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

The hand lifting the water glass was not Vera’s.

She knew where her own hand should have been: curled around a ward crystal in a cold room above the Rookfall stable, with ink drying between two fingers. This one was warm. Human. Blue stained the side of its thumb.

A wet receipt clung to the bottom of the glass.

The hand peeled it free before Vera could make the fingers stop.

Six tables crowded the little restaurant. Two red stools showed cracks through their seats. Rain dragged the lights outside into long white streaks across the window, yet no wick burned in any lamp. A paper sign beside the register announced that a card machine was broken, though Vera had no idea what the machine or the card ought to be.

The body did.

So did the man across the table.

”You hid it under a clear glass,” the borrowed mouth said.

”I panicked.”

His answer came too quickly. The woman whose body held Vera knew that tone, and the recognition arrived with an ache Vera had not earned.

She reached for mana. Nothing answered. No warmth in her channels, no ward shape waiting behind her eyes. Her sleeping shoulder could almost feel the low beam above her bed, but the other woman’s fingers were already flattening the receipt beside a plate.

The cook slammed a door. A dark bottle skidded toward the table’s edge. The man caught it without looking, then left his hand there as if holding the bottle still might hold the conversation with it.

The woman took the last dumpling, bit it in half, and put the rest on his plate.

”I’m full,” he said.

”You’ve been watching it since it stopped steaming.”

He ate it.

Ginger and vinegar flooded June’s mouth while Vera strained behind it. Hunger eased in the borrowed body. Across the table, the man’s shoulders loosened by a degree the woman noticed because she had spent years noticing.

The woman waited until he swallowed, then tapped the damp receipt. ”The car coughed after you turned it off. How many Saturdays?”

”Two.”

”Which ones?”

He worried a grain of rice loose with his nail. ”Raymond’s kid is sick, and Mark already covered-”

”Which ones?”

The second question came out lower. Not louder.

Vera tried to bite it back. The mouth moved around her resistance.

”The next two,” he said.

The receipt folded lengthwise under the inked thumb. The hand opened it again and pressed the crease flat.

”The second one is ours.”

The man looked down. ”I know.”

His nail returned to the grain of rice. He drew breath to explain again, stopped, and pressed it into paste.

A phone buzzed beside the woman’s bowl. Vera understood none of the device and all of the irritation that crossed the borrowed shoulders.

The man glanced at its glowing face. ”It’s over the cabinet, on the red hook.”

The woman’s thumb hovered. Then she turned the phone facedown.

”They can use their eyes tomorrow.”

He looked at her then.

The woman reached across the damp receipt and put her inked thumb against his knuckle.

”I had you beside me and missed you anyway.”

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. At last he turned his hand beneath hers and held on.

”I should’ve told you.”

Vera pushed for release; June’s fingers tightened. She pushed for a firmer hold; they remained still. The warmth belonged to two strangers, and Vera had been placed inside it like a thief.

Then rain struck her face and wiped the restaurant away. Black pavement shone under impossible streetlights. The man walked on the curb side while the woman’s anger still lived in her chest. She bumped him toward the storefront. At the next puddle, he drifted back.

The crossing signal counted down from fourteen. A delivery van waited at red. Its driver sagged behind the wheel with one hand pressed to his forehead. His head jerked up, then fell again.

The woman stopped watching the signal and watched him.

”I see him,” the man said. ”Wait.”

The white walking figure lit. People moved behind them. The woman’s foot stepped off the curb.

The van’s brake lights went dark.

”June, back.”

The name struck through Vera from the place where June had heard it.

The van crept across the painted line. Its engine roared.

Vera clawed for a ward and found June’s bare hand in the rain. The man seized June’s sleeve above the elbow. Cloth tore. His shoe slipped. June’s fist knotted in his coat, and the receipt collapsed in his other hand.

The van caught him below the ribs. His coat tore out of June’s fist as his heels left the road, and the windshield burst white around him.

Vera woke choking on somebody else’s scream.

The ward crystal had cut a hard oval into her palm. Her breath smoked in the stable room. A horse kicked the wall below, and another answered with a snort. When Vera sat up, the low beam caught her shoulder and knocked her back onto the mattress.

Two fingers against the sore place found a bruise exactly where the beam had struck. Vera planted both feet on the floor and named the room before she could name herself.

”Vera Pike.”

The crystal lay in her open hand. Its cloudy center still held the wrong-side thumbprint left by the contactless scan, but the fine lines around it had sharpened overnight. She turned it toward the window. The lines bent inward, then returned when she changed the angle.

It offered no image, voice, or direction.

She set it on the washstand, beyond easy reach, and pulled the nearest report page onto her knee.

Unknown city. Body called June. Full sight, taste, touch, and movement. No mana. No control of hand or mouth.

She listed causes beneath it: scan feedback, soul-pattern echo, memory graft, retained-object contact, dungeon interference, exhaustion.

Dream distortion went beneath exhaustion.

Her pen stalled over the shared dumpling and the hand across the receipt. She drew a line beneath the facts instead. Whatever else the memory was, those pieces had belonged to June before they became evidence in Vera’s room.

Someone knocked once, waited, then knocked again.

”Vera?”

Tess. No joke through the door. That frightened Vera more than one would have.

”Come in.”

Tess entered with two tin cups and her coat fastened one button wrong. Her braid had surrendered behind one ear. She looked first at Vera, then at the untouched boots, the scattered pages, and the crystal keeping its distance on the washstand.

”Dream?” she asked.

”Someone else’s memory.”

Tess put one cup within reach and kept her eyes on Vera. ”Do you know whose?”

”The body was June’s. The man was her husband, I think.”

”Did he see you?”

”No.” Vera rubbed the groove in her palm. ”He called for June, and I heard it from where she heard it.”

Tess’s grip tightened around her own cup. She pulled the chair over, but instead of sitting close, she placed it between Vera and the washstand and settled there.

”What do you need from me?”

The answer should have been simple. Vera looked at the steam lifting past Tess’s crooked button.

”Tell me why you’re dressed for the dungeon before breakfast.”

Tess exhaled through her nose. ”Brant sent me up. Your hazard room appeared on the morning board as closed for floor repair. It wasn’t listed when we came in last night, and there is no transfer docket.”

Vera picked up the tea. One swallow gave her hot water and nothing else.

”You forgot the leaves.”

Tess tasted hers. Her eyes closed. ”I did.”

The mistake sat between them. Tess Crowe could price three contraband poisons while being chased. Tea usually asked less of her.

Vera set the cup down. ”They moved the chest after my seal.”

”Or they want us to believe they did.”

”Both require us to see the old room before a repair crew destroys the trail.”

Tess glanced toward the cased chalk at Vera’s belt, then away. ”Brant said you’d say that.”

”Did he also say I would be barefoot?”

Tess nudged one boot against Vera’s ankle. ”He has limits.”

Vera’s mouth twitched before she could stop it. She pulled on the first boot. By the second, her hands had stopped shaking enough to manage the laces.

”Bring Brant and Holt,” she said. ”We inspect from outside my marked threshold. Nobody crosses the red line until Brant clears it.”

”And the crystal?”

Vera lifted it by the edges. The wrong-side print clouded, sharpened, and told her nothing. She slid it into its padded case and buckled the flap.

”It comes with us, in the case.”

Tess opened the door.

Vera folded the report once and put it in her inner coat pocket.

”Tess.”

Tess looked back.

”Her name was June. Mine is still Vera.”

”I know.”

They went to find Brant and Holt.