Steph took a shower at 5 am. The cold water screamed along her burns, but it didn't hiss. It woke her mom up. She made her coffee as an apology. She dressed in layers, like she was going to go to school. She took her bag with her, like she was going to school. She got on the light rail at 6:30, like she was going to school.
Her brain, running on autopilot and three hours of sleep, disengaged at the station. Instead of taking the right turn to Green Bakery to buy a customary bánh mì bì, she kept straight and walked the extra two blocks. Ridgeview High wasn't too big of a school for one in the city. Cutting behind the teacher's parking lot, Steph eased open the gate and let herself into the back field, where track and field would be running morning practices in the summer. Luckily, it was April and nobody was around.
Softball, on the other hand, was a spring sport. The equipment would be in the ramshackle shed with the lock that could be picked so easily, it might as well have not been there. Steph beelined for it, scanning the field just to make sure that nobody saw her.
It only took a little jimmying with an unbent paper clip to get the lock to spring open. Steph slipped inside, softly closing the door behind her. She glanced around before finding what she needed: a repurposed garbage can full of aluminum baseball bats.
Steph slung her backpack off and plopped it on the ground, opening the main pocket. She examined the bats - all cheap Louisville Sluggers, but good enough for what she needed them for - and selected the one with the least dents in it. She pushed aside her mask, a pair of cheap knit gloves, and her jacket inside the main pocket of the backpack and stuffed the bat in: it was a little too long, so when she zipped her backpack up, the handle poked out from the top.
She'd been caught out twice already because she hadn't been properly prepared. While Steph didn't know any fancy martial arts, like a real vigilante, she could still take the opportunity to stack the odds in her favor before she went to go make the same mistake a third time in a row. Especially without half her costume to protect her, she had to get creative.
Weapon of choice acquired, Steph snuck out and relocked the door behind her and tried very hard not to think about the fact that her father started out as a thief too.
She had to sit on the hard green plastic seat of the light rail with her backpack behind her, using her torso and head to block the view of the stolen baseball bat. She had stayed awake nearly the entire night, running the clues back and forth and through in her head. Algorithms, like her father taught her. Consider each and every possibility, each and every possible option, and eliminate that which did not make sense.
Lux elata alumnos tollitt. A raised light elevates the students. Can be rearranged into many anagram solutions: A manilla outlet's tux toll. Lo, a littlest autumnal lox. Lull loot exits a tantalum. Lotto insult; exult a llama.
She had thought about that last one for an inordinate amount of time, because it did kind of sound like her father's sense of humor. She couldn't think of anything that it could be a riddle or reference to, though, so she abandoned that train of thought after she had sunk fifteen minutes into it. She had spent another hour going through every anagram of every permutation of the English translation, consulting Latin dictionaries on her phone as she went when Google Translate failed her. She had doubted that would be the answer though; word choice in translation was, by necessity, imprecise, and anagrams relied on precision. Cluemaster would never allow his intentions to be lost in the inherent heat-death sacrifice of transmuting one language to another. Plus, his Latin was not that good.
She thought of universities next. Rutgers University's motto, the first she looked up, was sol iustitiae et occidentem illustra. "Sun of righteousness, shine upon the West also," could maybe be interpreted similarly to "a raised light elevates students." The sun was a raised light, she supposed, but it certainly wasn't elevating anyone, unless Cluemaster just did not understand the Space Race. Plus, she thought, more than a little bitter, he probably wouldn't risk using his next clue as the previous clue's red herring. He would have wanted whoever was chasing him to know, deep in their bones, that they were outsmarted. That was why this clue was less permanent: this was him exulting in winning, and hoping to hammer a little more desperation in.
Unluckily for him, Steph hated being outsmarted. And she was plenty smart right back: her father's insecurities ran deep and she knew back when he was 21 he'd lost his scholarship to a certain prestigious college and had to quit, seven semesters in. Lux et Veritas. He'd hated that. He'd always said that there wasn't an ounce of truth in that academic review board, and they couldn't shed light on a pile of shit with a lighthouse searchlight.
The light rail thundered to a standstill at its Shopping District stop. The crush of early morning commuters moved, displacing each other in their shuffle to get on or off. The middle-aged woman next to Steph got up and disappeared into the throng, replaced immediately by a young girl with her own backpack.
"Where are we getting off?" the girl turned to ask Steph and - holy shit.
"Cass?" Steph asked, bewildered. Then angry. "Jesus, how long have you been following me?"
"Since…. you…. went to school." Her speech was slower, more halting than it had been before.
"I didn't see you."
"Sneaky." Cass smiled hesitantly at Steph. "Good at that."
"Yeah, I bet," Steph said. She reminded herself that she was still mad. "You gonna try to tell me I should leave this up to the professionals? 'Cause you guys have been doing such a great job so far. Or are you gonna accuse me of working for a supervillain again?"
"...I…. didn't say that," Cass said. She paused, and it was so similar to the way Batgirl would pause to look for words that Steph couldn't believe Cass ever had her fooled. "And Oracle never thought… that…. you…"
Steph cut her off. "She sure sounded like it. I see she told you about the whole conversation, seeing as you've suddenly switched up your linguistic patterns."
"Talking," Cass said, a look of pure frustration crossing her face and settling in her shoulders. "Hard… Me-I'm trying... to do… it... right. You…. already… caught me… once." She articulated each word like it was a revelation to her, not so much stringing words into a sentence as she was individually excavating, sanding, polishing, and beading them together.
She made a few hand motions, all open palms and specific positioning of the fingers, and Steph knew just enough to regretfully say: "Sorry, I don't know ASL."
Cass looked a million different ways in the moment. Steph thought she caught sorrow though, which was what spurred her on most to dig in her pocket and retrieve her phone. She googled what she needed, pulling up an image. Hesitantly, she glanced at Cass before she held up her right hand.
"M-E-E-T Y-O-U I-N T-H-E M-I-D-D-L-E," she fingerspelled, halting and slow at first, with her eyes on the chart on her phone screen. When she looked up from it to Cass, Cass had the widest smile she'd ever seen, not just on Cass but on a person in general.
"I ?-A-? D-?" Cass signed, so fast the forms felt like they blurred together on her hand. Steph winced.
"T-O-O F-A-S-T."
"S-O-R-R-Y," Cass signed again, this time waiting for Steph's eyes to flick from her right hand to her phone before moving on to the next sign.
"J-U-S-T K-E-E-P G-O-I-N-G," Steph signed out. "I N-E-E-D P-R-A-C-T-I-C-E." Already her own fingerspelling was starting to pick up speed, her brain catching onto a code in use and doing what it had been trained to do best. When Cass responded, Steph had barely even needed to check against her phone to read.
"T-A-L-K-I-N-G L-I-K-E T-H-I-S I-S E-A-S-I-E-R. M-Y V-O-I-C-E I-S H-A-R-D T-O U-S-E."
"WHY," Steph signed, smoother this time.
"MY FATHER THOUGHT RAISING A CHILD WITH NO LANguage would make them fight better."
Somewhere in the middle of that long sentence, Steph stopped needing to use the chart as a reference. "That's awful," she signed with her right hand, stowing her phone back into her pocket with the left. "I'm sorry about your dad."
Cass quirked her lips into an ironic grin. "Sorry about your dad." There wasn't really a way to put a tone on fingerspelling, but somehow Cass had figured it out. Of course she had. "Do you want help stopping him?"
Steph watched her for a while. The light rail stopped again. They were about three stops away from her own, which meant another ten minutes. "When did you figure me out?"
"Wed." Cass fingerspelled. She held up three fingers and ran them in a counter-clockwise circle in the air. Steph filed that away as a sign, Wednesday. "You always walk the same. When did you figure out me?"
"Sunday. At museum. You don't talk much, made it harder, but after a while I heard it."
"Slow," Cass teased. Steph smiled back, a little unsure - she thought she might be forgiving Cass a little too fast, but at the same time, she didn't think she had it in her to stay mad.
The light rail stopped again. Six more minutes. Cass looked at her again, but it was less searching than it had been in the past. Softer, somehow. "I don't like to talk. But I liked talking to you. As Cass and Steph, not -" she put her fingers up at her temples, like horns or little bat ears, and Steph didn't laugh but she did exhale harshly through her nose and quirk her lips. "You make talking easy."
Another stop. Next one was Steph's. Three minutes.
Steph made her decision. "We're getting off at G-O-T-H-A-M U."
"You thought you'd go through the front door?"
Cass was so angry, her fingerspelling had managed to go double-time. Steph was almost impressed.
"I don't know. It worked last time," she said out loud with a shrug.
"It worked" - and Steph was very impressed with how Cass could sign like she was talking through gritted teeth - "because I was there to save you."
Steph uncrossed one arm to hold it up to her side, signing just below her eyeline and therefore right in Cass's face. "And you're here now." Steph added a little extra flourish to her signs because it seemed like it'd get Cass's eyebrow to twitch again in irritation. It did, and Steph smiled a little brighter.
"How have you survived 2 outings?"
"I think to solve half my problems beforehand," Steph used her signing hand to gesture over her shoulder to the stolen baseball bat, still sticking half out of her backpack - she hoped people just thought 'student athlete' and not 'teenage thug' - and then flicked it down to encompass the general rest of her, "and wing it on the rest. Get it? Wing?" She uncrossed her other arm so she could hook her thumbs together and fluttered her fingers like she was doing a shadowpuppet for a bird. Or a bat.
Cass closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "You're not funny," she spelled, her eyes still closed.
"Aw," Steph said out loud, still fluttering her fingers. "You think I'm hilarious."
Cass put her hand right under Steph's nose. "N-O." Steph grinned.
She opened her eyes and scanned the area. The central portion of Gotham U's campus was a plaza and at the very center, exposed on all sides to a student population milling around in the early morning, was a very tall belltower. She wondered, errantly, how her father had planned to smuggle a bomb in. Did he go through the front door, or did she inherit her instincts from her mom instead?
At the very top of the belltower was a light, and when it was on, you could see it for miles. She wouldn't necessarily know, since she was rarely on the eastern side of Midtown, but it was pretty distinctive. Tall, and on a hill, too. A raised light, to elevate students.
Cass clearly saw something that she didn't, because she pointed with her left hand and spelled, "There," with her right. Steph followed her point to a staircase headed down into the ground. She dutifully trudged over, Cass trailing after her.
The stairway was slightly blocked by all the random plants that private colleges loved putting everywhere, their overgrown non-native leaves clambering over the grey concrete. "Service entrance," Steph said. "Sneaky."
Cass grinned. "Good at that."
Steph checked her phone. "It's -" she flashed seven, five, and eight fingers in succession -" 7:58 right now, so let's go find someplace to change and wait out the passing period."
They ended up in a public bathroom, which felt a little unglamorous, but whatever. Steph assumed she had a little less to go through than Cass, seeing as her costume, now sans scrape-proof leggings and hood, only required gloves and her mask. She flipped the top of her hoodie hood up, then pulled on the beat up purple jacket. The roller-derby elbow pads felt reassuring to her, as well as when she loaded up all her pockets with her familiar tools. Sure, Batgirl had professional vigilante tools for every occasion, but so far, mace and Google hadn't led Steph astray. By much. Finally, she pulled the baseball bat out of her backpack and thought ironically of King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, New Jersey edition.
Steph rapped on the metal divider between their stalls. "Cass, you finished?"
Something black slid under the divider. Steph picked it up.
"Is this a bulletproof vest?" she yelped when she realized how heavy it was and what it reminded her of.
"Yes," Cass's voice floated over. "Put it on."
"These are…" Steph's brain was defaulting. "Very expensive." She'd know: she'd checked on Amazon and decided that gunshot wounds would just have to be a future her problem.
"Bruce Wayne is…. a… billion-aire."
"Alright," Steph said, then remembered all over again that Bruce Wayne was Batman which really, really, really fucked with her head. Christ. What was next, Jeff Bezos as Aquaman? "You know they probably can't shoot us, right? It's a college campus and there's only one way out of the belltower. Fire a gun and everyone'll hear it and come running."
"...I…. didn't know…. we… were going to a school."
Steph yanked her successive layers off and set to work figuring out how to get the heavy vest on, even if she doubted she'd need it. Hopefully, she could hold on to this afterward.
"Wait, didn't Oracle tell you?" she asked, figuring out one hook.
"She…. felt… it might be a school. Didn't know. Which."
Steph froze with her hoodie halfway on again. "You mean, you actually didn't know where I was going on the light rail?"
"No," Cass said.
"Jesus," Steph muttered, pulling her hoodie back all the way on. She grabbed for the jacket and held it, folded in her arms. "Here, I thought you guys were supposed to be real professionals. Turns out you're just as clueless as I am. Reassuring."
"Not as clue-less," Cass said, a smile in her voice audible past the stall. "... Me- I….. know how to fight."
"Hey," Steph said. "Fighting's not all there is to this gig."
"Is most of it."
"It's like, half."
"Nine-ty per-cent. Ten per-cent…. is… listening to… bad guy talk."
Steph snorted. Cass had her there. There was still one thing bugging her, however. "If Oracle already knows about the whole supervillain dad thing, how could she not know that this place is next? Arthur Brown actually got expelled from here: you don't have to be his kid to know he'd target this place next in his 'Fuck you, I'm smarter' campaign."
"Oracle didn't know. Said dip-lo-mas only on… on-line. Can't hack if didn't gra-du-ate."
"Huh," Steph said, swinging her backpack back on and exiting the stall. "So the expulsion stuff is all on paper files somewhere? Nowhere else?"
Cass left her own stall. She was wearing an oversized sweater over her costume and her face-covering hood was down, leaving her looking like any other yoga-pants-wearing freshman college student on their way to class. Steph assumed the utility belt was cinched around Cass's waist, therefore covered by the slouchy cable-knit outerwear. She nodded to answer Steph's question, then shrugged her own backpack - presumably full of her normal clothes - back on.
Steph would follow suit, but she was lost in thought. She didn't snap out of it until Cass got very very close to her face and poked her nose.
"Stop that," Steph said, swatting at Cass's hand gently. Cass gestured with her head and they exited the bathroom together, hopefully just looking like any two girls walking around a college campus in the early morning. It was now well after the 8 am classes had started, so there were very few straggling students, most of whom were focused on rushing to whatever class they were late to. None of them really paid Steph or Cass any mind, and Steph realized with a jolt that that was because they looked like they belonged here.
It was a strange feeling, knowing that she could walk around the hallowed halls of higher education with a hoodie on and a baseball bat in the crook of her elbow with her jacket, and still nobody would look too closely at her so long as she flashed her blonde hair. She'd known, dully and without really thinking about it, that her father had once been an unquestioned part of this campus, but she hadn't thought about how it extended to her. Everyone they passed looked at them for a second, then their eyes slipped off and away, dismissive, like they were just a normal, unquestioned part of the college scenery.
She and Cass, shoulder to shoulder, slowly walked up behind the iconic belltower. Did they look like just any two girls: maybe roommates, maybe classmates, maybe on an early morning coffee date?
They descended down the hidden back-entrance stairwell, Steph following Cass who kneeled by the locked service entrance with a surety of experience and pulled her sweater off, revealing the top part of her Batgirl outfit. It was strange to see it without the ghostly Scarecrow-esque mask, the deaths-head eyes and the stitched up frown. An odd superposition of Cass and Batgirl. Steph moved to block the sight of her from the stairwell: while it seemed like the stairwell was in a less frequented corner of the campus, it probably still paid to be safe.
There was some sort of electrical buzz and then when Steph turned around to look over her shoulder, Cass was putting a little black device away in one of her dozens of pouches and the locked and keypad-ed door was ajar.
"Useful," Steph signed. Cass smirked at her as she put her backpack down, stuffing her civilian-passing sweater into it. She left the backpack carefully in the corner near the door, presumably in case of a quick getaway. Steph followed suit, leaving her own mostly-empty bookbag next to hers and pulling her face mask out of one of the pockets. They made eye contact as Steph hooked her mask on and shook out her jacket, Cass pulling her own hood on over her head as she went. Steph swapped out her phone for her beloved sparkly canister of mace and adjusted her gloved grip on her bat, then nodded at Cass.
"Ready," she said, and Cass nodded back and disappeared behind the door. Steph followed suit.
The room they slipped into was dark, somewhat damp, and all concrete: it was probably only a little wider than Steph was tall, and if she jumped, she could probably tap the ceiling. Claustrophobic would be an understatement.
On the other end from the door was an elevator: only one button, so they were clearly at the basement level. There were doors next to it, presumably to another stairwell. Cass already started moving to the doors, but Steph thought, this tower is tall enough to see for miles, and also my legs are the sorest they'll ever be in my life, and came to the conclusion: fuck that. She stepped forward and pressed the button for the lift.
Cass turned and tilted her head: amused. Steph scowled behind her own mask.
"I have burns," she justified.
"If you're scared of hurt, shouldn't fight bad guys," Cass signed back, but it held all the teasing qualities and none of the bite that Oracle's admonishment did.
Steph rolled her eyes since it would probably be more effective than a muffled scowl. "What was I supposed to do, let a preacher burn? That's on the nose," she signed, then tapped her own nose. Cass made a noise that probably could be a laugh.
"Are you -" and she tapped her head, sternum, shoulder, shoulder. She seemed legitimately curious.
"No," Steph shrugged, "but Pascal's wager, or whatever. Can't let a person die."
This elevator was taking forever. Steph felt even more justified in not wanting to take the bajillion stairs, though she was now very nervous for what they might find at the top. She distracted herself:
"Are you religious?" she asked Cass, genuinely unsure of what her answer might be.
Cass shook her head. "My mother was Hindu," and she paused, "but also, she kills people."
Steph snorted a little right as the elevator pinged open. "The more I learn about your family dynamics," she said, shuffling in, "the more freaked out I get."
"Scared off?" Cass teased, coming in after her and standing between the elevator doors and Cass.
"You wish," Steph snorted, watching the elevator slowly tick up through the floors. "Let's go punch my dad."
The elevator stopped and Steph tensed up, gripping her mace and bat tight, while Cass's body seemed to go liquid. The elevator doors slid open, and there was a pregnant pause for a few seconds.
Steph broke it.
"Are we early?" she asked, softly nudging Cass out of the elevator. They filed out into the cavernous topmost room of the tower, windows on all sides, and the centerpiece a deep, brass, Liberty-Bell-looking church bell. They were the only people in the room.
Cass tilted her head and stalked all the way around the bell, soundless and methodical. Steph furrowed her brow and leaned back: it was pretty clear that there hadn't been anyone in over the night, especially since her father had been busy setting a church on fire a dozen miles away.
That thought occurred to her again. Lux elata alumnos tollit.
Steph turned to Cass, who was standing at a window and looking off across campus, obviously unsure of her next step.
"Does Oracle just speak Latin fluently?" she asked.
Cass nodded again. "Why?" she signed.
"Well, first of all, how on-brand for Ms. Delphi. And second," Steph turned, tapping her baseball bat against the floor in thought. "I don't think my dad knows Latin."
Cass managed to convey "raised an eyebrow" without her face exposed. "Go on," she spelled, clearly willing to wait this out.
"The first thing I've done with these clues is to just look up what they mean online," Steph said, "but that's easier for the living languages than the dead one. I think we might have the same instincts, my dad and I."
She felt the puzzle pieces click together. "But my dad's a hack. He lost his scholarship, a semester away from graduating, for plagiarism. He was the kind of kid who'd Google Translate his foreign language homework, if Google was around back then. And I know for a fact, that there's a reason why you're not supposed to do that. 'Cause here, in this case, the translation is wrong: if you plug lux elata alumnos tollitt in, it gives you 'let the students take the data.'"
Cass tilted her head. "Take… the data?"
"I thought he'd target the belltower, because it's this iconic symbol of a university that kicked him out but I should have known - if the only records of his expulsion are paper in an admin building somewhere, that's where he's gonna go first. He wants to burn the proof down."
Steph fished for her phone and went for the recent calls. She tapped on the first one. "I'm gonna phone a friend," she told Cass. "Sorry if she'll get mad at you."
Cass caught on. She looked almost sheepish when Steph put her phone up and said "Oracle, I'm putting you on speaker."
"You know," Oracle responded, reverberating a little off the echo-y walls of the tower. "You're the first person who's ever tried to call back."
"Yeah, I'm one-of-a-kind. Come on, eye in the sky, Batgirl and I need to know what's going on in the admin buildings of GU. I think Cluemaster's setting up his next move there."
There was silence for a half minute. "The Sionisis Hall feed has had cameras on looped footage for the past ten minutes. Good catch."
"Great," Steph said and tried not to feel too pleased that even Oracle hadn't figured out the whole plan, or even the location. Not good at detective work, her ass. "Ten minutes - they should just be getting started with the setup. Sounds easy en-"
"There's a building full of people, and nobody walked out," Oracle cut in. "You're looking at a hostage situation."
"Shit." Steph should have learned to stop jinxing fate like that. "Shit, okay. Can you fix the looped video problem?"
"Not how it works, kid," Oracle said. "Want my advice?"
Steph scowled. "Are you gonna tell me to leave it to the professionals again? You have to realize by now that I'm not going to."
"No," Oracle said. "Even if I think you're an untrained idiot, you have valuable insight into Cluemaster. And that's the only reason I'm tolerating this. Cass, put your comm in, I'm going to reestablish your line, and we'll talk about you running away to meet up with your girlfriend later."
Steph snorted. Threats didn't work so well when Cass had already given away the plot; that 'valuable insight' was the only reason the professionals had even gotten here.
"We have the advantage of surprise," Oracle said through the phone. "We're early, and Batgirl has a reputation for only striking at night, while Spoiler only shows up at dusk. They won't expect you in the morning, but that doesn't mean they're not expecting regular reinforcements either, like campus police. So no, you cannot go through the front door. Something must be set up there, preventing students from coming in too."
"Any…. back-doors?" Cass asked, moving already back to the elevator. Steph followed close by, her phone still on speaker, the volume turned down low.
"There's one, on the right quadrant. Room, connected to the main ventilation system. How does your new friend feel about tight spaces?"
Steph stared at her phone. "Are we going through the vents? Are we seriously going through the fucking vents. Like, The Breakfast Club, crawling through the vents."
Cass winced. "Close," she signed.
A/N: I apologize in advance for how long this author's note is about to be. It's just me expanding on small throwaway lines, not updates on posting schedules or anything: feel free to skip this.
Regarding Lady Shiva's Hinduism: there's a concept in Hindu philosophy called the dharma-kshetra, or what I can best translate into English as "the battlefield of duty". It comes up most famously in the Baghvad Gita, when Arjuna is faced with the prospect of going to war and possibly having to kill his own family. Now, I understand that the DC writers almost definitely did not know this and did not have this in mind, but it's an interesting implication to consider: the conclusion of Arjuna's talk with the god Krishna is that his duty to his society and community must supercede his duty to family. (It's always been described to me as the stages of life having accompanying and different dharmas that they must put first above all: children are expected to have a duty to learn, adults are expected to have a duty to better their society, and older adults may have a duty to their families). This concept of hierarchical duties is one of the concepts that remain both in the religious version of Hinduism and the philosophy that atheists may follow as well. If Lady Shiva sees her dharma to the world as her job as an assassin, her decision to want to go out at the hands of her daughter - specifically once her skills fail and she can no longer perform her dharma - in the context of the dharma of your final stage of life is fucking heartbreaking. Which is why I imagine it to be true.
Also re: American Sign Language (ASL). Unlike English, where Americans and New Zealeanders and Australians and Brits speak the same language with different dialects, ASL, BSL, NZSL, and Auslan are all different languages: apparently fingerspelling is done two handed in all the other sign languages I listed, which is just insanely alien to me - ASL is done one-handed, usually with the dominant hand. (America, by the way, also can refer to the continent here: both Canadians and US-Americans use ASL.) ASL is also pretty unique for just how much fingerspelling is done here compared to other sign languages, though obviously we don't fingerspell out entire conversations or anything, the way Steph and Cass have been communicating. But hey, it works for them. Also, if anyone wanted to know why Cass was making unusual grammar mistakes for the typical ESL, it's because her "first language" is ASL actually! ASL grammar has different pronouns (pronouns are gender neutral and determined through where you signed something + where you're looking) and no need for "the" as a word because subject/object is identified through facial expression, which are the two major things Steph identified as "off" about Cass's speech.
This is basically the compromise I made with myself: Cass always says that her first language was "body language" which I've taken and run with since the alternative is pretending that a person who missed the critical period for language development can still suddenly learn a language at 17. The famous psych/linguistics case study, Genie, (also ominously known as The Forbidden Experiment, for good reason) proves pretty definitely that children exposed to NO language in their critical period will never be able to fully learn one. However, there's a lot of evidence to prove that CODA (children of deaf adults) who learned sign language first in their childhood can still pick up a spoken language like English, even after their critical period, and they'll speak it at a similar level to other English speakers who learned the language in their teens/adulthood. I don't think Cass was explicitly taught ASL or any sign language by Cain, but I think something in the Wernicke's area of her brain might have latched onto the whole martial arts body language stuff and clung to that for dear neural life.
I'm gonna cut this diatribe off now, but if you want more information/headcanon, please feel free to hit me up. I will respond with a five paragraph essay; that is a promise and a threat.