Speaking of the Giant's Drink, here's a kid playing it. He's sitting tucked into a corner of the games room with his desk in his lap, and every time his little avatar gets a new death, he giggles and tries again.

"Are you just trying to see if it repeats itself?" Bella asks, peering over his shoulder.

Nobody clever enough to be in Battle School needs to be told that the drink game is rigged after doing fifty of it. Bella refrains from telling him anyway. "Why is that funny?" she asks instead, swaying idly with the rhythm in her thoughts.

"Why isn't it?" he counters, glancing up at her to share his wide, cheerful grin. "I just like watching the little guy die horribly!"

"It's like the game was designed for you, then," says Bella, eyeing the boy with amusement. "Since that's all you can do in this section."

"I never heard of one. I quit playing after I heard it's rigged, though, so I haven't seen for myself." She stands on one foot. She does that sometimes. Balancing is easy when you can hold perfectly still solely by wanting to.

"Why'd you quit?" he asks interestedly.

"I don't really think it's that entertaining to watch my avatar die a million times. I'd rather fly around in the practice rooms or read if I have spare time," she shrugs.

"There's a whole rest of the game, though," he says, and he sends his avatar back for another death.

"The rest of it was all right, but any game where there's a part you just can't live through seems, I dunno, mean-spirited, it'd bother me to keep playing now that I know. I like books and stuff better anyway."

"The homework stuff. Classic literature - old stuff that's barely English like we talk now. Sometimes stuff on psychology or modern novels if they're highly recommended or whatever else. I finished Utopia this morning. It wasn't very utopic, though, I was disappointed."

"What was it instead?"

"There was all kinds of pointless stuff in. Like, you had to move houses every ten years. And worse than pointless stuff, like they had slavery. And people weren't allowed to travel, even just within the country, without a passport. I dunno, I think I could do better. But Sir More wrote it a long time ago."

"Weird," the boy concludes, steering his avatar into another grisly death.

"Yeah. I'm Bella. What's your name?"

"Nice to meet you, Bella!" he says brightly, ignoring the question.

"If you won't tell me what to call you it can't be all that nice, can it," she says.

"Don't feel bad," he says amicably, "I'm like that with everybody."

"Why?" She clearly expects there to be an answer and for him to know it. She still expects people to be able to read their own minds, even if they can't read anyone else's.

"Because I hate my name and I don't have a better one."

"Then you should make something up. Half the kids in my launch already have nicknames even if you don't count 'Bella'. And we only got here three weeks ago."

"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.

"What is it?"

"I wanna see the rest of the room," he says, "but I'm too slow, the Giant keeps squashing me flat. Think you could give it a try?"

Bella doesn't duck in right away - she's not having any trouble dodging the giant, so she makes a complete circuit, and then she squirms through to see where the tunnel goes.

"Want the controls back?" Bella offers.

Bella does what it is normal to do with a hug: she returns it. "You're welcome!"

"I wonder if there's a point to this part or if this is just what happens when you go off the rails," says Bella. She peers over his shoulder. The console to his left opens up. She tries this game too; it turns out to be more her speed than the minefield, with a space station she can arm and armor against little blinking enemy dots. Winning against the first wave of them earns her the right to name her station and save her progress. She calls it "Aegis".

"Goddess of wisdom, shield," Bella controls her little laser array one handed long enough to tap her head, "my brain - I like the word."

Bella's game has moments between waves when she's out of upgrade credits and she glances over at his screen. "It's not even presenting you with obstacles. It's just a sky of pretty colors. It's like a screensaver," she says. "I think I might've just won the game for you and it's a victory screen."

He giggles. "I love it!"

"It's even more boring than watching your avatar die fifty times in a row," asserts Bella.

Bella shrugs and spends upgrade credits on commerce infrastructure for the Aegis so she can collect more in tariffs and buy shiny armor plating before the next round.

"Oh, stuff," Bella says, as her new spherical defense web takes out a flock of enemies and depletes her electricity bank. She buys a new generator and starts setting up for a trade arrangement to get fuel on the regular; she wasn't expecting the web to be that expensive.

The sun dips below the horizon; the lava fountain reaches up as far as the clouds and lights them on fire, burning them away to reveal a skyful of multicoloured stars. Streamers of burning cloud fall into the ocean, leaving coloured streaks on the surface of the water when they finally burn themselves out.

"And maybe I'll grab some screenshots for desk wallpaper," she adds. "This is pretty."

"It is!" he agrees.