Hong Kong never felt so foreign, so inhospitable and unwelcoming. Not because anyone there made me feel like I didn't belong. As a matter of fact, when I touched down in the kid's room, I ensured no one knew I was there to begin with. Couldn't face Mom or Nanna or even GreatGram again, not after what I'd done.
What I was becoming.
I sank to the floor amid the gathering of objects, marble cold under my jeans, darkness through the window reminding me it was a day later than where I'd come from, lights still bright despite the early hours of morning in the sprawling city below. The transmuted kids, instead of greeting me as they always had, touched me with their power, tentative at first, but with growing confidence as they realized such a thing was possible. Through our ties to Viviana and my own growing control, they reached out for me and I flinched from them, not wanting them to see me, to see what I'd done, that I was becoming the very woman they feared and hated.