F-Rank Mimic Chest: My SSS Mimic Skill Lets Me Become Anything

In Dane Rook’s old trade, the word ”again” had a name. It was a callback: the first job had failed, the customer was standing over it, and nobody paid for the second visit. This customer was Vera Pike, with her wrapped hand flat on the crack the first job had made worse. The first job had been a roof that a blind mimic chest built out of his own boards at dawn, and it had shut on six people. For the moment he was back to a wagon, in the rain on a pier in the middle of Rookfall’s storm cut. Behind him the House had laid stolen rooms to the foot of the pier, and their doors were opening upward. He had wanted legs since the hour he died, and now he wanted them for walking these people off this rock with the door open.

”This comes off first,” Vera said, and her chalk smell came close while she worked the loose wedge out, pocketed it, and lifted the splint away. Rain found the crack for its whole height, where a leftover charge buzzed in the salt.

”That floor’s about to be all doors, and I’m not walking on doors,” she said. ”So it’s the roof from dawn, with a door that stays open, and it gets us across to the gate wheel.”

”Then the front’s mine.” Harl Fen came down the slope on a boot and a leg splint. ”I can limp, before anybody’s kind about it. A crushed shin won’t carry, climb or run, and there’s no other work on this rock. Driving’s done sitting down, and sitting I’m still rated for.”

Six plates scraped up beside Dane, three dragging. Istra had torn a seam and bled on the way over, and nothing that bled rode him. Blood on his boards woke the hunger.

”She’s dry,” Harl said. ”That’s my knot on her.”

Senn Parr brought her bar down twice at the near edge. No. At dawn she had gone in first, with the front open, and it had shut on her. Kril planted his blades beside her. Nobody argued, Dane least of all, who had done the shutting.

”Four,” Harl said, mostly to himself. ”I said six.”

They stood back from him. At dawn he had asked this body for a step and given it nothing to build one from. His sealed skill built for other people’s need, out of what he knew.

So he did not ask. He remembered what his hands knew: two buckles at the foot and a strap below the knee, pulled a hole past comfortable. He had hung ceilings on drywall stilts. A stilt cannot stand by itself. All that keeps it up is somebody on top who is paying attention.

He had put in for legs once. In the first hour he was dead, with no hands and no throat to shout with, he had offered to take anything with legs, because legs could go and find out what happened to June. The last he knew, his wife was up on a curb in the rain with her sleeve torn in his hand. He had been waiting on legs ever since to learn the rest.

The wheels went first. Both axles drew up into him, and what came down was long and jointed, a stilt to every corner, each with a flat foot and a spring at the ankle. He had legs. They squeaked as they always had, and he had not expected to be so glad of a noise.

The rest he had built at dawn, a floor for six, walls, and his lid for a roof. This time he hung a door in the front, to open outward, to code, with his lock on it. The uprights that once strapped to his shins came up through the floor as two levers. Then the room knelt on folded legs, low enough to board.

Harl went in first and sat between the levers. Vera put her back to his cracked side, Istra’s plates rang across his floor, and Tess came last, smelling of pepper, and stopped in the doorway.

”I’ll have the door,” Tess said. ”One way out of a thing, I like to be standing in it.”

”On your feet, the rest of you,” Harl said. ”When it leans, lean against it. Up.”

He hauled both levers back and the knees opened under Dane’s floor, partway. The room came up into a crouch with the door open and stuck there, shaking.

Istra shifted a plate to keep her balance, and Harl’s knot pulled. One warm drop landed on Dane’s boards, ran into a joint, and he tasted it.

The hunger came all the way awake. It went through the room and found four hearts: a slow one in three beats at his cracked side, a heavy one at the levers, a quick one in the doorway, and the one that leaked. Names were no use to it. It took stock of the four and noted the one way out. There was no anger in it. It was closing up.

His door began to swing shut.

He told it to stop, but it had his lock on it, and his lock had never taken an order with a heart on the wrong side of it.

”It’s closing,” Tess said. Her back hit the door and her boots hit the frame. ”I’ve got it. I’ve... no. I’m no weight at all, Vera, I can’t hold it!”

Orders were no use, Dane thought. But a door needs none to stay open, only something in it, and he had hung enough doors to know where. Leave a thumb in the gap behind the hinges and a child’s push comes down on it like bolt cutters, and the door stops dead, wide open, on what is left of the thumb.

He had one thing in there to spend that was not a person, and he talked with it. He unrolled his tongue into the doorway past Tess’s boots, laid the thick of it behind the hinges, and let the door come.

It came with everything four hearts were worth to the hunger. He felt the tongue go flat, and something in the middle of it burst, and then he felt less than he should have.

The door stopped as wide as a man, with rain blowing in. The hunger leaned on the door, the door leaned on his tongue, and the room went on shaking and would not close.

”That’s his tongue,” Tess said, and took her hands off the door. ”He’s shut his own tongue in the hinges.”

At his cracked side Vera’s slow heart lost its count. She kept her place.

”Then I’m driving while he can bear it,” Harl said, and the lever on Dane’s good side went forward.

A leg came up. Harl did that much: the knee folded, the foot left the paving, and a corner of him swung out past the lip. But no driver sees through a floor. Where the foot came down was his to say, Dane thought.

He had heard five copies of himself land on the fallen roadbed, which lay piled against the pier a long stride below the lip. He picked a place clear of the scrap, reached, and put the foot there.

Stone came up through the foot into a leg. He put the room on it, four people and all. The ankle spring squeaked, and it held.

He had been carried, dragged, rolled and lowered since the day he died, and every yard of it had been somebody else’s idea. This was one square foot of wet paving, and he had picked it himself. He would have stood on it all morning.

Harl gave him the other lever. The second leg swung, the floor tipped toward the two places nobody had filled, and four people leaned against it. It wanted six. Two legs let go, and the room folded like a card table, slid down the rubble on its belly, and came apart along his crack.

It threw all four clear. The hunger counted four hearts on the fallen road, each still a person and inside nothing.

/==[ System: Shape Held ]==\\

| Source: your stilts

| Held: one step, one door open

| Then: fell over

\\==[ Closer ]==/

Dane lay in a heap and read it through. He had paid for those stilts himself, so the first line was fair. The last was the kindest word that office had spent on him.

The door had come off its frame and let go of his tongue. He tried it, and the end still moved. The middle had no feeling at all.

”One step, cupboard,” Saint Rust said, from what was left of Dane’s mouth. ”I’ve known cathedrals that managed fewer.”

Senn’s bar and Kril’s blades were coming down the rubble on the scout’s line, Dane’s splint knocking along with them.

”It’s built for six, and we gave it four,” Harl said from the rubble. ”It went over at the two empty places, and it never got its knees straight. But I measured the one stride. Sixty of those across open floor to the far wall. I can drive sixty, if the chest can stand sixty.”

Dane felt through his own heap for a stilt.

Behind the pier the House began dropping rooms into the cut by the dozen, and the grinding that had crept along the floor came round both sides of the pier at a run.

”Sixty paces, Vera Pike.” The calm voice came down off the far bank, out of the Harrow, which had lost its drum. Lord Thorne had been listening. ”And then me.”

Vera spent no voice on him.

”Who’s getting on?” she asked.