"No, but priests get - I don't know the English word - from God. He asked God for one that see a person afterlife, and mine bright like holy warrior and not too dim to see like fifteen year old girl who is not chosen by God."

"Hmm." 

Claudette looks thoughtfully at her, then tilts her head to the side a little. "That - definitely sounds like a magic power. How sure are you that you would definitely know, if they were just pretending to have it? Because, uh, I think - or I would have said before now, at least - that we can split the atom and send rockets to the moon and I think we know enough about physics to be pretty sure that magic isn't a thing. Even people who believe in God mostly don't think magic is a thing." 

"The priest could be pretending to see my afterlife but the priest could not be pretending to do all the other priest things like make water and heal people, and I think God would leave the priest if he pretended to have more powers than he had and then he wouldn't have any powers. On Harry Potter they had magic powers?"

"Yeahhhhhhh, Harry Potter isn't real, it's fiction. ...A made-up story. But if you've seen a priest make water from thin air then, yeah, I don't have an explanation for that."

Claudette scowls at Emily. "When you said foster kids are weird sometimes, you could've warned me that meant spooky shit." 

"This is literally the first time I've met a foster kid claiming they had magic powers from God, okay? I am just as weirded out as you are!"

She glares at the phone, then shoves it back in her pocket and stands up, heading for the closet-study.

"- Iomedae, come on, we're going to do a Google Earth tour and you can show me the island God pulled out of the sea. Google Earth has, like, satellite imagery, we can go in up close and see if the rock that makes you a god is there." 

(It's - wow, somehow it's only 5:10 pm, that felt like way longer than forty minutes. Good. It would be such a mess if Evelyn picked now to come home. Emily is - honestly Emily has completely lost the plot and has no idea what's going on, anymore - but the last thing she wants is for Evelyn to be compelled to tell Iomedae's social worker that Iomedae believes in magic.) 

Evelyn's desktop browser is definitely slower than Emily's newer laptop, but it loads eventually. Here's a picture of the planet from space! 

"It's a real picture," she tells Iomedae. "Or, well, a lot of real pictures, they take them from satellites - little machines that are way high up in the sky, in orbit around the earth - and they sort of stitch them together into an animation." 

"That is very cool."

"I do not actually know what the 'Starstone' look like. The holy books say you have to fly to get to it? But not what it would look like from the sky."

Shrug. "I can't help you there, but I assume it wouldn't look like a normal city or a field or something. Here - you hit this key to turn around the planet -" 

This is probably a stupid exercise. Emily is still somehow finding herself half-expecting that they're going to discover a supermagical rock on Google Fucking Earth. Iomedae just seems so sure of it, like it's not even an interesting claim or the sort of thing you need to proselytize about, like it's - something that everyone knows - 

Well, if it turns out there's a magic space rock that turns you into a god, maybe they can all turn into gods and fight the Christian God, who Claudette disapproves of on principle. 

GOOGLE EARTH IS SO COOL

She starts looking across the whole of the island that is in the right place to be Absalom. It takes...a while. She doesn't know what she's looking for, really.

It's a lot of land area to cover; the island is over a hundred miles long. 

From above, it...mostly looks like it could be the same as what little she's seen of America and American cities? There are green uninhabited areas that are probably forested, and square-patchwork areas that look like fields, and dry reddish-beige deserty areas, and roads, lots of roads - labeled, helpfully, though it seems to be in a language other than English that she also doesn't know - and cities, little blocky houses arranged on curving streets like Evelyn's neighborhood, or denser buildings that cast shadows in some of the images. If she zooms in close enough, there are cars on the roads. 

"I am very confused."

Watching Iomedae scroll around endlessly on Google maps is boring. Emily has been checking messages on her phone. 

"- Yeah. Well, join the club." 

Claudette takes a step in. "What are you confused about?" 

"Taldor no trade America. America have cars, Taldor no have cars, this no confusing. Taldor do trade Absalom. If Absalom have cars I think Taldor have cars. Maybe no have cars where I live, the ground not flat for them where I live. But cars a thing people say about big places I think? And if this Absalom, and Absalom trade with America, then America know there gods, because in Absalom no can miss it. And if someone lie and say Absalom have 'Starstone', write a pretend holy book about it, no can tell any important people, they will go there and see it. 

Maybe Absalom a different island. I not seeing a good map before I come to America. Or maybe I was turn to stone and a thousand years happen and the gods are dead and no one remember them? That happen to people sometimes."

"That happen both of us? I think no."

Poor kid. Poor both of them. Emily feels like her brain is being thrown into an interdimensional blender and she doesn't understand how anything works anymore -

- which is, on reflection, not actually how she would expect to feel about a conversation with a schizophrenic person? She's talked to schizophrenic people, before. (She made some life choices, when she was thirteen, and some of them involved sleeping rough, and the homeless alcoholic population of Reno, Nevada was surprisingly nice to a dumbass thirteen-year-old.) 

She's still trying to think of something to say. 

"I think that is not something that happens to people sometimes, actually. Also we know the history of a thousand years ago pretty well, unless it was a place without writing, and - it sounds like 'Absalom' would've had writing?" 

"It's really confusing!" Emily agrees, unhappily. "Man. There's two of you. Do you even come from the same town?"

She has a feeling that not. This would be much less confusing if there were only one kid with crazy beliefs, or two kids who were siblings. This...is weirder.

"No. I is glad Alfirin or I would think I am sick. 

I thinked at first Taldor is secret, and I should not say of it. Then I see the map and I ask if that where God from and Evelyn say yes and I think not secret, just far. Now I back thinking Taldor is secret."

Emily squints at Google Maps. ...Leans in and toggles the key to zoom out. 

"...Yeah, okay, that's understandable but I think she probably thought you were pointing at, like, Israel. Which is where Jesus was from, and it's actually super close to - uh, Cyprus, it looks like? is what this island is called - so probably Evelyn just wasn't sure where exactly you'd pointed. But it's - not that far, really? This is the 21st century, you could get a plane ticket and be there in less than 24 hours. That's not true for everywhere on the entire planet but it's - more or less true for anywhere where people can read? So. Yeah. I feel like I'm crazy, right now, but - like, in some ways it'd be less confusing if you were literally from a different world." 

"I think that's still actually weirder and less likely than all of us being crazy." Grin. "It would be pretty cool, though." 

"Maybe if our homes are secret we should stop talking about them." she says in Taldane.