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

His lock tried to shut her in before Dane had finished being glad she stayed. One heart aboard was all a mimic’s lock needed. The door swung at Vera Pike where she stood in his doorway, smelling of chalk and rain, and Tess’s cord took the strain with a creak of wet hemp, and the door stopped short of her shoulder and shook there.

Blind as he was, he had the rest by ear. Rain drummed on his lid, a roof today, and ran down four stilts to Rookfall’s road, where he knelt at the top of a slab of fallen paving with no steps left in him. Behind him, across the flood, the House was tearing rooms off itself and throwing them in the water to make a way over.

A knuckle rapped his front wall low down by a stilt and stayed on the board to feel what came back.

”Dry through,” said Harl Fen, and his splint creaked as he straightened. ”I wouldn’t drive him a yard on that. An hour of this rain first. Two, if anybody asks me.”

An hour with nothing to carry, and Vera in his doorway for all of it. Dane wanted that hour badly.

Quick light steps went up the road and came back, and pepper came and went with them.

”An hour here?” Tess said. ”With that thing over the water building a bridge?”

”Not on running water, it isn’t,” said Senn Parr. Her bar came down on the paving, and her boot dragged after it. ”That gate runs till afternoon. And there’s a town at the top of this road about to be standing in my water, and nobody’s told it.”

”And Thorne’s machine?” Tess said.

”Downstream,” said Kril, whose blades were already scraping uphill.

Across the water the rafters were screaming from farther down the cut than before. The House had gone after the rooms the flood took from it, and Thorne’s machine had gone after the House.

Vera spoke from the doorway, in the whisper she had been down to since last night. ”Guild stable. Tell them Vera Pike sent you.”

”It’s your own town, Vera, and you couldn’t ask it the time,” Tess said. Her steps stopped in front of him. ”I’ll say your name for you. It’ll cost you.”

A coin rang on the paving at Tess’s feet. She let it lie long enough to make a point of it, and then she scraped it up off the wet stone.

Harl’s splint creaked past. ”His bench is seventeen inches, by the way,” he told the road. ”A bench wants eighteen.” Dane had built a few benches, and Harl was right.

Senn came to the doorway last. Her bar reached in past Vera and rested on the front bench, over the locker where her brother’s knife lay, and in the locker the knife went still.

”Keep it dry, chest,” Senn said, and took the bar away.

They went up the road in the rain. Istra’s three dead plates dragged on the paving behind the rest of her, and that was the sound Dane kept longest.

He drew his tongue back into the locker, torn end last, and laid what still worked of it along the knife. Then he pushed one thing at the steel with everything a torn tongue had: not a word, not for an hour.

The steel kept quiet long enough that he began to believe it.

”I was a soldier’s spare once, cupboard,” Saint Rust said from the locker. ”Nothing you two do will be news.”

None of it reached Vera. The knife talked to Dane alone, and always had. Then it can miss this, Dane thought, and coiled his tongue at the far end of the locker, off the steel.

Vera came in at last and sat down on his floor against the back wall. He felt her settle into his boards and give them all her weight.

Behind her, two of the wall’s boards moved together until they met, and the rain stopped coming through between them. The shape carried people who were awake and working, and when one of them stopped, it began to close on them a gap at a time. At dawn it had shut on all six.

The hunger heard the gap close and turned its whole attention on her heart.

Vera leaned her head back against the boards that had shut. ”Nothing closes around me,” she whispered.

It had been her rule from the start, and he had always kept it. Dane told the two boards to come apart again, and they stayed where the shape had put them. He wanted her boots off and her hands on his boards for some better reason than holding him together, with the door open the whole time, so that she could get up and walk out of it whenever she liked. The hunger wanted the door shut on her.

Vera got up. The lock pulled at the door, and for a bad moment he thought she was going out of it.

She went to his lock instead. Her wrapped hand found Tess’s knot and picked at it. Tess tied knots to keep, and it took Vera a while and some swearing before the hemp came loose and dropped on his floor.

The lock had the door then. It came round at her with the hunger behind it, and Dane caught it short of the frame and held it with nothing but himself. Holding it was the old kind of hard, the same as keeping his lid up over Toma’s hand at Rainhouse.

/==[ System: Technique Noted ]==\\

| Held Open: your door, one heart aboard, no cord

\\==[ Door: Yours ]==/

The door shook and stayed where he put it. He could feel how near the edge of himself that was. With a second heart aboard it would have shut on them both.

”It’s just you,” Vera whispered.

She stood there a while before she asked it. ”Still here?”

She had kept those two words back ever since he knocked yes to going with Thorne. A knock would only have said yes. He opened the door a hand wider, against the lock, and held it there.

Vera put her palm on its edge, flat, pushing it neither way. Then she sat on his bench and took her boots off.

They went down by the bench one at a time, and her bare feet came onto his floor, and Dane found out he had a floor that could feel. People had stood on it in boots the whole way over the cut, and he had felt them as weight. Two cold feet, and he was ticklish.

A board twitched under her heel before he could stop it. Vera stood where she was a moment, and then she set her heel down on the same board again, slowly, on purpose.

She crossed to his cracked side. Her shoulder had been in that crack all morning, and he waited for the shoulder. Her hands came instead, flat, one on each side, and stayed.

Under her hands the crack still buzzed, and he wanted them kept there. Against the wood the pulse in her palms came up. The hunger counted the change and leaned on the door with it, and Dane held the door with one part of himself and warmed the boards under her palms with another.

”Red,” she whispered into the crack, ”or three.”

It was their stop from long before this shape: red if either of them had the voice for it, three hard knocks if not. He knocked a floorboard down on its joist, once. Yes.

He leaned into her hands with all of him he could spare from the door, and a stilt’s knee took the shift badly and knocked. Not now, Dane thought at it. It knocked again, and a third time.

Her hands went still on him. ”Was that three?”

He knocked a floorboard down on its joist twice, as hard as the joist would take. No.

She laughed into his boards, hoarse, with her mouth against the wood to keep it down, and it would not keep down. When it let go of her she lay down along his cracked side, under his lid, and his walls began to close round her a board at a time.

”Let them,” Vera whispered.

He let them, and held the door.

After that the rain had the road to itself for a long while.

She fell asleep with one hand still flat against the crack. Her heart slowed, three beats and a long rest, and the hunger counted every one and wanted the next, and on every one the lock leaned on the door and he leaned back. All his walls were shut around her but the door. Tess’s cord lay on his floor where it had dropped.

The rain got into him. It ran down his roof and soaked into his boards and down his stilts, and he felt the steps coming back into him, slow and prickling, like feeling into a foot gone to sleep. His hinges ached from the holding long before the rain was done with him. Steps or no steps, nobody could have driven him a yard with a sleeper aboard.

Down the bank, a long way off, wood came grinding up out of the flood onto stone, a whole room’s worth of it, and stopped. The hunger found no heart in it. The House had a room on Rookfall’s side of the water.