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The sound of chains rattling together is almost drowned out by the sound of her own breathing. Ragged, heavy pants, through the nose, as she screws her teeth shut and tries to breathe through the pain, just like Batman taught her to.
She closes her eyes, but she can’t escape the smell. The smell of Orpheus’s dead body,[1] tossed to one side like he’s nothing, the smell of her own blood…
He is there, and he’s smiling, or at least she thinks he’s smiling, it’s so hard to tell with his face like it is, and he wrenches her face upwards and she can smell his breath, can feel his fingernails digging into her jaw.
“Now, let’s try this again,” he says to her.
There is a loud whirring sound, and her teeth part as she starts to scream.
Stephanie Brown woke up with the scream from a nightmare trapped tightly between her teeth.
She was drenched in sweat, her blankets in a tangle around her, and her heart trying to race its way out of her chest.
“Damn it,” she muttered, grabbing a corner of her sheets and trying to wipe off her forehead with it.
A vigilante only got so much sleep every night, and she couldn’t afford to waste her precious hours like this.
But there was no point in trying to get back to sleep now. Not with adrenaline coursing through her system and her mind trying to jump back into the highlights reel, to point out what had been wrong about the nightmare, how it didn’t compare to the reality of it all.
She forced those thoughts away and swung her legs over the side of her bed.
Stripping the bed was easy. If they had still been in the house in Manchester, she would have snuck down into the basement and loaded them into the washing machine and started a load, but there wasn’t an in-unit washer in their apartment in Midtown, so instead Steph simply dumped them in the laundry bin and grabbed fresh ones from the closet. She made the bed quickly, if a bit-half-heartedly. Her mom would definitely notice, and know that she had another nightmare, and know which one it was, since Steph hadn’t gone back to bed.
But she had to at least try to pretend that the Black Mask wasn’t invading her dreams as well as her waking hours, had to pretend that she was well-adjusted and normal as someone who dressed up in a Batsuit and pranced around Gotham City for hours every night could possibly be.
Once the token effort had been made, she sat down at her desk and pulled out her work. Not her homework—there was no way she was going to be able to concentrate on her Arabic homework with the phantom taste of blood in her mouth. But instead, she pulled out the copies she had made of the Black Mask’s file.[2]
Bruce and Barbara had been trying to keep her away from this. They had locked her out of the digital files, turned off her alerts for his activities, and kept trying to schedule her patrol routes away from anywhere he was active.
It made her so furious sometimes that she could scream.
She was Batgirl. And the Black Mask was her responsibility.
She scanned through his file again, a copy she had made of his physical file that Bruce kept for emergencies and so that Babs couldn’t just know everything he knew by virtue of living inside of his computer at all times.
It didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. Roman Sionis, the Black Mask, a dangerous gangster whose quirky obsession with masks had turned over the years into a zeal for torture, blood, and conquest.[3] The Mask’s traditional areas were the Fashion District and East End, before he had clashed with Catwoman, and it had driven him underground.
Until a girl named Stephanie Brown had come along, and, thinking that she had the key to solving all of organized crime in her hands, had caused Gotham to collapse in on itself in a futile attempt to make Batman proud of her.[4]
Stupid? Very. And it had, in the end, gotten a lot of people killed, including a man named Gavin King, also known as Orpheus, who had been one of the best and brightest stars that Gotham had, and the Black Mask had clawed his way to power and nearly killed her in the process.
Had killed her, legally and technically. Her heart had stopped, and there was a death certificate and everything.
And the Black Mask had stayed in power, building himself up in the Diamond District, living large and ruling over Gotham’s underworld while her and Orpheus’s blood hadn’t yet dried.
The Black Mask had survived Batman, the underworld, and eventually the Red Hood, before Catwoman had put a bullet in his head.[5]
And that should have been the end of the story.
But then Blackest Night happened, and now the Black Mask was back, and was working his way up through the criminal underworld of Gotham City once again.
Bruce and Babs and—and everyone who wasn’t Cassandra Cain—wanted Stephanie Brown to stay as far away from him as possible. To let other people clean him up, sweep him away, and stay safe.
Steph hadn’t become a vigilante to be safe, let alone Batgirl.
Besides. Bruce and Babs and the rest of them? They’d had their chance at him. She’d been gone for three years, recovering from her injuries and recuperating her strength.
And it had been Catwoman with a gun, not any of them and their plans, who had gotten rid of him the first time, two years after the Black Mask had murdered Gavin King and tried to do the same to Stephanie Brown.
So yeah.
They had their chance.
Now, it was her turn.
And this time, she was going to do it right. No destroying the city, no dying. No needing Bruce or even Cass to rescue her.
She was going to do this. Her way.
And no one was going to stop her.
Bowery, Gotham City
The Black Mask generally made his money through protection fees, racketeering, weapons smuggling, and drugs. And that wasn’t counting extorting sex workers, white collar crime, or open robbery. The Mask had rarely had his fingers in those pies in the past.
But now, the Mafia, the Odessa Mob, the Triad, the Hill Gang, and every other remotely organized group, who had tentatively come together under the Black Mask’s reign, had splintered into their own corners. The organized crime groups had fallen back into their home territories, and built-up little empires of protection rackets
The problem was that after being six feet under, the criminal enterprise that he had carefully built up had been carved up into tiny pieces by various groups and individuals. Each neighborhood’s protection racket had been taken up by their local organized groups, the Penguin had cheerfully seized control of as much smuggling as he could handle, and the remains of the Red Hood Gang still had a good percentage of the market cornered for the drug trade.
The Red Hood himself was gone, having disappeared into thin air after escaping prison,[6] but he’d left in place several lieutenants, who held down the fort while he was in prison, and, once he well and truly evaporated, immediately began duking it out privately over control of the kingdom.
The tentative winner was the woman who Batgirl was watching through the plate glass window. Rosalind O’Conner had been a cop for years, happily in the pocket of the Mob like so many of the other cops in Gotham. But she’d gotten a little too greedy, a little too obvious, and she’d gotten herself caught. The Mob had declined to protect her, not when they had so many other informants and stooges in place, and, well, O’Conner had decided to take it personally, and taken her knowledge and her portfolio of blackmail and secrets directly to the Red Hood, who had taken her on and rewarded her with a position as a Lieutenant.
O’Conner was relatively low on the Bats’ radar. The Red Hood Gang had followed their boss’s model when it came to the drug trade, which kept the supply relatively untainted, and kept the worst of the violence away from residential areas. It allowed them to remain in position while the Bats focused their efforts on other, more immediate, problems.
Which made O’Conner and her resurgent Red Hood Gang the perfect target for the Black Mask, looking to regain a piece of the action in Gotham City.
The Black Mask wasn’t stupid. He was keeping a relatively low-profile. The gang lords of Gotham all knew that he was back and didn’t like that. They enjoyed the current set-up, even though plenty of them dreamed of one day taking the man’s place, few of them were willing to put their money where their mouths were just yet.
The Black Mask had been powerful and demanded loyalty from his followers, but he wasn’t well-liked or popular. It’s hard to get there, when he was known as a sadist, a monster, and a torturer with a tendency to murder and maim people who pissed him off. There were bounties out on his head. Quiet bounties, without names attached, in the name of plausible deniability in case he should get back on top, but bounties, nonetheless.
Sionis was keeping on the downlow, but Steph had her ear to the ground. She had her contacts, even if Oracle and Batman were keeping mum, and she knew that the Black Mask was back, and looking to regain what he had lost.
It wasn’t hard to figure out his first target.
O’Conner, unlike Jason Todd, was more willing to put a face to her organization. She had selected a brownstone as her headquarters. It had been a GCPD safehouse before she had sold the location to Todd, and the place was enforced with military-grade technology from those days. She was laying money down for aesthetic improvements, but security improvements weren’t on the books right now, which Steph was grateful for. Todd had never, for whatever reasons, made the necessary changes he would’ve known how to make in order to Bat-proof the house. So Steph’s distance microphone was going to do just fine.
Like any sensible Gothamite, this liaison was happening during the day.
Steph didn’t like being active at these hours but getting inside the Red Hood Gang’s headquarters right now wasn’t in the cards, so a personal stakeout rather than bugging the place it was.
“Ms. Li,” O’Conner said, handing a crystal glass full of amber liquid—Scotch, probably, the woman spent an absurd amount of money on the stuff according to her credit cards—to the woman sitting on a leather armchair. Rosalind O’Conner was tall, leggy, and blonde. She wore a bright red blouse, a black leather skirt, red stiletto heels, and wore matching lipstick. A statement, to match the moniker she had given herself.
Scarlet.
Kelly Li was her opposite in many ways. The woman resembled a librarian or a middle-manager business woman, with her dark hair in a bun, practical spectacles, and a sedate suit in charcoal and black. Her makeup was the kind that was meant to look like she wasn’t wearing any at all, and she was a good foot shorter than O’Conner besides.
But that didn’t mean she was any less dangerous. Li was the Black Mask’s number two in this world, according to Steph’s best source. She was his mouthpiece in the negotiations, in the behind-the-scenes power plays and maneuvers. Li was smart, competent, and cautious… but she was going to be Steph’s key to Black Mask. One way or another.
“Ms. O’Conner,” Li said, nodding her head. “I’m glad you could make time to talk to me.”
“Well, your message did involve the severed hands of three of my men,” O’Conner said. “I like to think I’m a good manager. I listen when my people tell me that someone wants to speak to me.”
Li didn’t appear ruffled by the statement at all. “I’m glad to hear it.”
O’Conner grinned. “So. Should I guess at what your… what was the word you used… client, wants? Or do you want to say it yourself?” She snorted and sipped her drink. “He wants to do a hostile takeover of my business. He had… let’s say words with a few of my people in the process and decided to show them around his offices. And now you’re going to tell me, in that bullshit lawyer-speak of yours, that if I join up now, I’ll get… benefits and all of that. How am I doing so far?”
“Not too badly,” Li said. “Although I must say your background is showing.”
“What can I say? Not fond of lawyers.”
“I’ll take it that I can deliver a no, to my client, then?”
O’Conner rolled her eyes. “Listen. I’m not stupid enough to rip you to bits and mail you back to your boss like the Odessa Mob would. I don’t want to be at war with your boss. But make no mistake. I’m the boss here. And the Black Mask can threaten me all he wants. If he’s stupid enough to come after me in the open, we both know that the Bats will reign down hell on him before he can so much as take a single step into the open where a security camera can see him.” She spread her hands. “He can grab a few of my guys all he wants. I have plenty more where they came from. But just because I’m the new girl on the block, doesn’t mean I’ll just roll over because he asks me to.”
“The benefits package—”
O’Conner laughed. “I worked for the cops, remember? I’ve seen how he treats his employees. It doesn’t look to me to be much safer to work for him than against him.” She grinned. “I’ll take my chances.”
“I see,” Li said. Her lips were tight, but in a way that made Steph wonder if the woman was suppressing a smile. “Well. I won’t take up any more of your time, then.”
Li got up, sat her untouched drink down on the mahogany table, and walked out. She left behind a listening device, beneath the chair she’d been sitting on, and brought with her a recording of their conversation.
Stephanie Brown took a deep breath in and out, and then forced herself to walk away.
Li wasn’t stupid. The Black Mask wasn’t stupid. She couldn’t follow her, not directly. Not without them noticing her. It was daylight, and Li was, supposedly, an ordinary lawyer doing contract work for a real estate company.
Luckily, she had a plan for that.
Li flagged down a cab; she hadn’t brought her own car. Smart; it would have been a piece of cake to put a tracker in it. It was a lot harder to track a cab through traffic at this time of day, especially since most of them didn’t have numbers—a local ordinance that had been pushed through years ago, for reasons like this, among others.
Steph managed to catch the license plate, which was something at least.
If she had Babs on her side, she wouldn’t need to do this. Babs could have just followed the cab through security cameras and the taxi’s GPS.
But Steph was doing this old-school.
It didn’t take long. Fifteen minutes later, her burner phone that she used for Batgirl-related work pinged with a message from one of her contacts, informing her that Li had been spotted at the headquarters of the Odessa Mob.
Steph made a mark on her map and went back to her cave. She’d locked Babs out last week, after she’d figured out that she suddenly could no longer access the Black Mask’s digital file, and her news alert for him suddenly no longer worked. Babs and Bruce could probably brute force their way in if they wanted to, but so far, they’d left her alone.
She knew that was the case because they hadn’t tried to stop her yet.
Her map of Gotham was up on the wall, and she set to work updating it.
Red for altercations between the Mask’s men and other gangs. Green for sightings. Blue for Li.
Her phone went off several times throughout her work. After Little Odessa, Li went to the Mafia, then back up to the Bowery, then down again into the Water District before she was picked up by a limo and driven to the Iceberg Lounge.
Steph put pins in until her fingers were aching, and her eyes swam with colors, but in the end, she had what she needed.
Li was careful, always doubling back and circling around and never traveling anywhere directly. Alone, Steph might not have been able to put it all together.
But she had it. All of it; the patterns of violence, Li’s movements, and the handful of direct sightings, lead her right to his secret headquarters.
East Side. The heart of Mafia territory.
“Ballsy,” Steph said.
East Side was Catwoman’s old territory, for all that Selina Kyle currently resided in Robbinsville. But with Catwoman out of the picture and Huntress once again back in with the Birds of Prey, East Side was relatively low on superhero attention. Mario Falcone ran a tight ship, which meant that no one would expect him to show up in that territory, not with Catwoman gone.
Sionis, as it happened, had owned a lot of property in the East Side, before he’d gotten his brain-cavity hollowed out, and Steph had those records. Sure, she couldn’t run current real-estate listings without alerting the all-might Oracle, but she could narrow things down.
He wouldn’t stay in anything too shabby, but he also wouldn’t want to be too near the Falcone House. But not too far away either, or his men wouldn’t be getting into those scuffles.
She narrowed it down to three locations. Which meant that it was time for legwork.
She called Cass on her way out, using the burner. “Cassie? I’ve got a lead in Downtown. Keep them busy?”
“Sure,” Cass said, immediately and without question. God, Steph adored her. Cass and Steph had pre-arranged to shuffle location names to throw off eavesdroppers. It would be nice to believe that Babs and Bruce respected their privacy, but after so many years working with both of them, Steph viewed privacy as a polite illusion that could be shattered at a moment’s notice, especially if they decided it was for her “own good.”
She shattered the burner afterwards. It would delay Babs a little while. Steph would need every inch that she got.
She got on her motorcycle. Not her official one, with all of the systems that Babs had carefully coded, and that Babs could turn off with a flick of a switch. This was one that Steph had owned since her days as Spoiler, which she had lovingly repaired over the years, and painted black and purple and attached a Bat to the front light for just such an occasion. It wasn’t a great bike. It didn’t have the gadgets and gizmos or an Oracle uplink. But Babs couldn’t turn it off to stop Steph from making this choice.
Comms off, Stephanie Brown set out to meet the man who had killed her.
Even a knock-off Bat machine, with a genuine Bat riding it could cut travel time in Gotham in half.
She stashed it in the garage of one of Selina’s safehouses, before she took the roofs, away from the security cameras.
One of the properties could be written off immediately—it had been divided into apartments and was full of families with kids.
The second one required more investigation, but it seemed to be abandoned. Steph risked entering and found only mice and dust.
Which left the last location.
She stood on the roof, across from the house, and watched through her binoculars. She couldn’t move, not until she was certain that he was actually there.
And—there. A ruffle by a curtain, an all-too familiar silhouette, clutching a glass. She risked the microphone.
“Kosov will be the first to budge,”[7] his voice said, and Steph’s spine immediately stiffened.
“Do you think this is a game?”
“She’s practical, but she’s too scared of the Bat to ever really act on any ambitions. Once they start sniffing around her territory, she’ll come right back into the fold. Dominos, Li. It’s all dominos.”
Despite herself, Steph found herself smirking. He sounded the same.
“Gotcha,” she breathed.
It had been nearly six years. But she finally had him.
It was an easy grapple across the roof. She placed three electrorangs in strategic places on the roof, and then moved into place.
Six pieces of plastic explosives, pressed against the wall, in a large, rough circle.
She took out her phone and made a call.
“Wendy? Send ‘em.”
“You’ve got it, Girl Wonder. Good luck.”
She took a deep breath in.
“Don’t need it,” she said. And then she cut the lights.
Curses split the night. Criminals of this experience knew to fear a blackout, knew what it could mean.
Steph blew the wall.
“It’s the Bat! Shoot him, you idiots!” Roman Sionis howled.
No one was looking at the window when Steph entered.
Gunfire was ringing—stupid, they could easily shoot each other on ricochet, but they were scared, and no one acted smart when they were scared.
Inhale. Exhale. Use the dark. Use the environment.
The last time she had faced the Black Mask, it had been as a teenager, scared and in pain and off balance.
This time… he was going to be the one scared.
In order to minimize damage, she was going to have to use the gooparangs. She threw out her arms, the sound of them hissing through the air concealed by shouts and bullets.
To her night vision, Black Mask stood out. He was trying to run, while his hired help fought off the Bat.
Wrong Bat, however.
The men started to shout and scream as the foam and goop exploded out around them, coating their arms and legs.
Her father had, a long, long time ago, invented a chemical formula which stopped most guns and prevented them from shooting.[8] He’d never patented it; it had just been another tool in his arsenal of criminal incompetence.
Steph was one of two people in the world who knew that formula. It hadn’t been hard to add it to the goop that the Bats supplied her.
The room filled with curses as the men kept trying to fire, only for their guns to fail them, jamming and malfunctioning in their hands.
And then she went after the Mask.
He was in the stairwell, shouting into a phone—uselessly, since Steph had deployed a cell-jammer at the same time as she had blown the lights—trying to get help.
He’d made it down a flight of stairs, but Steph spread her cape wide and glided.
He heard her coming, and she saw him moving for his gun, but Steph was on him in moments. One quick, brutal movement to disarm him, a second to send him crashing to the ground, and—and that was it.
He was down, she had a gun, and she had beaten him.
He didn’t know that, though. Not yet.
He screamed at her. He didn’t know who she was, either. It sounded like she thought she was Bruce, or Dick, or maybe even Cass.
“It won’t stick, Batman! I’ve got lawyers, I’ve got people. You couldn’t stop me last time, and you won’t stop me this time—”
“I already have,” Steph said, quietly and clearly.
He started. “You—”
Then she knocked him unconscious. Just like Cass had shown her. A nice, easy nerve pinch.
Better than he deserved. By a lot.
But she didn’t have long. She got to work.
When the police would arrive, three minutes later, they would find the Black Mask bound with the black wire of a Bat-grapple, hanging from the ceiling, surrounded by his men, who were all contained in gray foam. The guns in their hands and at their feet matched the ballistics for dozens of cases for the last few months, and the Black Mask’s own outstanding warrants had been left helpfully stacked on his desk, where his computer had been left, password entered, all of his bank accounts having been recently emptied into the East End Children’s Collective.
All across Gotham City, mobsters, supervillains, mafiosos, and more than a few journalists had received texts and emails, containing the Black Mask’s exact planned takeover of their organization. Blackmail, extortion, framings, insurance fraud… all of his careful plans, months of work, were suddenly publicly available to anyone who thought to check their phones.
“Go away,” she said.
Bruce was behind her, where she sat on a gargoyle, watching the Black Mask and his men being loaded away.
“Batgirl.”
“Batman,” she imitated his voice back. “It’s done. There’s no point lecturing me. His plans are spoiled, his money’s gone, and he’s going to jail. I won. He lost. The end.”
“That’s not the end and you know it,” Bruce said. “You told him who you are. He’s going to use that against you.”
“I didn’t tell him,” Steph said. “I didn’t need to.” She sighed and turned her face up to the sky. “I never told him; you know. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“I know,” his voice was quiet. It barely sounded like Batman at all.
“I never beat him. Not in real life, not in my nightmares, not even in my dreams. In those, it was always you, or Cass, or Tim, or Selina, or Superman, or just… anyone. Someone coming to save me. Because I couldn’t even imagine a world where I could beat him. I’d built him up in my head as some sort of… ultimate evil.”
“But you did.”
“I spent weeks tracking him,” Steph said. “Finding his assistant, tracking down every inch of his life, putting together his passwords from what Selina knew about him, finding his plans, figuring out how to disrupt them… and I realized. He’s just any other sicko-bastard that we fight every day. He just happened to be my sicko-bastard. And he went down, just like anyone else. This time he wasn’t the one with all the power against a teenage girl with none.”
“He’s not just some—”
“He is,” Steph interrupted him. “He’s just another sadist, just another guy who gets his rocks off on torture and pain and power and control. He’s good at it, but he’s not special. Except to those of us unfortunate enough to have been under his knife.” She crossed her arms. “I lost three years, because of him, Bruce. Nine months in that coma. A year to just get back full movement in all of my limbs. I slept for days at a time, even then, because Leslie would have to sedate me. I couldn’t sleep because I kept being scared that I wouldn’t wake up, or worse, that he would be there when I closed my eyes. I had to get reconstructive surgery to repair some of the damage that he did. I still have nerve damage. My fingers healed crooked.” She held up her left hand as evidence. “ Three years. I was sixteen when he killed me. I was seventeen when I woke up.” She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I’m twenty-two now, Bruce. I’m not a child. I got to make this decision. Not you, not Babs, me. Because either I’m one of you, or I’m not. And if I’m not, well, I’ve got a Spoiler costume in storage somewhere that will work just as well.”
“Stephanie,” he said.
“Batgirl,” she hissed. “Only codenames in the field, remember? Or does that just not apply to me?”
His shoulders shifted. Was it shame, or exasperation?
“Batgirl.” He took a deep breath that felt like it filled the entire roof. “You’re right.”
Steph stared. “What?”
“This was your choice. He was your ghost to fight. And us taking away your resources… that only put you in potential danger. It didn’t help.”
“No. It didn’t.” Steph held her chin high. “But, as you can see, I did it anyways.”
“Of course you did,” he said. “You were trained by the best. No,” he corrected himself, cutting off Steph making a dig about him feeling the need to compliment himself and take credit for her hard work. “You are the best. Good work, Batgirl.”
He moved, as if to vanish into the night, but Steph wasn’t fifteen anymore, and she caught his cape before he could leave.
“I love you too, Bruce,” she said. “But I had to do this myself. Because no one else did. Not the entire time I was gone. So this had to be me. You get that, right?”
“I do. And I’m sorry that we let you down.”
Steph released his cape and took a deep breath. “I need to go talk to Oracle.”
And then she took her turn to disappear.
“You understand why I was worried?”
“Yes. And you understand how you’d feel if someone had tried to stop you from going after the Joker.”
Babs nodded. “I know.”
“You can’t control everything or protect everyone, Babs,” Steph snapped. “I get to make my own choices about things. I thought we’d agreed on this, after you decided that I could be Batgirl!”
“Did you expect me to just let you go and fight him on your own?”
“I wouldn’t have had to go in it alone if you and Bruce weren’t trying so hard to wrap me in bubble wrap! Only Cass believed in me! Everyone else was telling me to stay safe. I didn’t become a vigilante to stay safe!”
Babs frowned. “I wasn’t trying to do that. My intention was that we would work together—”
“Bullshit!”
“It’s the truth, Stephanie.”
Ooh, full name, Babs was not happy.
“Fine. Assuming I believe you, then you should have told me that. You’re the Oracle, my mentor, and my friend. Not my puppet master, or manipulator, or someone who gets a veto button over my life.” She looked over Babs’s shoulder, where she could see Cass, lurking in the shadows, looking at her.
“I’m Batgirl,” she said, quietly. “I know it wasn’t necessarily your decision. But I’m not going to let it go to waste. And that means doing things my way, and not running away from something just because it’s hard, or brings up bad memories, or because other people would rather me not.”
“Steph. I don’t—you’re—you’re not someone I manipulate,” Babs protested. “We’re a team.”
“We are,” Steph acknowledged.
“I’m—” Babs put a hand over her eyes. “Okay. Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Steph blinked in surprise. Behind Babs, Cass did too.
“I was overreacting. I should have listened to you. I was… Steph, I know what that bastard did to you.”
“I know,” Steph said. She looked at Babs, rather than Cass. “But that’s why I had to face him.”
She bent over and kissed Babs’s cheek. “Don’t do it again?”
Babs sighed. “I’ll… I’ll try, Steph.”
“Good enough, I guess.”
She went up onto the roof, where Cass was waiting for her.
“It’s done?”
“Done.” Steph spread her arms wide and took in a deep breath of Gotham’s awful air. Air that she had missed, the whole time she had been gone. “He’s gone.”
“Good,” Cass said.
Impulsively, Steph threw her arms around Cass. “Thanks. For being the only one to believe in me.”
“Always,” Cass said. “You’re Batgirl.”
“And you’re Batman,”[9] Steph agreed, pulling back enough to grin at Cass. “Like you were always meant to be.”
“Yes,” Cass’s grin was cocksure and wide. Then her eyes widened, as she saw what Steph was going to do a moment before it happened.
Steph poked her in the chest, in the center of the Bat.
“Tag.”
Rooftop tag was a game from their childhood days.[10]
But tonight, Steph had just put a six-year ghost to rest.
She wanted to be a kid for a little bit.
Cass laughed, disbelieving.
“Catch me if you can!” Steph shouted, before throwing herself off the top of Kord Tower.
Oh yeah.
It was good to be Batgirl.