She spends a lot of time staring at her paper when she gets it. The men are treating it like money. It's all painted on both sides, and so thinly that she can't feel the paint. Most of the painting is exactly the same, apart from being worn or torn. There's only a few small places where they're different. There's a lot of writing on them. Probably they're magic. Maybe the face of the king or emperor or whatever on the one side is watching her. Maybe the eye on the other side is. She carefully folds it all up in a way where none of the eyes can see her.

It's a well-run farm, after a fashion; the workers do not complain and the overseer has in fact had no occasion to beat them. They are shouted at if they dawdle about their lunch break, but otherwise left nearly alone. Everyone gets paper by the weight of their basket. The field is nearly all plucked of fruit by evening, and there's only one more field. 

The workers don't offer Alfirin free food tonight; she has money, now, and can pitch in if she wants to share.

She'll watch to see how the rest of them are turning their papers into food?

Well, some of them are doing a Costco run in one of the vans but this won't necessarily be very comprehensible. They come back with bulk tortillas and rice and beans and goldfish crackers and chocolate pop tarts and some of the one-dollar giant churros.

It's comprehensible enough; they took the beast to the market and bought food. Can she give them some of her papers for some of their food?

Sure, why not. Usually people put in orders in advance, but they mostly remember their first season in a strange country, and more than half of them have kids back at home, and they are not inclined to make a fuss if she wants to buy a share of the cooking, or a bag of goldfish or a churro, even though she didn't say because she can't because she doesn't speak the language for some reason.

She will do that! She is working on learning the language and manages a "gracias" by imitation.

This churro is amazing???? She did not know that there was such a thing as food this sweet and delicious????

Someone who has a daughter about her age sits her down and tries to explain the money to her. She made eight dollars today. A churro is one dollar. She shouldn't just live on churros, but she can buy one every day there's work. ...there isn't work every day. They'll be heading out from here in a few days. If she's smart she'll save some of her money for when they're looking for work. 

He has no idea how much of this she understands.

She understands that the papers are "dollar" and she knows her numbers and can figure out the numbers in this language by holding up fingers. Tortilla one dollar? Tortilla two dollar? Beans one dollar? Beans two dollar? Rice?

This whole stack of eighty tortillas is three dollars. This many beans a dollar. (It's a lot of beans.) This much rice a dollar. (It's a lot of rice.) 

There is more than enough money for food - enough money for the people with family at home to send money to family at home - when there's work. But she should save it for when there isn't work.

She isn't at all sure what he's saying when he's not talking about concrete things like how many beans for a dollar. But it's clear enough that she should save her dollars, for when there isn't work or she gets sick. He probably thinks she doesn't know that because she is small and lots of kids are stupid but she's not stupid so she knows it.

They finish the fields in two more days, and then drive out a couple hundred miles to a job somewhere else. This is tree-picking, harder for a child to help with, but she's not completely useless. When she's been there five days they work a half-day to go to church, in a glorious stone building that is very beautiful and delightfully cold inside. The god is not immediately recognizable from the holy symbol. The exquisite statue of a man being tortured to death on a cross at the front might be suggestive. 

She doesn't know very much about gods, and the gods here are probably different from the gods back home anyways. It's not Erastil or Gozreh or Gorum but she knows they have other gods in Mendev and Numeria and they aren't even very far away. She doesn't do any praying in the church because the priest isn't doing any healing and of course there's the torture so probably it's not a very good god. She pretends, though, because probably if she doesn't she will get in trouble for defiance.

Defiant is not a word anyone would apply to her. She does her own work and buys her own food and goes to church and picks up the language and does not irritate any overseers and wins acceptance; people tell her, once she can understand them, of their own children her age, and of how to stay out of trouble.

(There are some children that travel with the workers. Many more of them have children at home far away, where there isn't work; they came here, where there is work, and they send money.)

They fear the local authorities. This is because being in this country without papers is illegal. Usually you do not get in trouble for it, but if you come to the attention of the authorities for anything else, they will never release you; they might send you home, or to some other place. The authorities are capricious about this; sometimes they will come to a camp and arrest twenty people in it, never minding that the rest are also without papers. Some people have heard that they cannot arrest you in a church, but of course you cannot shelter there forever. Some people have heard that there is a way to get papers, but it costs money and has incomprehensible steps, unless you marry someone with papers, or have a relative with papers who can do the incomprehensible steps with that advantage. 

They like their local god. He was tortured to death by the authorities, that's what the statuary in the churches is about. He died to free everybody of sin, and then he returned, and now he's in Heaven. 

They like the work fine, when it's not too hot and when the campsites have running water and when the wages are fair. They aren't weak, like the native people of this country who cannot do this work all day.

Where is she from, how'd she end up separated from her parents?

Their local god seems alright, then. She was afraid that he was a god that liked torture, but this is much less scary.

She is from Sarkoris, which she thinks is very far away because nobody here speaks Hallit. She doesn't know how she got here. She knows it gets colder when you go more north and warmer when you go more south, and it is much colder in Sarkoris than it is here, so she thinks Sarkoris is more north. In Sarkoris people are not weak but they are also very poor, they do not have cars or soft clothes with bright dyes and there is not running water anywhere.

They haven't heard of it but maybe it's what they call Siberia, that's a cold north place where people speak something different and which is poor. America is the richest country; it's why everyone wants to work here, even with the threat of being taken by the authorities. 

If she is from a village somewhere she will like Costco. - the market where they buy the food. She should go with them to Costco.

She goes with them to Costco. Costco is amazing! It's so big and it's all indoors and there is so much of everything - she thought it would just be food, and there is so much food but there are also clothes and she can buy a dress for less than two days of work - she does not need more clothes so she doesn't but it is amazing, it would take her months to make that, not even accounting for buying the wool -

At the fourth job they take after she joins them la migra is there. They surround the campsite in the middle of the night and then start shouting things with terrible booming amplification, demanding papers, demanding people line up. 

She is scared but she lines up if the other workers are lining up.

They load them into vans and drive them for a while; it's hard to guess the hour when their sleep was interrupted but by the time they wake up it's morning. They send the children in one direction, the adults in another. The other children are mostly younger and several of them are inconsolable.

It's a big open room full of lots of children, most of them also crying, and uniformed guards, and people with cameras, and some inexplicable hoops for ballgames dangling from the ceiling. 

They give her a slice of pizza and an apple.

She doesn't trust it. And there's lots of people watching so she can't check if it's poison or not.

They leave the kids there for most of the day. At one point they start playing extremely cheerful music over the gym speakers. 

Eventually someone comes by with a clipboard and paper and pencil to ask her (in Spanish) her name, and her parents' names, and how long she's been here, and if she has any other relatives in the United States, and where she is from, and how old she is, and if she is blind, or deaf or hard of hearing, or physically disabled, or reliant on any medications, and whether she has ever been to school, and whether she has papers.

"Soy Alfirin. No se 'padres'. No hablo español bien. No se 'cuando tiempo llevas'. No entiendo - no entiendo."

What language does she speak?

"Hallit."