Catherine awoke desperate for water, Not in the sense of thirst, but the burning need to escape the pain exposure to the dry air was causing. She stumbled out of her shelter on clumsy, mutating limbs. Her vision was fuzzy, but she was driven by a burning desire to get into the water. The force of gravity was weighing heavily upon her as she fell to the ground, unable to push herself back up with arms that were retreating into her increasingly streamlined body while losing their hands and fingers.
The last few dozen feet were covered by a writhing, desperate beast crawling on her belly while sucking up oxygen through the blowhole that had emerged at the top of her hairless head as her neck disappeared and her mouth widened with an array of sharp teeth for tearing meat.
Relief flooded every pore in Catherine's body as she plunged into the icy, but somehow comfortable, waters that buoyed her up. She noticed that the dead orca's body had fallen back into the water and instinctively tore at it, consuming chunks of raw flesh to fuel her transformation without considering that she was performing the most intimate act of cannibalism--eating a creature that shared her identical DNA.