Well if Iomedae can't read then Haley is deciding she, as the competent American with a twitter account and a driver's license, has executive authority over texting. They will be an excellent partnership. Iomedae can handle being a holy warrior and Haley can understand how to acquire a fake ID.

She considers briefly, deletes one of the emoji as perhaps excessive, and sends Ludmila the text.

"If you can't lie can you steal? If not, how are we getting food? Reckon they can trace my credit card?" 

"We go to the people who work on farms, not here but a few cities over, say you look after they kids while they work and I help them work, get five dollar a day, buy food at Costco."

Haley's phone pings.

> Where are you getting ice cream?? This is serious Haley - the cops have been called. We are all very worried. You can't just kidnap minors even if for ice cream...

> oh I don't really know what it's called sorry!! 😅 just the ice cream parlour 🍧🤤

> There are no ice cream parlours in town. The closest is twenty two miles from site and you left on foot.

Haley switches her phone off. 

"Okay we are under no circumstances working for five dollars a day. Are you sure you know English numbers or like, is this like the thing where you can't read?" 

"I know numbers. I worked four months on farm. Five dollar a day, spend three, save two, buy food for me and sugar for kids, give to the Church once have a hundred dollars. Not hard."

Haley holds up five fingers. "Five is this many? One two three four five?" 

"Yes." She draws the numeral in the soil. "On the bill, look like this. If order a week of food at Costco for," more numerals in the soil, 19.55, "then have" 10.45 "left. Not stupid, don't know English."

"I'm, like, a starving artist, right? I make like no money. I can get five dollars an hour on fiverr doing freelance logo designs if I'm bored in the middle of the night. I get like thirty thousand from my job - like, that's more than a hundred dollars a day - just messing around on the internet for a few hours a day. Five dollars a day isn't work, that's, like, slave labour. You were getting robbed. I don't think that's legal, like, at all."

"I want to do work that is legal, but I do not understand what you just sayed. ...anyway today we just need get far away from here. Food we can think tomorrow."

"There is no such thing as work that is legal for five dollars a day. If we do legal work they can track us and find us, much more likely than if I just use my credit card and hope they can't trace that. For work to be legal you have to pay taxes and stuff."

Haley does not want to think about food tomorrow. She ran for approximately five geological eons of the earth and her stomach is upset about it right now. 

"Pay taxes and stuff. What stuff?"

"You have to give your employer your real name and have a contract and a bank account and the government takes some of your salary and you have to tell them your social security number and stuff and then the rest goes in the bank account and like, the bank tells the government if you do any fraud, and then you also have to file your taxes which means reading and writing, and sometimes you have to be in a union or have a licence and stuff, honestly I don't know how much of that is legally required or just the normal way to do it, but it's against the law to make children work and it's against the law to pay anyone five dollars a day. It's fine, I reckon I can cycle credit cards and rack up quite a few thousand before they actually cut me off, and it only involves lying to computers, not people." 

"I need to think. I think - not obeying the law is bad, because makes other people spend time stopping you and people like you, and makes it hard that people know what happen, hard plan for winter, hard try new things. And stealing is bad because means other people have less of thing they worked for. You are saying, 'cycle credit cards' does not do that?"

"We are breaking the law in like five different ways right now by trespassing and hiding from your foster mom and all that, like, possibly worse than stealing? Credit card companies make all their money off people messing up and using them wrong. You're supposed to pay them off every month but most people don't. They want you to overspend and get hit with huge fees. They just also want you to actually stick around to pay the fees and if you're telling the truth I shouldn't have to do that."