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

The first thing Dane Rook learned about standing up was that the rain landed late. It fell past his walls and hit stone a good while afterward, and that was how a blind mimic chest found out he was tall. He was a room on four drywall stilts this morning, six people aboard, at full height on the floor of Rookfall’s storm cut. Under his front legs the House had opened the first of its rooms, and the rest were grinding down the cut. The far wall was sixty steps off. He wanted all six people to walk back out at the end of them, and he meant to enjoy the walk while it lasted.

A lump of the fallen road dropped off his underside, and he timed it. That put him level with an upstairs window, for whatever a view was worth to him. A wind that did not reach the ground leaned on his wall, and he swayed and came back, because Istra lay along his floor on her six iron plates for a keel.

In the locker under the front bench, Nate’s knife scraped.

”Well,” Saint Rust said. ”Somebody’s a home.”

Dane took that for a passed inspection.

”Nobody’s driven one of these,” said Harl Fen, a lever in each fist. ”So when he leans, you lean the other way, same as... no. Better than last time.”

A leg came up off the rubble, and that was Harl’s doing, every inch. The foot swung out over the open room. The click he found the ground with was dead for sixty breaths, as always after he spoke, so he let the foot go down where Harl sent it. It went on going down so long that he had time to think the man had driven him off a ledge before it found stone. Six people leaned the other way, a spring squeaked, and the room went a stride toward Rookfall and stayed up.

/==[ System: Form Unlocked ]==\\

| Wayhouse Form

| It walks only when someone drives it

| It carries six, all awake and working

| One door must stay open

| Source: your stilts, and a job-site lunch trailer

| Control: 0.10%, unchanged

\\==[ SSS Mimic Skill: Still Sealed. Still Working. ]==/

Wayhouse was the knife’s old word for a shelter that walked the roads and let its guests out again. The rules under it read like the placard by a trailer door: capacity six, driver required, this door to remain open while occupied. Every big job had a lunch trailer, a tin box on blocks with six places at one table and a door propped with a bucket of joint compound because the latch stuck. He had eaten beside that latch for years.

A break room on stilts. He had never been prouder of anything.

Harl gave him the other lever, where the room had folded last time, and it held.

”Two,” Harl said. ”That’s the record.”

After that Harl drove, muttering slopes, and a leg rose when a lever said so. Dane had asked for legs in the first hour he was dead, and what had come was a company vehicle, with a driver assigned and no personal use. On legs he had carried nothing with a pulse farther than one step, and he would have carried these six as far as the road went.

Two nights of rain had soaked him through. The legs drank it a stride at a time, until he creaked like a deck in August, with maybe sixty steps in him and no sixty-first. His cracked side opened as he dried. Vera Pike had her shoulder in the crack, and whenever it gaped she pushed deeper.

Below, the House slid room after room under him and opened them, a floor of warm doors that kept whatever crossed a sill. His feet came down on the strips of wall between. One opened late, and its sill bit the edge of a foot already coming down. He had still never crossed one. The sill held on anyway. Harl hauled for nothing while the room began to lean over its own stuck foot. Pepper went past the bench, quick and light. Tess hung out of the doorway by the cord she had tied it open with and kicked the top of the stuck leg until the foot skidded off onto stone.

”That room owes me a boot heel,” Tess said.

Around the fortieth step the click came back into his mouth, and four words with it. He threw a click down to hear his own feet, and it came back from so far below that he threw another for the pleasure of it.

”Wall’s early,” Harl said. ”I measured him in a crouch.”

In that wall was the gate wheel that flooded the cut, and running water made the House let go. On the bank above stood the Harrow, the machine of Vera’s patron, Lord Thorne, waiting for them to finish walking to it.

”The wheel’s a yard past his doorframe,” said Senn Parr. ”Put the door on it, Harl. I’ve a bar’s length and my own arm, so near enough won’t do.”

She took a turn of Tess’s cord round her waist and leaned out of his door over the cut until the hemp creaked.

Every door on the House opened inward, Dane thought, so nobody got back out. His was tied open, with the sister of the first man he had killed hanging her whole weight out of it.

The bar went through the hub. She threw herself on it, and the wheel went over.

Up the cut a gate came off its seat, and everything standing behind it came down the channel at once. Senn swung back in before the water took Dane at the ankles and climbed to the knees and went on under his floor. People built on stilts for exactly this, he thought. He had never, alive or dead, been built right for the site he was on, and he was now.

Behind him the House let go, room from room, and they rolled down the cut with their hosts still talking. He turned his lock toward the shoulder in his crack. Tell me.

”It’s working, Dane,” Vera said, hoarse. ”The ones that opened for us are full, and the water’s shoving their doors out the wrong way. One room in four. Those are gone for good.”

His click found the way up: the end of the fallen road, a slab of paving leaning on the far bank. Kril, still half out of the door on two blades, cast his line up it, and the loop took a post at the top. When the flood shoved, the line held. Harl drove him up while Dane clicked out each foothold ahead of the foot.

Above them one of the Harrow’s three feet scraped for a lip that had dropped into the water, and the machine stepped back from the edge.

”I have lost a drum, Vera Pike,” Thorne said through it, calm, with no breath in the words. ”And now some ground. I have not lost interest.”

”That’s sixty,” Harl said, as the last foot came up out of the water onto Rookfall’s road. ”I said sixty.” He eased both levers, and the room knelt with its door open on the rain.

Nobody got up. Harl’s hands came off the levers and Vera’s shoulder eased. Somebody sighed. The draft through his back wall stopped, because a gap there had drawn itself shut, and he had not told it to.

Dane had heard that sigh at dawn, a moment before this room shut on all six in the dark. All awake and working, the rule said, and the work was done. The best thing about the lunch trailer, he thought, was that it never kept anybody. When the half hour was gone, somebody stood in the propped door and said so. He was dry as kindling, with no step left in him, and speaking would kill the click again on a road with Thorne’s machine on it. And he wanted all six to stay.

So he ran the live end of his tongue up the door to his lock, the dead middle dragging behind.

Dane said, ”Last stop. Everybody out.”

It came out mashed. Something tore where the live part of the tongue met the dead. The click went out of his mouth, and his cracked side began to shake.

For two breaths there was only rain. Then Harl barked, and Tess went after him, and a scraping noise had to be Kril. Istra’s plates rang with it. Senn held out longest and lost. Vera had no voice left to laugh with, and he got hers anyway, through the crack, where her shoulder shook.

”Sixty steps I drive him,” Harl said, when he could, ”and he’s the one who gets to call the stop.”

Then they did as they were told. A splinted boot went out over his doorframe, then pepper, blades, plates and a bar, and Vera’s shoulder left the crack last. The hunger counted every heart out into the rain and could do nothing but count.

/==[ System: Crossing Complete ]==\\

| Steps: sixty, all driven

| Aboard: six in, six out

\\==[ Guests: Departed. As Intended. ]==/

All driven, it said, which it had not needed to put in. But the System had filed him under refused and under misused, and never once under intended. He knelt on the road with nobody in him.

Across the water, rafters screamed. The House hated to lose a room, and it had begun tearing them off itself and laying them in the flood.

Chalk came back over his doorframe, and the smell of air after lightning. Vera had been the last one out. She stood in his doorway with the rain behind her.

”Everybody out,” she said. ”I heard you.” And she stayed.