They'll try to get a translator. Have another slice of pizza. 

She is still suspicious of the pizza, even though she's getting really hungry by now.

Some of the other kids have been removed by now by harried-looking people in well-tailored clothes. The staff give out boxes of apple juice and Lunchables around when it's technically noon outside, when they've been there twelve hours or so. The other kids have eaten their pizza and none of them are apparently suffering from it. 

A person with a clipboard comes up to her and tries eight different languages, none of them Hallit.

She also speaks a little Taldane? Not that any of those were Taldane.

(None of the other kids are suffering from their pizza yet but maybe la migra are a kind of fae and if she eats their food she'll be trapped here forever. She can't think of any other reason they would capture her and then offer her pizza.)

Right. (They now suspect she's faking it.)

In Spanish, then. They want to find her mother and father. If she does not have those, they will have to give her to strangers. If she knows anyone, she should tell them, so they can give her to those instead. 

Got it?

She does not got it!

They can read off the names of the people arrested in that raid! Are any of them her parents?

She can guess what they mean by "tus padres" but it's only a guess and anyways her parents are still in Sarkoris and none of the people on the list. She shakes her head.

They leave her be, again. 

"All day? And you're just asking now? Christ, of course, but you should've called me sooner."

He hangs up the phone still muttering to himself. "Diel?"

"Yeah?" she says, though she can guess. 

       "That was Jeffords, in Clark, calling in a favor. ICE raids all across the area overnight, apparently. They've got sixty kids who've sat all day in a high school gymnasium, they've run through every local fosterer, their own team is run ragged,  and they want help finding kinship placements, foster carers, kids whose mothers they need to release on humanitarian grounds -"

"Imagine if ICE would ever coordinate with other agencies in advance so we could have somewhere for the kids to go."

         "Imagine if."

"Let me grab my bag." She brings a lot of toys and games and a lot of candy, for this. It helps the kids get un-terrified enough to talk to you. 

-----

A few hours later she finds herself blinking down at -

- they look nothing alike, actually. Iomedae had meticulously braided hair and linebacker shoulders and a polite, earnest expression like she was sincerely very grateful to answer your questions. This girl is darker-skinned and thin and wary and withdrawn.

And speaks mediocre English and mediocre Spanish and is wearing hand-sewn clothing and hasn't touched her pizza, though she also hasn't run off to give it to the poor so maybe that's not a similarity.

Maybe Iomedae wasn't lying, and there's a under-the-radar cult out there somewhere. Maybe it's in Mexico and that's why no U.S. cult experts have records. 

In Spanish, then. "Alfirin? I'm Diel. I work for Social Services. Can I ask, do you know an Iomedae?"

"Don't know Iomedae."

"Who do you know? We want to place you with people you know, unless those people are not safe for you."

"Don't know people here. Know people in Undarin. Undarin in Sarkoris. Sarkoris far away. North. Cold in Sarkoris."

Sigh. "How did you get here."

"Don't know. Not trying. Didn't walk. Just was."

"Have you heard of Taldor."

"Know Taldor. Taldor very south Sarkoris. Not go Taldor. In Taldor speak Taldane, person here speak Taldane?"

"- we may be able to get you someone who speaks Taldane. I will see what I can do. ...would you like me to eat a bite of the pizza, so you know it's safe?"

How would that prove it's safe? Fae can eat Fae food.

Diel is so tired. She never did get off work in time to pick up that prescription and she's now going to be wrangling USCIS about two kids who claim to possess no accessible relatives but to be from nearby villages in the middle of who fucking knows where, probably Guatamala, and to be in Nevada by complete accident, and they both have food refusal issues and are teenagers with limited English and -

She smiles at Alfirin, but it doesn't end up being a sincere smile at all. "Want to do a drawing game with me?" Drawing paper! Pencils! "I will draw my family. Here is my mother, and my father, and my sister, and my brother. Now you could draw your family, or something else, if there's something else on your mind."

Alfirin draws her mother and her father and her grandmother and her aunt Leshka and her brother Bron and her brother Jannug and her sisters Vesla and Yanka and Esik and the little one who does not have a name yet. She tells Diel their relations to her but not their names.

No dead babies.

Diel is tired and isn't sure there's any point in testing a theory further when it's not even clear what it'd mean if it were true. "Thank you for the picture. I hope we can get you home to your family. They must miss you terribly."

They probably do miss her terribly but that will not save her from a ferocious beating if they learn she stole a book of spells and teleported somewhere on the other side of Taldor.

Orrr she doesn't want to go home. 'doesn't want to go home' is one of the things you get good at reading, in children.

"It must be very scary for you to be so far from home," says the social worker empathetically. 

"Is strange. Not know how be here, is scary. Water come from hoses*, is scary. Other things scary I not have words."

*(She means 'snakes')