The part of the police station that called Chavez and asked to get social services involved is apparently a completely different part from the part that deals with her once she shows up. They were not expecting her, are not pleased to see her, dawdle for a while verifying her identity, tell her to wait until the investigating officer is available, and begrudgingly get her a glass of water for the baking summer heat when she asks. 

"Are you Diel, from social services?" someone asks about ten minutes later. He's a balding man who has sweated right through his uniform and looks as annoyed to lose a Friday night like this as she feels. 

"Yes, that's me."

"Oh, good. Are you going to take the girl off our hands? It'd break my heart, really, to have her spend the weekend in juvie with all the little bastards."

That is not what she expected the police to want here. "I'm going to have a very hard time finding a placement for someone accused of stabbing a man."

"I don't think there'll be any charges. She's, you know, from one of those fundamentalist families that the Mormons kicked out for being too extreme, or something. She barely speaks English but she swore on the Bible that he started it and that she tried not to hurt him and then immediately carried him straight to get help. I believed her and so would a jury. Honestly, I'd want my daughter to do the same thing."

"Chavez said she hasn't seen her family in months? Did she get kicked out? Run away?"

A tired sigh. "She got a vision from God that he'd chosen her as a holy warrior and decided to leave to join a religious order, which her folks approved of, because you can't argue with God. Then she got lost in the desert and ended up here, and doesn't know how to get back. She was living with some of the illegal migrant workers, when someone took a pass at her and learned that she knows how to use the fucking sword she carries."

"She stabbed him with a sword?"

"As a holy warrior of God, she carries a sword. I told her that's against the law and she was very apologetic, said she thought it was completely legal if you were a holy warrior of God."

"Fifteen."

"Yep."

"Has she ever been to school."

"Tutored at home. Claims to know all of Scripture in the original language it was written in, but not in this one. Also told me quite proudly that she knows how to do addition and subtraction."

Diel hates the fundamentalists. It's not that she has anything against religious people. Many of the people who give their time and attention and love to desperate children do it as a deep expression of their Christian faith, and the world would be much poorer without them. But the loons who take several wives and live out in the middle of nowhere and don't educate their children and kick them out while they're still children, and children totally unequipped to survive in the real world - it's usually teenage boys, actually, who the fundamentalist cults kick out, because the leadership wants more wives and the boys are competition. It'd be unusual for them to kick out a girl instead of forcibly marrying her to someone her father's age. Of course, the girl could be lying, could have had her vision of being a holy warrior of God's in order to avoid exactly that. "I'd be happy to meet her."

The girl is in an interrogation room, but not in handcuffs. Her hair is meticulously if unevenly braided, and she's wearing hand-sewn cotton clothing. She is sitting patiently at the table, her head bowed in prayer, muttering to herself; she looks up when they come in.

"Claves?" the cop says. "This is Diel, from Social Services. She's here to figure out a place for you to sleep tonight."

"Hey," Diel says. She usually hates whatever people follow up "from Social Services" with as an explanation but that was honestly fine. "Claves? Is that your family name? What's your first name?"

"Iomedae, ma'am."

"That's a lovely name! I've never heard it before. Detective Carres said you only speak a little English, can you understand me all right? Should I speak more slowly?"

"I - only speak a little. Understand all right - more."

"Okay. And - do you have any family aside from your parents and siblings? Any - grandparents, aunts or uncles who live somewhere else -"

That was too many words and she does not know them. 

"Maybe we can draw together." She mostly carries coloring paper for younger kids but you work with what you have.  She pulls it out, and some colored pencils, and starts drawing.

"This is me. This is my mother, and my father. These are my mother and father's other children. My sister Anna, my brother Leonard."

"Oh. My sisters Acavna, Memacantie, Naovia. My not alive sisters Cahana and Eterel. My brothers Amaznen, Centauli, Kovoris, Resetoie. My not alive brothers Amaznen, Novicantie, Shovani."

Five fucking dead kids.  And she can't even ask "how did Social Services not catch this sooner because the answer is that they don't register the births they don't register the deaths and if you try to do anything about them it turns into Waco. She hates the fundamentalists. "I am so sorry for your loss. What did your dead brothers and sisters die of?"

She looks baffled by the question. "- they got sick."

And no one would even think of taking them to the hospital, no, of course not, let's just pray to God to handle everything. "Iomedae, do I guess right that you have not had any vaccinations?"

"I don't know that word."

"A doctor gives us a little bit of a sickness, and then our body learns the sickness and we cannot get sicker."

"I did not know that! That is very good!"

"Right. I am going to try to find a home for you to sleep in, and then we will see about getting you doctor's visits and vaccinations and - informing the government that you exist - you were born at home, not in a hospital?"

"I don't know that word."

"You were born at home, though?"

"....yes." She can't quite make sense of the question. Where else would one be born, on the road?

"So then the government does not know you are here, and we will have to get proof you were born in this country so that you can access services."

Too many unfamiliar words. "Government, ma'am?"

Usually fundie parents warn their kids constantly about the evils of the outside world. There's something weird up here. "The police, who talked to you today, are part of the government. They protect the country and send bad people to jail and help children like you."

"I am not a child, ma'am."

"Detective Carres said you were fifteen?"

She can count it out on her hands. She is this old.