Free Khe by Alexes Razevich

and there I found food still on the bough, vine, or bush. I took what I could carry—stuffing it into the small harvesting bag I’d stolen. I set my mouth in a hard line and did not look back when I crossed the border of Lunge commune.

Chapter Eight
    OUTSIDE
    With the exception of occasional, mild fatigue, Khe’s health remains excellent. She shows no ill effects from the Resonance sac surgery or her newfound abilities .
    --Ninth communiqué from Simanca to the orindle, Pradat
    I lay on my belly on a weedy hilltop. I could smell the weeds’ green scent where my body had crushed the seed heads. In the field below, twenty or so doumanas worked at harvest. The failing sun threw long shadows across the land. The air was growing chill.
    For five days I’d walked south, moving away from the land that had nurtured me, and from the commune-sisters I loved. For five days the thrill of independence had fueled me, keeping legs unused to travel moving forward, a mind unused to solitude from falling into fear and loneliness.
    Yesterday I’d run out of supplies. I’d thought I’d find food on the way, but each commune I’d crossed had been stripped of everything edible. It was the tenth-year competition, of course. Not a leaf, seed, stem, or root would be left that could be harvested and put on the scale to be weighed. My stomach twisted and groaned. My thoughts crawled slowly and always turned to food no matter how hard I tried to concentrate. I had to find something to eat.
    On the flat fields below the hillside, four doumanas piloted large harvesting machines, great silvery gray crafts with high smooth sides and a whirling metal string on the bottom. Doumanas on foot followed the machine—their backs bent in what I knew quickly became a painful position—gleaning the usable crops the harvesting machine missed.
    Based on the size of the three neat, rectangular fields spreading out below the rise, I figured that this commune was larger than Lunge. As far as I knew, all communes were built on the same model. I couldn’t see any dwellings from my perch—only a few machinery sheds and outbuildings. If, like Lunge, the main structures lay at the heart of the commune, this was probably a community of three hundred or more.
    With a communiteria full of hot food and soothing drinks. And sleeping quarters with fine cots and warm blankets.
    Several doumanas stood on the beds of each vehicle, metal tridents in hand, pushing straw mulch onto the harvested ground. The faint strains of their work song rode on the cool breeze.
    We’d sung the same song at Lunge. The doumanas in every commune probably sang it. Tav had said that even the males sang the same songs, spoke the same language, and worshiped the same creator we did. Thedra said that was because our species didn’t have enough imagination to make up anything different. When I was young, I sometimes feared the creator would strike Thedra down for the blasphemous things she said, and sometimes I wished it would, but nothing ever happened. And what did that mean?
    I sighed and watched the workers. I couldn’t let them see me. No sane doumana traveled alone except during Resonance, and even then none traveled on foot. If they caught me, they’d want to know my community. They’d send me back. What would Simanca do then? Order me shunned, and to the fields. Kill me in a season instead of a year.
    My neck burned. My spots lit blue-red. What did I, who’d lived all my life as part of an entwined community, know of survival alone? I rubbed my neck for comfort. I didn’t need self-pity. I needed to learn how to survive.
    A second group of workers arrived, hauling tents and torches in a large, open-back vehicle, and made their way to the field nearest me. I swore under my breath. This crew would harvest into the night.
    I didn’t have a choice. I was going to have to cross those fields. If I could get past the doumanas, I could grab some of the crops off the vine to eat. I drummed my