Backstory

The barn on the hill had no chickens in it for years, which was the first clue. The second clue was that the hens it eventually housed all entered through a door that only opened at midnight, and none of them ever came back out as hens. The Stealth Chicken was recruited there: trained in shadow-walking, dust-step discipline and the ancient art of not being where the light is.

It clucks in Morse code. This is not a quirk. This is procedure. Every “bok” you cannot hear is a message you were not meant to receive, and every silence between them is a signature that the farm’s intelligence staff — a slightly worried cat — has never managed to trace.

When idle, the Stealth Chicken is invisible. Not camouflaged, not sneaky — simply absent from your perception until it decides otherwise. The farm learns of its presence the way one learns of a draft: suddenly, quietly, and slightly too late. Its cover only breaks when something makes a sound it cannot ignore — and sound, mercifully, is the one thing its training never taught it to survive.