She covers her bulbous, flattened face with both soft, wide hands. Toby wants to change back and escape at least this feeling of suffocation and have normal control of her breathing - why is it like laughing almost? it doesn't make sense - but knows by now that the tear fluids would linger and be stinging and painful in her throat and the long cavity of her nose. She has to ride this out.

"It's all so - it's so dead," she manages to say in a weird, strangled, high voice. "Even the sky. It's like being buried."