Free Khe by Alexes Razevich Page A

fingers against the ground. The light would be completely gone soon. I had to go now.
    I gathered my small bundle of belongings and started down the hill, hunched into myself, hoping to be inconspicuous, but one of the doumanas spotted me. She nudged her companions and pointed my way, then leaned over and called to the vehicle’s pilot. The vehicle came to a stop. My neck burned. If they got close, they’d see the colors of my fear. Five or six doumanas jumped down from the machine and ran toward me, waving their tridents and shouting.
    I stood as still as a rock, my mind spinning with fear. Had word been sent out to look for me?
    The other two vehicles stopped. The doumanas on them jumped down and followed their sisters in the race.
    If word had been sent out, it was Khe the Grower they would be looking for, not some wandering babbler.
    I twisted my back into the bent posture I’d seen in the babbler we’d once driven from Lunge and let my face go slack, the way hers had been. Moving slowly, I pulled my cloak around my throat to hide the colors there.
    “Pretty day,” I said when the fastest doumana came close enough to hear. I hoped my voice didn’t betray the fear pounding inside me.
    The doumana’s face screwed up with confusion. Her emotion spots flared brownish green.
    I made my voice high, like a hatchling’s. “I’m very hungry. “ I held out my hand. There was always a chance that they’d give me something to eat.
    The doumana jabbed her trident toward my stomach. “Be gone,” she said. The sharpened tips stopped no more than a finger’s width away from my skin. “Go on. Get out.”
    I hobbled slowly, hoping she’d let me go and none of her sisters would come to help her.
    But her sisters kept running toward us until a crowd nearly surrounded me. They shook their tridents and their fists, yelling.
    “Get out, babbler.”
    “She stinks like a dung pile.”
    One of them picked up a stone and hurled it. Pain exploded through my thigh. I grunted, and forced my face to go slack again. Babblers, it was said, didn’t feel pain.
    “Move,” a doumana said, her lips pulled back over her teeth. “Filthy babbler.”
    Another doumana picked up a rock and held it high, squinting her eyes as she took aim and threw.
    I ducked and ran.
    I could hear them running after me. My heart pounded. A rock zinged past my head.
    “Come this way again and it’ll be more than rocks we aim at you,” a doumana yelled.
    These fields were well tended. There wouldn’t be too many rocks for them to find. What if they threw their tridents at me?
    “She’s heading for the wilderness,” a running doumana called.
    “Over the hills and into death,” another said.
    “Let her go,” a third said. “Let the wilderness have her. She’ll make a good meal for some wild beast, tomorrow or the next day.”
    Several of them laughed, but they stopped giving chase.
    I kept running. My chest tightened.
    The last commune.
    The end of the world.



Chapter Nine
    THE WILDERNESS
    The wilderness is a wasteland, useless for commune or kler. The fearsome beasts there live by preying one upon the other .
    --Narration from a vision stage presentation
    Hills grew up beyond the last commune, sloping gently at first, and then turning mean. Fear had kept my legs moving, my hands scrabbling when I fell to push myself back up. If the doumanas came after me in vehicles . . . I couldn’t outrun that.
    The land was rocky at the top of the hill. Rough-edged stones, some as large as my fist, littered the ground. Scrubby gray bushes sprouted here and there, keeping their distance from each other. In the valley beyond, large, red rocks, twisted into strange shapes, jutted from the ground. Panting, exhausted, I looked back across where I’d come. The commune’s fields stretched out, looking as brown and flat as a blanket in the failing light. I heard the soft whir of harvesters in the far distance, but nothing else. No one was chasing me. Beyond the