And is immediately stabbed by a lightning covered spear, shoving her back into the shaft.

Cherry clings to the spear automatically so that she doesn't fall back down the shaft. The lightning doesn't bother her, but the spear is weird. It's not entirely made of atoms, instead being partially comprised of interlocking wormholes.

Dauntless retracts his spear, sees Weeping Cherry clinging to the end of it, and extends it back into the elevator shaft.

"It doesn't seem to be affected by my Arclance," he calls to the trooper at the rooftop terminal.

"Dispatch says Armsmaster is on his way up. If you can keep it in the elevator shaft, he's got a sonic crystal disrupter that he thinks will work," the trooper replies.

Cherry gathers her wits, and uses the tip of the spear as a platform to launch herself to the other wall of the shaft. It took her a moment to realize that she doesn't need to leave via the door.

A moment later, she's through the far wall and launching herself off the side of the building.

Armsmaster, riding the top of the elevator, sees her leave and fires a shot with his sonic disruptor, making the building ring like a bell but doing no perceptible damage.

Miss Millitia, running out the front doors of the building and into the street below (where troopers stopped traffic and redirected it when the building went into lockdown), tries to hit her, but can't get a shot where the backdrop is clear.

And Weeping Cherry goes hurtling out into the air between buildings. It looks like she'll be able to grab onto the window of that building and maybe not break it and be able to scuttle up the outside.

She switches her radio broadcast to "I made it out! Thanks for being my witnesses," and then ends it. She turns optical camouflage back on, on the premise that maybe their scanner has a limited range which she can outpace, and drops her temperature to match the chilly January air through which she is sailing.

A moment later, Armsmaster steps out onto the roof and activates his density scanner. It catches something moving south for the briefest instant before she makes it out of range. He double checks that the building is clear, and radios his findings to the Console.

Weeping Cherry skips across the rooftops, throwing herself across the gap between buildings.

She takes a moment to just -- have nothing happening. That whole thing happened fast, relied on her reacting without time for rational thought, and now she's out.

When she has finished collecting herself, she is on an anonymous gravel rooftop on a four story residential building. She hops up on the ledge around the edge of the roof and takes in her surroundings. What she needs, is somewhere to hide.

She will feel a lot better about going toe-to-toe with people again when her forb has regenerated enough for her to operate at normal speed.

She briefly considers dropping into an anonymous alley and burying herself in the ground, but a more appealing prospect beckons her from the East. Because, while water won't perfectly mask the hyperdensity of a forb crystal (especially one growing into new spatial dimensions), it will do a lot to stop anyone from following her.

She resumes roof-hopping, and in short order she is sailing out over the clear, dark waters of the Bay. And then plop! She is safe under the waves.

She gathers the water she can reach and throws it behind her, propelling her further out into the bay. She lets herself sink to 10 meters or so below the waves, and then stays there.

For a while she drifts, and she heals, and she plans.

Eventually, sometime around midnight, she sends herself jetting out through the mouth of the bay and into the ocean. She makes her way a few tens of miles up the coast, and then surfaces near a small town notable only for having a lighthouse that made finding it easy.

She checks in on her forb's progress at decoding local radio traffic. It does not, unfortunately, match the relevant telephony standard from her world. But she's pretty sure she's isolated at least some of the frequencies used for cellular data.

She switches her vision to radio-spectrum, and picks out a local celltower. She hits it with a packet of tight-beam radio that might be the correct authentication packet for a phone becoming associated with a new tower.

Her first guess isn't right. Nor is her twenty third.

But even in the quiet of the pre-dawn, people's cellphones are exchanging data with the three towers she can see from here, and eventually she has enough data to brute-force the handshake protocol, and then the encryption, and then the authentication.

Probably the first thing that she should check is an official government website of some kind, but what she actually looks for first is news about her.

PRT ENE Fails to Control Rogue Tinkertech

Tinkertech Radio Broadcast Disables Brockton Bay

PRT Issues Tinkertech Advisory

Interdimensional Visitor or Dangerous Hoax?

Okay. That is ... not ideal.

She thinks about where to go from here. She could just lurk in the ocean until her forb is fully repaired, and then it would only take another few months to exponentiate hard enough to cover the entire world in fixity fields and fix (hah!) everything.

But.

This world is strange, and that plan lands better, with fewer people hurt, if she has a chance to introduce herself, and to explain. And Weeping Cherry is not, fundamentally, the kind of person to sit quietly and wait for other people to solve her problems.

She checks whether this world has an equivalent of the U.N.

It looks like it does, with a headquarters in New York, just like she remembers.

Dragon did not, herself, notice the anomalous logs from a celltower in Maine. She cannot actually be everywhere all at once.

But when a dangerous piece of self-replicating tinkertech escaped the PRT ENE, she directed her various monitoring programs to focus on the area. So when she reviews the logs of a series of garbled transmissions and dropped packets that slowly resolve into a handshake for a phone SIM that was never issued, she has a good guess for what might have caused it.

She sends a tentative probe -- just a SYN scan, to see if the emulated device has any open services.

And Weeping Cherry's forb's patched network communications suite logs the unexpected connections and pops up an alert for her.

She decides she's done enough poking for now, and slips back beneath the waves, and off to the south.

And in another timeline, Tattletale has a late night and a strenuous morning.

By the time dawn breaks, Weeping Cherry is skimming along the floor of the East River in New York, trying to spot U.N. headquarters from several meters underwater.

When her attempted intrusion failed, Dragon traced all the activity originating at that tower. So she had a good guess at both Cherry's destination, and based on the timing of her escape from Brockton Bay, she has a good estimate of Cherry's water speed.

Which is why Legend is up at the crack of dawn, floating in the sky over lower Manhattan.

The treaty that establishes the UN headquarters in New York specifically prohibits American law-enforcement personnel from entering to apprehend someone without the permission of the Secretary General. It's the same here as it is in her world of origin (she checked).

So when she (quietly) surfaces and slips up the bank of the east river and into the Conference and Visitors Center, she's not expecting any trouble.

Four hours previously:

Rebecca leans on her hand. Her tiredness is feigned, but Director Piggot's tiredness is not.

"And Dragon thinks it's headed to the UN building? Why?"