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?"

"She traced its network activity, and apparently it looked up a lot of information on itself, the UN, and not much else. So, it's a guess, but we should still probably either declare an emergency or get the Secretary General up to speed."

"At this time of morning, we would be lucky to get his deputy. Your report said that Armsmaster thought it was self-repairing and might be able to self-replicate. How sure is he?"

"Very sure, ma'am. He said that it was growing denser as he scanned it, and his scanner picked up traces of neucleosynthesis."

"So it's nuclear interdimensional self-replicating uncontrolled hostile nanoscale tinkertech."

Rebecca runs a hand down her face.

"Yes, I think that warrants declaring an S-class incident. File the paperwork and get some sleep. I'll make sure the Triumvirate is notified."

"Thank you, ma'am," Director Piggot says. She ends the call.

So it comes as a surprise when, as soon as she starts across the lawn in front of the Visitors Center, she's nailed with a laser.

Well, it's not a laser. It's ... a thing. A phenomenon. A synchronized multidimensional excitation in the underlying quantum fields of reality. That glows.

It abrades a few surface layers of her forb before the forb can react. The forb condenses a shield of air between it and the excitation, causing a continuous rolling thunder as more air rushes in to fill the void and is immediately grabbed and boiled away.

Weeping Cherry reverses direction, vaulting out of the sudden crater and returning herself to the river.

Everyone knows that Legend's lasers can turn corners. What most people don't realize is that this means he can aim perfectly well through differences in refractive index. Now that he's got a fix on her, he can keep hitting her with shots with various exotic effects, even once she's back in the water.

Weeping Cherry jets close to the bottom of the river, churning up plumes of dust to help cover her retreat. When she reaches the confluence of the East River and the Hudson River, she quickly back-tracks, and buries into the muck.

Where two large bear-shaped forcefields will dive after her and start digging through the muck.

Damn.

Should she dig in further and play dead, or get back out into the ocean?

She knows they can track her somehow, although not what the range is like. Did they track her all the way here?

Either way, the bears are certainly kicking up silt. She tries to slip between them into the upper bay.