Haley stood at the bus stop, shifting her weight from foot to foot, trying to ignore the dull pressure building low in her belly.

It had started on the walk from her parents' house. A heaviness. A fullness that made her walk with her legs slightly apart, waddling without meaning to. She knew what it meant. Her body was making another egg.

No, no, no. Not here. Not now.

She checked her phone. The bus was five minutes late. Then ten. Other people waited too, so she knew she hadn't misread the schedule. A woman nearby sighed loudly and said something about a car accident on the main line. "They're rerouting. Could be another twenty minutes."

Twenty minutes.

Haley's stomach clenched, a deep cramp that radiated through her pelvis and made her gasp. Her cloaca throbbed — a hot, insistent pulse that she could feel with every heartbeat. She pressed her thighs together, but that only made it worse. The pressure was building, something large and hard shifting inside her, moving down a channel that shouldn't exist but absolutely did. She remembered the last time — the agony, the stretching, the terror of that first egg pushing through flesh that had never been meant to accommodate such a thing.

And this one felt bigger.

I can't do this here. I can't.

She looked around frantically. The street was busy enough that people would notice if she started acting strange. The bus shelter's bench was hard and unforgiving. She imagined squatting on it, pushing, and the thought made her want to die.

Then she saw it. A narrow alley between two buildings, half-hidden by an overflowing dumpster. Dark. Private.

She didn't think. She just moved.

Her talons scraped against the pavement as she hurried, the sound loud in her ears. The alley smelled like rotting garbage and stale urine, but she didn't care. She found a spot behind the dumpster where the wall created a small alcove, hidden from the street. An old stack of newspapers lay on the ground, damp and yellowed.

She dropped to her knees, then froze. Her hands were shaking. Her whole body was shaking.

This is insane. I'm in an alley. I'm about to lay an egg in an alley.

But another cramp seized her, doubling her over. It was worse than before — a deep, grinding pressure that made her vision blur. She fumbled with …