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."

"I know I am breaking the law running away. I stayed when they made me a foster child because holy warriors should follow the law, but - if they are evil and know God and are his enemies, then no. But I want to break only laws that are not honorable. No stealing a good law. No working for five dollar a day, that not a good law I think?"

Right now minimum wage laws are Haley's favourite laws in the whole world because it seems like they might be the only thing standing between her and whatever absolute bullshit Iomedae is even on. She does not see how working for five dollars a day is going to progress the quest to overthrow the conspiracy even slightly! 

"No working for five dollars a day is a really important law. It's not, like, about you, it's like, the employer is doing a crime by hiring you. It's exploitation. And I don't know if you're, like, undercutting a union or something."

"I do not know employer, exploitation, undercutting, union." It seems to Iomedae like one reason to make a law against working for five dollars a day is that if you prohibit this you make it much harder for escaped slaves to establish themselves and become rich. She does not think that's a very good reason for a law, but maybe she'd think so if she wasn't feeling very biased in favor of escaped slaves right now.

Has reblogging leftist memes on tumblr adequately prepared Haley for explaining unions to a medieval warrior from another fucking planet? Time to find out! 

"Um. So. Let's say you work for a really bad boss. Like, he pays you badly and shouts at you and gives you dangerous work. If you complain and say you want more pay and safer work, he can fire you and you don't get health care any more - um, nobody will fix you if you, um, got sworded, because you don't have a job. So you can't improve your life. The, um, evil boss has all the power. But if you get together with lots of other people and say none of you will agree to work for the boss unless he changes, then he can't hire anyone, so he can't run his business, so he has to pay more. Then all of you can have more pay and be safer. But it only works if you all stick together, because if even one person betrays everyone and agrees to work for five dollars a day, the evil boss doesn't have to change."

Iomedae thinks. She doesn't understand, not really, and it's not just a question of language, she thinks there's something non-language she doesn't understand, but what it is is Lawful, obviously, people coordinating to their own benefit. 

If all of the men who worked her father's land said they wouldn't work unless taxes were lower, that would...probably be bad if the taxes were serving the long-term prosperity of the holding, but good if they were too high - and probably taxes are too high much more often than they are too low, because people have a vice for luxury -

"I think I understand," she says. "But all the workers get five dollar a day, so no thing to betray. If the other workers not work for five dollar a day, I should not too."

"I feel like maybe you did not get the part where I make more than a hundred dollars a day? And I really do not make that much. My job sucks. Aleksei makes -" she does some quick maths on her fingers- "I think nearly six hundred, a day?" 

Iomedae imagines the men who work on her father's land demanding not that the taxes be lower but that they be as rich as educated wizards living in Oppara. It makes much less sense than the previous imagining, because that is not a thing that her father could give them, not being himself anywhere near that rich. And not having the ability to conquer Oppara. That's the other way you could do it, in theory, though not honorably. 

" - if you make a hundred dollars a day, then make sense to have me stand look for bad things, not work also all day for five more dollars," she says after some considering. "This more true if working for five dollars maybe not the law. If I was talking to the people who work on farms, I not tell them ask for a hundred dollar a day, but I not talking to them, so maybe not important now, when anyway maybe we die. I think we keep running while sun."