"I guess it's harder if you hate your name that much."

"Yep," he agrees. "You can call me whatever you want, anyway, I figure out all right when people are talking to me."

"Dunno." She peers at his avatar as its bones melt and it collapses into a puddle of flesh. "Suicide Watch, maybe, but that's just as long as the name I'm shortening and not very namey."

"It's funny, though," he says cheerfully. "It'll do for now."

"Okay." Bella's done standing on that foot. She stands on the other, then decides that's boring and clings like a koala to an unused pole-shaped game console nearby instead, with one arm and one leg. She doesn't like to be still for too long, not when she can move so perfectly. "How come you don't like your name?"

"Because my dad gave it to me," he explains, as though that's all that needs to be said about it and the rest is obvious from there.

"And I hate him," he corrects, without strong emotion. It's just a fact about the world.

"Oh. Well, at least you don't get leave to go planetside for another five or six years at the soonest?"

"Yep!" he says brightly. "My favourite thing about Battle School is the miles of vacuum between me and home."

"I like being busy," says Bella. "I like my parents but I'm always away from one of them anyway, so two isn't so much different."

"What do you like about them?" he asks.

"They're nice. They love me. They got me my exo," says Bella, letting go of her perch and landing on one toe to twirl. "They're just not all that interesting."

"Trade you," he offers, and then snorts. "No way, I like you too much to stick you with mine."

"What do they do?" she asks. The game console next to him - not the fantasy game, some kind of infinite minefield puzzle that won't interfere with her ability to hold a conversation, opens up; she sits and starts skimming her coppered hands over the controls.

"What's with the hands?" he asks instead of answering.

"The copper stuff? That's part of my exoskeleton," she says. "I'm sort of a cripple. This gives me superpowers instead. It's not safe for most people but it is for me 'cause telepaths can't touch my brain and take over the exo like they did with that one guy that one time that made it hard for me to get one."

"Oh," he says. "Cool!"

"It is!" The puzzle game has ramped up to match her speed adaptively; she doesn't even look at her hands, just the screen. "I love it. I never take it off if I can avoid it."

"I wouldn't either," he laughs. "Are you paralyzed under it, or what?"

"That's awesome," says the boy.

"Yeah. I just think and -" She executes an unnecessarily showoffy sequence in the minefield; it hasn't 'figured out' for this iteration that she's faster than it is, yet. "I move. It was way easier for me to adjust to a battle suit than anyone else in the launch. I could compensate for the stiffness and any flashed parts and learn to move in zero-g without needing special muscle memory for it, I just have to know what to do. Some of them don't think it's fair but if I took off the exo it wouldn't be fair, either."

Bella's not looking at his screen, but she hears the sound effect. "There's one that makes you blow up?" she asks.