It was undoubtedly risky admitting that he didn't have a path to them, but at this point Oliver had little choice. He didn't know exactly what they knew, but if they could see or analyze mana in the way that he could, and since they could clearly tell that he didn't have a path in some other way — a scan of his system, somehow — then it was obvious that he'd have withheld information from them if he didn't come clean.

While he felt playing his cards close to the chest with Gideon earlier int he day wasn't unwise, now that they'd made a show of trust by allowing him into their secret base, continuing to play hard to get would simply sour the situation.

"Sung, the truth-teller, if you please," Gideon said.

Sung withdrew a small bag from his pocket and shook something out into his palm. Oliver realized as he held it up that it was a small, clear gem of the same kind that made up the truth-teller rings.

Gideon cleared his throat. "Do you know what this is?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to ask you some questions. If you lie, we'll have to kill you," said Gideon seriously. It wasn't quite a casual threat, but it was made off-handedly enough that Oliver felt a chill tickle his spine. This wasn't a man who hesitated to take a life, and Oliver was in a position where he was both at his mercy and held information that rendered him vulnerable. It was a cold reminder of who he was dealing with.

"What is your name?"

"Oliver Grace," said Oliver, taking another glance around the room. It was just the three of them, him and Gideon and Sung Lee.

"Where are you from?" asked Gideon.

"America. New Hampshire," said Oliver.

"How did you get here?"

Oliver recounted his recent experiences since arriving in the wood, and as he did so realized why Gideon hadn't pressed him on the walk here. There'd have been plenty of time for it later, with the truth-stone. Now, why Gideon hadn't brought the truth-stone with him to question him before taking him into the fold wasn't clear, but he was sure there was a reason.

As he finished his tale, the smell of cooking food became even stronger and his stomach rumbled embarrassingly loud a couple of times. Gideon and Sung were too intent on him to notice or react, it seemed. It made sense. They were trying to figure out whether or not he was legit, whether they should welcome him into their company or dispose of him.

After a certain point, when the truth teller had shown zero signs of falsity for some time, Gideon and Sung began to relax, and an air of tension that he hadn't been consciously aware of fell away. It wasn't just that they were getting the truth, it was that they were getting to know him.

They exchanged glances a couple of times as he talked, trying to be subtle about it but not quite enough to escape his return scrutiny. Of particular interest to them were the decisions he'd made around saving the couple in the camp and his reckless attempt to save the wounded soldiers during the harpy attack.

Despite their interest, through, they didn't question him further about those cases.

His tale eventually wound to a stop. They asked a handful of clarifying questions and were just beginning to slow down when an unfamiliar voice came in from another room demarcated by a hanging curtain in the doorway.

"Dinner's ready," a woman was shouting, in an unmistakably British accent.

"Ah, that'll be Graves," said Gideon. "Dinner's ready. Come in, follow me."

Apparently he'd passed the test, or tests, since neither Sung or Gideon seemed to mind much that he was entering further into their home and lives as they welcomed him into a dining room offset from a narrow kitchen with a window open to the air at the end of it, beyond which lay another clay wall a few feet away.

This part of the city so close to the exterior of the wall was packed close together and the walls were of thick clay, dimly lit, with low ceilings and lots of hangings. It was both heat- and cooling-efficient and cozy, speaking both to a harsh climate and the fact that mana alone wasn't the solution to everything here.

It was becoming clearer and clearer that mana was both incredibly useful and incredibly valuable in this place.

Graves was a short, blond British woman with an incredibly upbeat voice in, Oliver didn't like to guess, maybe her mid-thirties?

"Ah, here's the new meat," she said cheerfully as Oliver trailed in behind Gideon and Sung. She stuck out her hand for him to shake, still covered in meat juice from transferring the burger patties between plates.

Left without a choice, he took and shook it, then tried not to wipe his dirty hand on anything.

"Graves," she said. "And you must be Oliver."

"That's right," he said. "Pleased to meet you."

Interpersonal niceties dispensed with, she went back to bustling about and bringing more stuff out to the table armload a time, Sung going to help her.

Gideon sat down at the table. "Would you look at this," he said to Graves admiringly, gesturing to the spread. "You've outdone yourself today!"

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Burgers for the American," she quipped, bustling around. "A little taste of home."

It did look pretty familiar and brought a pang of homesickness to Oliver. "That's thoughtful of you," he said.

A low wooden table was laden with a small feast. Burger patties on ceramic plates. Buns. Something that looked an awful lot like ketchup, a yellow substance that could have been mustard.

Shortly they were gathered around the table, ready to eat. "Thanks to the chef," said Sung as they prepared to dig in.

Gideon turned to Oliver as he was assembling his burger. "We take turns cooking. Whoever doesn't cook does the cleaning."

Oliver nodded as he put together his own burger. "Got it. Looks amazing."

"We've had practice. We're getting closer and closer to home food all the time, but it's a challenge since the ingredients are so different," said Graves.

"She's being modest," said Sung with a grin at her. "Leave it to the biologist to make the best food."

Graves took a huge bite of her burger. "Don't let him fool you," she said through the massive amount of food in her mouth. "He's the one who's come up with a lot of the recipes."

"Hey, having eidetic memory's good for more than just programming," he said.

There was a brief pause as they all tucked in, the sounds of chewing the only thing to be heard. The burger was amazing. It wasn't really anywhere near an Earth burger, a little too acidic and not really tomato-y at all, but the textures were just right and he was hungry enough that the individual flavors all blended together into a general burger-y-ness that was sufficiently close to the real McCoy that he was all but inhaling the food.

"Did you always have an eidetic memory or was that something the system helped you with?" Oliver was asking as Tallahassee wandered in shortly after everybody else had already started eating and silently took a seat at the only other empty spot at the table.

"System," said Sung. "Before the System I couldn't even remember where I left my keys. Now"—he gestured to the concentration of mana around his brain, a dense web of lines so finely threaded and packed together that Oliver couldn't actually make out where the typical mana aura exuded by people ended and the webs of mana channels began—"I remember every time I ever put my keys down."

"That sounds like a… lot," said Oliver.

"It is, but we've gotten a lot better about managing it. The first time we tried it, it knocked me out for nearly a week. The next time, it was just a few days. Then eventually we found a way to keep the eiditic memory patch running all the time."

"Who's we?" asked Oliver, serving himself some slices of a potato-like substance that might have been intended to be fries but instead was altogether too gluey and gummy. Still delicious, though.

"Graves and I have done a lot of the mind patching work," he said. "Tallahassee, Gideon, and Luke"—he caught himself, but it was too late, the words were out and the petite Indian girl seemed to shrink even further into herself, and Graves glanced over at him reprovingly, "focused on the more… military applications," he went on, trying to brush past the faux pas. Nobody seemed inclined to take him to task for it.

"I see," said Oliver, doing his part to keep the conversation moving. "I have to say, it seems like you guys are all pretty smart."

"Not just smart," said Gideon from the other side of the table. "Tough, determined, brave—all of the people you see sitting at this table, like you, have what it takes to survive. That's why they did."

Glances were exchanged around the table and a heavy silence abruptly descended.

"I just got lucky. A bunch of times in a row," said Oliver.

"Luck's a part of being a survivor, too," said Gideon.

The heaviness lingered, a question unasked pressing down on the table.

"How many of you were there? In the beginning?" asked Oliver quietly after a moment, with a glance at Tallahassee. She was pushing food around on her plate with her hands, not really looking up.

"Sorry?" asked Gideon, glancing over to Tallahassee with a gesture that said something like, Are you really going to go there right now?

"How many people have you found, like you found me?" pressed Oliver. I didn't go there, you did, and now I need to know.

Gideon remained silent. "Thirty seven," said Sung after a pause. Oliver turned towards him. "Total."

"And the rest, they—all—" began Oliver, then trailed off, not wanting to finish the sentence but desperate to know. How many people had been killed here just trying to get home? What were his chances?

"Not all of them," said Graves, putting down her burger with a sigh. "Some of them left. But yeah, most of them got killed one way or another."

"On missions?"

"No," said Gideon finally. "We haven't lost anybody in a while, not since we found and joined the Moderates. No, some were recaptured by the Empire. We lost a lot to… environmental hazards. And others to political and social missteps."

"Turns out the people here generally don't take too kindly to outsiders," Graves said.

"Do they know about you? Us?" asked Oliver, realizing that he was already beginning to identify with these people, already becoming an Us with them. He was aware of it, and didn't really try to stop it. This was good. Eating together, talking. Shared trauma and breaking of bread formed bonds, the kind of bonds that he desperately needed right now.

"In general?" asked Sung rhetorically. "No. And we're trying to keep it that way. But the magisters do, and other higher ups in the Empire. They'd like to bring us all in, if they could, regardless of the cost. We're on a capture or kill list, several in fact, and they don't hesitate to use force. They want us dead."

The line of conversation trailed off after that. It wasn't really unexpected.

"Do you all have military backgrounds, then?" asked Oliver eventually.

"Heavens, no," said Graves. "I'm a microbiologist. Sung was a firmware developer. And Tallahassee was a daycare worker. A babysitter."

"No kidding," said Oliver. "And now you're all running a rebellion and doing magical research and development on another planet with the goal of what, overthrowing another national power?"

"Again, subverting," said Gideon. "But that's just the really big picture. Mainly, we're all working together to find a way home."

—

After dinner, Graves showed him to his room. It lay down a narrow hall on the second floor, which proved to be as back home where the bedrooms were located. His was the furthest back on the left of the narrow, dimly lit hallway. Evening light trickled in through a rough window at the end of the hall.

"Here you are," said Graves, opening the wooden door that led into the room. It was sparsely furnished with a standalone wooden armoire, a chair and a bed. "Make yourself at home."

"Thanks," said Oliver, both for dinner and for welcoming him in.

"We've all been where you have," the British woman said. "Don't mention it." And looking at her as she said it, Oliver felt empathized with, truly understood, and he nearly broke down in the doorway. Over dinner they'd answered all of his questions about the Empire, their situations and personal backgrounds, but had asked him little of his own since arriving. And it was good, because if they had, he wasn't sure he'd have been able to keep it together. Just the relief of being around other people from home was enough to—to—

"Thank you again," he said, throat thick and tip of his nose hurting in that weird way it did before he started to get teary-eyed, and stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. It was maybe a little rude, but he really wasn't in the mood to break down in front of a relative stranger.

Oliver sat on the bed and cried by himself for a while instead.