There is an announcement of a rules change: you are not allowed to perform the victory ritual without freezing or disabling all of the enemy.
This rule change is generally attributed to the antics of a Thomas "Sue" Sanderson, who coordinated his toon across the room without commander authorization and won the game before more than four soldiers, total, had been taken out.
It's a month shy of Bella's ninth birthday when Flame and Meerkat once again meet in the battle room.
"Freeze their mutie," Flame's commander tells everyone. "Don't look at me like that, Aegis." (People have occasionally started calling her this; she always picks it as her username or her space station name or whatever she's allowed to christen, and it's started to stick.) "You're not that kind of mutie, but theirs is. He can't do his hivemind shit once he's froze or he'll get iced. That's everyone's priority, clear?"
"Yessir," says each toon leader in unison.
They form up in the corridor.
Needless to say, the Meerkat mutie is almost certainly among them. But they're all small, and they're moving fast; individuals are hard to pick out.
The rest of Meerkat pours out after them in a more normal order.
"I can," says Aegis, "might get flashed first but I can."
"Go," says the commander, and Aegis leaps in one bound from the hall into her element and grabs the corner of a star and pushes off.
She can't, actually, hit anyone in the wheel while it's spinning, there's too much of a lag between hit and freeze, but she can dive through the center of it and kick someone's helmet and shove someone's shoulder, and when the formation explodes, then she can hit them. She twists in the air, pushes off a wall and flies and shoots. And she recognizes a familiar face and shoots him too and his suit goes still.
But she expected them to engage the other Flame formations, and they're not. Everyone in the wheel is specifically after her. A moment after she freezes Sue, two boys come at her from perpendicular angles behind her; one gets her shooting arm and the other hugs her thighs. And - though she often neglects to tell anyone this - it doesn't make her stronger; she can't force them off. A flick of her wrist gets her gun into her other hand - she's effectively ambidextrous in the exo - and she shoots the one who's got her arm before she sees a third Meerkat incoming and gets frozen herself.
She spends the rest of the game floating around, frozen soldier clinging to frozen arm.
She shouldn't be able to tell he's there. She's supposed to be all locked up in her brain safe from telepaths of every stripe.
They'll take her exo.
She looks at him with unadulterated terror.
The nudge was momentary, gone before she even started trying. But he got in once, and maybe there's some muscle she can flex, some exercise she can do, that will keep him out, that will keep her safe, that will let her limbs go on belonging to her.
They're going to have to talk, and not in mime, either.
"You shouldn't be able to do that," Aegis hisses at Sue as soon as her jaw is free. "They gave me my exo because you shouldn't be able to."
"I felt it this time!" She's still being very quiet, though fierce, as the commanders bow to each other. Maybe she can keep the exo if no one finds out. Sue's not planning to possess her body, right? Right?
"It's not supposed to. They could only let me have it because I sat there wondering what was going on while telepaths threw everything they had at me. If you can touch my brain then it's not working and they might take it away and I'll get iced and I'll feel like I'm made of bricks all the time."
But she doesn't smile for the rest of the day, and when she has to take a shower in the deserted girls' bathroom, she shivers under the hot water.
She paints colored dots on the ground in the antelopes' village. She points at herself, and then at the orange red red that signifies where she is, and then she draws a bird (not a bird person, a bird like Sue's avatar) and gestures more broadly at the dots.
The antelopes look at her. She repeats the sequence.
An antelope points at dots, and they aren't Meerkat's brown yellow yellow.
She signs out again and paints a path to there.
"I need to talk to you," she says, coming up behind him and planting her feet. There's a few other kids around. "Alone."