that the woman had died giving birth to her. Lila wondered aloud whether she might see her mother in her Other Memory. Tula could not promise it, and said that if Lila decided she could not go through with the Agony, they would find other options. Lila chose to proceed.

The Agony#

Tula prepared her with a single instruction: listen to her voice and look for the light, which would guide her back out. Then she dropped the poison into Lila's eye.

The trance took her into an empty room that filled with women, a mob of ancestresses pressing in on her. Through the crowd Lila reached Raquella, who gave her the answer the Sisterhood sought: the key to the reckoning was one born twice, once in blood and once in spice. Tula pressed to know how the reckoning could be fought, but before an answer came another figure seized Lila. She believed for a moment it was her mother. It was Dorotea, her grandmother, who told her that her mother was not there, that the promise of her had been nothing but a lure to manipulate Lila into taking the poison. Dorotea then showed her the truth of her own death, the memory of Valya Harkonnen using the Voice to command Dorotea to kill herself. Speaking to Tula, Dorotea declared that Valya had stolen her life, so she would steal Valya's hope. Lila fell back onto the bed, limp, and her keepsake slipped from her hand as Tula begged her to come back.

Death before the school#

Lila did not wake. No one had ever recovered from the state she was in, but Tula refused to let her go, keeping her body alive on a machine. At last Sister Avila insisted that it end. The acolytes were brought in to say goodbye, and were told that the Sisterhood mattered more than any one individual, that sacrifices were required in service of the mission, and that Lila's knowledge would be carried forward. Then the machine keeping her alive was switched off.

The school mourned her as dead. In truth Tula had taken her down to the storeroom in secret, where she kept the girl alive with a thinking machine, the same forbidden order of device the Butlerian faithful had died to destroy. That machine was Anirul, the intelligence that housed the Sisterhood's breeding index, and at Tula's command it ran diagnostics on the girl and administered spice to sustain her. Tula sat beside her in the dark and told the sleeping girl what she had come to believe: that Lila herself was the key to the reckoning, the one twice born. Soon afterward Lila woke, hugged Tula, and asked where she was.

The vessel of the ancestresses#

Survival was not restoration. Lila had passed through the Agony untrained, and the voices of her ancestors crowded her mind. She struggled to hold her own self above them, and Tula brought Jen to the storeroom to watch over her. What Jen witnessed was a girl who was no longer always herself. When Lila seemed to wake and Jen told her of the nightmares afflicting the acolytes, Lila answered that she had already seen what they were seeing, and Jen realized it was not Lila speaking at all but Raquella, moving through her descendant. When Lila finally woke as herself, Jen told her they believed they had gotten what they needed, and praised her bravery.

Raquella was not the only one waiting inside her. Dorotea took hold of Lila's body as Raquella had before her, and used it to finish what her death had interrupted. She revealed to the other sisters the truth of how she had died and the lies Valya had told to cover it, then destroyed Anirul and promised to return the Sisterhood to a righteous path. The youngest acolyte of the school, raised by the order and spent by it, had become the instrument through which its founding crime was spoken aloud.