"Okay. And the police, you tell the police. I said to them I think I never broke any law but this was not true."

Oh noooooooooooooooo this poor kid. Evelyn really badly wants to give her a hug right now. "Your social worker will know what we should tell the police. No one is going to be angry with you for not knowing that before." 

"It's not - angry - holy warriors must obey laws, or countries will say, no holy warriors, they too much trouble. I break laws I hurt all holy warriors everywhere!!! If I do it on purpose God says Iomedae no holy warrior but even doing it not on purpose hurts everyone!"

There's something so...thoughtful, insightful...about that, especially coming from the mouth of a child who has never been to (actual) school and only started learning English six months ago. Evelyn had to take an ethics class once, in first-year college, and the names of all the different philosophers are a blur in her memory at this point but it's definitely the kind of reasoning that you might expect to see in an ethics textbook. 

"...I think that's right. I think the police you talked to don't - know what the rules are for holy warriors - and probably haven't met anyone before who said they were one. If it's very important to you, I can tell your social worker to write to the police and explain, but - it's not like you lied to them, you didn't know. And I'm sure that God understands."

Doooooes she have another opening here to bang on her favorite hobby-horse again? Yeah, okay, but after this she really should leave it alone for a bit, Iomedae must be sick of her. "- And this is why it's important to go to school, before you try to do any big projects that are hard. There are going to be a lot of laws in America that you don't know about yet." 

"I will go! If it is free. I maybe no have money."

"School is free!" School supplies aren't free but hopefully there won't be a fight over Iomedae wanting to pay Evelyn back for a $0.50 school notebook. "Well, up through high school. If you want to go to college that costs money - you are smart enough for college, and it would give you more opportunities and ways to do work that helps people - but that's something you can decide later. I think by the time you're eighteen we can make sure you have the right papers to work a job and get paid." 

"Should I keep my money until police decide if I have it, or should you?"

On the one hand, this is money Iomedae could absolutely use to run away to Africa and die of malaria because she thinks God can make her immune to disease presumably you can't actually get to Africa without, like, a passport, but consider that a stand-in for whatever Iomedae might decide to run off and do. Evelyn is generally pretty antsy about teenage foster children in the at-risk-of-absconding demographic having that much money on them. And here Iomedae is, straight up offering to give it to Evelyn for self-keeping, avoiding any need for an argument about it. 

On the other hand...

"You can keep it. I trust you."

She means it because being trusted is something that kids need, especially kids at Iomedae's age, but she also means it because Iomedae is possibly the most trustworthy, scrupulously honest child Evelyn has ever met. And she thinks God will punish her if she doesn't give the money back. It seems really unlikely she's going to use it to run away. 

It did not even occur to Iomedae she might not be trusted! She just thought it might not be appropriate for her to retain possession of the money given that it might have been illegally acquired! She will put it all right back in her shirt, then.

(Iomedae bathes every week before Sunday Mass. It is a Friday so she is fairly grubby, though they cleaned her somewhat in the hospital while cleaning off all the blood.)

Yeah she needs a bath. (She's...probably not familiar with showers yet? Given how the indoor running water amazed her.) Evelyn usually prefers not to push children to bathe on their first night with her when they're still probably anxious and don't feel at home, but she's planning to at least insist that Iomedae wash her hands and face - properly, the hospital did not get all the dried blood out from under her nails - and change into clean pajamas. She doesn't smell as bad as Jeremy used to when he would come home from a days-long camping trip - and Evelyn is pretty inured to bad smells, she's taken in a lot of severely neglected children. Iomedae's clothes at least look like they were washed in the last month. 

"I won't know more about it until tomorrow, the social services office will be closed now. Do you have any other questions for right now? If not maybe you could wash up and get ready for bed before you eat, so you can go to bed right after." 

"No other questions, ma'am -

- oh, I have one. Do I need to give you warning, if I decide to go some other place? A week? Two weeks?"

Oh dear. Iomedae is not going to like this. 

"...If you aren't happy here, you need to talk to your social worker about it, and we can figure something out. So that would need some notice, yeah, probably a week would be enough to find you a different foster home."

Evelyn has a sneaking feeling that that's not at all what Iomedae means.

"Um. If you leave without telling me, or if I don't know that where you're going is safe, then - because in America you aren't considered an adult yet who can safely live on your own - the law says that I'm responsible for keeping you safe, and so I would have to report you missing to the police. I know you can look after yourself pretty well, and have been, but many girls your age would have been in a lot of danger, in the situation you were in before. You could have been badly hurt, if you hadn't, um. Had a sword." 

"If I leave I will first get a new weapon and train with it! My safety is very important to me."

For reasons (the reasons are a previous foster child), Evelyn actually knows significantly more detail on the legality of carrying a knife in Reno than just "it's probably illegal right???" 

"I...think it's very good that you want to be able to defend yourself and other people. But there are laws about what kinds of weapon you can carry in public, and about when you can use them without getting in trouble with the law. The laws are different for police but there isn't a special law in America for holy warriors of God." 

"Yes, the police said that. ...I take classes at school on the laws for weapons, and I will not leave until I know the laws and am trained in a weapon legal to have."

Evelyn considers whether she feels like explaining that that isn't really the focus in American high schools and Evelyn will get such concerned phone calls from her teachers if she keeps asking questions like that, and decides that she is not having that conversation tonight. She probably has at least a week before anyone can arrange a school place for Iomedae anyway. 

"I'm glad," she says, because she can't really think of anything else to say. "You can always ask me more questions as you think of them. Right now, why don't we go look through my spare clothes and find you a pair of pajamas that will fit to sleep in?" 

"- you not want me sleep on rich bed in my clothes?" This is perfectly reasonable it's just kind of boggling to suggest giving her a second set of clothes as a solution.

"...I think it would be nice if you wore something clean to sleep in, yeah. But it's also...not that big a deal? If your family made all of your clothes from scratch then it makes sense it would seem like a big deal, but - America is rich, remember, and it really isn't. You could buy twenty sets of clothes with the amount of money you have."

(Evelyn doesn't actually take foster kids shopping at second-hand stores to pick out their own clothes, Social Services doesn't like it and it's a self-esteem thing for a lot of kids - and also stores like Goodwill are best when you have two hours to browse without hauling a bored child - but her spare clothing stash is mostly from second-hand stores, or else lightly used hand-me-downs from various friends and thus cost her zero money. It's hard to convey the extent to which Evelyn does not think that giving Iomedae some spare pajamas is a big deal.) 

"I no own twenty sets of clothes when children hungry. God should leave me, I do that! - three is okay, I think. One for wash days and one for church days and one for other days."

...Yeah in hindsight she walked right into that one. Evelyn can't help but feel like Iomedae seems to think that God is very judgy. 

"I didn't say you should buy twenty sets of clothes even if you can! Though in my house the rule is that you change your clothes every day so that you don't smell bad, and since I have lots of spares that don't cost me anything to lend to you while you live with me, I think it would be easier if you had enough sets of clothes to wear a new one every day for a week, it would waste water to do a tiny load of laundry every day. The government also gives me a bit of money to buy clothes that are just for you, but if you want, we can stop at three pairs and I can give you the rest to save or donate to a charity instead."

That is not really fostering best practice but you know what is also not fostering best practice, is disrespecting a child's very clearly deeply-held faith and making her have anxiety attacks that God will "leave" her for owning too many clothes when there are starving children. Which honestly makes God sound like a questionable and controlling boyfriend or something but that's probably mostly the language barrier. She can work on it more later. It's...kind of fair, that there are a lot of children - children who Iomedae met - who are still living in poverty.

The rule is that you have to wear new clothes every day, and it would waste water to do laundry every day, so you must own many clothes. What kind of topsy tervy world gives out clothes to save on water. Gives out precious things that require months of labor to save the thing that falls out of the sky on a regular basis and also any priest can give you. And even if there's easy spellwork for weaving, here, like it's said there was in lost Azlant, the biggest problem with having to do laundry all the time would still not be that it wasted water, it'd be that it wasted half the day. Iomedae appreciates the free school but she's going to seriously resent having to launder clothes she has worn once. 

"Water falls from the sky or is given by gods, you not fear run out," she says, because that seems like one of the confusing things there though not really the most important one and it's not picking a fight about the rules, which she does not want to do.

Iomedae looks kind of horrified about the prospect of washing her clothes every day and - oh, right, her family almost certainly washed their clothes by hand, which would be really annoying. Evelyn once bought a couple of fancy blouses where the tag says 'hand-wash only', and quickly concluded that she is not the sort of person who will ever wear a blouse if it's not washing-machine-and-dryer-safe. 

And then Iomedae says that and Evelyn has to try very hard not to laugh, and stomp on the urge to say facetiously that she never learned the trick to ask God for free water. (She...probably just misheard...Iomedae saying 'gods', plural. Iomedae has an accent.) 

"I guess I'm not going to personally use up the entire Reno water supply by doing laundry every day, you're right, but I do have to pay for it if I want the water to come out of the pipes in my house. It doesn't rain that often here, Nevada is a desert. ...Anyway, I think maybe you've never seen a washing machine. You're going to love washing machines." She would normally worry about putting literally hand-spun clothes in the washing machine, but Iomedae's clothes seem to have held up tolerably to months of being her only outfit while she did farm labor, and she can just use a gentle setting and the mild detergent. "Come on, follow me. I have a load I meant to put on tomorrow but I can do it now to show you." 

- she will follow.

She doesn't know enough about anything but weaving magic like in Azlant, plus laundry magic, might in fact be sufficient for this set of priorities to be, while insane, not very costly? 

Evelyn forges up the stairs and collects the laundry hamper. It has Lily's duvet cover and some of Evelyn's jeans and shirts, plus what looks like at least a dozen distinct Lily outfits, varyingly food-stained and dirt-stained and grass-stained (Lily is an active child and a messy eater.) 

The laundry machines are back downstairs and in the garage; there used to be a set in the downstairs hall closet but they were scaled-down models, and fostering means a lot of laundry, so she invested in a special-mail-order industrial size washer and dryer set. Evelyn decides not to give the usual speech that Iomedae shouldn't come in here by herself, she's big enough and responsible enough and Evelyn is way too tired to have another argument about why it's a rule. "It's dangerous for Lily to come in here," she says instead, "that's why the door has a child lock." She pops it open and negotiates the door with the laundry hamper and heads over to the washing machine. 

"You just put it all in here." Evelyn shifts laundry into the front-loading washing machine, not seeming to expect help from Iomedae. "And shut the door, and then the laundry detergent liquid - soap, but special for clothes - goes in here, and then you press the buttons to turn it on, like this. It'll start washing them in a moment. Then we just need to come back in an hour when it dings to say it's done, and put them over in that machine to tumble dry. If I have time I hang them up to dry to save electricity but it's not a big problem." Evelyn's own mother would be appalled at how much electricity her household uses on the dryer. Evelyn's mother has also never fostered three very active, messy bedwetters at the same time. 

"That is so good!!!! Everyone everywhere should have!! God is good and paradise need not wait for dying!"