The coop smelled like the coop. Some things never change.

I took the basket and started collecting, and I was doing okay right up until I picked up an egg that someone had apparently decorated personally. I nearly lost my breakfast into the straw. Then a worse thought arrived, fully formed: my eggs come from the same place. I put the basket down and breathed through my mouth for a while.

That's when Rayan said my name. Just my name. I turned around and he was standing in the middle of the coop with his hands jammed in his pockets, looking like a man about to defuse a bomb.

"I have to tell you something," he said. "Privately. As private as it gets in a chicken coop."

"Rayan—"

"No, let me. Okay." He took a breath and it came out shaky. "Please don't laugh. And please don't scream."

His hands were trembling. I'd known Rayan for four years and I'd seen him nervous maybe twice, and never like this. Whatever he was about to say, he'd been carrying it around all morning, probably all night.

"I won't laugh," I said.

He pulled his shirt over his head, then unzipped his shorts and let them drop.

"OH MY GOD, RAYAN!" I yelled, and clapped my hand over my own mouth, because we were twenty feet from the farmhouse. "You too?!"

He blinked at me. "Wait. Too?"

Because there it was. The same sleek black feathers over white down, glossy, covering everything that used to be his business. And I'm not going to pretend I did a full survey, but what I could see had gone smaller, tucked up close and fluffed around like something out of a nature documentary. Redesigned. Streamlined. Not human anymore in any sense a doctor would recognize.

"Turn around," I said.

He turned, and I saw the rest. His tailbone had pushed out into a short fan of feathers, same stage as mine, but not black. Red. Deep glossy red with copper coming in along the edges, the first curl of what would eventually be that big proud fountain roosters carry around like a flag.

"There's more," he said. His voice cracked on it. "My legs."

He stepped out of his shorts and lifted one foot. The yellow scaling was there, same as mine, creeping up his shin in an uneven tide. But on the inside …