"I can change to look like different humanoid forms (misleading truth)," she offers. "I don't normally look like this (true). I mean, I normally change my looks fairly often (true). I like having freckles (true). Sometimes I'll sit in front of a mirror and move them around my face (misleadingly true)."

He exchanges a look with the PRT Trooper.

"I think we're almost done. Is there anything else about yourself or your circumstances that you think I would want to know?"

"Well, yeah! (true)" she exclaims. "I think there are probably a lot of things about me that you would want to know (true). But I don't want to share all of them (true). I mean, for example, I bet you'd probably want to know that shapeshifting means I don't need to wear a bra (true), and I don't really want to talk about my sex life on the record (false)."

You know what? He came here because it might have been a Cauldron matter, but San Antonio is perfectly capable of handling this without him.

"Okay, I think we're done here. Officer Fitzpatrick will escort you back to your temporary lodgings while we look this over, and we may have further questions for you as we determine how to handle your case. It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Yu."

"And you as well, sir. (false)"

She lets herself be escorted back, and then checks in with Xanthoceras to catch her up. They brainstorm next steps, and Xanthoceras slips through the straight of Gibraltar.

Later that day, a review of Yew's case pops up in front of a thinker who can spot connections between incident reports. He links her to Weeping Cherry's incident from a few weeks ago.

"They're both named after trees," he says on the conference call that this causes. "Yes, I'm sure. It's obvious."

The P.R.T.'s internal networks are surprisingly well secured — they actually have mandatory lattice-based public key cryptography, presumably some Thinker or Tinker's answer to Shor's Algorithm. But Yew has a lot of time on her hands. They are really taking their time about interrogating her more, and there's a fiber-optic that runs right past her room.

She doesn't want to play her hand by actively making requests, but eavesdropping on the data that happens to pass near her is totally fair game.

And she's bored.

So she knows almost as soon as the local PRT office does, when the report about her is made.

"... they're not going to get me a legal identity, are they?" she asks Xanthoceras.

"Nope," her other self agrees.

"I'm going to break out," Yew decides.

"'kay. Be safe."

Yew goes sideways through the wall. Doors are for people who don't deserve to keep the element of surprise.

She tucks and rolls over a surprised P.R.T. officer's head, grabbing onto an I-beam and throwing herself up and out, at an angle that takes her in a flat arc over the city's skyline.

She has plenty of extra mass, so she releases a thick cloud of water vapor as she exits the building, hopefully somewhat obscuring her path.

"... and she has a tap on the PRT network," a different Thinker adds almost immediately as an after-meeting action item.

Eidolon is across the state, helping fight a fire in an oil field. By the time he puts it out and switches for a teleportation power, she's gone.

"... sorry to call you again so soon, but the P.R.T. is really putting their full attention on this. I've been asked to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip to a few different cities in the U.S. to try and get more information."

Eve has a silent conversation with her boyfriend.

"Alright — I can be at the airport in ... call it six hours. Can I bring a plus one?"

"Rose, with how freaked out the Chief Director is, I think you could bring a plus twelve. I'm emailing you your tickets."

"Alright everyone. Thank you all for coming. Explain to me, please, how it is that we manage to lose a piece of extremely dangerous rouge tinkertech somewhere in America for an entire month," Rebecca says, her fingers laced in front of her.

"We think she may have an anti-Thinker power," the think tank representative responds, which is their way of saying 'I don't know, but I'm too smart to not know things unless superpowers are involved'.

"For one thing, she doesn't appear to be the result of a power expression, even though that is obviously nonsense. For another, thinkers trying to determine the location of 'Weeping Cherry' are equally likely to say that she's in India vs the location of 'Yew'. Finally, 'Yew' is definitely within the continental US, but she's either moving too fast or somehow employing a stranger power, because we have not been able to narrow things down beyond that."

"So have we been able to put anything together through conventional means?"

Director Brown, of the Houston PRT, makes an annoyed frown.

"In a word — no. Not only have we not found the bugs it must have in the PRT system, but it more or less vanished immediately into the city."

"I have reassigned Armsmaster to attempt to build a device that can track Weeping Cherry, but he reports only minimal progress, without a known sample to base things on," Director Piggot adds.

"... and that's basically all the useful information from that meeting," Zebrawood summarizes. "So, in short, we've managed to remain pretty much below their radar. If there are no questions, Yellow Birch, you have a report on civilian communications?"

"I've gotten us an array of social media accounts, and started building a network," she reports, sitting up from her place on one of the overlarge bean-bag chairs.

Meetings with her other selves were never very formal.

"Overall, things are surprisingly normal. The PRT has been pushing their narrative, but without any appearances from us to reinforce it, people largely aren't paying attention. If we can continue avoiding presenting as 'dangerous Tinkertech', I think we should have relatively few problems."