Iomedae is finding it pretty straightforward but of course that's not going to be very predictive for Alfirin of how hard it is. Iomedae can do men's work and fight with a sword.

"Iomedae is picking it up pretty quickly! But it's easier for some people and harder for others, and Iomedae does still fall a lot. I think maybe we should borrow a bike for you to try?" Alfirin is tiny and will not cope well on Evelyn's bike, it would be a very unfair initial experience of cycling. "And you can see how quickly you pick it up, and whether you would want to go a lot of places that way. It's also pretty tiring for some people, even once you know how to not fall over. I know Iomedae is - very very strong - so I think she can go basically anywhere in the city if she wants to, but I couldn't." 

Alfirin still doesn't understand why the bikes ever don't fall over and doesn't expect to entirely trust them until she does but she's willing to give it a try.

...In the meantime, there's something else she should talk to Evelyn about.

"Evelyn I need you help me."

It's kind of the worst time of day for traffic, but that's fine. Evelyn is listening. "Yes? What do you need help with?" 

"I need to not give the doctors my blood. I think if I give them my blood they use it to find my brothers and sisters and steal them. I do not want my brothers and sisters to be stealed. It would be very bad they are foster children, badder than I am foster child."

Iomedae suspects that approximately no foster children go to Heaven. The system, however well-intentioned its design, punishes you for telling the truth and rewards you for keeping adults happy with lies and punishes misbehavior flailingly and at random - not an immediate swat for being impolite, but a soft-spoken question at the doctor's office days later, about whether the child's behavior is causing problems at home and requires incomprehensible America things to make the child behave herself. Everyone tells children it's fine to have sex if they are a bit older, with no mention of marriage. Everyone thinks it's all right to kill babies.

It is an environment tailor-made for denying people paradise.

And no educated American will care, because educated Americans believe there is no paradise.

????????????????????!!!!!!!!!

"....I don't think that's what they do with blood tests? I - guess you could do a DNA test - sorry that's a science thing, I can explain later - but they would have to have already found your family and be checking if they were really related to you? There isn't, like, a DNA bank of families, even in America? The science isn't that good yet so it's still expensive. And your family is - somewhere outside America, I'm pretty sure." 

Okay right there was a second half there. 

"- Why do you think they want to take your brothers and sisters into foster care?" Because Evelyn can make all sorts of guesses but she has learned, over the years, that her guesses are pretty often wrong. 

"Because the doctor who do the behavioral health exam very worried when I say my parents hit me when - thing I not have word for - start asking me if I have brothers and sisters - I not lie, but I only tell her about dead baby brother - She not believe me -" She is getting kind of panicked and it's so much harder to find the right English words and say them the right way -

Iomedae reaches across the back seat of the car and takes her hand. If she were a great and noble paladin she could make people not afraid just by being near them but she is a baby paladin and she cannot keep Alfirin's sisters and brothers safe. 

Right. Yeah. Of course. That's incredibly predictable and Evelyn suddenly really wishes she could have been in both rooms at once. 

(Evelyn doesn't miss that Alfirin is kind of panicking. It won't help to point it out. There's actually very little she can do to help, from here and also with her current relationship with Alfirin, which is - very reasonably on Alfirin's part - not an especially trusting one. She just - tries to catch her eye again in the rearview mirror, and takes a slow casual deep breath and lets it out.)

(....Evelyn is abruptly so so grateful to Iomedae.) 

"I see why that would make them very worried." Evelyn keeps her voice level and calm and in an ordinary conversational sort of tone. "In America, parents aren't supposed to hit their children - I won't say that parents don't ever hit their children, or that - a particular parent hitting their child means they're a bad parent," because Alfirin is absolutely going to be dubious on those grounds, "but it's something that the government worries about, because - parents know that they're not supposed to, right, and so if a parent does it anyway, that's a bad sign about other things." 

Pause. 

"- It sounds like you think your parents were good parents, overall? And that your siblings are okay, living with them?" 

"My parents are good parents, and my siblings are okay. And they would not be okay if foster childs."

"...Most child, do the thing I do for my parents hit me, do it all the time that child die. Because of brown thing or hose or wolf or all the other thing I not English word for. Thing like bad combine harvester, or like bad person, or like bad tree or bad rock. Parent not hit child, child do the thing all the time, child die."

This is a terrible time to have a conversation about how there are better parenting methods that do not involve much bigger adults doing physical violence to children under their care, and in fact there's no evidence that spanking results in better behavior or children learning self-control earlier, and there is evidence that it results in worse family relationships once the child is older. (Evelyn is pretty sure that's from some kind of study, probably? Or at least a book. She learned it in a foster parent training session and does not remember the source.) 

It's a terrible time for it because, wow, that's describing a genuinely awful and scary kind of childhood, and - one that genuinely sounds like it wasn't her parents' fault, it's an environment where Evelyn herself might not have done any better and she should be empathetic... 

...also her brain is kind of repeatedly stumbling over, uh - 

"- I don't think they would have had hoses where you grew up? They're not a kind of wild animal, they're a - sort of tube, pipe," she can't remember if the girls know either of those words, "that you pump water through?" 

"Hoses here make water, hoses at home bite people, make them sick and die?"

What. 

"I - think those are talking about different things? Hoses are - made out of rubber or plastic," ugh do they know either of those words, "- made out of the same thing as the bottoms of shoes, and long and skinny and hollow - have a space - on the inside, and you attach them to a tap - like where the water comes out in the kitchen - if you want the water to be coming out further away. They aren't - alive - like how people or animals are alive and move by themselves." 

She has no idea what Alfirin is thinking is a hose that bites people and makes them get sick and die but– 

.... ohhhhhhhhh. Okay wow on reflection that's even pretty understandable.

"- I think the thing you mean is snakes? They're a kind of animal that's alive, and they have teeth, and bite people and the - venom - thing in their bite - can make people sick. Hoses are not snakes." 

...oh. If hoses are not snakes and never bite people it is - slightly less confusing that the healer thought Alfirin's parents hit her with hoses.

"Oh. I being stupid. Hoses are not snakes. I meaned snakes."

"I can see why you were confused! I hadn't thought about it before, but hoses do kind of look like snakes, they're long and thin and even have the same sort of pattern like scales sometimes. I don't think you were being stupid, just - trying to understand things that were very weird, and people weren't explaining them well."

(Evelyn is pretty sure that Alfirin is very smart, actually. She's already noticeably improved in her English communication. Evelyn doesn't feel like she has nearly as close of a read on Alfirin's, well, overall emotional life, as she does with Iomedae, but "quick on the uptake" she can pick up.) 

Right she should probably go back to the actual topic. This conversation feels important. It's - actually the closest she's come, so far, to feeling like she at all understands Alfirin's emotional life. 

"...I understand that your parents were - trying to take care of their children as well as they could, somewhere very different from America? With more - dangerous things, like snakes and wolves. It sounds like you think they were doing a good job of keeping your brothers and sisters safe, and teaching them what they would need to know to be safe once they were grown up?" 

"Yes. My brothers and sisters younger than me, none of them die after they get names. My parents do a good job keeping them safe. Should not be stealed."

"...That makes sense."

Oh no a traffic light is coming up and someone is honking at her and Evelyn is not 100% sure what she just did to merit honking. She clearly needs to become a BETTER DRIVER so she can handle conversations like this in the car. 

"I - think you shouldn't be very worried? We don't know what country your family is in, and even if we did, CPS - the part of the government that investigates if children are being hurt - is in America, and I think they mostly don't do things that aren't in America?

...And if somehow they did find your family, I - believe you, that your parents were trying their best to be good parents with what they had, and I would argue to the court that your siblings should still live with them, and the government should give them more money to feed them and better advice on how to be good parents. I've done that a lot of times before. It's - bad - for children to be torn away from their family, I know that." 

Iomedae squeezes Alfirin's hand. Evelyn is very good, maybe actually on their side. 

She's also having a sudden epiphany about the nature of Law, but she is going to wait on that until Alfirin is reassured. It's important to whether they should do blood tests, though.

"But you are still a foster parent." she says in a somewhat accusatory tone.

This is not wise to say but it is very satisfying. 

Additional hand-squeeze.

Evelyn is pretty confused about what that means–

....no, actually, she's not confused. That's a pretty reasonable sentiment. One that most of her teenage foster children might have expressed, if they had the words and felt like they were allowed to.

"- Yeah. Because - okay, so for one, there are lots of kids like Lily, whose parents - really did hurt them very very badly - and it's actually just better, for them, to be living somewhere else, with someone who won't hurt them. And - there are lots of kids whose parents are trying their best but - actually never learned how to be good parents, and they take drugs and drink alcohol," Evelyn knows her pediatrician's standard speech and is sure the girls have that vocabulary by now, "and they don't mean to hurt their kids but they are hurting them, and - sometimes all they need is a little break, to take care of themselves, and then they can be good parents. 

- and sometimes the system is wrong, and it takes kids into foster care when it shouldn't have - it thinks someone is a bad parent because they're poor, or," okay she is 95% sure Emily would have brought up racism last night, "- because their skin is the wrong color. And - I think it's better, if I'm here, and I can - notice the system is wrong, and say, actually these are good parents, and the child should go home." 

Iomedae nods vigorously. "The childs would not be free if you said 'this is wrong and I will not be part of it.' Only doing things that fix everything, not just things that make bad things farther away."

"If nobody be foster parent what happen? President - government - still steal childs, kill them? Or let childs go."