When John draws down the first crumpled balloon, he freezes at the sight of its burden. That creased sheet of notebook paper is familiar, and when he unfolds it, so too are the words:

song of my soul my voice is dead
die thou unsung as tears unshed

In his mind, dark stars wheel over the city. He can smell damp island caverns and the streets of Carcosa.

John crumples the note in his fist, and pretends that his hand does not shake.

For the rest of the month, he is alert as a hunting dog. Each time he spots one of those pages, whether sitting on a convoy table or peeking out of someone's bag, he waits for an opening. For any distraction. Then he tries to palm the note and slip away, intent on destroying the evidence at first opportunity.

But these sleights of hand were more Arthur's domain than his own. He is less subtle than he thinks.

The storm builds. John can feel it in limbs he does not possess, in the urge to twist and coil. It is like the moonlight madness, so he suspects this is a cycle, reliable as the movement of alien suns across the sky. There is some comfort in that: a cycle need not be measured in Earth-hours to be comprehensible to him. Like the blue dawn in the Dreamlands, it will come when it comes.

Nor does the prospect of sprouting teeth and tentacles frighten him. Privately, it's the opposite. When madness takes the Convoy, he would like to wear a more powerful form, so long as Arthur's body emerges unharmed by moonset.

But he resents the half-steps, the lingering corruption. He resents the glossy black feathers that speckle Arthur's skin, the grand eagle wings edged in iridescent gold. He often stops to glare at his own black-scaled hands, the curved talons which adorn each finger.

He is not clumsy with these. The wings, the talons, he moves more gracefully than Arthur's human legs. But the changes have forced him to go shirtless, and thus put too much on display: Arthur's skinny ribs, the slash and toothy bite mark at his belly, the gunshot scars over his stomach and chest. John has scavenged lengths of yellow fabric in half a dozen shades, and wears these as cloak and cowl, always hooded over his face.

Some days, these threadbare robes are clean. Others, they are speckled with blood from where he's plucked at feathers and picked at scales, furious at such corruption of Arthur's body. Only his left arm is always glossy-feathered and untouched.

John has learned what happens when he gets caught in the rain. So he waits nervously for the gaps between squalls, hunched in the safety of his truck or taking shelter in a crumbling ruin. Anything to stay dry.

Each time the rain stops, he picks his way through the field of Husks. He crouches, grim and harried as a graverobber, to lay his left hand upon a silver corpse. Always he hisses a gasp as though burned, recoils, and stalks away again.

Should he spot anyone else scavenging nearby, he tries to act casual. He waits out the rain in an abandoned building, stalling for privacy, acting as though nothing has happened at all.