I woke up feeling very tired. Every muscle ached, deep and dull, like the day after helping Jason move apartments. Except Jason had never made my ribs feel hollow.

I tried to sit up and my body didn't cooperate. My arms wouldn't push. They folded. They flapped.

"Oh no," I whispered, and even my whisper came out wrong, breathy and whistle-thin.

I looked down at myself. Wings. Real wings, folded against my sides, layered in black feathers that shone green and purple when the dawn light caught them. My chest was a smooth round breast of feathers. My legs, when I kicked the blanket off, were yellow and scaled, ending in three long toes with blunt claws. My whole body was a chicken's body. A big one, sure, still bigger than any hen I'd seen in the coop, but unmistakably a hen.

I tumbled off the bed and landed in a crouch that my legs absorbed perfectly, like they'd done it a thousand times. Waddling to the mirror on the wardrobe door, I got my first full look.

A giant chicken with a human head stared back at me. My face was still my face. Everything below the neck was not.

And under my tail — I twisted to check — my rear was a mess of matted feathers, dirty, smelling like an actual coop, because I had been producing actual bird droppings for days now. Beneath the messy feathers I caught a glimpse of my cloaca, pale and ridged and real. That was where the eggs would come from. That was where eggs had already come from. My first proper clutch was going to come out of there.

Then my brain caught up with a worse thought: I hadn't seen Rayan since yesterday evening. His bed was empty. Made, even. He'd made his bed, which he never did, and vanished.

Outside, a rooster crowed. Perfect, full-throated, deafening.

That wasn't the old rooster. That was too clear, too practiced. Something in my chest went tight and fluttery, and I decided to believe it was worry.

Getting out of the room was a comedy. My wings were useless little stubs against the door handle, and it took me several tries of hooking, slipping, cursing (which came out as an annoyed brrrrk) before the latch gave. In the hallway I fell over twice before I found the rhythm …