I woke up sore.

My first thought was that I'd caught something. Some farm germ, some infection, because everything down there was irritated and wrong in a way I hadn't felt since a bad reaction to a perfumed body wash in ninth grade. Infection. Treatable. Antibiotics.

It took me a full thirty seconds of lying there to remember that infections don't explain feathers.

That's the embarrassing part, honestly. After the egg and the tail and the whole breakdown on the toilet lid, I'd slept like a baby and woken up thinking yeast. My brain had filed the entire chicken situation under "later" and clocked out.

Then I sat up too fast and the blanket slid off my feet.

My feet were not my feet.

Three toes each. The pinky toe was just gone, absorbed sometime in the night, and the three that were left had stretched out long and thick, ending in curved yellow claws. The skin had gone scaly, thousands of tiny overlapping plates, hard and dry and faintly warm under my fingers. My ankles had thickened. The tendons stood out in ropes. And when I flexed my toes, all three of them moved together, smooth and coordinated, like one mechanism instead of three separate digits.

That was the part that got me. I could have handled claws. It was the way they moved.

I got off the bed and took a few steps, and my walk had changed without asking me. A little bob, a little hitch, like my legs had already finished negotiating with the rest of me.

I made a sound. Somewhere between a squeak and a word.

I sat back down and pulled my knees to my chest and checked the rest, because of course I did. The feathers were still there between my legs, glossy black over white down, exactly like yesterday. Nothing new down there. And when I reached behind me, my fingers found the tail. It had grown, but not much. Still small. A short fan of stiff black feathers, maybe the length of my hand, with that green sheen when the light hit it right. It twitched when I touched it.

I decided very firmly not to think about that.

I found thick socks, which hid the claws if you didn't look too hard, and pulled my long skirt down over the tail, and went to breakfast.

Rayan was already …