Tama can't decide whether she's more psyched or scared.  She's about to take on her first big-name bad guy, and she's working alongside Batman.  Those are good reasons to be psyched.  But she's also about to have a close encounter with a grenade-chucking maniac.  That would give anyone pause.

            She and Batman are on the ground-floor landing of the stairwell, looking through the little window in the door that opens onto the lobby.  Mad Stan passes in and out of view as he paces around, waving his arms wildly as he argues for his cause du jour.  After a few seconds of this they step back from the window and review their strategy one more time.

            "Remember, wait until his back is turned before you go after him," Batman reminds her.  "Got it?"

            She nods.  "Got it."

            Batman goes to the far end of the landing – opposite the door – and crouches, getting ready to rocket through.  "Good luck," Tama says.
            Maybe it's just her imagination, but she thinks she sees a smile on his face for just a fraction of a second.  "You too.  Here goes…"  For a few tense seconds, he just stays where he is – probably watching with an infrared vision filter, waiting until Mad Stan is directly in his line of sight.  Suddenly he leaps forward, startling Tama.  The thrusters on the soles of his boots propel him through the door, which is ripped right off its hinges.  A second later Tama hears an "Oof!" from the lobby, produced by Mad Stan as Batman tackles him.  Tama peeks around the corner of the doorway to see what's going on.

            Mad Stan is getting to his feet; Batman has landed in a crouch a few meters away from him.  Stan is facing away from Kitsune, but he doesn't actually have his back to her – if she tries to jump him now, he'll pick her up in his peripheral vision.  She decides to stay where she is until she gets a better opportunity to strike.  Batman is attempting to provide her with one, shuffling sideways so he can get Mad Stan to turn his back to the stairway door.

            "I knew you were comin', man," Stan says as he shifts position so that he can keep Batman in the center of his field of vision.  "So I got a surprise for you!"  He grabs an explosive device from his belt and taps a button on it with his thumb as he pulls back his arm to toss it.  Tama decides that this is a good time to make her move.  She charges out of the door, holding the staff near one end so that she can bring the other around with a mighty swing when she gets close enough to her target.

            Then a whole lot of things happen at once.  Stan throws his grenade, which Batman avoids by leaping out of the way.  The explosion takes out the front-window display of the boutique that Batman was standing in front of just a moment ago.  As the bomb goes off, Stan senses that something is amiss and turns around to look behind him just as Tama lets him have it with her staff, catching him in the abdomen on his left side.  She could have taken him out more easily by aiming for the head, but that might have killed him or at least caused some brain damage, and Tama is aiming to take him alive and without any permanent harm.

            Stan's about as stocky as they come and she hit him near his center of gravity, so she is not surprised when the momentum from her swing fails to knock him over.  Tama pulls her staff back quickly and shifts it into a defensive block as she shuffles backward, barely dodging the blow that Mad Stan aims at her in retaliation for her attack.  He's surprisingly quick for his size.  But he's not as quick as Tama, so she can match her agility against his strength.

            "Geez, man!  There's two of you?" Stan exclaims as he looks back and forth between Batman and Tama.

            "Yeah.  Two for the price of one," Batman responds.  "Must be your lucky day."  Then he takes a running leap into the air, leg out to deal Mad Stan a nice flying kick.  Tama advances slowly, getting ready to launch her own attack while Stan is busy dealing with her ally.  She's surprised when Batman's kick doesn't knock Stan to the ground, but he was obviously prepared.  He just rebounds off Stan and somersaults to land facing him again.  While Stan is still reeling, Tama swings at him again, this time going for the backs of his knees.  She neatly sweeps his legs out from under him, turns the follow-through into an overhand blow as she dances backward, and whacks him on the head.

            Batman flips Stan onto his stomach and handcuffs him before the guy has a chance to recover.  The two of them remove Stan's considerable arsenal of grenades and other toys as the police rush in.

            Tama looks up to see the Commissioner directing her officers into the shops around the lobby to help any civilians who might have been trapped there during Mad Stan's rampage.  Two of her underlings haul the still-woozy Stan to his feet and drag him off to an armored car waiting outside.

            As for the Commissioner, she looks at both Batman and Tama in turn – Tama for a little longer – and nods.  "Thank you," she says, simply but sincerely.  "We'll take it from here."

            "Anytime," Tama says.  Batman just returns the Commissioner's nod.  Then he turns around (rather anxiously, it seems to Tama) to look at the bank.  The police are gently escorting about two dozen people out of there.  The Commissioner heads over to join them.  One of the civillians, a short woman with cropped red hair, smiles and waves at them.  Batman looks ever-so-slightly relieved, and Tama wonders what she's missing here.

            That little exchange over, Batman turns back to Tama.  "Thanks for your help," he says.  Hearing the words from him makes her feel like she's just won the lottery.

            "It was great working with you," she says, as the two of them walk towards the exit onto the street.  Some of the people running around the lobby stare at them for a couple of seconds, but nobody actually approaches them.  "Maybe we should do this again some time," Tama suggests facetiously.  She can't help it.

            Fortunately for her, Batman seems to think that the remark is funny.  "We probably will," he says.  "In that case, I should give you this."  He reaches into one of the pockets on his belt and pulls out a small device that is, judging by the buttons and dials and other things on it, a communicator.

            "I'm afraid I haven't got one of those," she apologizes as he hands it to her.

            "Oops," Alex says over her transmitter, speaking for the first time since she accompanied Batman down to the lobby.  "I guess we should include those things in our standard equipment.  I'll have one ready for you by tomorrow night," he assures her.  Tama decides that this would not be an appropriate time to respond to him, so she doesn't.

            "Is there any other way I can contact you?" Batman asks.

            "We can send him the frequency for HQ when you get back," Alex suggests.

            "I'll send you my frequency when I get back.  This isn't really a good place to do it," she says, with a sweep of her arm that takes in all the hubbub around them.  As they step out of the lobby, Tama hits a recessed button in her belt to call her hoverboard.  She hid it on the roof, so it should be down here in a couple of seconds.

            Batman nods as Tama's hoverboard glides in and comes to a stop next to her, hovering a few centimeters off the ground close by.  She hops on to it and feels her feet tingle as the boots are magnetically clamped to the board.  "I'll be calling you – if something else doesn't come up.  Actually, I probably will if something else does come up."

            That actually gets a smile out of him, albeit a small one.  "Take care," he says.  He stretches out his arms and a pair of black wings with red undersides suddenly snap into place.  Then there's a flash of yellow light as his boot thrusters carry him into the air like a rocket.  Tama watches him as he shoots up, goes into a glide and moves out of view.  Then she departs as well, flying upwards at a forty-five degree angle to the ground.

            "That went well," she remarks to Alex.  Although that's really understating it.

            Alex seems to think so too, if his chuckle is any indication.  "I think the boss is going to be very happy with us," he says.

~***~

            Natalie, Melanie, and Alex are sitting at the table in the meeting room at headquarters while Tama gives them an enthusiastic narrative of the day's events.  Tamakazura Otani is six years older and slightly taller than Melanie, with glossy shoulder-length black hair, hazel eyes, a delicate-looking oval face and the kind of lean, boyish body that ballerinas and gymnasts tend to have.  She also has all the ebullience of a hyperactive child, a trait that shows in the way she tells her story.  Tama learned jiu-jitsu, judo and aikido from her father, who taught a martial arts school in San Francisco.  From there she went to Japan and later China to study some more obscure and difficult types of combat.  After that she went through a series of professions – karate instructor, circus performer, and bodyguard, to name a few – and kept none of them for more than a year.  Sometimes she got fired, sometimes she quit, but always because she tended to get bored after doing the same thing for too long.  She is, by her own admission, working for Natalie because it's more fun than anything else she's ever done.

Alex Jacobson, her assistant, occasionally chimes in when he feels that Tama has omitted or misrepresented some detail of her experience.  Everything about Alex's appearance marks him as a hacker:  He's tall, thin, and pale, with a round face framed by overgrown strawberry-blond hair and black-framed glasses perched on his aqualine nose.  But there are many ways in which he differs from the computer geek stereotype – he's got what Natalie calls Machiavellian guile, and what Melanie calls uncanny street smarts.  He used to be a freelancing electronic security specialist, working for whoever offered him the most money or the most exciting project.  Now he's on VibranTech's payroll, ostensibly as a computer systems administrator and secretly as Kitsune's one-man tech crew.  He's here because he likes a challenge.

And then there's Melanie herself, an eighteen-year-old girl with tawny skin, pale blonde hair and cornflower-blue eyes.  Although she is lovely and intelligent, she finds it difficult to make friends – she moved around too often as a child to form a close relationship with anybody, and after a while she developed a habit of distancing herself from everybody except her immediate family.  Before she worked for Natalie, she was a member of the Royal Flush Gang, until she encountered Batman and fell for his alter ego.  She's still not sure why she's here.  Maybe she's trying to atone for the mess that is her past.

            While Tama is talking about her meeting with Batman and the fight with Mad Stan, Melanie is wondering what Terry would think if he met Tama as herself, and what she would think if she met him.  Would they know each other for Batman and Kitsune if someone didn't tell them beforehand?  The answer is probably no.  What would they make of each other's normal, everyday selves?  That one she doesn't know the answer to.

            "Mel?  Mel, what's wrong?"  Melanie is jerked out of her reverie by Alex's concerned words.  She's embarrassed to notice that everyone's looking at her.

            "It's…it's nothing," she says.

            Tama looks consternated.  "God, Mel, I'm sorry.  I know you and Batman…"  She trails off.

            "Don't worry about it," Melanie says with as much sincerity as she can muster, even as she thinks You don't know the half about me and Batman.  And I'm glad you don't.

            "Melanie," Natalie says gently, "You look tired.  Why don't you go home for the night?"  Of course she knows that Melanie's inattentiveness is not the result of fatigue – but she would never say so.

            "Thanks, but I'm not really that tired," Melanie replies, grateful for the offer to escape but feeling obligated to refuse it.

            Natalie gets an odd smile on her face, the smile of a mother who is touched by her child's naïveté. She shakes her head.  "I know better than that.  Go home and rest."

            Well, she insisted, so that's that.  Melanie thanks her, says her goodbyes, and leaves the conference room.  From there she heads for one of the secret passages to the surface, one that comes out in a derelict warehouse on the edge of the city.  From there she will take a bus home and try to relax and rest, as Natalie suggested.  But she knows that she won't be able to relax, and she definitely won't be able to sleep.

            She thought she'd gotten over her love for Terry.  He'd certainly gotten over whatever he felt for her.  But when she saw him yesterday afternoon, she realized that her feelings for him hadn't really changed at all.  She' been trying since then to force herself to let go of him.  She has to.  They can never have a happy ending in which love triumphed over all; they can't even have a tragic Romeo-and-Juliet ending.  That's all over, she'd told him.  It didn't work out.  She'd said that, but she couldn't make herself believe it.  It doesn't feel over.  She still loves him.

            God help her, she still loves him.