I was scrolling through my phone, trying to distract myself from the slow crawl of time. The search history was a graveyard of desperation: how to reverse genetic modification, chicken transformation cure, what happens when you lay an egg. Nothing useful. Just a bunch of forum posts about people who were also turning into birds, which I was ninety percent sure were all trolls.

Then my skin started to prickle.

I looked down at my arm and watched in horror as dozens of tiny bumps rose across my skin, each one tipped with a dark spot. Pinfeathers. I knew what they were before I even processed it. The same ones I'd seen on Ms. Gibson's tailbone yesterday, except these were spreading across my arms, my shoulders, my stomach.

I gasped and looked over at Ms. Gibson, but she was hunched over her workstation, scribbling notes, completely absorbed. Good. I didn't want her watching this.

The itching wasn't the problem, though. The problem was the heat.

It started low in my belly, radiating down to my cloaca. That familiar, terrible ache. The one I'd been trying to ignore since I woke up this morning. My body didn't care about my embarrassment.".

I shifted on the sofa, trying to find a position that didn't make it worse, and that's when my legs just... moved. Without my permission, they slid forward, bending at the knee so my feet ended up on either side of my body. I was sitting like a chicken. Belly down, legs tucked under me, talons peeking out on either side.

And god, it was comfortable.

I looked at my yellow scaly feet, so close to my face, and felt a wave of dizziness. I was a bird. I was actually, genuinely becoming a bird.

But the heat was worse than the horror.

I glanced at Ms. Gibson again. Still working. Not looking.

My hand moved on its own, sliding down between my legs. I told myself I was just checking. Just making sure everything was still okay down there. But my fingers found my cloaca already slick, already open, and I pushed inside without thinking.

The sensation hit me like a wave. I gasped, my eyes fluttering shut. It was so much. So different from what I remembered. My fingers sank deeper, and I realized with a distant shock that I'd gotten my whole …